Leonardo Digital Reviews

Lester Beall: Space, Time and Content

By R. Roger Remington.
Graphic Design Archives Chapbook Series: One. Rochester Institute of Technology, Cary Graphic Arts Press, 2003. 36 pp., illus. Paperback, price $15.99. ISBN 0-9713459-8-8.

Reviewed by Roy R. Behrens, Department of Art, University of Northern Iowa, Cedar Falls, IA 50614-0362, U.S.A. E-mail: ballast@netins.net.

A chapbook is a small book or pamphlet, the term for which comes from its having been sold by peddlers, who were at one time commonly known as "chapmen." The term is familiar to designers because at the end of the 19^th century in the U.S., there was an offshoot of the Arts and Crafts Movement called the "Chapbook Style." This chapbook is the first in a series of booklets about various 20^th-century graphic designers, whose personal papers, business records, and work examples are currently housed at the Wallace Library, at the Rochester Institute of Technology, in the Graphic Design Archives, a collection that was founded by RIT design historian R. Roger Remington nearly twenty years ago. As this essay reaffirms, Lester Beall (1903-1969) was an extraordinary graphic designer, who was born and raised in the American Midwest but spent nearly all his professional life in New York. He is typically remembered for two major projects: An astonishing series of posters he made for the REA or Rural Electrification Administration (exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in 1937), and a logo and packaging system designed for the International Paper Corporation (c1958). But his achievements were considerably deeper and broader than that, and through its concise text, chronology, and more than fifty accompanying pictures of Beall and his work, this book (introduced by Massimo Vignelli, and enhanced by an elegant layout by Bruce Ian Meader) provides a brief, wide-angle view of the full, rich range of his accomplishments (both client-based and not) as a designer, artist and teacher. (Reprinted by permission from Ballast Quarterly Review.)