The Marginalian
The Marginalian

A Lovely Vintage Children’s Concept Book About How the Imagination Works, Newly Discovered and Illustrated

A Lovely Vintage Children’s Concept Book About How the Imagination Works, Newly Discovered and Illustrated

In the late 1950s, children’s book author Ann Rand collaborated with her then-husband, the graphic design legend Paul Rand, on a series of unusual and imaginative children’s books — Sparkle and Spin and I Know a Lot of Things. Even after they divorced in 1958, they continued working together and published the loveliest of their collaborations, Little 1, in 1961.

After Rand’s death in 2012, a marvelous unpublished manuscript of hers from the 1970s was discovered — a most unusual concept book, partway between graphic design primer, Norton Juster’s The Dot and the Line, and Umberto Eco’s vintage semiotic children’s books, exploring how our imagination combines lines and shapes to build an entire world.

Four decades later, this forgotten masterpiece is brought to life as What Can I Be? (public library) with stunning illustrations by painter and architecture professor Ingrid Fiksdahl King.

whatcanibe_rand1

whatcanibe_rand2

whatcanibe_rand22

whatcanibe_rand3

It is hardly a coincidence that King co-authored the 1977 architecture and urbanism classic A Pattern Language — a pioneering inquiry into how the elements of urban design and their arrangement form the patterns that compose the language of community livability. It is our ability to imagine, after all — to combining basic elements into a language of the possible — that makes life livable.

whatcanibe_rand4

whatcanibe_rand5

whatcanibe_rand24

whatcanibe_rand6

With simple, inviting words, Rand constructs a poetic game of possibility.

whatcanibe_rand25

I’m thin or thick
but always straight as a stick

What might I be?

the mast of a ship
a jump rope held tight
the trunk of a very young tree
or the stem of a flower?

There are a hundred things
you could make of me

whatcanibe_rand7

whatcanibe_rand8

whatcanibe_rand23

If I’m a line that’s not straight
If I wobble and weave
What could I be?

I can easily make
a splendid snake
or curl into a big lasso

I could be the ruffled edge of waves
on a stormy sea

But let’s see
what you can do with me

whatcanibe_rand20

Complement the wondrous What Can I Be? with Shapes for Sounds, a visual history of the alphabet.

Illustrations courtesy of Princeton Architectural Press


Published May 10, 2016

https://www.themarginalian.org/2016/05/10/what-can-i-be-ann-rand/

BP

www.themarginalian.org

BP

PRINT ARTICLE

Filed Under

View Full Site

The Marginalian participates in the Bookshop.org and Amazon.com affiliate programs, designed to provide a means for sites to earn commissions by linking to books. In more human terms, this means that whenever you buy a book from a link here, I receive a small percentage of its price, which goes straight back into my own colossal biblioexpenses. Privacy policy. (TLDR: You're safe — there are no nefarious "third parties" lurking on my watch or shedding crumbs of the "cookies" the rest of the internet uses.)