You know how sometimes, you meet someone and you’re like “wow I didn’t know there was a gaping hole in my life where you were supposed to be…until you came along and filled it”?

That sounds gross. Let me start again.

You know how sometimes you see a GIF on tumblr at two in the morning and it’s like “wow I didn’t know I’d been waiting my whole life to a moving picture of Zac Efron dancing on a golf course”?

Hold on…that one sounds sad. One more time.

You know how sometimes, you find an amazing book that you never would have imagined existed in a million years, but once you find it, you realize it’s exactly what you’ve been looking for? Swissted is exactly that kind of book for me. (There we go. I guess sometimes the direct approach is the best one…)

This book came across my desk about a month ago and I’ve been dragging my feet waiting to review it. Not really dragging my feet as totally absorbed in preparing for and then attending ICFA, but you know–tomato tomAto and all that. This book is another Poster sized monster from Quirk, much like the Presidential Election poster I reviewed last year. Swissted, however, does not aim to educate but rather to entertain and aesthetically please. On both counts, the book succeeds.

The concept behind Swissted is simple, on many levels. It redesigns classic punk concert posters using the simplistic aesthetic of Swiss Modernism.

An original Ramones poster, for comparison

If there is any educational value at all, it is in bringing the concepts of Swiss Modernism to a wide audience. The foreward, written by design critic Stephen Heller and the introduction, by author/designer Mike Joyce, help inform readers of the inspiration behind the designs. Perhaps Heller puts it best when he says “Swiss and punk are like champagne and whiskey: combined, they deliver a profound kick by leave you with quite a headache. That is, until Mike Joyce started mashing up the two ingredients into his own special cocktail”. The cocktail resulted in over 200 original works of art, perfect for ripping out and framing in your “modern, grown-up but not too grown up, art-appreciating but still still stickin’ it to the man” living space.

An original Hans Neuberg design–a member of the Swiss Modernist movement.

The “champagne and whiskey” combination works because it’s so different. Joyce describes both the world in which the grungy, photocopied posters of the original gigs were created, and then travels through time and his art education, where he became transfixed with the c0ncepts of the International Typographic Style movement. He draws a connection between the punk rock that started in the late 70s and this minimalist style: “The Swiss modernists purged extraneous decoration to create crystal-clear communication, while punk rock took on bloated self-indulgent rock and roll and stripped it to its core. Both created something new, powerful, timeless.”

Back to my original point: Joyce has struck on something here that readers may not have known they wanted until they saw it. Certainly that’s what he discovered with swissted.com, a small venue for this idea in its early stages that has since seen some major traffic (and led to the book deal with Quirk); the transformation of low-budget concert posters into clean, digital representations is perhaps something we’ve been waiting for all along.

For more information on Swissted or Mike Joyce, check out QuirkBooks.com/swissted. For more posters that didn’t make the cut, check swissted.com

Jen Schiller
Staff Writer
twitter.com/jenisaur

King Jackson

Happy week after Memorial Day! That’s a thing, right? I’m making it a thing, and celebrating by telling you about Quirk Books’ new title Presidential Campaign Posters: Two Hundred Years of Election Art. I thought this book was a joke when I first saw it, considering the cover prominently displays an image of Gerald Ford dressed like the Fonz; however it is all too real and the surprises don’t begin or end with Ford.

It’s not just the subject matter that makes this book unique, but also the format. As opposed to the typically stout mass-market paperbacks that make up most of the history section at any bookstore, Presidential Campaign Posters is tall and 208 pages long. It begins with Andrew Jackson pictured as a King by his opponents and ends with Obama’s “Hope” campaign. Each of the posters is perforated so it can easily be removed and framed, however the back includes factual and anecdotal information about the presidential race in which the poster featured. Even if I had the wall space, I prefer to preserve the book the way it is. Not only is each poster a gorgeous, high-quality re-print direct from the Library of Congress, but the story that the posters tell from beginning to end reveals how little has changed in our country’s politics in the last two centuries.

Really, when I first read about this book I thought it was a clever trick; some kind of satirical commentary on each president’s reign. I thought there was no way posters as ridiculous as President Carter dressed like Jesus could be real until I was flipping through this book and reading the stories that went along with each image.

Another very real Gem from our history

What fascinates me even more than the posters themselves is the narrative that they spell out about our history. Presidential elects have always tried to appeal to the common man, and no smear has ever been too low.

This book is credited to “Library of Congress” as the author. I’m a dramaturg, so I love research and love seeing it organized in interesting and innovative ways. My press copy of Presidential Campaign Posters arrived along with an interview with the Library of Congress’ Publishing Director W. Ralph Eubanks, and I wish that the interview had been included in the book itself. Eubanks specifically talks about how television changed the way that campaign posters were composed, and while the book touches on this element of campaign races it only does so briefly. Eubanks explains the broad effects: “Whereas early campaign posters were vehicles for publicizing candidates’ political messages, the post-1960 posters were simply ways to get the names of the candidates in the minds of the voters, with political messages communicated via television commercials and the news media.”

If I had a rating system of five stars, this book would get all five. It took a subject in which I was only mildly interested, and made me pour over pages and pages without realizing how much time had passed. Not only that, it’s a brilliant piece of dramaturgy and a fascinating way to present what could very well have been dry, dusty material. Highly recommended for…pretty much anyone who can read.

Presidential Campaign Posters at Quirk Books