El Lissitzky: About 2 Squares

imagecover and p. 1 of About 2 Squares, 1922 © El Lissitzky In one of my classes today we spent a little while looking at and discussing this beautiful children’s book by Russian artist, designer, photographer, teacher, typographer, and architect (seriously!) El Lissitzky, titled About 2 Squares. In the images above, the page on the left (the cover) translates from Russian to English as “About 2 [Squares]” and the page on the right translates as “To all, for all Children.” Lissitzky produced and sold about 3,000 copies of it in 1922 - quite a lot at that time. The MIT Press released a great letterpress reproduction with English translations printed on a transparent overlay to register over the original Russian in 1991 - now out of print. From their website:

El Lissitzky’s first supremacist book is a story about how two squares, one red, one black, transform a world. It is Lissitzky’s “scientific romance,” an allegory of the fourth dimension and its effect on the three-dimensional world. When it was first published in Berlin in 1922, About 2 [Squares] presented a radical rethinking of what a book was, demonstrating a new way of organizing typography on a page and relating it to visual images. It marked the beginning of a new graphic art and is among the most important publications in the history of the avant-garde in typography and graphic design.
It’s really worth seeing if you can find it. Lissitzky’s vision of design and typography was brilliant for his time and he was making work that was both visually innovative and socially/politically relevant. See more pages from About 2 Squares (with text in Russian) here.