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a rare Isotype publication by Gerd Arntz

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A few months ago we walked along the streets of beautiful Dordrecht. A lunch rendez Vous with my mother in law and Linda. After dinner we visited a local brique a braque store filled with all kinds of small and larger objects with a special department filled with books. Because Linda, my wife, was looking for some glass object birds ( which she found and bought) I had to wait and leafed through the smaller books and…… there it was , stacked away, hidden because of its small size, between all kinds unimportant publications. I stopped at the moment i recognized the typical Gerd Arntz Isotypes on the cover . It is only 20 pages , published in 1938, but this one of the rarest of all Isotype books published in the Netherlands.

rondom rembrandt a

The condition is excellent and the pages clean and filled with typical “Rembrandt” related Isotypes. The quality of the Isotypes is magnificcent. The images are very clear and show the relations for all Rembrandt material and paintings spread over the Netherlands. Printed by Trio and published by “de Bijenkorf” in 1938 this book has all the qualities to become the most wanted of all (dutch) Isotype books. Perhaps it already is the most wanted, but it ceratinly is a very very special publication and i believe that i am the only bookseller that has this one for sale at this moment. available at www.ftn-books.com

 

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Gerd Arntz (1900-1988)

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Otto Neurath was the first, but together with Neurath, Arntz is considered to be one of the founders of Isotype. A simple word for ISOTYPE is pictogram and he made over 4000 of them. Gerd Arnyz is even in our days considered to be one of the great inventors of the pictogram. The strength is that one can immediately see the meaning of the picture/pictogram and in relation to numbers and other pictograms.

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Picture from www.gerdarntz.org

Because he opposed to the Nazi party in Germany and made some political drawings and statements against them, he fled to Den Haag in 1934, where he joined Neurath and Reidemeister. The three of them became extremely productive and it is in the Netherlands that most of his books, pictorial statistics and pictograms were published. Living and working in Den Haag, Arntz was familiar with its museum and for this reason the Haags Gemeentemuseum could acquire a large collection of his works and still on the book markets, when looking thoroughly, you can even find some nice publications, but this is getting harder and harder each year. www.ftn-books.com has some nice publications and the book ZEVEN HOOFDZONDEN in which an original woodcut by Arntz is published together with 6 other originals.

It was about 10 years ago that STROOM had a nice exhibition on Arntz and Neurath and they made a spectacular poster for the exhibition which is also available at www.ftn-books.com