The Art Of Disney

In 1960, several hundred concept paintings and drawings personally selected by Walt Disney were sent to Japan to promote the release of Sleeping Beauty.
The art was shortly there after donated to Tokyo Museum of Modern Art. Not seeing the collection as valuable they sent it to Chiba University of Science and Engineering. Chiba University, being a science school, put the art in cardboard boxes and stored it in a damp janitors closet and there it stayed for 50 years until being re-discovered in 2002. The art, some of which in very poor condition was restored and the collection with 350 more bits of additional art from Disney toured Japan before finally being returned the Disney archives.
This is the catalog from that exhibit-
It's a rare book.
Usually I dont like to post rare books to Parka's site since they dont do much to support his efforts with book retailers - but this one I had to make an exception for and Im sure Parka will agree that its a magnificent collection worth mentioning to the members of the forum. (Especially Kirikou- you need this book for your shelf!)
A few things in it Ive seen in the Disney Design book- but much of it Ive never seen ever before. The catalog seems to be broken into sections according to artist instead of film- so get ready to see real mouth fulls of Tyrus Wong, Eyving Earle, Mary Blair along with all the rest of the Disney greats. Id say if I could only have 1 Disney book, this is definitely the one Id want.

The Art of Disney
245 pgs (SC)

Joseph Urban

Architect Joseph Urban (May 26, 1872 – July 10, 1933) came to the US in 1912 to be the art director for the Boston Opera Company. Although he moved on to design ornate interiors, and entire buildings, hes always focused on framing a scene- I dont know if I've seen anyone continually design such great framing elements into his Scenes. This guy is so bad ass!
If youre into set design and all the things great set design can do for things that are not necessarily sets, definitely check out this book!


Joseph Urban
John Loring
224 pgs (HC)
Abrams Publishers
ISBN 978-0-8109-9026-5

Type: A Visual History of Typefaces and Graphic Styles

Its a double feature this week!

I found these great type resources from Taschen, Vol 1 spanning 1628-1900 and Vol 2 1901-1938. Theres so much stuff in these- mostly clip-art looking style sheets for different bits of type and also other graphic details related to books. The real treat of these collections is that they both come with a key card that allows access onto a site which has hi-resoultion scans of nearly all of the pages. So the books then become more than just inspiration but actually really nice catalogs of the contents of the website. Id suspect the entirety of those contents are copy right free. Pretty nice, if not priceless.

Type: A Visual History of Typefaces and Graphic Styles

Volume 1 1628-1900

360 pgs (HC)

Taschen

ISBN 978-3-8365-1101-8

story of Typefaces and Graphic Styles

Volume 2 1901-1938

360 pgs (HC)

Taschen

ISBN 978-3-8365-1514-6

Lettering Art in Modern Use

When using text you really need to find the right font. Anyone can by instinct, see when a font works and when it doesnt. Its weird and it baffles the hell out of me, so I hit the books for ideas and inspiration. This old Lettering Art In Modern Use is a really great, *general* book with lots of examples of text and some really nice things that you dont find in books much anymore, like tracing paper overlays and work sheets. Dont underestimate the power of typography, and take advantage of how lucky we are now a days to have such easy access to an infinitely wide variety of text.
Some people, old people like me may remember lettrasets, and some others might remember even before lettrasets, when people actually had to ink their own fonts and font styles- which is just mind boggling.
I digress- this is a great book on lettering.

Lettering In Modern Use (1952)
Raymond Ballinger
246 pgs HC
Reinhold Publishing