BAGDContext CSM

Here is the cover of a book I just found in London. It is a travel guide to ski resorts in France from 1936, and sponsored by the railway companies. It’s a lovely piece of design with fabulous alpine photographs and editorial about ski technique, winter sports fashions, the health benefits of mountain air and winter sunshine etc. The design and art-direction are terrific too.

Here is the text of my original post on New Pamphleteer…

I’ve posted before about my interest in spiral, or wire-bound, books. The spiral wire binding was patented in the 1920s and was immediately of interest to the publishers and designers who had begun to use photographic images in new and exciting ways.

The smaller hand-held and high quality cameras of the 1920s, by Leica especially, are acknowledged as having created a new way of seeing and a more-or-less cybernetic extension of the intelligent eye. The spiral binding was, in my opinion, as significant in promoting these new kinds of images to a wider public, and in marking the beginnings of modern art-direction in graphic design and magazines especially.

The wire binding allowed for the pages of a document to be opened flat, and for photographic images to spread seamlessly across the centrefold. This produced a much bigger and wider image. A sort of print culture version of cinemascope…

Without being a winter sports fan I have collected a few books that feature the development of alpine ski techniques and winter holidays….I’m more interested in the style and image culture of winter sports than in the sports themselves.

This French book is from 1936, and is the first edition of a winter sports guide produced in association with the French railways. It’s a sort of atlas of resorts and is designed, magazine style, to combine sports, fashion and beauty against the dramatic, pin-sharp and exciting backdrop of the high mountains. Parts of the lay-out are quite experimental, especially in how the use of type, image and space are combined.

The promotion of Alpine resorts and of winter sports to a wider audience in France, during the 1930s and especially after WW2, provided a huge boost to the domestic leisure and tourist economies of France. The Grenoble winter Olympics of 1968, internationally televised for the first time, further popularised this combination of sport, sunshine and style.

It’s worth noting that the bright light and clear air of the mountains produced the ideal circumstances for outdoor fashion shoots. These shoots were enhanced, in France and America, through association with popular-cultural celebrity. It’s not surprising that a specialist mountain photography scene emerged to feed this demand.

For me, the combination of design, fashion-image and railways is a sort of jackpot. I also love the combination of speed and style in these images and page spreads. Perfect.

The railway invented the modern time system…and here, 200 years later, is the new digital time display at London Bridge. An app is planned to allow smartwatch wearers to download the clock face for their own wrists.

Here is a previous post about time and the railway…

This was the stand-out display this year…a post-industrial fantasy, Mad Max style!

This photo is of the rail-head and pier, at the docks in Oakland, California. Nowadays, Oakland is one of the largest Pacific-facing ports in the US.

Oakland does a bot of heavy-lifting for Los Angeles, and the Bay area. The story of how globalisation has played out politically in Oakland – through exclusion and gentrification etc, is told in this new book…

This is a lovely small impressionist style painting, in open air, of a suburban railway station. There are many famous paintings of the railway, by Monet and Pissarro especially.

In this painting, I especially like the architectural detail of the station and bridge; the iron railing picked out against the sky has real sparkle. The railway line provided for faster and more convenient communication in a number of ways; the telegraph lines remind us that the railway line was an information super-highway of the 19C.

This picture of a steam loco, on the ceinture line in Paris, reminds us that steam trains in cities produce lots of mess – soot and steam especially. Not surprisingly, most of the areas around the railways tracks were either industrial brown-field or slums…Mornington Crescent, outside Euston in London was so bad that, at the end of the 19C and beginning of the 20C, artists and poets could afford to live there.

I like the look of that! The ceinture was a line built to go around Paris, so as to make journeys across the city easier, especially as the city expanded rapidly at the beginning of the 20C.