Merz to Emigre and Beyond: Avant-Garde Magazine Design of the Twentieth Century

Steven Heller's Merz to Emigre and Beyond surveys the avant-garde magazine across the twentieth century, from Kurt Schwitters's Merz to Rudy VanderLans and Zuzana Licko's Emigre, as the form in which new art, politics and typography first reached print.

Arranged chronologically, the book follows the little magazine and the underground press through Futurism, Dada, De Stijl and the Bauhaus, the Surrealist View and VVV of the 1940s, the East Village Other and the 1960s underground papers, Punk, Raw and the desktop-published titles of the 1980s and 1990s. Some 350 reproductions of covers and spreads carry the argument: that the magazine, cheap, periodic and disposable, was where designers tested ideas before they hardened into style.

Heller (b. 1950), art director of The New York Times Book Review for over thirty years and co-founder of the MFA Design programme at the School of Visual Arts, has written more than 100 books on graphic design history, among them Design Literacy and Graphic Style. This hardcover first edition was published by Phaidon in 2003; a paperback edition followed.