PICTOGRAMS BY WARJA LAVATER SC

Pictograms by Warja Lavater / 124-page paperback, 7.7 x 10 inches, co-published by Nieves and 50 Watts / a new reprint of the long-gone 2008 edition / published September 2023.

An early progenitor of the artist's book genre, Warja Honegger-Lavater was born in Winterthur, Switzerland in 1913. She worked as an illustrator for the magazine Jeunesse from 1944-1958, and moved to New York shortly thereafter where she began a wonderful series of artist's books.

All of Honegger-Lavater's books were made using the accordion-fold binding. Her aesthetic has been aptly described as "very clean, very Swiss." Each book tells a story, sequentially, like traditional books, but varying from them by rarely using words. Instead she chooses a symbol to represent, for example, a character, as in the red dot standing in for Red Riding Hood in Little Red Riding Hood.

These 60 ink pictograms, drawn between 1976 and 1996, were originally printed individually as A2 plane prints.