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One of my favorite small books: Das kleine Blumenbuch - In vielen Farben. The little flower book - In many colors. Fifty-eight plates of offset prints reproduced from botanical images drawn by Rudolf Koch and cut in wood by Fritz Kredel. Published in 1933 by the Insel-Bücherei, Leipzig.
The Insel-Bücherei was founded prior to the first world war, and from its inception sought to sell, at affordable prices, short works such as novellas, poetry collections, essays, and groups of illustrations. The series has been hugely successful in its 98 years of existence -- this Little flower book has been reprinted at least 27 times.
The early paperboard covers featured geometrical designs, primarily bicolor, as far as I can tell. On the Kleine Blumenbuch's cover, I find the handmade look of the green stripes and the little red stars wonderfully appealing. (The stars are more easily visible if you click on the image to enlarge.) Nowadays, the covers have become more complex in both design and color schematics. The image of the poppy shown above is one of two flowers in a pattern now adorning the latest edition of the Kleine Blumenbuch:
Koch and Kredel are interesting figures, with a collaborative history that began years before the publication of this little book. Koch was in his last year of life when the Kleine Blumenbuch was printed; his student Kredel soon emigrated to the United States, where he taught at the Cooper Union and where his illustrations found wide recognition.
It turns out that yellow has infiltrated all but my very first post so far, though I've set out to focus on red-green phenomena. Because this post is about wildlife in books, I thought I might conclude with a photo of this bright yellow migratory phenomenon -- a photo of wildlife near books -- too bright and handsome to exclude: the prothonotary warbler who till this weekend was making a temporary home outside the New York Public Library.
Photograph by Ardith Bondi, The New York Times.
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