Books and Such Designed by Carl Zahn

Carl Zahn is one of our very favorite designers. No joke. He spent the bulk of his career at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Upon his retirement in 1997, the MFA published Books and Such, a 56-page checklist of Carl’s work for the museum, with Carl’s engaging observations about the people and processes involved. There are stories of reviewing early Sabon proofs in a pub with Tschichold, receiving repro-proofs from Zapf of the difficult-to-acquire Optima oldstyle figures, and a classic Carl story in which, after polite disagreement with Georgia O’Keefe over the design of a book about her late husband, Alfred Steiglitz, he suggested that she might like to design the book herself. This is a rarely-seen book about a designer who’s not nearly as well-known as he should be. If this book goes before you can grab it, read about Carl here.