The Reading Room - Gallery Wall Set of 3 Book and Library Posters

Three mid-century American posters celebrating books and reading, sold together as a gallery wall set of three same-size prints: 'National Library Week' (1961), Bruno Munari's 'Swing Into Books' (Book Week, 1964) and Maurice Sendak's 'Hurray for Books' (Book Week, 1960). Between the late 1950s and the mid 1960s, American libraries and publishers ran an unusually confident campaign for reading. National Library Week was launched in 1958 by the American Library Association and the National Book Committee, and each year's poster was commissioned from a working graphic designer; the 1961 edition, 'Wake Up and Read', gives the slogan to a reader with an arrow running straight from the open book to the heart. Children's Book Week, older still, was by then the Children's Book Council's flagship event, and its posters went to the illustrators of the moment. Bruno Munari's 1964 poster is the most graphically inventive of the three. Munari, whose 'Design as Art' appeared in 1966, draws a flamingo in a single flat magenta and hangs a child reading from a swing between its legs. Maurice Sendak's 1960 poster predates 'Where the Wild Things Are' by three years and already has his line: a clown in a checked coat plays the tuba on a tightrope while books fly overhead. The National Library Week poster provides the typographic backbone. Hung as a row, the three read as one campaign, which in spirit they were.