Sandol Stoddard / Ivan Chermayeff: The Thinking Book

Estava a pensar (in English, The Thinking Book) is the third of three books with illustrations by Ivan Chermayeff that have been published by the small Portuguese house Bruaá Editora. Their catalogue is full of careful, considered reissues like this one, and I would gently suggest setting aside an afternoon to go through it.

The book was originally published in 1960 by Little, Brown and Company. What is extraordinary, more than fifty years later, is how modern it still looks. Chermayeff’s collaged shapes, his confident use of pure flat colour, his happy disregard for the rules of perspective — none of it has dated. You could put a spread from this book next to anything being published in 2014 and it would more than hold its own.

Chermayeff was, of course, one of the great American designers of the twentieth century, half of Chermayeff & Geismar, and the hand behind some of the most familiar logos in the world. But his picture-book work is less known and very much worth chasing down. He and Sandol Stoddard collaborated again on the wonderful Keep It Like A Secret, also worth seeking out if you can find it second-hand.

Estava a pensar shows the world from the point of view of a child who is, simply, thinking. Thinking about her bed, about the ceiling, about what is on the other side of the wall, about the shape of her own thoughts. The text is short and rhythmic; the pictures bloom around it. It is the kind of book that adults read aloud and then, halfway through, slow down because they have begun thinking themselves.

Hats off to Bruaá for bringing it back into print.