DYNAMIC AMERICA
A HISTORY OF GENERAL DYNAMICS CORPORATION
AND ITS PREDECESSOR COMPANIES
John Niven and Courtlandt Canby [Editors]
Erik Nitsche [Designer]
Erik Nitsche [Designer], John Niven and Courtlandt Canby [Editors]: DYNAMIC AMERICA: A HISTORY OF GENERAL DYNAMICS CORPORATION AND ITS PREDECESSOR COMPANIES. Fort Worth and New York City: General Dynamics and Doubleday & Co., Inc., 1960. First edition. Folio. Blue cloth stamped in blue. Printed dust jacket. Elaborate endpapers. 426 pp. Over 1,000 color and black-and-white illustrations. Jacket lightly worn with weakened joints, a couple of short, closed tears and mild wear overall. Interior unmarked and very clean. Out-of-print. Designed by Erik Nitsche. A very good or better copy. 10.5 x 14.5 hard cover book with 426 pages and over 1,000 full-color and black-and-white illustrations. An elegantly designed presentation of the history of General Dynamics -- and maybe America too: "It is the chronicle of a tumultuous period, of a nation oscillating between war and peace, of a people committed to a scientific future both to protect and advance Western civilization." Beautifully printed in Switzerland with inserts and some of the best endpapers ever.
From "Erik Nitsche: The Reluctant Modernist" by Steven Heller on the typotheque web site: "Seymour Chwast, co-founder of Push Pin Studios, compares his tattered, well-thumbed copy of 'Dynamic America,' the ambitious corporate history that Nitsche edited and designed between 1957 and 1960, to Herbert Bayer's landmark Geo-Graphic Atlas for its innovation in the area of information graphics. And Walter Bernard, principal of WBMG, routinely shows slides of 'Dynamic America' in lectures describing his early influences. Bernard also credits the bookÕs exceptional cinematic pacing as having radically changed the way that he achieved kinetic flow in his own books when he was a designer for American Heritage in the early 1960s."
Contents [Sections Only]
- Years of Growth
- World Power
- Towards War
- The Flying Machine
- The United States Goes to War
- Postwar: Starving Times
- Postwar: Times of Peace
- America Takes to the Air
- The Great Buildup
- The Test of Arms
- The Emergence of General Dynamics
- The Scientific Revolution
From the web site for The Art Director's Club: "The genius of Erik Nitsche encompasses virtually the entire sphere of visual communications. 'I would put him on the top-ten list of the best 20th-century designers in the world,' said Michael Aron, graphic artist and professor at the Parsons School of Design. Nitsche's prodigious and globe-straddling career, spanning nearly 60 years, included art direction, book design, typography, illustration, photography, film, signage, exhibits, packaging, industrial design, corporate design, and advertising."
Spreads from this volume can be viewed here.
out of stock