Tara books have hinted that they may be reprinting 'Anything But a Grabooberry', written by Anushka Ravishankar, and typographically illustrated by Rathna Ramanathan, which is wonderful news as this celebrated book is very hard to find.
‘We found that children enjoy figuring out words like puzzles, since they have no pre-conceptions about this. Adults are not necessarily faster at comprehending it.’ Gita Wolf, publisher at Tara Books
Christian Morgenstern's 1905 'In the Land of Punctuation' was re-interpreted and published in 2017 by Tara Books with graphic design and typography by Rathna Ramanathan. Christian Morgenstern’s poem is a darkly comic dadaist piece. The text has unmistakable political undertones suggesting manacing, authoritarian systems of control. Its graphic representation through typography by Rathna Ramanathan has a very similar visual language to Russian Constructivism of the early 20th Century.
"Writing is a visual image. In order for us to read sometimes, we don’t react to writing as a visual image because we’re taking in the content. There’s a sort of hierarchy that’s contained there where you ignore how something looks — unless you’re a designer and you refuse to buy something because the typography’s really bad!" Rathna Ramanathan
Jellyfish wash up here in drifts at certain times of the year, beautiful and fragile with newfound cyanotype joy after getting the correct Potassium Ferricyanide (red not green), I thought, well I thought maybe I could print a jellyfish!
A new skill is always tricky especially when working with scary unfamiliar materials, and sunshine which is not very predictable here. So I have been running at pieces of paper with seaweed and transparencies then rushing into the bathroom often to wash an image clean away or for it to fade to almost none existence. Finally, I have three images that I had hoped I would achieve, but this is a fickle art form who knows when I will achieve my fourth.
