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
