What You Get — Perks
In addition to The Bolted Book Facsimile itself, we are offering an perks developed from the art and design as well as the ideas found in The Bolted Book and the work of Fortunato Depero.
Depero Futurista Tote Bag
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For $25: DEPERO FUTURISTA TOTE BAG, featuring artwork from The Bolted Book (Depero’s portrait and the title page). Unbleached certified organic cotton, 13 in. wide x 14 in. high. Manufactured by Enviro-Tote, a family-owned business operating since 1990 in Bedford, NH.
- Get the DEPERO FUTURISTA TOTE BAG AND A COPY OF THE BOLTED BOOK in the BOOK + TOTE BUNDLE #1 for $154.
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Depero Futurista Tote Bag, showing both sides, which feature artwork from The Bolted Book.
Depero Futurista T-Shirt
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For $32: DEPERO FUTURISTA T-SHIRT, featuring logo designed by Fortunato Depero in 1926–27. Designed and manufactured by AS Colour, based in New Zealand. Charcoal gray, 100% combed cotton. Printed by Gowanus Print Lab — a community screen printing studio in Brooklyn.
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Depero Futurista T-Shirt, showing the men’s style (left), the women’s style (right), and back of the shirt (center). Men’s sizes XL, L, M, S; women’s sizes L, M, S.
“Promote Yourself” Tote Bag
For $34: “PROMOTE YOURSELF” TOTE BAG, featuring Depero’s exhortation to artists to vigorously advertise themselves: “Necessità di auto-réclame” (“The Need for Self-Promotion”), first published in The Bolted Book in 1927. 15 in. wide x 14 in. high with a 5-in. printed gusset. Printed on all 4 sides. Two internal pockets: cellphone size pocket on one gusset; 8 x 8-in. pocket on one wide side. External art: original layout from the book on one wide side, with text in Italian; English translation on the opposite side. Gusset panels with art as shown. 100% organic and ethically sourced cotton using environmentally safe dyeing and printing processes. Manufactured by London-based re-wrap — a not-for-profit enterprise that equips women living in rural India with sewing skills, enabling them to gain economic independence.
- Get the “PROMOTE YOURSELF” TOTE BAG AND A COPY OF THE BOLTED BOOK in the BOOK + TOTE BUNDLE #2 bundle for $163.
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“Promote Yourself” Tote Bag, showing both sides and gussets of the bag.
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“Promote Yourself” Tote Bag, detail of English text featured on one side of the bag.
8 Great Pages Poster
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For $52: 8 GREAT PAGES POSTER. Specially created for this project and featuring 8 iconic images from the new facsimile edition, 36 x 24 inches, designed by Laura Lindgren, printed in Italy. Ships rolled.
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The Book
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For $130: THE BOOK. The Bolted Book Facsimile will be an exact copy of the original Depero Futurista by Fortunato Depero, Dinamo-Azari, Milan, Italy, 1927, 12.5 x 9.5 in. (32 x 24.2 cm), and will be accompanied by a Reader’s Guide.
- For more information, see the section About The Bolted Book Facsimile and Reader’s Guide, below.
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The Book + Special Frame Bundle — New!
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The manufacturers described above represent our current plans for fulfilling rewards. The project creator reserves the right to substitute a manufacturer of the same or better quality if warranted. Occasionally, special purchase terms may be offered to new backers. If that that happens, those same terms will also be made available, upon request, to existing backers.
A Word About Our Shipping: Your book and other rewards will arrive safely! Our top-quality shipping company, highly experienced in shipping and handling fine-arts materials and crowedfunding projects (clients include the creators of the NYCTA and NASA Graphics Standards Manuals, launched on Kickstarter), has developed special packaging for The Bolted Book, designed to shield the bolts and protect the book.
About the Original Bolted Book and Fortunato Depero
Before artists like Andy Warhol blurred the lines between commercial and fine art, before there were zines that questioned the concept of the printed page, Fortunato Depero (Trento, Italy, 1892–1960) created The Bolted Book.
The book was a showcase for Depero’s work completed between 1913 and 1927 and also a platform for his iconoclastic ideas — what today would be called an artist’s book. These ideas anticipated, by almost 100 years, an approach to design and art making that can now be seen everywhere — from the breaking down of barriers between fine art and popular culture, to an emphasis on working in multimedia, to the necessity of self-promotion by artists and designers.
As a portfolio of Depero’s career, The Bolted Book includes paintings, sculptures, textile and architectural designs, theater, dance, and advertising work, wordplays, manifestos, and reviews he received in many different languages. The book in particular highlights Depero’s work in graphic design and typography, including his well-known advertisements for the Italian apéritif Campari.
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Portrait of Fortunato Depero photographed in a theater dressing room in 1924, from The Bolted Book.
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Detail from The Bolted Book. Photo: Russell Fernandez
Depero by 1913 had embraced the modernist movement Futurism, which was marked by a love of the new century’s machine-driven technology and “dynamic” motion (in the form of cars, trains, and airplanes), coupled with a forceful rejection of past traditions and institutions.
With painter Giacomo Balla, in 1915 Depero authored the manifesto “Futurist Reconstruction of the Universe” – whose aim was to reimagine and redesign every aspect of the world to make it more exhilarating: to fuse life with art. The Bolted Book summed up Depero’s attempt, over the next decade and a half, to do exactly that, challenging the very structure of the book at the same time.
Published in Milan in 1927 by the painter-aviator Fedele Azari, who on an introductory page describes it as “a mechanical book bolted down like an engine,” the book was dubbed “a typographical racing car” by Futurism’s founder, F. T. Marinetti.
Selected Pages from The Bolted Book
Manifestos
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“Plastic Arts of Today” by Depero, celebrating Futurism as the culmination of sculpture, comparing Impressionism and Cubism.
Advertising
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“Advertising painting” for Campari, 1926. Exhibited at the 1926 Venice Biennale, this work was controversial as it showed advertising in a fine-art context.
Architecture
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“Typographical Architecture” manifesto, which presents Depero’s ideas on fusing architecture and advertising, realized in his Book Pavilion (Padiglione del Libro) for a 1927 exposition.
Textiles
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Two designs for pillows, published in The Bolted Book. Depero envisioned his book resting on a pillow while being read, to cushion the bolts.
Theater and Dance
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Opening page for the section “Magic Theater.”
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Page showing part of a press release for a “mechanical ballet” that featured stage sets and costumes designed by Depero. “Anihccam” is the Italian word for machine spelled backward.
Futurist House of Art
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Logo for Depero’s Futurist House of Art, which the artist established in 1919 in his native town of Rovereto, Italy, as a workshop for his Futurist projects. Detail from The Bolted Book.
Depero took The Bolted Book with him on his first trip, in 1928, to New York, where it served as a business card for securing design work and as a “portable museum” (when the bolts were removed, the pages could be pinned up on a wall, exhibition style). He was the only Futurist ever to live in New York City and while there, he produced graphic designs and covers for publications such as Vogue, Vanity Fair, and The New Yorker.
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Cover of “Vanity Fair” by Fortunato Depero, 1930 (left); and Depero and his wife, Rosetta (holding a copy of The Bolted Book), on the rooftop of the Advertising Club in New York, 1930. Photos: Mart, Archivio del '900, Fondo Fortunato Depero
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The Bolted Book unbolted and displayed on the wall during the Fortunato Depero exhibition at the Center for Italian Modern Art, 2014. Photo: Walter Smalling, Jr.
The Bolted Book and Depero in the 21st Century
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Typographical composition from The Bolted Book.
Depero continued a long and varied career in the years following the publication of The Bolted Book. In 1959, a year before he died, he opened in his hometown of Rovereto the Casa Depero, a museum-laboratory dedicated to his Futurist work and ideas (today part of the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Trento and Rovereto).
After Depero’s death in 1960, the vast range of the artist-designer’s production receded from public view and attention. As Futurism approached its 100th anniversary in 2009, however, Depero was gradually rediscovered and his adventurous, playful, and expansive outlook on art and design, expressed in The Bolted Book, came to be seen as an embodiment of the 21st century.
“Depero’s Futurist vision is now ubiquitous. We are living in his reconstructed universe.” Jonathon Keats in Forbes, May 29, 2009
About The Bolted Book Facsimile and Reader’s Guide
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The new Bolted Book Facsimile will be an exact copy of the original Depero Futurista. The scans used for printing will be of number 843 (out of a stated total of 1,000) from the original edition. This copy was personally presented in 1928 to Gianni Mattioli, who was one of Depero’s most important patrons and supporters and who actively participated in the production of the original book. His daughter, the Milanese art historian Laura Mattioli, is the founder of the Center for Italian Modern Art in New York.
Two facsimlle editions were published previously (in 1978 and 1987). Both were published in collaboration with the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Trento and Rovereto (Mart) and both are now out of print. Unlike those editions, which included added front and back matter, a table of contents, and page numbers, the new facsimile will be a faithful re-creation including only material that appeared in the original edition.
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SPECIFICATIONS
- Trim: Length: 32 cm (12.5 in.); height: 24.2 cm (9.5 in.). Oblong
- Page count: 240; 146 with text or images
- Binding: Open on four sides, cover and all pages hole-drilled for bolt binding and fastened with aluminum bolt, nut, and cotter pin (2)
- Cover: Textured, colored cardstock
- Paper: Various colors, weights, and textures, plus 4 tissue (glassine) pages
- One two-panel gatefold
- Inks: 4/4; occasional pages throughout 5/5
- Production and Reader’s Guide design by Laura Lindgren
- Printed by Graphicom, Vicenza, Italy
- Bolts manufactured by VIPACO, Maniago, Italy, under the supervision of artist Paul Etienne Lincoln
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Photo: Laura Lindgren
READER’S GUIDE
A Reader’s Guide, featuring essays by Depero scholars, English translations and annotations of key texts, and previously unpublished archival photographs and other materials from the Fortunato Depero archive (Mart), will accompany each copy of the facsimile. Specifications: 48 pages, sewn paperback, 10.5 x 9.5 in. (26.5 x 24 cm), 4-color throughout.
Who We Are
Designers & Books has decades of experience in the design book publishing world, covering all aspects of the process from developing book concepts through delivering finished books into the hands of eagerly awaiting fans and supporters. Designers & Books managed the successful campaign in 2015 to publish a facsimile edition of the classic design book Ladislav Sutnar: Visual Design in Action (now available from Lars Müller Publishers) as well as the original letterpress hardcover edition of Seymour Chwast’s book At War with War in Spring 2016 (and which is scheduled for release in early 2017).
Our team includes two important cultural institutions — the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Trento and Rovereto (Mart) and the Center for Italian Modern Art — that focus on the work of Fortunato Depero. Through them we have access to multiple original copies of The Bolted Book.
Also on our team is an award-winning book designer who designed and managed production for the catalogue for the 2014 Depero exhibition at the Center for Italian Modern Art. Our printer, based in Vicenza, Italy, specializes in superior-quality fine-art books.
This experienced team has been working on The Bolted Book project for more than a year and is dedicated to delivering a beautiful facsimile edition that will provide endless enjoyment and inspiration.
Credits
Please see our Kickstarter page (campaign concluded December 1, 2016) for a detailed description of all of our team members.
All pages from Depero Futurista, Dinamo-Azari, Milan, Italy, 1927, artist’s book bound with bolts, 12.5 x 9.5 in. (32 x 24.2 cm). © 2016 Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY / SIAE Rome. Reproduction, including downloading of Fortunato Depero works, is prohibited by copyright laws and international conventions without the express written permission of Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Photographs of Depero Futurista details are courtesy of Designers & Books. Except where otherwise noted, book exterior photographs by Adam Reich; book interior photographs by Jason Burch.
Thank you for your support!
