Our project draws on material from the Otto and Marie Neurath Isotype Collection. This collection holds copies of all the children’s books produced the Marie Neurath and her team when they were working in London in the 1950s and 1960s.
We are also fortunate to have archival material that tells us how the books were designed. We know, for example, that it involved teamwork – writers, editors and illustrators working together. This table shows the roles and some of the people involved in the making of the Visual History series (1948):
The archives contain correspondence, notes, sketches, dummies of books, often annotated by Marie Neurath, that evidence the stages in the design process. We will display some of this material at the ‘Picturing Science’ exhibition at House of Illustration in summer 2019.
You can read more about Marie Neurath’s working method in this paper by Sue Walker: