A delightful recent purchase was the Tara Books edition of
Christian Morgenstern's
In the Land of Punctuation. Morgenstern's poem is effectively a fable of political intolerance and genocide, with different punctuation marks as the different races or political factions involved. Tara have translated the poem into English, and produced it as a beautiful picture book, with artwork by
Rathna Ramanathan.
Ramanthan is based in both London and Chennai. I'd dearly love to reproduce several of the book's double-page spreads here, but as it's quite short, that seems unfair. Instead, here are a couple of single pages which should give you some of the flavour: all of the illustrations consist entirely of typography in black and red (with overprinting).
She has worked on two other books for Tara, providing the type for
The Fivetongued Firefanged Folkadotted Dragon Snake, and the typographical illustrations for the nonsense picture-book
Anything but a Brabooberry, by Anushka Ravishankar, of which here are some sample pages.
More of Ramanthan's work is viewable at her
website, including a wonderful talk on small presses
here.
EDIT: I first learned of this book from
here, Levi Stahl's interview with Tara's director. There are further samples of the book's art there, too.
