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THE MELTING VISION
The dark side of post-industrial modernity
This book uses deconstructed typography to explore the experience of post-industrial modernity. The main quotation, which runs throughout the entire book, is from Marshall Berman's 1982 work All That is Solid Melts into Air. Each spread also contains secondary text, often taken from news accounts, pertaining to the darker side of modernity.
All primary text is set in Berthold Akzidenz Grotesk, with secondary text set in DTL Documenta. Images are of the urban environment (primarily Toronto and London), cropped and bitmapped to highlight interesting visual forms and counterforms. The book is printed entirely in black and white, without greyscale.
The entire book is concertina-folded with a wraparound cover, and can be unfolded into a continuous single unit. -
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The wraparound cover of the book. The title is a reference to Karl Marx's 1848 work The Communist Manifesto. -
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William H Whyte, Jr, the writer of the classic business/sociological text The Organization Man, on the Protestant Ethic. -
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Alex Inkeles confidently predicts that modern management methods will bring about worker empowerment.
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Marshall McLuhan waxes overly optimistic on the role of the computer in the modern world. -
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Alex Aspden on the Wapping printers' strike of 1986, in which Rupert Murdoch's News International crushed the once-powerful printers' union. -
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Simon Sadler discusses the proliferation of modern architecture. -
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Barry Grey outlines the events of the 1981 air traffic controllers' strike, in which 11,359 controllers were fired on a single day. -
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Karl Marx's description of industrial society. -
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The attribution for the main quotation. -
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A listing of all references used in the book.
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