FRITZ KHAN: Infographics Pioneer

Natural science buffs, graphics professionals, and anyone interested in the visual expression of data will be fascinated by this tribute to Fritz Kahn, the German infographics pioneer. He demystified complex scientific ideas and his creative concepts have influenced generations of artists and designers through to today. Fritz Kahn (1888-1968) was a German doctor, educator, popular science writer, amateur astronomer, medical scientist by training, gynecologist by early occupation, artist by inclination, humanist, visionary and polymath who was chased out of Germany by the Nazis, who banned and burned his books. He emigrated to Palestine, then France, and finally the United States to continue his life's work. His concern was developing innovative visual metaphors for understanding science and the human body, seeking to strip scientific ideas of their alienating complexity and engage a popular audience with those essential tenets of how life works. Best-known today for his iconic 1926 poster Man as Industrial Palace, Kahn inspired generations of scientific illustrators, including such legends as Irving Geis and such cultural treasures as the 1959 gem The Human Body: What It Is And How It Works. This new publication celebrates Kahn as a creative genius. The book's core is a comprehensive image section with more than 280 illustrations in 20 chapters, following Fritz Kahn's own systematics. It presents a selection of the most interesting images from Kahn's complete works and several preserved original illustrations. Most images have been reproduced at a much larger scale and thus may give a slight idea of the visually overwhelming impact Kahn's richly illustrated books triggered in his first readers. Detailed captions shed light on the content of the images as well as on Kahn's ideas and the general mindset of his time. The monograph presents three programmatic texts as transcriptions and original spreads of various illustrated articles from the 1920s to 1940s and features more than 350 colour illustrations with extensive captions, three original texts by Fritz Kahn himself, and an essay about Kahn's life and oeuvre. 19.6 x 25.5cm, 400 pages.