book zoo by josh macphee

Book Zoo

by Josh MacPhee Author

This artist book has been a labor of love—being a lover of books, I’m always surrounded by publisher’s logos. While it’s easy to think of these little graphics as contemporary brands, publishing as an industry is hundreds of years old, and there are contemporary publishers who trace their logos back more than five hundred years. Early printers and publishers—and I mean 16th Century early—often used a printer’s mark, sometimes called a colophon, to distinguish their books. Here I've collected and arranged a zoo of 156 colophons that are animals. It was fun to do, and hopefully be fun for people to look at and read through, a great collection that documents a little-looked at history of design.