Materiality in Bruno Munari’s book objects

This paper reviews the primacy of materiality in Bruno Munari’s work based on the case study of two of his picturebooks. Bruno Munari was one of 20th-century Italy’s most eclectic figures. Over the course of his lengthy career as an artist and designer, Munari explored the field of materiality in children’s books with exceedingly favourable results. His picturebooks set a precedent in the field of children’s literature, and they are highly valued even today. Children are fascinated by the opportunity to organise the experience of reading more freely thanks to innovative graphic and typographic mechanisms that fully exploit the editorial potential of materials such as paper, construction paper, and cardboard, but also transparent or semi-transparent sheets of acetate film, wood, plastic, sponge, and so on. In this paper, I describe the exclusive relationship that Munari developed over the years with the book as an object in all its various components (text and paratext). To do so, I discuss two of Munari’s significant editorial projects, the picturebook entitled Nella notte buia [In the Dark of the Night] (1956) and I Prelibri [Prebooks] (1980). I analyse the ways in which the Milanese artist succeeded in exploiting all the communicative, aesthetic and educational potential of these books’ material dimension.