Issue Fifteen: You and Me
Today's collection is a series of covers from Ty I Ja (“You and Me”) a monthly cultural review published in Warsaw from 1960 to 1973. The magazine was originally created to appeal to upper-class Polish women, but its wide coverage of international culture (translated literary pieces from authors like Hemingway and Simone de Beauvoir, foreign film reviews, etc.) made it one of only windows to the Western world in the post-Stalin era—solidifying its popularity with the country's intelligentsia at large. The magazine was cofounded by editor-in-chief Roman Juryś, a journalist and prominent socialist activist, and head-of-fashion Teresa Kuczyńska, with Roman Cieślewicz, a founder of the Polish poster school, serving as artistic director. Ty I Ja was disbanded in 1973 by Polish authorities who deemed the magazine too aspirational, and therefore “unsuitable to the economic realities of the country.”
This issue's featured archive is the amazing Arabic Cover Design Archive, founded by Egyptian designer Moe Elhossieny. The archive includes over 1,000 book covers from 1940 to 1990, collected from local markets, user submitted scans, and book publishers. As often discussed in this newsletter, design history is hugely bereft of non-Latin typography examples, and I'm so excited to see more archives like this filling in the gaps.
Bonus plug: today my friend and frequent collaborator Misha Euceph of Dustlight Productions launched the second season of her amazing podcast Tell Them I Am (I did the cover art), starting with this episode. New episodes drop every weekday for the duration of Ramadan; highly recommended!