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"A wunderkind was born whose initial creative attempts encompassed the usual poems and paintings, amazingly giving expression to the latter in an untypically self-assured manner for a 15-year-old in an exhibition in the forest. It was imperative for him that his poems be published. A strong will to express himself is recognizable." Gregor Jansen, excerpted from the The World is a Sign in Yester 'n' Today.
A monumental, three-volume encyclopedia of alphabetically organized images, Ferdinand Kriwet: Stars was first published by Kiepenheuer & Witsch in 1971. In the 1960s, German author and media artist Ferdinand Kriwet (1942–2018), inspired by concrete poetry and its interest in the visual quality of linguistic signs, began to approach the literary medium of the book in a new way. Imagining new ways of reading that resisted linearity, Kriwet experimented with alternatives, encouraging a rapid back-and-forth between the pages of the book and the texts and images on them. In Stars, he treats images like words and arranges them in alphabetical order in an epic encyclopedia format.
For years, Stars has only been available, at considerable cost, in antiquarian book catalogs. This new facsimile edition of Ferdinand Kriwet: Stars brings Kriwet's pioneering vision and his seminal book back into print.
