“God is a circle whose centre is everywhere but whose circumference is nowhere”. Circle means perfection, cyclicity, superiority of the divinity, but also instability and movement. Bruno Munari selects and describes in this little, extraordinary encyclopedia, several uses of this fascinating and mysterious form, unstable and hieratic at the same time.

Bruno Munari (24 October, 1907–30 September, 1998) was an Italian artist, designer, and inventor who contributed fundamentals to many fields of visual arts (painting, sculpture, film, industrial design, graphic design) in modernism, futurism, and concrete art, and in non-visual arts (literature, poetry) with his research on games, didactic method, movement, tactile learning, kinesthetic learning, and creativity.

“You throw something into the sea, and the sea (after an unspecific and indeterminable amount of time) hands it back to you carved, finished, smoothed, shiny or polished according to the material and wet too because that way colours are brighter”. Reflections on the sea as creator of ‘useless’ design objects.

Bruno Munari (24 October, 1907–30 September, 1998) was an Italian artist, designer, and inventor who contributed fundamentals to many fields of visual arts (painting, sculpture, film, industrial design, graphic design) in modernism, futurism, and concrete art, and in non-visual arts (literature, poetry) with his research on games, didactic method, movement, tactile learning, kinesthetic learning, and creativity.

In 1949 Munari designed for the first time a series of “libri illeggibili” (illegible books), which abandoned textual communication in behalf of aesthetic function only. Paper is no longer the support of only text, but it also communicates a message through the format, the colour, the cuts and their successions. The elements that usually set up a book (like the colophon and the title-page) are removed, and the reading seems the execution of a melody, with always different tones during the sequence of the pages.