Get Your Reprint of Depero Futurista, One of the World's Most Iconic Design Books

Now you can experience Fortunato Depero's iconic monograph the way he intended: with your own hands.

In 1927, Fortunato Depero published a collection of his work that would become one of the most revered books in the canon of design. The Italian artist and designer, who is also famed for his Campari bottle design, called his monograph Depero Futurista---but most people know it as the Bolted Book, on account of the two large aluminum bolts with which Depero bound its contents: 240 self-promotional pages of typography, architecture, and product designs.

Some 90 years later, the rare monograph is legendary in design circles. “If you say Depero, the only thing I picture is that Bolted Book, which I’ve never seen in real life,” says Michael Bierut, a partner at Pentagram. “It’s this totemic thing that every graphic designer, even if they didn’t study it directly or if they’ve never seen it, is aware existed at one time.” What copies do exist, when you can find them for sale, run thousands of dollars---but thanks to a new Kickstarter project from the Center for Italian Modern Art in New York, the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Trento and Rovereto, and the publishing house Designers & Books, Depero’s famed book is getting a reprint, bolts and all.

Those bolts are important. Depero wanted his monograph to be interactive; the metal pins let readers dismantle the book and explore its contents piecemeal. In this way, the volume was more than a catalogue of Depero’s work. “He was creating a book as machine,” says design critic Steven Heller, who served as a consultant on the project.

The book’s physicality reflected Depero’s world view as an artist, as well. He belonged to the Futurists, an avant-garde artistic and social movement born out of early 20th century Italy that latched onto technology, machines, speed, war, and eventually fascism. The group was known for its wild manifestos, which addressed nearly every aspect of life. “They wrote manifestos about everything," says Raffaele Bedarida, an art historian at the Center for Italian Modern Art. Sex, love, money, war, advertising, and even food. “They once wrote, ‘We want to abolish spaghetti,” Bedarida recalls. “The goal was to shock.”

The Futurists were also known for their creative breadth. Depero, for his part, was a classic multi-hyphenate—a painter, sculptor, graphic designer, writer, composer, product designer, architect, and, above all else, a relentless advocate of his own work. In the Bolted Book he wrote: “Self-promotion is not a vain, futile, or exaggerated expression of megalomania. It is instead the irrepressible need to let the public know, and fast, of one’s creations and ideas.”

Had he been born a century later, Depero almost certainly would have been on Instagram. “He was constantly documenting his work,” Bedarida says. His Campari bottle, for example, existed not just as a physical object, but in photographs, paintings, and advertisements. It’s only fitting that the Bolted Book, a rare catalogue of his work, should find new life in a perfect facsimile, nearly a century after its original publication.