Mini Modernist Book List

Fellow design book fetishists: One assumes you fancy yourself a taste maker in all that you do, so your home reflects your sensibilities as an arbiter of all that is clever, creative and hip. But add a baby and sh*t hits the proverbial Cirrus Ceiling Fan. You don't panic, not you. You simply develop a costly, all-consuming quest for children's books that will serve as window dressing for the munchkin's bookshelf to artfully disguise the stacks of (equally brilliant but lesser designed) reading material that, well, your kid will more likely read, but you find a little ahh... pedestrian. Shudder. Never fear. The following books (shop them all here) make great gifts for your breeder friends or keepers for your own little tyke's library that make the immediate statement that you are A) an brutal aesthete who doesn't abide Junie B Jones and B) unapologetic about it. Feel free to add to this list; the goal is to fill that Eames bookcase to the brim and that alone-- takes a village. 
You could ease Junior gently into his ABC's. Or you could blow his little mind:
Try the following, starting with ABC3D, a nutty 3-D cut paper pop up book that yes, Junior will rip into shreds the moment he touches it, so better keep this one on the UPPER shelf and let him read the Richard Scarry instead; Every child's Ero Saarinen side table should have Bruno Munari's ABC perched upon it; and Charlie Harper's ABC's for the little avant naturalist in the family should suffice.

Next up, munchkin learns her numbers. Why lower the bar on your burgeoning genius by using Dora the Explorer flash cards when you can have Jean-Luc Fromental and Joelle Jolivet take a crack at her brain with their charming oversized 365 Penguins?; Charlie Harper's jovial little woodland creatures in his 123's  may do nothing more than list numbers, but so elegantly! And no modern bookshelf would be complete without Ann & Paul Rand's Little 1. Learning is Chic!

What's cuter than... Modernist Animals! Aww... There are many on that front, but let's just stop and rest here for a moment, on Fani Marceau and Joelle Jolivet's Panorama Fold Out Book.

And once again, Charlie Harper, An Illustrated Life will give serve you a little talent-envy humble pie with your bedtime story.

Coloring books that don't have Hannah Montanna, Lil' PetShop or Pokemon are easy to come by. Toss those atrocities in favor of Taro Gomi's oversized "gee why didn't I market this" Scribbles, Squiggles and Doodles books. So pumpkin only COLORS em in-- these make nicer wall art than his original stuff! (Wait, did I say that out loud?)

Some smarty-pants reads for Madison or Ezra will not only widen their verbal horizons, it'll help them understand the relevance of color-balance harmony and faux-naive lettering. Try Laura Ljungkvist's Follow The Line (it's a series, there are two), Taro Gomi's Bus Stop, and Ann & Paul Rand's I Know a Lot of Things and the famous word-play book, Sparkle and Spin. Start em snobby, nice n' young.


And of course, the pop-up book. Sigh. These'll lead you to prematurely teach little Robert inappropriate terms like "This Mo-Fo Is Jacked UP!" once you start browsing through.  David A. Carter kinda cornered the market on shapes, with his amazing series below, to start with.


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