9. CHRONICLE BOOKS
As an undergraduate intern at Dartmouth’s design studio in the 1970s, Martin Venezky came across a copy of Seymour Chwast’s and Milton Glaser’s The Push Pin Graphic and snuck it out the door. Set against the sterile corporate modernism that then prevailed, the Graphic exploded with kaleidoscopic experimental abandon that its creators legitimized with the swagger of technical mastery. “It opened up the possibility of the pleasure of graphic design,” Venezky says. “You could create by hand. You didn’t have to be antiseptic. You could be lavish.”

The Graphic was radical in political stance, voracious in its appropriation of historic and artistic references, and prolific. Its mythology, in fact, has weathered the years more bravely than the thin stock of its 86 issues. Decades after he first saw The Graphic (“It was issue number 65, by the way”), Venezky approached Chronicle Books with his idea for The Push Pin Graphic: A Quarter Century of Innovative Design and Illustration. The 2004 volume safeguards a relic that might otherwise have disintegrated.

As important, it presents an oeuvre that—under the weight of Push Pin Studios’ legacy and the Graphic’s impermanence—has been neglected by critical analysis, even within a visual culture shaped by it. “There is a Push Pin style,” says Steven Heller, the book’s editor and author of its historic overview, “but the Graphic was the place where they tested that. More than any other artifact, the Graphic underscores how truly progressive—and downright fun—Push Pin Studios were.” Tiffany Meyers