Hello, and welcome! Thank you for signing up for this newsletter, and I hope you will enjoy the ride. For the very first edition, I spy with my typographic eye a collection of Hindi children’s books from half a century ago. If you follow me on social media, you might have seen a few Jnyanabharati Bala Pocket Books covers that I shared last year. Today I take a dive into the history of these books, and a closer look at the design of their covers. Plus, a couple of book recommendations for those of you who love children’s books, their design and histories as much as I do.

But first, introductions. My name is Pooja, aka Matra Type. I am a typeface designer, letterer and typographer. Usually, my work centres around Indic scripts, especially Devanagari, but my flights of fancy are many and varied. I draw, engineer and write about type at TypeTogether, aside from being available for commissions as an independent designer (get in touch!).

This newsletter will be a mixed bag of typographic curiosities — I will talk about street lettering and ephemera; share what I have learned through my work as designer; review new and old typefaces; and point you in the direction of great books, online resources, and events about type and design. I live and work in India, and I expect that will shine through every time I write.

Jnyanabharati Bal Pocket Books

For as long as I can remember, there have been nooks and crannies in my parents’ house where, if I braved the dust and looked hard enough, I could find old books. Books that belonged to my grandparents, and to my Dad when he was a young boy. Last autumn, in a trunk that hadn’t been touched in years, my family found a collection of children’s books that my Dad would have read when he was about ten. They belonged to a series called Jñyānabhāratī Bāla Pocket Books (ज्ञानभारती बाल पॉकेट बुक्स).

Small and cheaply-priced, Jñyānabhāratī Bāla Pocket Books were paperbacks for children published from Lucknow starting at the fag end of the 1960s, and into the 1970s. They featured stories from a range of genres — mystery, thriller, fantasy, humour, mythology and history, among others — and equally evocative cover designs.

A little history

According to Dr. Nikesh Kumar in Bāla Sāhitya: Swarūpa evam Vikāsa (बाल साहित्य – स्वरूप एवम् विकास, 2021), Jñyānabhāratī Bāla Pocket Books began publication in November 1969 in Lucknow, close on the heels of Kiran Bāla Pocket Books (किरण बाल पॉकेट बुक्स), which came out only a month earlier, and were the first children’s pocket books produced in Hindi. Conflicting information appears in the chapter on Hindi in Children’s Literature in Indian Languages (2017), edited by Dr. KA Jamuna, which states that Jñyānabhāratī Bāla Pocket Books were the pioneers, followed by Kiran, Anil (अनिल) and Subodh (सुबोध) Pocket Books. Either way, it is evident that this series was amongst the earliest produced pocket books for children in Hindi.

The books were published in sets of six, cost Re. 1 each, and were available as part of their very own post-based home library scheme, called Jñyānabhāratī Gharelū Bāla Pustakālaya Yojanā (ज्ञानभारती घरेलू बाल पुस्तकालय योजना). One could become a member by sending Re. 1 by money order. And then every other month, they would receive six books by value payable post, but wouldn’t have to pay any postal charges. That’s right, no delivery changes, and cash on delivery! Apart from the books, the membership promised a monthly magazine, plastic covers for the books, and other free gifts. In just a few years, the cost of the membership rose to Rs. 2, and instead of six, members received only five books at a time.

None of the thirty-odd books I found carry their years of publication, but they follow a series numbering system. If we assume November 1969 to be the publication month for the first set of six books, we can try to calculate when the rest came out. The first book in my collection is №16 (likely published in March 1970) and the latest is №141 (likely published in 1973).

The cover story

The books are small, about 13 cms in height and 9 cms in width, and some covers follow a design template. The cover is divided vertically into two. Roughly 3.75 cms on top is reserved for the publisher’s logo, book title and author name, and the space below is filled up with an illustration. This system is easily broken with the illustrations sometimes encroaching into the top bar, and the logo moving from one corner of the cover to another. The odd book will even invert the template. On some occasions, the bar for text is done away with entirely, allowing for greater flexibility in composition. In contrast, the design of the back cover appears to remain consistent. Titles of the upcoming cohort are listed in an ellipse in the centre of the page, along with information about the library scheme. The ellipse is anchored by geometric shapes on the top and bottom, and the colour palette of lemon yellow, teal and pink is uniformly applied.

I find the interplay of different lettering styles on the covers remarkable. Where most titles are in bold, eye-catching styles, the author names are in much more delicate monolinear letters. Less important parts of speech, like kā (का), ke (के), kī (की), are often styled similarly to let the remaining words take centre stage. The book titles are usually in bright red, and it is not uncommon for three, even four, styles to be used together for them. The result, especially when seen together with the primary coloured illustrations, is nothing short of splashy.

The books don’t specify who designed the covers. Some illustrations are signed, though one can’t be sure if the same person drew the lettering also. The two signed names I managed to make out are “Shirazi” and “Prashant Paul”.

Swashbuckling rakaras

You don’t want to miss the immaculate swashes in the names of the authors. The downward diagonal strokes of the र स are always good candidates to elongate, as is the final stroke of the ह, and the ukāra and ūkāra mātrās. But what really caught my eye here is the treatment of the rakāras. The flourished rakāras on combinations like प्र and श्र have the effect of ribbons fluttering in the wind, adding cadence and movement to these short snippets of text, making them come alive.

Playing with weight and stress

The covers are full of examples of how weight and stress can be manipulated to create striking lettering — from letters with razor-thin headlines and heavy vertical stems to those with portly headlines and weight on the horizontal strokes to chunky monolinear designs. My favourite one uses tall triangles in place of vertical stems, alternately upright and upside down, to create unmistakable rhythm, which on first glance masks the eccentric weight distribution.

Typographic shape-shifting

User interface typefaces tend to be designed to fit into rigid vertical proportions, compressing Devanagari letterforms that would otherwise burrow deep below the baseline. Use them enough and for everything, and one can get used to seeing Devanagari text as being loosely contained between two parallel lines, like rows and rows of train tracks, if you will. So it is refreshing to see letterforms on these covers that swell and shrink to fit organic shapes, drape around undulating headlines, and treat neither the baseline nor the headline as unyielding and unbreakable.

Expressive letterforms

I love the way a couple of covers quietly replace a part of a letter with a more expressive form, made all the better by the fact that the arched mātrā and abstract, floral candrā bindū are not in-your-face visual puns that usually dominate. Though don’t be fooled by these examples into thinking that subtle is always how these covers go. After all, we have a blood-soaked title in the mix (scroll up to find it in the first image).

Faux-script wonders

The Arabicised Devanagari on these covers showcases some top-notch script impersonation. These examples do a great job of drawing Devanagari letters with a notional pen held at an angle you’d expect in Arabic, and the flourishes and superfluous marks are the cherry on top. When I shared these covers on Twitter, it opened up an interesting conversation full of links to more examples of faux-script lettering — check that thread out.

To serif or not to serif

Back in November last year, I highlighted some Jñyānbhāratī Bāl Pocket Books’ covers with “seriffed” letterforms on Instagram, and asked if seeing examples like this critically may throw light on how the designer understood (or subverted?) traditional Devanagari letter anatomy and calligraphic stroke order to decide where the “serifs” should go. In the absence of a long typographic history that showcases the development of different serif shapes like in Latin, equally curious are the different styles of “serifs” one sees on Devanagari letters, not only on these covers but also elsewhere, and I wonder what meanings and moods get intuitively assigned to these serif shapes. I would be remiss not to ask if my use of the word “serifs” here is an unfortunate consequence of my own Latin-centric design education, and what I am seeing are out-strokes, albeit non-traditional versions of what would have been made by the reed pen. What do you think? What term do you prefer in this context, serif or out-stroke?

Do you have collections of old children’s books in local languages? I would love to see them. Hit reply on this newsletter to tell me all about them, or share them on Instagram for everyone to enjoy, and tag me.

From my bookshelf

If this issue of the newsletter was right up your alley, you might enjoy picking up Lawrence Zeegen’s Ladybird by Design: 100 years of words and pictures, which tells the story of the iconic English children’s book publisher and is full of reproductions of covers and inside spreads. A wonderful counterpoint to it is Giedrė Jankevičiūtė and V. Geetha’s Another History of the Children’s Picture Book: From Soviet Lithuania To India. This heavily-illustrated book examines the affects of globalisation on design, publishing and reading by grounding its arguments in the examination of Soviet children’s books and their influence in India and Soviet Lithuania.

P.S. Please tell a typographically-inclined friend about this newsletter, and send them here to subscribe.

This issue was first published on August 10, 2022.

It was featured in Robin Rendle’s newsletter Adventures in Typography, in an issue titled The Shackles of the Baseline. Robin writes about the parallels he sees between the Devanagari lettering on the book covers and his wish to be more playful with Latin typesetting. He reminds the readers that “what I [sic] learn from other languages, other cultures, other places, can be applied to my [sic] own.”