War with the Newts

Recently, I read a marvelous book by Karel Čapek and would like to share my delight with it. The story itself is very good (some may say even brilliant), but what I truly appreciate is the craftsmanship of this particular edition. The book is filled with illustrations by Hans Ticha, a contemporary artist, one of the very few pop artists in the former German Democratic Republic.

Sadly, I don’t think there is an English edition with Ticha’s illustrations (or in this theme in general). But, if you speak German, Polish, or Spanish, you should definitely read Der Krieg mit den Molchen, Inwazja jaszczurów, or La guerra de las salamandras. If you happen to not know any of these languages, I would still recommend reading War with the Newts, though more for its literary than artistic qualities.

The story#

In his book, Čapek (who is known for coining the word robot) creates a world set in his contemporary times (that is, after the First World War) in which a certain sailor discovers a new species of intelligent salamanders. The creatures quickly become cheap, near-slave labor, which greatly benefits the world powers — but this situation cannot last forever.

War with the Newts is a timeless dystopia and a sharp social critique on greed, environmental destruction, fascism, and colonialism. By presenting humanity’s flaws through the rise of the newts, Čapek highlights the self-destructive tendencies inherent in human nature.

Čapek was a minimalist. He could have brought to life monstrosities with tentacles, telepathic powers, semi-liquid, venomous — whatever the imagination desired. Instead, he settled for clumsy, awkward, one-and-a-half-meter salamanders walking on their hind legs.
~ Jan Gondrowicz¹

The design#

First of all, the typography is flawless. I’ve lost count of the number of fonts that are used in the book (there are a lot of newspaper excerpts, mails, minutes, headlines, and regular narrative — so the fonts change quite often), but they come together in such a beautiful way!

Secondly, the illustrations by Hans Ticha phenomenally match the overall style of the book. There is no point in me describing them to you, so just go and google some of Ticha’s work. One example is Deutsches Ballett, which is included at the beginning of the post (this particular painting is not in the book — it’s simply on of the best-known pieces by Ticha, partly because it critiques the GDR’s policies).

The images used in this post come from freunde-der-nationalgalerie.de, diezukunft.de, and wydawnictwodwiesiostry.pl.