Description

Data Visualization
HISTORY OF IDEAS
LANGUAGES / AVANT-GARDE:

Paulo de CANTOS (1892-1979).

Adagios. Maxims

Porto: Tip. Imprensa Moderna [circa 1939].

In this unusual, slightly confusing work Paul de Cantos plays with languages, words, initials, sentences and passages from songs, to emphasize the importance of the same thought in various languages to exercise human mind. He translates short texts, proverbs and sayings, mostly by ancient authors, to English, German, Italian, French, Esperanto, Portuguese, Latin and Greek. The text on each page is printed in two directions, possibly to make the learning process more difficult with a goal to achieve better results. (Despite the effort, it appears, that de Cantos did not master some of the languages, especially German).

The author also included an elaborate abstract drawing of the languages, a dictionary and a series of questions, answers, unrelated sentences, sentences in Romanian, Polish, Arabic, Russian, Sanskrit, Chinese, Japanese (all in Latin script), and creates a collage of small pieces of contemporary languages, which human mind should process and join in a whole.

The learning method is similar to de Cantos’s abstract illustrations, where he uses unconnected small geometric symbols and lines without unnecessary information.
The book is not dated, but was probably printed around 1939, as the list of the author’s other works at the beginning, mentions books printed approximately until that date.

We could not trace any institutional examples on Worldcat.

Paulo de Cantos (1892-1979)

Paulo de Cantos (1892-1979) was a Portuguese author, educator, bibliophile and amateur typographer, who authored between 1920 and 1960 circa 40 (and according to other sources up to 70 titles) on linguistics, geography, anatomy, literature, mathematics and folklore, all illustrated with unusual and unique data visualization, which was a part of his innovative pedagogical theories. His images are composed of repetitive small geometric patterns, letters or musical notes, much closer to modern presentation of information than to the contemporary art of his time.

This aimed to help students detach the letter from its common function of conveying sound (phonetic writing) in order to access the letter’s potential as an expressive shape, capable of producing meaning through a kind of pre-alphabetized logic – i. e. by facing, using and combining it accordingly to its visual / formal similarities to bits of reality. (Rita Carvalho, Letterpress Experiments in a Design Course, Post-Digital Letterpress Printing. Research, Education and Practice, 2021, p. 77.)

Cantos’s work, which was often printed in various techniques, only recently started gaining recognition in Portugal and he remains almost unknown outside of his native country.

A handful of exhibitions (including an exhibition at the Gulbenkian Museum in Paris, between September 19 and October 20, 2017) and a monography (António Silveira Gomes – Cláudia Castelo, A Cantos Compendium: A Designer of Pedagogical Theories, 2023) have been made on him in recent years. According to today’s researches Paulo de Cantos is considered to be decades ahead of his time.

Cantos’s books, printed in only small numbers and mostly surviving in uncut condition, suggest, that his work was only known to a limited circle of his contemporaries.His works only rarely appear in libraries outside Portugal.