Machines Before Machines

In the 1930s, Bruno Munari drew ‘humorous cartoons’ for Bertoldo and Settebello, accompanying them with ‘puns and strange little stories’ inspired not only by Saul Steinberg, with whom he collaborated, but also by the American cartoonist Rube Goldberg, known as the inventor of the ‘Rube Goldberg machine’. In this book edited by Stefania di Maria, a researcher and scholar of the relationship between art and design, over 40 cartoons published in Settebello in the late 1930s and now part of the private collection of Bruno Munari’s heirs and grandchildren are collected. In these early experiments Munari played with freedom and later systematised the process, and taking up these prototypes he produced a book (Munari’s Machines, 1942) which is, reading between the lines, a real design manual.