“Marinetti stated a desire ‘to redouble the expressive force of words’ and spoke of ‘the flux and reflux, the leaps and bursts of style that run through the page’. As if the printed page was a battlefield. In fact, in a number of pioneering Futurist works, including Marinetti’s books, Zang Tumb Tumb (1914) and les Mots en liberté (Words-in-Freedom) and Carlo Carrà’s Guerrapittura (War-painting), were inspired by the mechanized warfare unleashed by World War II”. Andel 110; Ex-Libris n° 684.

“We say that the world’s magnificence has been enriched by a new beauty; the beauty of speed... Time and Space died yesterday. We already live in the absolute, because we have created eternal, omnipresent speed.” (Marinetti, 1909)

Filippo Tommaso Marinetti—poet, playwright, journalist, and novelist—was the founder and guiding spirit of the Italian Futurist movement. Beginning in 1909, he introduced ideas based on the visualization of speed and innovation in modern technology. His ideas had a profound impact not only on the visual arts, but also on literature and theater. Marinetti developed the concept of parole in libertà (free text), which carried the idea of free verse one step farther. It eliminated any rules regarding spelling, syntax, or typography.

Like many artists at that time, Marinetti developed a fascination with the concept of speed, sparked in part by advances in transportation and building construction. He was not interested in the social advances that technology would bring, but with the intoxicating and frightening experience of the power of machines. Using typography alone, Marinetti explodes the norms for book presentation, expressing modernity through a controlled chaos of words, shapes, and images.
Bibliography:
cf. Johnson, Robert Flynn, Artists' Books in the Modern Era 1870--2000: The Reva and David Logan Collection of Illustrated Books, San Francisco, 2001, no. 31