Reprints of Jože Plečnik’s Fairytales Makalonca

Abstract

This paper focuses on a small fairytale book entitled Makalonca, completely designed by Jože Plečnik, and its two reprints, which were unfortunately found inferior to the original design. The Slovenian architecture by Jože Plečnik (1872–1957) is well known in Europe, while his work in the area of graphic design and typography is less known. During the Second World War he made all the decorations, vignettes and initial letters for fairytales and elaborated graphic design for the book. Two paperback reprints were subsequently published as well; one a year after the architect’s death in 1958 and another in 1988, commemorating the centenary of the fairytales. In both reprints it was stressed that the graphic design remained the same as done by Plečnik. However, both reprints are deformations of the original. Not only are they different in book and layout size, typefaces, one even in the type style and type size of the body text, but there are also many other differences to be found within the rest of the text. In consequence, the Slovenian cultural heritage has lost a great deal.