Graphique De La Rue ─ The Signs of Paris

Paris is a city of pure enchantment, and everyone who loves the City of Light has a Parisian muse, from the Tour Eiffel tocreme caramel. For celebrated graphic designer and incessant flaum;neur Louise Fili, it's the city's dazzling signage. For more than four decades, Fili has strolled picturesque Parisian rues and boulevards with map and camera, cataloging the work of generations of sign craftsmen.

Graphique de la Rue is Fili's photographic diary of hundreds of Paris's most inventive restaurant, shop, hotel, street, and advertising signs. Classic neon cafe signs are juxtaposed with the dramatic facades of the Moulin Rouge and the Folies Bergere. Colorful mosaics cheerfully announce hotel entrances, department stores, fishmongers, even public toilets. Hector Guimard's legendary entrances to the Paris Metro stations brush elbows with graceful gold-leaf and dimensional Art Deco, Futurist, or Art Nouveau architectural lettering, as well as whimsical pictorial signs (giant eyeglasses announceoptiques, and oversized hanging shears indicate a knife and scissors maker).

A major influence on Fili's own work, many of these masterpieces of vernacular design, now destroyed, live on solely in this book, a typographic love letter to Paris sure to inspire designers and armchair travelers alike.

Louise Fili is well-known and respected throughout the design community—she has won numerous awards, including the AIGA Medal for lifetime achievement, and has been inducted into the Art Directors Hall of Fame.