A Story As Long As…

... a dachshund, an airship, a comet. These and other subjects hatched by the imagination of Pino Tovaglia stretch out across the 56 pages of Una storia lunga come, published by Lazy Dog. This game-book was presumably created in the late 1960s or early 1970s, when Tovaglia was working with Rosellina Archinto and Emme Edizioni, which at the time was the only Italian publishing company for children’s books that published works created by designers. This unique exercise in style, adapted for contemporary publication, takes us into a story as long as, and as great as, the imagination and creativity of Pino Tovaglia, one of the most remarkable figures in international design and graphics of the twentieth century. Tovaglia started his career as an assistant to Carlo Carrà at the Scuola Superiore di Arte of the Castello Sforzesco in Milan, and then made experimental short films for Pagot Film. He contributed to the newspaper La Notte and worked with Finmeccanica, creating an advertising campaign that earned him the Palma d’Oro for Advertising as early as 1954. In 1955 he was one of the founders of the Italian Association of Visual Communication Design (AIAP). One of his best-known designs is the Lombardy Region logo, created with Bruno Munari, Bob Noorda and Roberto Sambonet, winner of the Compasso d’Oro award in 1979. He worked for the most important Italian companies, including RAI, for which he and Bruno Bozzetto also worked in the field of animation. Tovaglia created famous advertisements and also designed exhibition stands for Pirelli, and he became the art director of Pirelli magazine. He reinvented the logo of the Long P for the campaigns of Il Centro, the company’s in-house agency, in the late 1960s. The logo can also be seen in this book: the word “Pirelli” moves on a truck that Tovaglia imagines on a bridge as long as the objects, landscapes, and animals that inhabit the pages that follow. In a comment, the author’s daughter, Irene Tovaglia, describes them: “Looking at that crocodile unravelling his armour onto a spool of thread so as not to crumple it before going to sleep, I can only thank my father for having so often evoked in his work the games we played with him when we were little girls […]. Thank you for bequeathing to us this vision of yours and these stories so full of questions why.”  

Una storia lunga come
Illustrations by Pino Tovaglia
Text by Marta Sironi
Lazy Dog, 2022