Bandontwerp voor: Margarete Boie, Waal - Waal! Das leben eines Sylter Grönlandfährers, 1942 before 1942

Reinier Willem Petrus de Vries made this design for Margarete Boie’s book cover in 1942. Just looking at it, I can almost feel the pen scratching across the paper, like the artist is carving into the page, building this dense, almost thorny frame. I wonder what de Vries was thinking, working on this during the war. The way the text is laid out, it's so formal, but there's also a kind of wildness to the lettering, a freedom in those swirling lines. It reminds me a bit of German Expressionist woodcuts, where the artists were really digging into the material. It feels like de Vries is trying to wrangle something unruly, maybe even the chaos of the time, into a contained space. Even though this is just a book cover, it's clear that artists are always in conversation, echoing each other, responding to what came before. And in the end, it all comes down to that physical act of making, of trying to make sense of the world through marks and gestures, embracing the uncertainty of it all.