Hell: The People and Places

＂Whether it is a real place, a human construct, an idea or a superstition, hell holds a place of honor in culture, literature, and religion throughout the ages. Journey beyond the gates of the underworld into diverse and unique versions of hell, with two extraordinary guides: Seymour Chwast and Steven Heller. Like Dante in the footsteps of Virgil, you will navigate through the most burning (or icy!) dark realms that lurk in the heart of the human imagination--the Jewish Gehenna, the Sunni Jahannam, the Swahili Jehanum, the Mayan Xibalba, and many others--and meet all the characters who have created hell, visited it, or been involved in more or less unfortunate descents into it.＂--Back cover.

Steven Heller is the author, editor, and coauthor of more than two hundred books on design, typography, political and satirical art, and illustration (Including Growing Up Underground: A Memoir of Counterculture New York), and fifteen of them with Seymour Chwast. For thirty-three years he was alternately an art director and book columnist for the New York Times Book Review. Currently he is the co-chair of the School of Visual Arts MFA Design program in New York.

Seymour Chwast is co-founder of Push Pin Studios and has been director of the Pushpin Group, where he reintroduced graphic styles and transformed them into a contemporary vocabulary. His designs and illustrations have been used in advertising, animated films, and editorial, corporate, and environmental graphics. He has created more than 150 posters and has designed and illustrated more than 50 children’s books. His work has been the subject of three books, including Seymour Chwast: The Left-Handed Designer. Many museums, such as the Museum of Modern Art (New York), the Library of Congress (Washington DC), and the Israel Museum (Jerusalem), have collected his posters. He has lectured and exhibited worldwide and is in the Art Directors Hall of Fame. He is the recipient of the 1985 Medal from the American Institute of Graphic Artists. He lives in New York City.