Say “visual storytelling” and the names of David Wiesnieski, Shaun Tan, Raymond Briggs, and Peter Spier are more likely to pop in the mind than the Hungarian artist Sándor Bortnyik, creator of a single wordless picture book in 1926: Potty és Pötty, kalandos utazása.  While it is not well known outside connoisseurs of the modernist picture book, other such books were published during the 1920s, such as Otto Geismar’s Old Testament stories acted out by stick figures or Edward Baumer’s Kinderparadies.

The story is familiar: a boy and girl are flying kites in the park when a great puff of wind pulls them up into the sky.  When they come down to earth, they find themselves in a strange land where balls grow magically.

Two of the balls carry them down the river to a castle, where they are welcomed by the king and his subjects, which include stereotypical renderings of a Black boy, a Chinese man, etc. in the crowd..  After a sumptuous tea, they enjoy a performance of the circus, fairground rides, a drive in  a touring car through the countryside, and the front row seats at the opera. They bid the king farewell and travel back home in an airplane before transferring to the backs of stars.The style of the illustrations in Potty és Pötty with its palette of flat bright colors and two-dimensional geometric figures bear comparison to Bortnyik’s famous contemporaneous advertising graphics, the best known being for Modiano cigarettes. The major difference was that he was under no obligation to promote a commercial brand, which gave him leeway to experiment with a visual narrative in the style of  Gebrauchtskunst, the early twentieth century design movement which redefined style and purpose of applied art.

If he was trying to break down the distinction between commercial art and book illustration as a minor form of fine art, the story of  two bourgeois children consuming a variety of elite pleasures while guests of royalty, was vendible if retrograde to a socialist who had spent time at the Bauhaus in Weimar.   Probably Bortnyik was pragmatic enough to realize that adapting Bauhaus ideas to trade children’s book illustration was a dead end.  Perhaps having proved to himself that a story could be told as a series of wordless posters, he had no desire to continue it, which might explain why he said nothing about book over his lifetime–unless he relented and included it in one of the many exhibition catalogues and retrospectives of his work in Hungary.

The book’s history is a curious and complicated one and all known editions are quite rare.  To date, the only scholarly article in English is by Samuel Albert at Fashion Institute of Technology in the 2015 collection Children’s Literature and the Avant-Garde.

Cotsen owns an edition issued by Ifjuság in Budapest with Bortnyik’s name on the cover title label, title and last illustration.  The color illustrations unaccompanied by text are mounted on leaves of thin card hinged with dark blue cloth in blue publisher’s cloth case; it seems unlikely that an artist’s copy (as the Cotsen copy has been described) would be in an edition binding.  Laid in is a typescript of 22 rhymed stanzas credited to Ernö Szep.  It has not been established if this is the Hungarian text published in a later edition.

In 1929 Alfred Hahns Verlag and Dietrich Sell copublished the illustrations with a verse narrative by Albert Sixtus, new endpapers conceivably  by Bortnyik, and an illustrated dust jacket by another hand (the Cotsen copy, like most surviving ones, doesn’t have the dust jacket).  Except for the copies designated as the 1.-4. Auflage of 16,000 copies, I have not been able to establish the date of the other copies in WorldCat.   In Germany, the book enjoys a sufficiently high reputation to have been reissued as a facsimile in 2008.An English-language text for Bortnyik’s illustrations called Tatters and Scraps: Two Paper Dolls in Toyland was brought out in 1933 by Chicago publisher Albert Whitman.  It’s almost as rare as the Hungarian edition!  During the 1930s the firm also issued translations of a few modernist German picture books by Tom Seidmann-Freud and Franz Ostini, which were quite different from the rest of the backlist.  Bortnyik—but not the author of Tatters—receives  credit on the title page.  Although the children have been turned into paper dolls, the original illustrations are unchanged.If there is a moral to this peculiar publishing history, it might go like this: pictures need their thousand words, whether or not the artist judged them easy to grasp!