Practical studies in the gifts
A kindergarten teaching manual from 1899 by Jeannette Gregory West, printed in St Louis by Woodward & Tiernan, for teachers using Froebel's gifts, the wooden building blocks of early childhood education. Its pictures are plain line drawings of block arrangements: a pair of rectangular bricks stacked in a column, clustered cube-and-prism forms seen in perspective, and unfolded grids of squares. A designer could take from them a clean, modular diagrammatic language built from cubes, grids and isometric blocks.
