= Extremely hard to find first edition of the groundbreaking isotype children's book. The book's vibrant illustrations and cross-sections help to explain how the tunnels and platforms were constructed and built, how trains, escalators, lifts, interlocking systems for carriages, etc., work, how platforms are built for speed and how the tunnel system fits together. A more common reprint was published in 1964. Covers rubbed/ worn along extremities; upper margin frontcover waterstained. Blindstamped school address in first free endpaper; some fingersoiling; hinges slightly weak. Still a very good copy. Marie Neurath, born Marie Reidemeister, was a German designer, social scientist and author. Neurath was a member of the team that developed a simplified pictographic language, the Vienna Method of Pictorial Statistics (Wiener Methode der Bildstatistik), which she later renamed Isotype. She was also a prolific writer and designer of educational books for younger readers. She met her future husband Otto Neurath in art school in the 1920s and the couple settled in Vienna. In 1925 she began work at the Gesellschafts- und Wirtschaftsmuseum in Wien (Social and Economic Museum of Vienna). The museum was founded to communicate the city's social reform programme to the public. This was the start of her long activity as the main "transformer" (in English, one would now say designer) working with Otto Neurath in the teams that made graphic displays of social information, an early form of information design. Marie Reidemeister worked at this museum in Vienna until the brief civil war in Austria in 1934, moving then with Neurath (a prominent Social Democrat) and Arntz (who had allegiances to radical-left groups) to The Hague. A new name was needed for the Vienna Method now that its original context was left behind: Marie Neurath developed the acronym Isotype (International System of Typographic Picture Education) in 1935. In 1940, as the German army invaded the Netherlands, Reidemeister escaped with Neurath to England, while Arntz stayed behind in The Hague. In 1941, after release from internment (as "enemy aliens"), Marie and Otto Neurath were married and resumed their work in Oxford, founding the Isotype Institute which produced more than 80 illustrated children’s books, half are dedicated to science education. After Otto Neurath’s death in 1945, Marie Neurath carried on the work with a small number of English assistants, moving to London in 1948.