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Cabada’s story is an allegory of popular revolution told through the lens of traditional Mayan legends. Melodic Incidents of the Irrational World, featuring wood engravings and scratchboard prints by Méndez, won the best illustrated book award at Mexico City’s Fourth Book Fair in 1946, and the volume was a bestseller for the Taller de Gráfica Popular’s publishing arm, La Estampa Mexicana.

With this marketing strategy, the Taller de Gráfica Popular aimed to appeal to international audiences by focusing on the powerful graphic qualities of the prints rather than their political messages. Designed primarily for American collectors, the portfolio images were plucked from their original narrative context and printed on fine paper. For its dramatic cover, the artist reprised the book’s jaguar motif. The 1945 limited-edition portfolio, Méndez: 25 Prints—for which Carl Schniewind, then the Art Institute’s curator of prints and drawings, wrote the introduction —features a selection of Méndez’s book illustrations for Melodic Incidents of the Irrational World.