It's been a long time since I featured anything you can buy. I really, really like the idea of nicely-printed, well-designed books with some refined design innovation: Chip Kidd's The Cheese Monkeys was one from last year; Richard Flanagan's Gould's Book of Fish - a novel in twelve fish was another.
Kidd's book was a typographic masterpiece, setting a rustic, almost linotype serif against the brash, laidback feistiness of the subjectmatter, while Flanagan's book has discreet and refined use of coloured text, and the typeface alone is a masterful choice. Not to mention the fact that the paper, too, changes almost unnoticeably from chapter to chapter.
This year, we have the superbly-designed You Shall Know Our Velocity by Dave Eggers, which begins in a no-nonsense way - right on the front cover. The first few sentences start right at the top of the cover, in embossed coloured type, with the title and author embossed (in silver, if I remember rightly) into a cloth strap-binding at the side. I haven't read it yet - just gazed at it enviously in the bookshops - but if you want it, hurry. It won't be the same in paperback, that's for sure. Kidd's book wasn't, and nor was Flanagan's. But then, nothing ever is...
No comments:
Post a Comment