As writers we are necessarily obsessed with the lengthy and complicated sequence of little hieroglyphics that are a book's content. We don't usually focus on a book's form unless we are either self-publishing, or furious with a commercial publisher for turning out our book with (a) a hideous cover, (b) an idiotic cover, (c) a cover that reveals the key plot twist, (d) a cover that reveals that the cover artist has never read the book or anything like it, (e) a hideous page format, (f) an idiotic page format...
But I digress. Surprise!
What I really wanted to say was that there are legions of fascinating folk out there who obsess over the place where form and content meet. My friend and colleague cj Madigan, who designs the books, such as Grief Country, that I write and publish under my BookStrategy imprint, has a nice post about this in her Book Thinking blog today. (Grief Country is currently the featured book on her site, so you can get a brief glimpse of the process of its creation here.) As a book designer, among other things, cj gets to obsess about stuff like typefaces and page structures. Different from obsessing about words, but no less glorious and no less frustrating.
If you're feeling the need for a mini-vacation from words, take a gander at her post and the book on handmade books it features, or visit one of the following sites that highlight the work of book, artists book and altered book artists: Little Red Notebook, the Journal of Artists Books, the International Society of Altered Book Artists, to name just a very few.
Most of the books you'll find on these sites are handmade, but there are also also folks who create books which meld text and book design in ways that are striking and artful, yet feasible for commercial book publication. Nick Bantok, creator of the Griffin and Sabine series, is perhaps the most famous of these. Gordon MacKenzie's Orbiting the Giant Hairball: A Corporate Fool's Guide to Surviving with Grace and Keri Smith's This is Not a Book are other personal favorites in this form.
Finally, I'd like to mention the work of the extraordinary Barbara Hodgson, a Vancouver graphic artist and writer whose books layer (extremely well-written) text, ephemera, fragments and glimpses and shadows of images, and all sorts of other visual goodies to create a memorable whole. I own and love Paris Out of Hand, a collaboration between Hodgson, Bantock, and Karen Elizabeth Gordon. (I confess with some shame that, having bought it purely because I love Paris and it is so deliciously pretty, I owned the book for some days before actually browsing past its rich visuals long enough to realize that it is a fantasy, a guidebook to an imaginary Paris. You'd think the upside-down image of the Eiffel Tower on the cover would have given me a hint. Surprise!) And I can't wait to get her Trading in Memories: Traveling through a Scavenger's Favorite Places.
Let me close this post by noting that I'm not suggesting that any of us boring ol' writers make the job of getting published even more difficult by adding all sorts of complicated and expensive graphics to the mix. If you didn't feel that visuals were a compelling part of your work from the start, no need to add them now.
Plus, finding publication is already hard enough. Surprise!
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