things happen, and are wrapped in newspaper

Lucky Last: Wolf Hall

Sun, 01 Aug 2010 13:43:50 GMT

Posted by: birdhead

Hilary Mantel. Wolf Hall. London: Fourth Estate, 2009. No designer information available, but typeset by G&S Designs. Collected 30 June

To finish off, I wanted to remind myself that book design doesn't have to be, and probably shouldn't be, eyecatching, dramatic, innovative or even visible to be good book design. I thought going through this book, a large trade paperback (very thin glossy card, uncoated book paper stock) from 2009, would be a pretty good opportunity to demonstrate that. Even though I've praised books with complicated design, that can go wrong more often than it goes right.
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New Zealand Play Series Presents

Sun, 01 Aug 2010 11:06:39 GMT

Posted by: birdhead

Sarah Delahunty. Two Plays. Wellington: Playmarket, 2009. Cover by Sorelle Cansion and Sean McGarry; John Vakidis. Tzigane. Wellington: Playmarket, 2008. Cover by Sorelle Cansino; Gary Henderson. Three Plays. Wellington: Playmarket, 2007. Cover by Sorelle Palmer. All collected 14 July

Playmarket presents awesome series design in its New Zealand playwrights series. ( read more )

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Knitting Rules!

Sun, 01 Aug 2010 10:59:24 GMT

Posted by: birdhead

Stephanie Pearl-McPhee. Knitting Rules. Massachusetts: Storey Publishing, 2006. Design by Mary Velgos and others. Illustrations by Diana Marye Huff. Collected June 14

Knitting Rules is a book of knitting tips and knitting humour in a fairly ordinary paperback with a fairly flimsy glossy cover and a standard white book stock. I don't really like the cover, but it's pretty to the point: a woman, (the author, who is a well-known knitter and author)knitting and dropping a ball of wool, with quirky typography and an exclamation mark. It might not be the world's greatest design, but it gets the job done. However, unusually, the book was printed in a maroon ink rather than in black. The first time I took notes on this book I found the entire concept so offensive that I fairly trashed it! However, on review, I don't feel quite so strongly. (For some reason, this text mostly scanned as black and white - take my word for it, it's maroon.)
( read more )

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Making Stuff

Sun, 01 Aug 2010 10:57:17 GMT

Posted by: birdhead

Making Stuff: An Alternative Craft Book. London: Black Dog Publishing, 2006. Designed by David Ottley, Chris Turnbull, and Angela Osgerby. Collected 24 July

Making Stuff is a pretty commercial book clearly designed to take advantage of one particular market. It isn't especially well-made and is clearly aimed at beginner crafters - no particular skill in any one craft is needed to make any of the projects in this book, so for me as a good knitter and an uncertain everything else-er I'm not sure how much of a wise purchase it is. However, it is a book that definitely knows its market, and I think its design is very coherent in that respect.
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Two Graphic Novels

Sun, 01 Aug 2010 10:54:04 GMT

Posted by: birdhead

Frank Miller (script & pencils), Klaus Janson (inks), Lynn Varley (colorist). Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, 1986. New York: DC Comics, 2002. Collected June 14

Striking cover, shame about the sticker placement! Standard comic book trade paperback format, glossy cover, thin four-colour pages.
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Apostolos Doxiadis, Christos H Papadimitriou, writers; Alecos Papadatos and Annie Di Donna, artists. Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth. New York: Bloomsbury, 2009. July 1

Logicomix, designed for a broader audience than the usual graphic novel (as indicated by the various intellectual endorsements on the back cover), is somewhat more up-market in construction and in stock. The cover is a matte-laminate card (matte is almost unheard of in comics trade paperbacks) with spot gloss on titles and images, it has large full-page flaps, and the internal stock is slightly heavier than that of The Dark Knight Returns above.
( read more )

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The Box of Stars

Sun, 01 Aug 2010 10:46:23 GMT

Posted by: birdhead

Catherine Tennant. The Box of Stars: A Practical Guide to the Night Sky and to its Myths and Legends. London: Chatto & Windus, 1993. Design by Terry Jeavons. Cards originally hand-painted by "a lady", in 1825.

The Box of Stars is unusual in that it is really a box - a small, blue, beautifully decorated box, which contains a small book and a set of cards. The cards are illuminated maps of constellations, originally created in the early nineteenth century; the book explains what they mean and how to use the cards to learn more about the modern night sky. All in all, it is a wonderful package.

( read more )

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Dictionary talk!

Sun, 01 Aug 2010 10:37:59 GMT

Posted by: birdhead

Checking out physical and online dictionaries! We were asked to explore some differences between using physical and online reference works, and I picked dictionaries because I had some quirky ones.

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Proud to Nurse

Sun, 01 Aug 2010 10:21:04 GMT

Posted by: birdhead

Mary Ellen O'Connor. Freed to Care, Proud to Nurse: 100 Years of the New Zealand Nurses Organisation. Wellington: Steele Roberts, 2010. Design is likely in-house. Collected 30 July

This new hardcover book is heavy on the images, many of which are pretty neat, and it usually does a good job of showcasing them. However, on the whole the design gives me the feeling of being almost-but-not-quite great. ( read more )

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Astronomy: Cambridge Illustrated History

Sun, 01 Aug 2010 10:06:26 GMT

Posted by: birdhead

Ed. Michael Hoskin. The Cambridge Illustrated History of Astronomy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Design by Stuart Macready and various others. Collected 30 July

Apologies for the scans for this one, guys, it's a big heavy book and difficult to get on the glass. Hardback, gloss laminated pages, four colours throughout.( read more )

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So Many Worlds (giant yellow book tyvm!)

Sun, 01 Aug 2010 09:35:26 GMT

Posted by: birdhead

Dieter Bachman & Daniel Schwartz. So Many Worlds: A Photographic Record of Our Time. London: Thames and Hudson, 1996. Design by Adam Hay. Collected July 29 30

With this deceptively simple book, it's all about yellow! ( read more )

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The Vegetarian Adventure

Sun, 01 Aug 2010 09:23:12 GMT

Posted by: birdhead

Rowan Bishop & Sue Carruthers. The Vegetarian Adventure Cook Book: Menus from Home and Abroad. Lower Hutt: Mills Publications, 1988. No design info. Collected 30 July.

I sat down to trash this design, but I found that it had really grown on me. What I like about it is that it has a really distinct sense of the time it was written, while still being legible, useful, and even attractive twenty years later. (Also, remember when a cookbook cost $20?) Paperback. ( read more )

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Cover talk

Sun, 01 Aug 2010 09:12:37 GMT

Posted by: birdhead

Let's talk about covers! Specifically, let's compare different editions. In this post, bibliographic data is all for the first cover posted, because that'll be the one I own. ( read more )

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Welcome to Tui's book design scrapbook!

Sun, 01 Aug 2010 04:02:41 GMT

Posted by: birdhead

Nau mai, haere mai, welcome to my design-scrapbook-blog-project.

What is this?

It's a scrapbook blog. I photocopy and scan and crop and upload pieces of book design that I like and dislike and am just kind of meh about. Then I talk about them a little bit. I am interested in design from a usability perspective; I like design to reflect and be respectful of content and audience; and I like variety. I also think jacket design should be commercial. Sometimes that just means beautiful; other times it means positioning a book clearly within its genre.

How do I get around?

There are lots of ways to read me. You can start at the top and scroll down, working backwards through time. Alternatively, you could start at my first post and go through the posts one by one - you can use the forward and backward arrows at the bottom left of each post to do this. You can also use tags, either by checking out the sidebar on the left of each page, or from the tags page. My tags are organised by kind of book and by the type of page I'm discussing.

OMG! How do I contact the maintainer?

My telepathy reception is spotty so I recommend email: tui.head(at)gmail(dot)com. You can also leave a comment on any entry.

Why is this a community and not a personal journal?

Because I wanted to be able to manage it easily. To all intents and purposes this Dreamwidth community functions as a personal journal. Membership will remain closed indefinitely.

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Archy & Mehitabel, by Don Marquis

Thu, 29 Jul 2010 03:52:33 GMT

Posted by: birdhead

Don Marquis. Archy & Mehitabel. Ernest Benn, 1931.

This book is included chiefly as a curiousity. The oldest edition of any of the books in the portfolio, I found its internal design interesting from a historical perspective. The imprint page is barely existent, and most of the information which would typically be found on it is either not there or in other places. For example, there is no statement of copyright; the name and location of the publisher and author appear only on the title page, while the printer appears on the final page of the book.

Interestingly, the design is still very readable and looks good to modern sensibilities. The typography has worked hard to reflect its content: the typeface, which resembles that of a typewriter, is reminiscent of the content in that the poems are supposedly typed by a cockroach (the reason why no capitals or punctuation marks occur: the cockroach cannot hold down the shift key at the same time as it hits a letter. The simple design also reflects these humble origins! ( read more )

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Cadogan Guide to Egypt

Thu, 29 Jul 2010 02:37:03 GMT

Posted by: birdhead

Michael Haag. Cadogan Guide to Egypt. London: Cadogan Books, 1993. Illustrations by Sophie Morrish. Design by Animage. Cover illustration by Povl Webb, cover design by Ralph King. Collected 28 July

Floppy cover, very thin stock but laminated stock - this is a guidebook densely crammed with information and designed to be lugged round with minimum effort and maximum efficiency. Design-wise, where to start with this book? Like Soon I Will Be Invincible, the Cadogan Guide to Egypt is characterised by a holistic design sensibility. Unfortunately - especially since the book itself is great and, I am assured, useful - this design is not so good! I seized on it the moment Elaine brought it out for indexing practice.

( read more )

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Malorie Blackman - Noughts & Crosses Series

Thu, 29 Jul 2010 01:09:32 GMT

Posted by: birdhead

Malorie Blackman's Noughts & Crosses series. Random House: London, various dates. Designer unknown, may be various. Collected June 2010

This series has simply exceptional cover design that is demonstrative of the fact that minimalist design need not abandon the ability to inform the reader about the content of the book. The Noughts & Crosses series is a science fiction series for young adults that deals with an alternate universe in which Noughts are servants to Crosses. The analogy to racial discrimination in the UK and elsewhere is underlined by the fact that Noughts are "white" and Crosses are "black". The startling, abrupt design highlights this tension and the stark nature of that universe; rather than becoming repetitive and typographic-only, books in the series pick out elements of the title or of the novel while retaining the colour scheme. Checkmate's cover is notably good from this perspective, referencing a chessboard without becoming literal.

One caveat would be that the white-on-white title on Noughts and Crosses is a bit difficult to read, especially from a distance. However, the clarity of the design - with a nought and a cross, from the child's game - is such that the type is almost irrelevant.

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Q and A

Thu, 15 Jul 2010 04:17:07 GMT

Posted by: birdhead

Vikas Swarup. Q and A. Doubleday, 2005. Cover design by Claire Ward. Illustration by Nicky Dupays. Collected 14 May 2010

Jacket

Matte laminated card with spot gloss on typography and on illustration.

This cover design is clearly going for minimalism, which in book design aims to get people to pick up a book just because it’s beautiful – not because they know what’s going on between the covers.Unfortunately in my opinion it is not a successful cover, perhaps because it fails to completely commit to the minimalism. The illustration on the cover, of a television, obstructs the book’s minimalism, but nor does it give much of an idea of what happens in the book, so the cover fails on both counts. Instead it becomes a cover that is neither beautifully simple nor informatively detailed. ( read more )

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Love in a Cold Climate

Thu, 15 Jul 2010 03:38:16 GMT

Posted by: birdhead

Nancy Mitford. Love in a Cold Climate and Other Novels (1945, 1949, 1951). Penguin, 2000 (Modern Classics), with an introduction by Philip Hensher. Cover photography (c) Host. No design info given. Collected 4 May

Unlaminated, very floppy card, desaturated colours, font-heavy front cover, no back cover art. This omnibus is chiefly of interest by comparison with Cold Comfort Farm, discussed below. Both books are Penguin Classics, satires by English women, historically but diminishingly widely read, being reissued with a critic’s introduction, with unlaminated covers and generally desaturated colours. Regrettably, the similarities end there. While the Penguin Deluxe edition of Cold Comfort Farm has pulled out all the stops and worked hard to emphasise the humour of Gibbons’ novel, the Mitford cover is dull as ditchwater and fails to capture any sense of Mitford’s notable wit. The back cover has been quite neglected - hence no scan - and looks more like a placeholder design with its dull silver-grey. The rose on the front cover is mysterious indeed. In essence, while the blurb describes the novels as ‘witty, irreverent stories of ... glamour, gossip and decadence’, the book’s cover gives it the lie, suggesting perhaps a torrid romance – doubtless disappointing many readers.

This book has not worn well. This book was acquired first-hand in late March 2010, and by the beginning of May it is already damaged and dirty. For a paperback containing three novels, clearly designed to be portable – for the pages are very thin and the type is rather small – this is simply thoughtless design. The covers should, at minimum, have been laminated, and the card should have been stiffer. Although a reader would not mind sacrificing quality for price in the case of the Pocket Penguin series – books designed to be read once – it is not appropriate for this volume. Paperbacks should be laminated.

15 July: Revisiting this cover, it's unfortunate that a backlit LCD screen makes it look quite vibrant! The physical book is quite dull.

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Cold Comfort Farm

Thu, 15 Jul 2010 03:37:20 GMT

Posted by: birdhead

Stella Gibbons. Cold Comfort Farm (1932). Penguin, 2006 (Classic Deluxe Editions), with introduction by Lynne Truss. Cover by Roz Chast.

Unlaminated card, desaturated colours, flaps. Hand-lettered fonts throughout. The front cover is vignettes of main characters in the book with humorous captions designed to amuse the reader and draw their attention. Both front cover and back cover are replete with in-jokes for those who have already read the book, which is a good decision for a classic being reissued. The flaps and pictorial jokes (such as the sukebind, which runs beside the spine) are good for people who have already read Cold Comfort Farm and must be persuaded that the re-issue is worth buying, perhaps for the second time; however, many of the jokes (such as naming a bull Big Business, or the captions to some of the vignettes: ‘Reuben: A Sad Sack. Judith Starkadder: Just Leave Her In Her Misery’) are funny in themselves, and not merely self-referential. Others are intriguing to the new reader.

Lynne Truss’ name, associated with her best-selling humorous book about grammar, is adequately sized to draw the attention of the reader. Cover artist Roz Chast is a cartoonist for the New Yorker. All of these details harmonise with Lynne Truss’ introduction, in which she suggests that Cold Comfort Farm has been neglected because modern readers fail to realise that it is a satire. It seems clear from the cover that Penguin is attempting to rectify this, with its funny sketches and Truss’ name, and in my opinion they succeed.

On a more pragmatic level, the inclusion of a space to put a price sticker on the back cover is very useful, and the flaps are a welcome and handy addition (as well as being humorous!) Although the lack of a blurb is typically a decision with which I quibble, in this case the cover had done such a good job indicating the content of the book that I found it was not missed.

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Austin Grossman - Soon I Will be Invincible

Thu, 15 Jul 2010 03:36:18 GMT

Posted by: birdhead

Austin Grossman. Soon I Will Be Invincible. Penguin, 2008, UK edition. Cover design by Estuary English. Illustration by Bryan Hitch. (NB: internal design may be Chip Kidd. The internal design is the same in US and UK editions and Kidd designed the 2007 US edition.) Collected 29 March 2010

I chose to look at a number of design elements from this book because of its elaborate design. Apart from its striking cover, the book also uses coloured inside covers, decorated part pages, and includes a glossy colour signature. What I found particularly noteworthy about the design as a whole was its coherent message that functioned parallel to the novel’s content. The comic-book iconography and the cover and internal art of characters from the book as characters on the cover of comic books draw attention to Grossman’s ironic treatment of comic book themes. ( read more )

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