The Shape of the Book
The Shape of the Book is a a chapter from A History of Reading by Alberto Manguel that discusses the craft of reading a book making in a historical context. In this project, I created a booklet design of the title chapter using original photography. In the creation of this book, I visited the San Francisco Center for the Book, a non-profit organization that fosters the joy of books and bookmaking, the history, artistry, and continuing presence of books in our culture, to capture much of the imagery and learn about bookmaking. Other specimens, like the hornbook, were photographed at Gleeson Library in the Rare Books Collection.
In the design of this publication, I wanted to mix the historical content of the text with modern influence. I chose a slab-serif font for the body of the book that has both traditional characteristic and a more friendly, modern curvature to it. I mixed photographs of historical bookmaking materials and machines with some modern day styling, like printing text onto the arms of a friend and putting a small book into the pocket of a pair of Levi's jeans.
pages 1-4
pages 3-6
pages 7-10
pages 13-16
pages 19-22