Subcultural engagement for the 21st Century...
Barbelith is a new kind of community (find out more)...
You can login or register.

Underground > Books, Criticism & Writing >

Typographical innovation, the uses of

11:58 / 14.06.02

I was looking at Gould's Book of Fish by Richard Flanagan in the bookshop the other day, and was prompted by it to wonder whether typographical and design innovation in books is ever really successful, or whether it is essentially just posturing (sometimes very witty posturing, but posturing nonetheless).

For those of you who haven't come across Gould's Book of Fish yet, it is bee-yootiful - it has a colour reproduction of old fish lithograph illustrations at the beginning of each chapter, and it is printed in different coloured inks according to what the narrator of the story is using as 'ink' at that point in the plot (see also Ariadne's post in the 'What are you currently reading thread).

But is this really essential to the book, or is it a jeux d'esprit? And, can anyone think of other books with interesting design elements to them (other than pictures in the text in trade paperbacks, which I found ridiculously exciting when they started making them) - ?

I can think of a few examples, hardly any of which I have actually read - The House of Leaves, Tristram Shandy, Alasdair Gray's books - but am interested to hear of more...

12:07 / 14.06.02

Donn Kushner's "A Book Dragon" has an ever-increasing number of small creatures and sketches adorning the margins of the page. These start around the time the main character (a dragon called Nonesuch) discovers a monk making an illustrated manuscript, and reflect what's happening in the plot as the book continues. It's a beautiful concept that makes the book even more precious to me, probably because they are done in a very simple, black & white style and don't distract from the textflow.

I think if it done well, typographic experimentation can enhance a book no end (the different colours of ink sound in Flanagan's book seem to do this). But there's a fine line between "just right" and "over the top".

12:20 / 14.06.02

Irvine Welsh's Filth, does strange things with the text, with different streams breaking off down the side of the page for different narratives -- something I reckon he nicked from Alisdair Gray. It does work, in a way, I think. You get the sense of a sqeaky side voice talking over and alongside the main voice.

Gould's book of fish does look gorgeous but I doubt that it made more than a smidgeon of difference to how much I enjoyed it. I'd notice the change of colour at the start of a chapter but then forget about it. The book, I think, would be every bit as good without the colouring and I suspect it's a bit of a marketing trick.

14:34 / 14.06.02

Douglas Coupland's first UK edition of Generation X (Abacus 1992) has and interesting typographical format, with definitions and random thoughts throughout the margin of the book. And there's some stream-of-consciousness images embedded in the text. I like it. I think it reflects the non-linear way the world is now; lots of conversations fighting for space and attention.

For Coupland fans, his new book, Souvenir of Canada, is out in July.

14:52 / 14.06.02

I don't think it works as it purports to, if only because of the fact that it's relatively uncommon. When I come across textual innovation, despite a degree of familiarity with that sort of text, I can't suppress that part of my brain that says "Oh look what ze's done here. Isn't that interesting. I wonder what that means.)

That's not to say that it doesn't work at all. Something can be added to the reading but only a little underscoring of a point rather than a real interaction with the effect. I think it can only work fully if you don't notice its presence and the effect works unnoticed in itself. Perhaps this would only be possible if the majority of books worked this way and so we didn't notice when effects were used. Hard to say for sure. In the meantime, I don't mind a bit of it, and only get irritated when I get the feeling that the author thinks ze's re-invented the medium by writing vertically or something.

The Return Of Rothkoid

21:48 / 15.06.02

Wave hello to House Of Leaves, everybody!

That's the main problem I had with that book; the typography seemed to be there for its own sake rather than for story exposition. Sure, at times it worked, but other times, it seemed to just say that someone knew how to use Quark XPress.

But there's a whole thread on that...

Would something like The Dictionary Of The Khazars fit in here, or no?

12:41 / 16.06.02

Oh woe and damnation! I've just lost my post, a longish one too. About Robert Leeson's Red, White and Blue , a children's book in black, red and blue inks. Also Laura Esquivel's Like Water for Chocolate (does it qualify?), and Anne Kennedy's experimental novel Musica Ficta . Will return - must get back to some marking.

11:24 / 17.06.02

I don't think that The Dictionary of the Khazars really qualifies - it's the structure rather than the visual which is innovative in that book, surely? (If indeed it is innovative, have never read it)

The Return Of Rothkoid

12:02 / 17.06.02

Well... I seem to recall it uses something similar to the marks in The Subtle Knife to indicate crossreferencing - although this may not be quite as inventive as the other stuff here...

Personally, I found the layout of the UK version of Generation X shat me to tears. IT was overly - look! Important! New! Zine-like! for my liking.

Bah.

12:09 / 17.06.02

Oh, I forgot the 'Fury' poem in one of the Alice books...

12:53 / 17.06.02

Apart from the novelty and charm of it, I think that in Red, White and Blue, the different coloured inks on white paper are effective in providing a cue to the tenor and mode of narration in each section. Wain (short for Gawain), the narrator, produces his 'made up' English homework about his life and opinions for his teacher on white paper (the sections printed in black ink), the 'real truth' about his family to an imaginary pen-friend on red paper (the sections printed in red ink), and the short, Arthurian style fantasy or 'quest' novel he's writing on blue paper (the sections printed in blue ink).

I gather, however, that the book has been reprinted in a straight black & white version, no doubt to cut printing costs.

13:30 / 17.06.02

The Mexican recipes attractively featured, journal-like, at the beginning of each month/chapter of Like Water for Chocolate are woven deftly into the narration of role cooking plays in Tita's love of Pedro and her struggles against the tyranny of Mama Elena. They are 'structural' and essential to the novel's magic realism.

I find Musica Ficta (University of Queensland Press, 1993) - about the discovery and history of musica ficta - fascinating conceptually, but quite difficult to describe.

In appearance, its five parts appear very disjointed, being arranged in (mostly) short sections of prose or poetry under captions enclosed in parentheses, such as '(the snapping and snarling of Wolf Fifths)' or '(A cloud encounters a soffit)'. These are interspersed with full page, medieval style, witty graphics in sketchy black & white - for example, an illustration of a skipping, draped damsel holding aloft and playing the angle, is overlayed jauntily with the words 'Musica Ficta' and 'a note struck on a slight Angle'.

There's a lot of humour and ingenious wordplay in this novel, mimicking the expressiveness of music. The sections weave discontinuous strands of narrative across space and time - about the 12th century mystic and composer, Hildegard of Bingen, a prince who wants to be a jongleur, the struggles of Mozart and Beethoven, James Joyce ... and much else.

ok, hope I don't lose it this time.

11:58 / 18.06.02

But that sounds fascinating... and the children's red, white and blue book too... I can think of a number of children's books which have interesting typographical interpolations, but I've never come across one like that (maybe that's where Flanagan got the idea for Gould's Book of Fish?)

13:04 / 18.06.02

Could be. I haven't yet seen Gould's Book of Fish and will look out for it. And yes, I *was* tempted to type out a few passages from Musica Ficta . It's so inventive about inventiveness and creativity - and witty & clever & touching, too, as she plays with words & musical ideas & multiple points of view - there's even a parody or two of entries for The Oxford Companion to Music .

Ahem. I've just noticed I wrote 'overlayed'instead of 'overlaid'. Mein Gott.

16:19 / 24.07.02

The Neverending Story has different text colors. It's red for the "real" world and green in the "imaginary" world, and it keeps shifting back and forth until the reader enters the book...then it is all green until the very end, when the reader comes back out. Pretty interesting & much better than the shite film(s)...but I haven't read it in years.

14:26 / 25.07.02

I love tristram shandy, although it's one of those books I enjoy thinking about afterwards than I enjoyed my initial reading of. And the whole world of the novel was still so, well, novel at the time of its writing, that the typographical play is quite fun.

On an archival note, there's a debate in Emily Dickinson scholarship about whether part of her resistance to publishing her poetry was due to the rigidity of typographical technology available in her day. The book Open Me Carefully argues, essentially, that its critical to understand many of her poems as letters to her sister-in-law Susan Dickinson. Knowing that she was scribbling in the margins, including flowers in the letter, is important to understanding the poems, the editors (Hart and Smith) argue. Some scholars read her handwritten dashes as being deliberately slashed up or curled down at the ends, carrying meaning that is lost when the poems are "translated" into standard text.

My jury's still out on that, but I enjoyed the Hart/Smith work, bearing in mind it's a trade book meant for popular consumption so it's argument is not so "rigorously" pursued as some scholars would like--it's subtitle and erotic photo of a calla lily have also been critiqued in this regard, a critique which mainly strikes me as scholarly frumpiness.

14:31 / 25.07.02

(yipes there's at least two its/it's errors in the above text. i'd love to say that was deliberate typographical experimentation, but I'm afraid it's just laziness and the tiny print in this box . . . )