Beauty and the Book

Can design alter the future of printed books? That is the question recently posed in the magazine Guernica.

From the article...

For many contemporary publishers and writers, of course, the idea of approaching form as content is nothing new.2 McSweeney’s Publishing, for example, has committed itself to exploring the formal possibilities of books for more than a decade; past incarnations of McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern include a deck-of-cards story and eight volumes housed in a board tray whose cover flaps complete an image puzzle. Its new chidren’s imprint, McSweeney’s McMullens, has also enthusiastically adopted the design mantle.3 McMullens books come with dust jackets that fold out as gorgeous colorful posters, and a number of them are interactive. In Jordan Crane’s Keep Our Secrets (2011), readers are encouraged to rub away the heat-sensitive color-changing ink to reveal the secrets hidden beneath: “Miss Young’s chest is a cage full of canaries,” or “There’s a computer in the trash that knows how to write poetry.” The The Author-Illustrator Starter Kit (2011) contains a boxed set of three completely blank hardback books for kids to fill with their own content.

But it isn’t only this playfulness that lends McSweeney’s McMullens books their material impact. Amy Martin’s illustrations for Symphony City (2011) create a layered multidimensional and richly textural world, which often appears like original paper collages. In some places the visual environment of an urban landscape full of music she creates is so absorbing that I wondered what an e-book or iPad app could offer that print couldn’t. By email, McSweeney’s art director and editor Brian McMullen, who developed and gave his name to the imprint, offered a more practical reason for keeping to printed matter for kids: “Those of us who are parents aren’t convinced that kids need to be encouraged to spend more time than they already do in front of screens… Have you ever tried to tell a three-year-old it’s time to stop looking at one of these devices and hand it back to Daddy?4 It’s not a pretty scene. These devices are just not compatible with bedtime, in my experience, whereas a printed picture book, for whatever reason, is.”5