Page Turners

I have rekindled* an old love for book design recently, which I think has come from the increased amount of reading I have been doing lately. And it is through the reading that I have noticed something about book design, which I feel makes for a good page turner.

The general idea is that sparse layout, with text spread out not on one page, but onto more pages—so no text is removed but more pages are added—and a high number of images maintains a readers [my] interest. This was noticed in 3 books: ‘The Architecture of Happiness’ – Alain de Botton, ‘The Medium is the Massage – Marshall McLuhan & Quentin Fiore, ‘Mourning Diary’ – Roland Barthes. None of them are perfect examples, but I feel they all have strong merits to the same point; let’s start with ‘The Architecture of Happiness’.

You can see the image-to-text ratio – images seem to dominate the page. But not without good reason, all the images used throughout the book are not decorative, they are used as examples in the text. There are some double-page-spreads which are purely text, but they occur perhaps once per chapter, of six chapters.

The way the designer has approached the captions is quite inspired – there is obligatory formal reference which essentially tells you what the image is, but then there is also a small quote from the text body in reference to the image. This gives you a direct link from text to image and instantly contextualises it. Architecture is quite hard to explain in text, and so having a simple but clear link from where in the text the writer is talking about a particular example is extremely effective.

The second example is the wonderful ‘The Medium is the Massage’.

The image-to-text ratio here is not as constant—the book design is quite experimental and can become quite abstract in it’s use of text and images—unlike ‘The Architecture of Happiness’. But there is not a single double page spread without any use of imagery at all – and the images do illustrate the text, they are not mere decoration. Pages with a relatively large chunk of text, as above, are almost always followed by an equally large image spread:

(You can see the slight abstraction in the use of imagery). It is quite nice not having captions alongside the imagery too, all references are left to the end which allows for a much clearer playground for the text and the image.

What both books so far are starting to play with is pacing, engagement and the flow of the text. The heavy use of imagery begins to upset the natural flow which one experiences when reading a large text block with little, to no imagery at all. I think this is a very good thing. This upset of a natural reading flow leads to the heightened sense of engagement. I am sure we all have days where we cannot read a text without drifting off into daydream, even while our eyes race ahead in the text, without us. A constant re-reading and a forced slowing down is, for me, the only remedy, or indeed a long break and a coffee. The imagery forces you to slow down, it forces you to consider smaller sections of text at a time and then gives you an image to juxtapose what you have just taken in—a chance to ponder and understand.

Roland Barthes’ ‘Mourning Diary’ is slightly different, in that there is no imagery at all (lie: there are 4 glossy image pages in the centre of the book, as is common with hardbacks, but for now, these are not worth mentioning). However, the text is still very sparsely set—there is a lot of white space. The book was not written as a book, but on a number of small cards which were handwritten, by Barthes, over a number of years directly after his mother’s death.

Given the nature of the writing—extremely personal, expressive, bold, and in typical Barthes style, quite heavy—the vast white space gives you what the images give in the previous examples, time to think, consider and understand the text.

But I feel the sparse layout of the text does another thing, it allows you turn more pages, more often. Turning a page of a book you are reading is a satisfying experience, a small reward after 2-3 minutes of reading—it marks your progress in the book and indicates how far, or near, you are to the end. Finishing a book is an even greater reward, I would say any avid reader dislikes the idea of starting a book but leaving it unfinished, and regardless of the importace of, or feelings to, the text, turning the pages is felt as a good feeling. Turning a page to find a largely empty page, with a small amount of text is equally hard to leave un-read.

There is no reason why this approach could not be taken to most books. It does take a carful consideration of the text, but ultimately any book worth considering, should be worth it. Ultimately I feel it leads to a greater appreciation of the text, due to a greater understanding. Illustration (imagery) used in a careful and thoughtful way can very much improve a text, whether through example or juxtaposition. These ideas, given my new-re-found love for book design, will hopefully be tested soon.

Josh

*is that why it’s called a kindle?