In December a
package which I'd been anxiously awaiting for a long while finally landed on my
doorstep. Visual Editions are one of my favourite small
publishers, and I've posted about their work with Jonathan Safran Foer
on Tree of Codes before. As someone who's spent years
analysing literature, and is now spending the foreseeable future analysing
books as objects, I sometimes get a bit exhausted by books in my free time -
but what draws me back to Visual Editions time and time again is the fact that
they make books that I am excited to read.
A while ago, they decided to
publish a re-imagining of Miguel de Cervantes'
Don Quixote, a fundamental text in the Western literary canon, with design by
Fraser Muggeridge studio. They used a
Kickstarter campaign to send RCA graduate Jacob Robinson on a two week camper-van trip around La Mancha, following a list of destinations derived from the novel's text, to provide photographs for the novel. The finished result is exactly as I'd known it was going to be: spectacular. I
almost didn't want to take it from its wrapper. The little nods to mapping symbols and journey routes are my favourite part of the design - but the hand-drawn title typeface, the subtly overlapping spine text, the atmospheric photographs and the colour of parts of the text matching the colour of the spine (is that Pantone 326?) make the book a whole. I can't wait to get stuck in.
Hello, I came here to admit that even though I'm Spanish I have never read Don Quixote. Hell, not even the chapter we had to summarise in the 8th grade, my mum did that for me. I have no shame. On another note, I also describe myself as an eternal student :)
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