October 10, 2006

Beautiful, Beautiful Books

Ihad planned to write about Mark Z. Danielewski's "Only Revolutions" in the same way that I wrote about the somewhat creepy "biography" of Nicole Kidman (part 1, part 2, part 3), but abandoned it when I realized a) I hadn't the time and mental acuity to decode the books, and b) frankly, I just wasn't into it. Once you start taking your job seriously, it's easy to get caught up in the things you "should" do, rather than the things that you really want to do. Work puts enough obligations on you without adding to it because of a false sense of obligation. And if your job is book reviewing, which pays at my level with a copy of the book and a clipping, then the obligation decays from onerous chore into drudgery.

It's tempting to buy "Only Revolutions," if only because it looks so damn good on the shelf. It's the supermodel of novels; who cares what she's saying when she looks like that!

So "Revolutions" will pass on by, but I did want to hold onto it briefly to point out a slow trend brought on by changes in computer and print technologies. In the last few years, I've seen a lot more beautiful novels.

Design has always been a part of printing books, but since Gutenberg's day, it's been limited to the selection and use of fonts, interspersed with woodcuts when needed. Over time, improvements in technology allowed for the insertion of more delicate drawings, evolving from line art to the scaling of shades. Some books were packed with pictures. Flip through my 1869 first edition of Twain's "The Innocent's Abroad" (horribly foxed and degraded, so don't be too envious), and you'll see pictures inserted on nearly every page. By the time Twain published "Following the Equator," in 1897, the publisher inserted photographs amid the drawings.

For various reasons, that practice faded and novels went back to grey text and white paper. If non-fiction books had photos, they were usually printed on slick paper and inserted as a block. Color photos were usually restricted to coffee table books.

But as time went on, the forms began to merge. The Griffin and Sabine books of the '90s were stunning examples of what could be done, mingling not only beautiful color art with a story, but there were letters tucked into envelopes that looked like they were handwritten or typewritten.


2004 saw the publication of two beautiful novels: "The Lives of Shadows" by Barbara Hodgson and "Caramba!" by Nina Marie Martinez. Chronicle Books published this story of a British man's adventures in Damascus from 1919-1945, and Hodgson's design mixes the text with contemporary photos, newspaper clippings, maps and woodcuts. There's a feeling, riffling through the pages, that you're not so much reading a novel as flipping through a scrapbook, a gathering of musty papers found in a cedar chest in the attic. I must confess that I haven't read the book, but I can't help pulling it off the shelf and admiring it. It's a beautiful book.


"Caramba!" takes a different tack from "The Lives of Shadows." It's the story of two Mexican girls, Natalie and Consuelo, and their lives in the small down of Lava Landing. "Magical realism meets la cultura de Kmart" reads one of the blurbs, and that's pretty accurate. "Caramba!" uses a deck of La Loteria cards that look like the major arcana on a tarot deck, but with a distinctly Mexican flavor. Each section opens with a particular card (some of which Martinez invented), and throughout are scattered a host of, well, things. A time line of notable events in Lava Landing's history, the songs on the jukebox at The Big Five-Four, one character's personal map of Mexico, showing the provinces where the best lovers and "too finely refined dancers" can be found. These visual clues give an interesting shape and flavor to this story.

There were other books as well, such as the odd black and white photos in "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close" and the color comics, photos and posters that dot Umberto Eco's "The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana." I'm sure there are plenty of books that I've missed.

Which brings me, at last, to "Only Revolutions." This is the only example I've seen of a "completely" designed book. And by that, I mean that every element -- text, page numbers, font colors, jacket copy, even the title pages -- were manipulated in service of the story. The book tells two stories, each taking half a page. You read them in the natural order, so that there are essentially two front covers and no back covers. Anyone who's read the Ace double science-fiction books back in the 1950s and ‘60s will know immediately what I'm talking about. The inside cover flap suggests that you read the book in eight-page bites, then flip the book over and read the other story (two ribbon bookmarks are included to help you keep track).

"Only Revolutions" is a difficult story to read. It's not on a par with "Finnegan's Wake" -- random passage: "But low, boys low, he rises, shrivering, with his spittyful eyes and his whoozebecome woice. Ephthah! Cisamis! Examen of conscience scruples now he to the best of his memory schemado." -- but that's only because no one can tell what "Finnegan's Wake" is about in the first place.

But it's a beautiful, beautiful book, the apogee of the designer's art. It's tempting to buy "Only Revolutions," if only because it looks so damn good on the shelf. It's the supermodel of novels; who cares what she's saying when she looks like that! Here's two thumbnails, one of the cover underneath the dust jacket, and the first page of the book. That pretty much says it all.