When Book Design Gets Weird

Hey, this is Eric Benson, the host of Climify. A podcast that connects design educators with climate experts to help bring more climate-safe projects into our design classrooms. Through my conversations with these climate leaders, I hope to help you "climify your syllabi" and to create the next generation of climate designers. In fact, at the end of each program, my guest co-creates a design assignment for you to bring into your classroom for your students. This season, we are talking to women leading the way in climate action through the lens of each of the drawdown.org solution sectors. You can tune in to "climify" anywhere you get your podcasts. Or directly at climate-safeiners.org/edu/climify. We'd love if you joined in the conversation on Instagram or LinkedIn at Climify Podcast. This is incomplete design history, a podcast that explores overlooked and ignored topics in graphic design history. It is our goal to deepen and expand the knowledge, understanding, and interpretation of design history. Because history is messy, it's incomplete. Thank you for joining us. I'm your host, Mandy Horton. We understand books to be stacks of pages either sewn or stitched in between a front and back cover. Books in many languages, English being one of them, have texts that reads "left to right, top to bottom." The stories these books tell start at the beginning and proceed chronologically. This format has proven remarkably durable, remaining essentially unchanged for hundreds of years. To a large extent, literature followed these structures up until fiction writers began tinkering with the conventions of storytelling. They showed a willingness to try something radically different, introducing elements like unreliable narrators, stream of consciousness, black humor, meta-fiction, fragmented storing lines, and magical realism. The obvious question at this point is, what does any of this have to do with graphic design? At roughly the same time that post-modern literature was gaining traction in the 1960s, there was also a willingness to play with the book structure itself. Does a book have to be a stack of pages bound between two covers? Does a book have to have text on each page flow right to left, top to bottom? While unconventional book design hasn't met the same success as the experiments in post-modern literature, it's history, as seen through the titles that challenge our notions of what books are supposed to be like, is difficult to discuss without also discussing the literature. To be clear, there are lots of unconventionally designed books out there. However, few are popular fiction titles where the design and page layouts help communicate the story. In 1997, Espin J. R. Seth, a university professor who specializes in video game studies and electronic literature, published a book titled Cybertext, Perspectives on Ergotic Literature. Ergotic literature uses a term appropriated from physics that derives from the Greek words Ergon and Hodus, meaning work and path. In Ergotic Literature, non-trivial effort is required to allow the reader to traverse the text. In other words, it takes some work to read the words on the page. Admittedly, Arthas' primary interest is in the electronic text that began to emerge as internet access became more widespread. The stories he had in mind were characterized by being fragmented, nonlinear, and giving the reader a role in how the story takes shape, meaning that each reading can be different from the last based on the reader's choices. For example, Mark Supportas' composition number one published in 1962 and BS Johnson's The Unfortunate's published in 1979. Both titles have very conventional layouts in typography. Their pages look just like any other book. The one thing that sets them apart and perhaps gives them the label of Ergotic is that they are both books in a box. Composition number one's pages are all separate, which means the reader can literally shuffle them like a deck of cards before each reading. In reviewing the book for the Guardian, Jonathan Coe commented that here the reader, always looking to make connections between the different fragments, becomes a conscious participant in the process of imposing a linear sequence. While at the same time remaining aware that all narrative is an act of memory, and that memory is necessarily random. The unfortunate isn't quite so drastic. Instead of a sheep of papers, each chapter is its own booklet. One is labeled first and another is marked last, the rest are unnumbered. So readers have full chapters, but those chapters can be read in any order. This format plays on the idea of memory being random. The first chapter sets up the story of a journalist going back to a city he wouldn't know as well. As he starts walking around, little things remind him of events and people from his past. On the other hand, Amy Kaufman and Jay Christoff's Illuminae file series of books are fragmented and have non-standard page layouts, but perhaps escape being Ergotic because for the most part they follow a narrative chronologically, and there isn't anything for the reader to do except read. No shuffling of pages or chapters, but the page layouts add a whole other layer to the story that wouldn't be there otherwise. The authors themselves admitted that when they started writing the first book, they weren't even sure it would get published, that it was just too weird. Each book is a collection of emails, instant messages, top secret files, and transcripts of conversations, along with drawings, schematics, diagrams, and pages of type as image. Initially, the idea, at least for the first book of the trilogy, was for it to be an email back and forth. However, Kaufman and Christoff realized that there were more formats that could be used, and that they needed those sometimes weird page layouts to communicate different things. Where a conventionally designed book would tell readers about how characters are communicating and describe things the characters see, here readers are shown these things. The design elements give readers an experience that goes beyond just sitting down to read a book, passively consuming the narrative as it is presented. Rather, the Illuminae files books put the reader into the narrative. It's not an accident that the series refers to itself as files. They feel like a dossier on the characters. The reader is absorbed into the narrative, becoming someone presumably with the clearance to be reading the documents compiled in each book. XX, by graphic and type designer Ryan Hughes, is bound as a standard book, implying the order in which to read the pages. It has sections of a conventional book layout, while other parts are decidedly weird. Hughes has primarily worked in the comic book industry doing things like logos for superheroes. He had the idea for XX bouncing around in his head for several years and kept putting it off before deciding to actually write the book. XX is a sci-fi story of first contact with extraterrestrial intelligence. And it's a story we read and seen before, perhaps dozens of times. Hughes flexes his graphic design and illustration muscles to bring a fascinating layer to the story, going so far as to design typefaces just for the book. Early on, readers are presented with what looks like a printout of email exchanges between two characters. Rather than simply say that it is an email exchange, Hughes shows it, much like how the Illuminae files do. There are font changes mid-paragraph to indicate a change in who is speaking or reading aloud to other characters. And when the alien intelligence makes its first attempts at communication, they really are just attempts. Readers see the failed communication on the pages, manifesting as truly unintelligible shapes and symbols. That idea comes from Hughes' frustration with what he sees in more modern sci-fi stories that assume that meeting aliens is no more difficult than going to Spain on a holiday with a phrase book. If an alien trying to communicate isn't enough, Hughes also included a story within the story that looks and reads like a classic sci-fi pulp serialized novel. In the book, this novel, titled Ascension, was published in a fictional magazine called Planetfall, and covers for both Planetfall and various editions of Ascension are printed on the in-papers. In talking about XX and the kinds of choices he made while writing and designing the book, Hughes says that what he was trying to do with the novel as an object is, inject something from the world of graphic design and the history of pop culture and the history of 20th century art movements and typography into the rather morbid form of the novel, which has just as many as unassumed unexpected cliches and ways in which it binds itself without realizing it. He goes on to argue that you need to step outside of the form in order to see what the form is, and by doing so, you very quickly understand that a lot of things that may be a lot of people take for gospel aren't at all, and you can alter them and mess with them and do things in different ways. And why not? This is all grist for the mill of creative expression. What's fascinating and sets XX apart from others is how Hughes went about writing it. He says it never existed in manuscript form. It was never just the text of a book set in a single typeface. Rather, the writing and the graphic design happened simultaneously, right in Adobe and Design. When it came time to send a copy to the publisher and editor, he had print on demand copies made so that what they got was very near what the finished product with less. like. Hughes had a very clear sense of the purpose for all the typographic shenanigans readers would experience upon opening the book. Everything on the page and how the page looks is all in service to the narrative. Hughes said, "The form that the book takes, as with any piece of graphic design, should come out of what you're trying to express, and there's no point in ladling in effects, just for the sake of fireworks. If that's not relevant to the plot or what it is, I'm trying to say." It's evident upon opening the book and beginning to read that a lot of effort went into XX to make it a completely different kind of experience than reading any other novel with straightforward conventional graphic design. Hughes doesn't think that should deter anyone from giving it a try. He sees no reason why people shouldn't pick up a novel and see fonts and see photographs and sketches and images. And as long as the designer is giving explanations or a thread for readers to follow without assuming a load of prior knowledge, it's an experience readers can enjoy. In S, JJ Abrams and Doug Dorst went all in on the idea of a book as an experience. Abrams says that the idea for S came when he found a book in an airport. Inside, someone had written a note for whoever found it saying to read the book, take it somewhere, and leave it for someone else to find and read. Abrams also recalled checking out books when he was in college and seeing what other people had written or highlighted and made him think about the life of the book before it came to him. It's safe to say that S nearly demands that the readers think about or at least notice and acknowledge the book's prior life. There is a history here. Once out of the Black Slip case, it looks like a library book titled "The Ship of Thesis" by VMstrocker. And even has a sticker on the spine with catalog numbers. The fascinating or perhaps infuriating part about S is the fact that there are three stories being told all at once. One is the main text of the ship of Thesis. One is the running commentary on the identity and mysterious author VMstrocker. The third happens as two university students, Jen and Eric, interact in the notes and handwritten in the margins of nearly every page. S comes in a slip case out of peer necessity. It seems like every few pages there is another piece of ephemera tucked in. Pictures, postcards, handwritten letters, a greeting card, and inside the back cover a decoder wheel. In an interview, Abrams said that the goal was to create something that wasn't just the typical book. And whether that's wonderful or better or infuriating and frustrating and worse, it'll depend on how different people accept it and take it in. With S, how the book is designed allows for levels of interaction that aren't possible with XX or the Illuminae files. Readers don't have to read everything to get a good story. You could read just the ship of Thesis and ignore the footnotes, the ephemera, and Jen and Eric's notes to each other. Or you could read the ship of Thesis and Eric and Jen's story. Or you could go all in looking for the little puzzles and figuring out how and where to use the decoder wheel. Doreston Abrams don't attempt to prescribe how to read S. Though Doreston indicated that he has been tempted to read the ship of Thesis all the way through first and then go back for Jen and Eric's story. Abrams suggested taking it one chapter at a time. Read the novel, then begin the same chapter again for everything in the margins and whatever is tucked between the pages. Even with everything happening in the book, we could possibly make the case that S isn't really all that unconventional. Take away everything in the margins and all the ephemera and the ship of Thesis would look like any other book, except for the unnaturally wide margins. But that part of experiencing S is a conventionally designed book. Jen and Eric's story is essentially epistolary. The design of all the ephemera is pretty conventional too. Things get interesting and what sets S. apart is when all of these elements are layered on top of one another, taking up space on and in between the pages of the book. Alejandro Zambra's 2014 book Multiple Choice uses a conventional format too, except this narrative looks like a standardized test. Complete with the answer sheet at the end of the book. The cover is the reader's first indication that this will be a different experience because under the title is a list of choices, fiction, nonfiction, poetry, all of the above and none of the above. The bubbles besides each option all look like someone has marked and then erased them. It's hard to pin down exactly what the book is about. However, in the broadest sense, we could say it is about memory, while recognizing that any other reader could come to a completely different conclusion. That has a lot to do with how the book's design invites the reader to interact with the text and produce their own meeting. It is possible to simply read through the questions and answers and get a sense of the story. It feels rather like recalling memories, some longer ago and dimmer, than the more recent ones. The book is divided into five sections, excluded term, sentence order, sentence completion, sentence elimination, and reading comprehension. The sections seem vaguely chronological, beginning with simply the single word questions, and each section is more complex than the last. Treating the narrative like a multiple choice exam and considering the option changes the interaction with the book and how it's experienced. When a reader approaches the text like an exam, namely that they look at the question and try to find the answer that seems most likely, the narrative opens up in interesting ways. Question 27 in the sentence order section lists these sentences. 1. You dream that you lose a child. 2. You wake up. 3. You cry. 4. You lose a child. 5. You cry. And then the options for what order to place these sentences are given. A reader in a hurry could skim over the options and move on. However, these lines take on a different and nuanced meanings when time is taken to consider the order in which they're read. The first sentence, you dream you lose a child if placed before sentence 4, you lose a child. Feels like a premonition. Switch the two around, and it feels more like a reaction to a tragedy. Every question has the same feel. Interacting with it produces multiple meanings without any real indication of which one is right. That is, except for the ones with lists of five identical answers. From a design perspective, telling a story as a standardized test gives the reader a lot of agency that the conventional book design doesn't. Multiple choice literally presents the reader with questions and possible answers. Like the rest of the books already mentioned, the design makes this kind of interaction possible, and depending on the reader, either fascinating or infuriating. There seems to be very little middle ground. Perhaps the most well-known, most talked about, and most polarizing book in this list is Mark Z. Danieluski's House of Leaves. If we're talking about when book design gets weird, House of Leaves has weirdness to spare. But much like XX, the typographic and design elements are never pointless. The typeface, the placement, the color, what little there is, and few images all have a purpose. They are there by design and they serve to tell the story. In the simplest terms, House of Leaves is about the Navidson family living in a house that turns out to be bigger on the inside than on the outside, and the people who engage with this family story after the fact. The layered narrative start on page one and never let up. This family documents the phenomenon on film which is presumably lost or perhaps never existed. The book is an in-depth analysis of the movie by a blind man, Sampano, who dies. Sampano's neighbor, Johnny Truunt, finds the manuscript and edits it for publication, adding his own extensive footnotes to Sampano's already extensive footnotes. If it sounds like a lot, it is. Not only are there footnotes the keep readers flipping back and forth between pages. When things start getting really weird in the house, things start getting weird on the page. One of the early events that takes place in the Navidson house is the appearance of an extra door in the living room, which opens into a long dark hallway. Navidson records several expeditions down the hallway. During one excursion into the hallway, the hallway shrinks, getting smaller and smaller. The text on the page describing the phenomenon is limited to a small square in the middle of an otherwise blank page, and also gets smaller and smaller the further Navidson goes. In talking about House of Leaves, Daniel Luski says that how the readers engage with the narrative is what matters. In his words, what he does is create work that are all about having a collaborative experience with the reader. It's not about making his point. His point isn't the thing that matters. It's the dialogue. Maybe that's a tough self for some readers, considering all the typographic shenanigans as Ryan Hughes calls them. But Daniel Luski maintains that everything happening on the page is important to the meaning of the overall experience, so different fonts make a difference. Different colors make a difference. And while House of Leaves may feel rather impenetrable, the book slowly reveals how to read the text, so readers learn how to embrace the twist in turns when they start appearing. Yet having to do things like turn the book upside down, or turn it on its side, or hold it up to a mirror are things that might either frustrate or delight readers, and Daniel Luski knows it. He said that once House of Leaves was written, his agents sent it out to dozens of publishers, and it got rejected by dozens of publishers. House of Leaves does require an above-average effort to read, but that shouldn't stop anyone from tackling it if they want a far more engaging and immersive reading experience. All of that said, not everyone thinks any of these books are great. A quick scroll through reviews on Amazon reveals some common complaints, self-indulgent, gimmicky, boring, and tedious are the most common. And maybe they are, whether they are or not these books aren't for everything. They ask something extra of the reader that conventionally designed books simply don't. There are levels of interactions that some readers don't want. The list of books like the Illuminae Files, XX, Multiple Choice, S, and the House of Leaves is rather short, and it isn't growing quickly. It is perhaps because there is a narrow section of readers willing to expend the extra energy or who try to understand the reasoning behind the unconventional design choices. However readers feel about these titles, we can't deny that they are pushing the boundaries of a format that even after hundreds of years still has plenty of room for exploration. There's a list of similar books on our website. [Music] This episode was produced with the aid of a grant from the University of Central Oklahoma. This episode is a special contribution by our story editor, Spencer Ge, who is also an alumni from our graphic design program at UCO, and all research and writing credits for this episode go to Spencer. It's sound design and engineering by the University of Central Oklahoma Center for eLearning and Connected Environments, music by Christina Geakona and Patrick Conlon of Onyx Lane. If you would like to contact me about this episode or about the podcast, please email me at [email protected], that is H-E-L-L-L-O at idh.fm. Our website can be found at idh.fm. You can also connect with us on Instagram at incomplete design history. And be sure to subscribe to this podcast wherever you listen to podcasts. [Music]