Wednesday, September 26, 2007

Strangely-Shaped Books


I think it is good how the last three books we have read have been interestingly shaped and sized.




Eeeee Eee Eeee: small and squareish, with text that doesn't claustrophobically fill up the whole page so that there are fields of white space around it. Hotel Theory bigger and square, double-fonted, columned. And Frances Johnson so cute and teensy, so it can snuggle in your pocket. All childrens books should be this size, I think.

It is a good sign when a book is strangely-shaped. I am only going to buy oddly-sized-and-shaped books from now on. I think that if something is an odd size and shape it is necessarily good.

I got a copy of Baudelaire's Poems in Prose today--it is beautiful: square, and hard-covered, with a man's face etched into the front cover, and with smooth, thick, white paper. I am in love with it.

2 comments:

Missy said...

i was thinking of this very thing last night.

i loved small books when i was a child. i used to carry around tiny hard cover copies of Beatrix Potter stories.

now i love the size of frances johnson and the built-in bookmark. it makes me happy.

i guess some things never change.

Anonymous said...

I used to work in the artists' books section of the library, and nothing is better than handling weirdly constructed books. Some of them are awful and sticky, but they're still somehow better.