Books and the People Who Make Them
I found this book in the powerHouse bookstore in Industry City, Brooklyn. What caught my eyes was its meta approach to use a visual book format to teach the concept of making a visual book.
The teaching starts right away on its inner front cover:
Swiss binding leaves the inner spine of the book visible. The pages are glued only to the back cover, not the front. This is not a manufacturing defect! It allows the spine of the book to lay flat while reading!
Tiny notes like “Swiss binding”, “Typeface”, “trim”, “paper weight”… and so on were placed all around this spread, explaining key concepts of the book making glossary.
Turning the first page, the table of content is presented as an “overview” of thumbnail drawings of all the people involved in the making of a book: The author, the editor, the illustrator, the graphic designer, the sales representative, the printer, the bookseller, the literary critic, the librarian, and the readers!
Left: Table of Content | Right: Foreword
On the opposite page, where you’d often see the Foreword, you see a letter addressing “Dear Readers”, singed by “The Author”.
You’d be wondering, “Well, who is the author?”
It took me a while to flip the book back and forth to look for the name of the author, and finally found it in the most inconspicuous place:
Cover closeup
Did you find it? A person to the upper right corder is holding two signs, one says “Stéphanie Vernet”, and another says “Camille De Caussac”.
Flipping to the publishing info page at the end of the book, in the fine print it says the text of this book is copyrighted to Stéphanie, and the illustration Camille. This book was originally published in French, and it was translated into English by Paul Kelly.
Given the role of the illustration and the translation in this book, isn’t it wonderful that the foreword - the letter to “Dear Readers” - was signed by “The Author”, instead of Stéphanie Vernet?
I love how they all down played the importance of the person who conceived the first draft, and instead choosing to celebrate the collective effort. It again went meta of itself: Books are made by a village of people.
The main content of the book consists of explanations of each and every role involved in the book making process. Each role takes up two spreads of pages:
One spread is a full spread illustration of the person in their working environment, with a paragraph or two giving an overview of this job; And another spread drills into the details of various tasks this job demands, again presenting the information with representational illustrations paired with succinct text description.
A book always starts with a writer, “reading is all about seeing the world through the eyes of the writer”. Since I’m particularly interested in illustrated books, “how are those made”? I wonder.
A book is a collective venture, and writing is not always the first stage…
The original idea for a book may stem from the editor, who then commissions the writer. An illustrated project could start with the artist before the author has even written the text.
A pop-up book can sometimes be proposed by the paper specialist, who has designed the model of the book before the writer has even thought of it.
Ah ha!
Left: Index | Right: Publication Information
After every character from The Author all the way to The Reader is introduced, this book ends with this beautiful illustration accompanying its “Index” and “Publication Info” - this is what I particularly like about this book: You wouldn’t expect a “children’s book”, which this book looks unmistakably like one, to have an “Index” section, yet it does. A very informative and educational book always has an Index. This Index is simple and pleasant, created at just the right level of complexity for its intended audience.
Even as an adult, I thoroughly enjoyed this book and learn quite a few things! As I discussed in Artists’ Book as Expanded Literacy, not everyone, not even adults, learns from reading linear text. This 45-page book is a living example of the proverbial “a picture is worth a thousand words”. I would recommend this book not only to young readers, but also to all the unpretentious adults!
