The Book as Object

Don’t you love it when books are made to be more than just things to relate information? When artwork, multiple typefaces, additions of other “documents” within the text, colophons and other embellishments are added, a book becomes a wonderful object to interact with. I especially love a map or a house plan. Didn’t Christie put those in her books now and then, so you’d know how close the library really was to the billiard room? Wonderful touches.

It’s with this in mind that I start this thread. I’ve been meaning to for ages and ages. To show cell phone shots of cool stuff that I find in particularly engaging books as objects. Feel free to jump on when you find a gem in your hands.

The book that I’ll start with is The Parts by Keith Ridgeway. It is a novel told in six narratives featuring six different characters. Each has its own little symbol - a knife and fork, a radio, a stylized person standing, a house, a car and a cell phone. Sometimes two will appear side by side at the beginning of a section, meaning both characters feature. Here’s the radio -



That’s Joe’s narrative because he’s a radio talk show host. Sometimes his on the air bits appear in italics.



There are station memos that appear with his parts -



Barry is Joe’s producer and often is the author of these memos, but nested within his sections are these others that are in a totally different font and feature a person named Kez. Whether this is real or some novel Barry is writing I have no idea yet. This one appears in the narrative of a different person. The font is the same, so I have to think it's still Kez's world. Very weird. I really better start this book soon.



Other strange documents are included -



There also appear to be newspaper clippings, but I don’t know what they’re in aid of yet.



All super fun and intriguing. I just love when books play with the form like this. Don't let me hog the thread either, jump in. I want maps, doodles, end papers, fake margin notes, colophons...whatever you find that makes the book a lovely object as well. Except covers. We have another thread for those.

No picture, but MrsHouseLibrary, when she took a break from reading tomes of paleontology and the like, read a lot of YAPR, most of which she felt was poorly done. She became obsessed with the Twilight series (doesn't deserve a touchstone,) and couldn't begin to explain why. After a while, though, she decided they really were crap. But, that's now why I'm writing this.

She then came upon Shiver by Maggie Stiefvater, and its accompanying books in the trilogy. Even I read them. The text of each book was printed in pastel shades of blue, green or red, which made reading surprisingly easy on the eyes. Two well-written passages in the first book were descriptions of the girl's bedroom (where her books were shelved using DDS) and a loft room in a bookstore.
It's a YAPR, alright. One of the main characters is a werewolf. Each chapter heading contained the chapter number, a title, and the current temperature.
Good touch, because when it drops to freezing, certain members of the community get quite hairy and trod on all fours.

Maggie did a book signing at the large indie book store in downtown Austin each time a new one in the series was released. You better believe Karrell had me drive her there to get an SFE of each of those books.

I enjoyed S. for just that reason. I don't remember much of the story, but I loved the interactions, notes, and inserts from the people "reading" the book in turns.

>2 WholeHouseLibrary: I don't know what YAPR is, and rather than look it up i'll employ my usual method of guessing the word from context and assuming that i'm correct until i'm proven wrong in the most embarrassing circumstances. Yes, i do that for pronunciation as well.

Therefore, i assume that YAPR is not a small, noisy dog. Rather, from context it would appear to be an acronym for Young Adult Palaeontology Research. That's a genre i'm not familiar with but very impressed that it exists.

>4 MrAndrew: Young Adult Paranormal Romance

disappointed.

>2 WholeHouseLibrary: I am not much of a YA reader, and definitely not Romance. Nevertheless I loved her The Raven Boys, which I read a couple of years back. You have convinced me that was not a fluke.

Though YAPR isn't my bag, the colored fonts sounds sort of cool. I think Christopher Moore fooled around with that for Sacre Bleu - every time blue was written it was in that color. Same with ... what was it the word house in House of Leaves? Can't remember any others.

I have S, but DNFed it. Maybe I'll go back and just read the marginalia. That was the more interesting part anyway.

I enjoyed the way the Neverending story used different coloured ink to differentiate between the segments in our world and those in Fantasia.

Am reading Blood Lure by Nevada Barr - one of her Anna Pigeon series. It's about bears in Glacier NP and here are the colophons for the chapters -



Isn't it great?

There’s at least one floor plan in the Sherlock Holmes stories, but i can’t remember offhand which one.

ISRT that the first edition of Gould’s Book of Fish by Richard Flanagan is printed in several colours, but I don’t own a copy to check.

And I’ve posted in my own thread about Bruce Rogers’ Oxford Lectern Bible, which (on the basis of the images I’ve seen) is simply the most beautiful manufactured object ever made (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford_Lectern_Bible). Unfortunately, all the website citations for that Wikipedia article appear to have succumbed to link rot.

I love a floorplan, too. Or a nice map.

Although this book is cheaply printed and weighs practically nothing (hence the see-thru pages), I appreciate the original artwork on the chapter headings.

Even chapters are done by Nicholas Delort -



Odd chapters are done by Gabriel Rodrieguez who also did the Locke and Key books with King's son Joe Hill -



Nice to see in this day and age.

I've been intrigued by this idea as well in 2022. A handsome book can indeed make one's reading experience more enjoyable and more memorable. It's the paper quality felt as you turn the page. It's the illustrations (such as the examples you post here in the thread). I read a Folio Society edition of Phantom of the Opera this year and the illustrations were expertly woven into the book's narrative structure. Makes a big difference in how well I recall the reading experience.

How did I miss this thread?? I love cool books, whether they have great cover art, or clever cover material or quality paper, etc. Maps, pictures, drawings, all of those things add to the experience. Now if I could only find a good quality copy of Sword of Shannara with the original full-color glossy prints by the Hildebrandt brothers!

I have so many books that I treasure not just for the great story, but because of the beauty of their making. Some of them I have to fondle as I read. I think I said this elsewhere, but the paper is like satin, the pages are either thick, or thin, the edges are gilt, beautiful illustrations are inside (I'm looking at you, Arthur Rackham) or perhaps maps to other lands. We loves them, precious. And if they have a foldout genealogy, or map, that is even more scrumptious.