The Great Ideas series, Penguin UK
Novelty and backlash, trend and counter-trend. *Digital Media Fatigue Syndrome rears its ugly head yet again. The first time around it was the compact disc versus the vinyl record: crisp flat crystalline sound versus space, warmth and surface noise. Eventually one medium absorbed the other, and now we enjoy reasonably warm digital sound while the ticks and pops of the vinyl era are immortalized in the mash-ups and remixes of countless DJs and turntablists.
These days, as we devote yet more time to tapping away at our metal and plastic keyboards and scanning streaming layers of text and image, we may cynically wonder if our fingers will soon forget the texture of the printed page, let alone the sensation of pressing pencil to paper and actually writing.
It was a case of the shock of the old when I first happened upon a volume from Penguin UK's Great Ideas on a writer friend's coffee table. The book was George Orwell's Why I Write, with a nifty retro cover, an homage to master typographer Jan Tschichold's austere but honest Penguin paperbacks of the postwar era. Better yet was the rich embossing on the cover, hearkening back even further to the days of letterpress and handcrafted bookmaking. It wasn't long before I found a selection of Great Ideas volumes in the stores and I picked up a starter set, which I felt obliged to photograph in the warm light of a reading lamp (above). Each cover design in the series is unique, but they share in common a spare elegance. Slim and pleasant to hold, each book invites a moment of reflection even before opening and reading, a moment snatched out of the headlong rush to scan and absorb we are all too often engaged in– a welcome relief from acute DMFS.
No comments:
Post a Comment