On Book Design

by Richard Hendel
1998, New Haven, CT, Yale University Press
ISBN:0-300-07570-7.

Reviewed by Roy R. Behrens


When Henry David Thoreau made a complete list of each and every possession he had at Walden Pond, he curiously omitted one thing: He forgot the pencil that enabled him to make the list. Successful book design, says Richard Hendel, often goes as unnoticed and unappreciated as Thoreau's pencil. It is, as Beatrice Warde once said, a transparent goblet, so that (writes Hendel) "the very invisibility of its design is to its credit." Hendel should know, having worked for many years as a highly regarded book designer, most recently with the University of North Carolina Press. Thankfully, this is not a prosaic instructional manual--"it is a book about how books are designed," he cautions, "not a book about how to design books"--but a medley of honest reflections about how book designers see, think, and feel. Written by the author and eight other American and British designers, it is illustrated by 110 black and white examples, among them several pieces by Iowa-born designer Merle Armitage and the University of Nebraska's Richard Eckersley, two of the century's most inventive (yet unheralded) book designers. With surprising candor, the text asks: How do book designers get their ideas? What do they worry about? How did they approach a particular book? And what difference does it all make? After all, confides Hendel, prize-winning book designs are largely unappreciated, cost more to produce, and are rarely available in bookstores. "There isn't any correlation between what books look like and how they sell," he laments. "Design seems to make no difference." Of particular interest is a section about the design of this book, which led us to wonder how well it will sell, whether bookstores will carry it, and (hopefully, because it has much to offer) the extent to which it might inspire other, younger book designers.
(Reprinted by permission from Ballast Quarterly Review Vol. 14, No. 4, Summer 1999.)