Circles & Colours (& Numbers)

One ongoing theory is that you fight the drift to ebooks by making your physical books as lovely as possible. Harvill Secker's imminent edition of Joshua Cohen's Book of Numbers, which looks very interesting, takes this idea very seriously indeed. It features the first circular dustjacket I can recall encountering, as well as using different single-colour overprinted illustrations that show up under different colours of light.

Quoting from Harvill's design blog: "The theme of surveillance was the spark of this cover. We had admired the RGB wallpaper work of Carnovsky for a while (a Milan based artist/designer duo comprised of Francesco Rugi and Silvia Quintanilla.) Their RGB work experiments with the interaction between printed light and colours. Images in these colours are overlaid, lines and shapes entwine but when seen under a filter/coloured light one of the three layers is revealed.

"The duo were given a large list of subjects from the novel, highlighting the ones that felt particularly important to be included. We then gave Carnosky an unusual circular grid. The idea was that this circle would fold down to wrap around the book as a jacket but when opened out would for an extraordinary poster of the novel."

The embossed boards underneath are very nice, too.

More Carnovsky wallpapers are at their site (see above). Here are a few samples. Click to embiggen and break out the coloured cellophane.