New York Diary

For Beautiful, For Spacious... Pages?

Reading: America: The Book

Everybody has already said their piece about this left-leaning (but largely non-partisan) take on Democracy, America, and All Things Political. Tom Carson of the New York Times Sunday Book Review went so far as to suggest that it should be nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for history (the link only works if you subscribe to TimesSelect, a really annoying new feature of the NYTimes website). Wal-Mart and two Mississippi library systems have refused to carry the book for reasons of taste and decency (so they plausibly say). Publisher's Weekly named it Book of the Year (2004) (I can't link directly to the PW article, since it requires a pay subscription that I don't have). Everybody on earth has offered reviews, it seems.

So I'm going to do something different. Yes, I find the book amusing--at times even insightful, though at times a little too base for my tastes. What I find particularly appealing about America, though, is not actually its content. Rather, I am taken by the book's form.

In terms of design, Jon Stewart and the Daily Show team have put together a masterpiece. The lines are simple and elegant. The color scheme is bold. Charts and graphs are straightforward and easy to read (if sometimes ridiculous), and pictoral interludes are cleanly and crisply designed with plenty of negative space to offset the images. Even the font is nice (though as for that, perhaps we oughtn't be surprised: font is often the only internal graphic element over which mainstream books take care).

I confess that I wouldn't buy a book simply for its nice clean lines and its excellent use of space, but I bet Diana Eng would. And she wouldn't be wrong, either; people buy coffee-table books all the time because of their form and design. I too can imagine buying a book for formal reasons, though I would privilege a different kind of form: for me, heavy pages, leather bindings, real ink, large size, and illumination would make a work worth owning regardless of content. But the idea is the same, and America: The Book is a beauty after its fashion.

(Note that clicking the page images will blow them up to a larger size for your leisurely perusal.)

posted by Skay @ 4:42 PM