Let Us Now Praise Famous Fonts

I never thought I'd become that guy who gets all worked up about graphic design and type-face and all, but I've recently fallen in love with the work of a dude named David Pearson, probably most recognizable for his work on the recent Penguin Great Ideas line.


Now on some level I've got mixed feelings about this line. Putting out stuff like Seneca and Montaigne in friendly, pocket-sized editions (not to mention two very cleverly selected little Orwell collections) is a good thing, charging eight or nine dollars for at most around 200 petite pages, maybe not so much. However, part of what you're paying here is the packaging, and the packaging is gorgeous.

I've got Orwell's Why I Write sitting on my desk next to me, and it is basically just a ton of fun to have around. The cover stock is heavyish with a very satisfying and subtle pulpiness, with tasteful embossing, and the interior paper is clean and bright with a little bit of nice grain visible under the right light. The trade dress for each 20-book volume is classy, with uniform spines and covers using black, white, and one of three spot-colors depending on the volume. It's one of those books that makes you feel better just to look at, and the same is true as the other books in the line I've seen.

Pearson's cover designs run the gamut from the minimalism of The Communist Manifesto and Seneca's On the Shortness of Life (which seems to use the same font as Wes Anderson's movies, oddly) to the ornate dress of Montaigne's On Friendship, to the homily florid, almost Beat-looking design of Tolstoy's Confession. The Proust volume has a great looking Art Nouveau while the Tolstoy is rocking a sort of Proletkult, protest poster aesthetic. There are a lot of clever decisions in the line, none more clever than Walter Benjamin's The Work of in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, which is a terrific visual pun.

Overall, price aside, these are beautiful, beautiful editions of books ranging from, I'd say, pretty worthwhile to fucking essential to being a human being. Keep an eye out for them-- I've found a number of them for very cheap at thrift stores and on amazon.