"Lady, only a fool thinks he's superior to beautiful bindings, but only a double-distilled fool reads nothing but bindings." - sinclair lewis' main street
a friend (in fact, a friend with a short novel manuscript that i believe would be very much at home here) sent me a link to london's persephone books, specifically to read about their design and endpapers.
just fascinating. how they choose the books that they print is also interesting. i'm not sure that i'd want every title here (no judith viorst, please) - but there's a few that interest me. (actually, a very NICE gift idea would INDEED be a book token or two.)
just look at the detail page for the book An Interrupted Life: The Diaries and Letters of Etty Hillesum 1941-43: the fabric design that serves as the book's endpapers is described thus: "The fabric, by Otti Berger (d. Auschwitz 1944), a Bauhaus designer living in Holland, could have been Etty's bedspread; the stripes running across the muted, if cheerful, pattern have the effect of barbed-wire."
they have their own, interesting-looking quarterly, a back issue of which featurees an essay entitled What's wrong with new novels by B.R. Myers, the same B.R. Myers who wrote the very influential - to me - A Reader's Manifesto: An Attack on the Growing Pretentiousness in American Literary Prose.
really very inspiring indeed, especially since, virtually halfway through the bookwork for the knitting tarot, we are going to be thinking more and more about the binding, jacket and endpapers. (while such issues do not necessarily enter into the NOSHI knitting monograph series, that series being much more utilitatian, i do hereby SWEAR that we are mere DAYS away from having the first two monographs available for sale - we will sell no monographs before their time - and we are all working tirelessly.)