The book I’m reviewing was produced by Bethan
Laurence-McGaffie, and is called CXXXIX, I’ll
start with the name, I’m unsure why it’s called this, but with the contents of
the book having religious connotations, I get the feeling it’s a passage out
the bible that was also use on some of the images. This works because the pages
that the images were printed onto got me interested in the first place, but now
I’d like to be able to spend more time looking at the book so I can figure
things like this out, and explore the work more.
I particularly chose this book because I liked the work
inside it, and that’s personally the most important thing, the work caught my attention
and made me want the look at it more, and figure out what was going on, I
started reading the text that was behind the images, to start trying to decipher
why there were images on top of it, and whether those images had any connection
to the text, which I’m still not sure about after looking at the book for a
bit, and that’s making me want to look at it again which in my eyes makes it a successful
book.
Onto the finer details, The font they used for the title and
the way they set it into the cover so it’s an indent works really well, keeping
the front cover simple, and I think them not putting an image on there was the
right choice. It’s also a hard back which works well, and I feel that it works
better than if it had a paper back, because the hard back makes it feel more precious,
more important, like it’s something that needs looking after, and also makes it
look more professionally done. As well as that I feel the size of the book is
about right, it wasn’t to small that you couldn’t handle it, and it wasn’t so
big that you felt like you’re holding a kids book, and the shape of it felt
right as well.
With the inside of it, they must have planned it a lot because
the images inside it flowed and work well in the lay out they used, it didn’t
have any points where you felt like the images were jumping around, but they
also managed to play around with the size of the images and the positioning of
them, but so it still flowed, they also left some blank spaces, a couple of
pages that were just black, which even though these may not seem important, they
help break up the book so it’s not image after image, it gives you time to
think and consider things before putting you back into the work.
They also used black paper which is something that can work
really well, in this case it helped to frame the images, and made them stand
out where as if they had used white paper the images would have just dissolved
into it, they also used glossy or pearl paper, which worked well because it
made the black shine, then the white reflected less making it stand out more by
putting the images forward again, and finally the thickness of the paper was
about right, it didn’t feel flimsy but wasn’t to thick making it feel strange
to turn the pages.
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