Why Bother When Books are so last Millennium?
Soon even good novels won't sell, right?
Wrong. People need stories. Stories will always sell.
Books, however, are another matter. A quick review:
Most of history. No one has texts. Priests and King's scribes, maybe. No one else. Paper and binding have yet to be invented.
1100s. Books (mostly Bibles) take forever to make by hand. New stuff sneaks in by the marginalia - like that great story about Mary Magdalen.
1400s. Printing = more books. 1880s.Industrialized printing = even more. But books are still pricey. They have to be worth it - leather bound and filled with colour plates, pasted in by hand. Margins are wide. Paper is thick and creamy.
1900s.The Penguin revolution. Cheap paper, cheap covers, thin margins, no pictures. Great, affordable ideas. Genius. 2000s. The net supplies all those ideas, plus an infinity more, cheaper, better and faster.
What a computer can't do is put something beautiful in your hands.
Books need to be beautiful again. We need books that look, feel and smell like luxury. Books that are a status symbol and an accessory. Books that are expensive.
Designers like Chip Kidd aren't the last practitioners of a dying art. They're the wave of the future. We need them to transform our books into masterpieces.
Because there's always a market for masterpieces.
No comments:
Post a Comment