Read in several books, how word and image together is often seen as either a comic book, a children’s book, or for advertizing/marketing. Why is that? Does anyone else like seeing pictures when reading? even a little color and attention to detail can go along way in making a word book different from other word books. I understand, it would be weird to add pictures to some text books whose authors never intended them to be illustrated. In these book I’m finding myself intrigued by, the authors seemed to have the insight/intent to have pictures as well as words or the artist has decided from the beginning that words will accompany the illustrations. 

The Telephone Book

Ronnel writes about telephone technology and its related psychology. Book designer, Eckersly plays with content, resulting in a book where no 2 pages are the same and may take some extra looking at the page to understand/read it. Many ideas packed into every spread. Telephones and psychology and the design  both about communicating…recieving and giving information. Some pages are blank, some words “reflected” on the backside of the page. Page numbers numbered like an address book (black tabs in different locations on outside edge of page) some pages are backwards, some seem to be in code, expiramental, on the edge of readability, as one reviewer noted, a book that holds attention even as it frustrates.

“When the need for belonging is not met, discomfort arises, including feelings of depression, disorientation and hostility. The sense of belonging – that is, the feeling that we are part of a whole greater than ourselves, with which we are physically, mentally, and spiritually involved – is a necessary factor to our well being.” (The Power of Kindness, 70)

“a book is seen in full after the act of viewing” “The page and its imagry exist and then the do not exist. This is ironic because it is also such a physical object requiring touch to experience it.” (Keith Smith, 17)

Exhibits often do not allow that touch. I guess I am more interested in the book as it can be read intimately pretty much any place, any time by anyone.  Vaster audience, less expensive and wasteful, read over and over, the passing of book from one to another generation to generation. Viewer determines the pace.

With daily practice, as response, happens naturally, not striving for certain methods, processes, not forcing, over-thinking, trying to explain, critique…finding something beautiful in the ordinary, the human-made – when extraordinary added to…light, possibility of what they could be