A good place to start when analyzing book design is at the most basic level, by asking myself some simple questions. What are the most important books to me? How about to history? And how do these connect?

Many of the most influential books on my life were fairytales of a sort or another.
When I was very small, my parents made a habit of reading to me every night, whether it was Winnie the Pooh, Little Golden Books (the classic Golden Book stories and Disney), or the Children’s Bible.
I was also greatly influenced by books with collected stories. I distinctly remember “Povestile Bunicii” and Tezaurul cu povesti I think these books are the ones that most influenced my aesthetic preferences in books. I like them to be tome-like, with images that look timeless and with hard covers. They are colorful, but not eye-searing and they are solid to hold.

Later I started reading C.,S. Lewis, and he quickly became one of my favorite authors (and still is). I read his Chronicles of Narnia and his Space trilogy when I was about nine years old. I am not sure exactly when I first read The Final Quest by Rick Joyner, but it was during that period. I remember loving The Last Sin Eater by Francine Rivers, and Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen.

Later, I discovered J. R. R. Tolkien with The Hobbit and The Silmarillion. These books started my love for fantasy. Jules’ Verne’s 2000 Leagues Under the Sea also marked a type of science fiction that I still enjoy. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes are still some of my favorite short stories to read. I also read a few biographies like Surprised by Joy, this one I remember, not only because he is a favorite author of mine but also because I greatly identified with the way he describes how he lives and creates stories inside his head. It made me feel a little less odd.

A quick side note on comics: I’m not sure how they factor into this, but I have favorites like Marvels (Marvel), Robin volume four (DC), The Killing Joke (DC), Marvel’s Civil War (Marvel), and Infamous Iron Man (Marvel).

High Performance Habits by Brendon Burchard is a book I will keep coming back to for years until I have mastered the principles in it.

And topping all of these off, the Bible is probably the most important book in my life, which I prefer to consider more than just a book. And I hope it will continue to shape the way I think and live for the rest of my days more than any other book I have read or will read.

If I am to discuss books in similar categories as the ones I have listed (myths, folktales, Christian/Religious books, classic novels, fantasy, self-help, comic books) Though Self-Help and comic books are not books I am interested in making, so I will be focusing on the other genres.

Christian/Religious books

The Bible and the Torah which was the foundation for the Bible. Not only was it the first book that was put through the printing press, but it is the most translated and the most frequently purchased book in the world.
Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan is an allegory of the Christian journey through life.
Mere Christianity by C S Lews. Lewis makes a short, concise, and very true description of the Christian faith. He uses plain language,  solid arguments and reason to describe the main elements of Christianity.

Mythology

Western society and literature was most shaped by Greek and Norse myths.

The Illiad and the Odyssey by Homer (Translated by Robert Fagles) Homer is considered one of the greatest poets of all time and if it weren’t for him, we would have no knowledge of the Trojan war or of  Odyssesu’s journey.

The Poetic Edda (Jackson Crawford) Is a collection of Old Norse mythical and heroic poems composed by various unknown poets in Iceland or Scandinavia during the Viking Age. It is the single most important source of information for Norse Mythology and religion.

The Prose Edda (Jesse L. Byock). Written by a scholar Snorri Sturluson. It is the second most important source of Norse myths, and is a popular treatise on the mythology behind the images in Old Norse poetry. Its accuracy is considered debatable, however.

Classic Novels

It’s entirely impossible to make a list of these which will have a general positive consensus, but here goes:
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte was revolutionary in the world of prose fiction because of it’s focus on the growth of the protagonist’s character and personality and its use of first person narrative. It was even originally published as an autobiography.
To kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. I discusses the fight against racism. Probably the most widely read novel in the United States and the most recognizable.
The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald. This book explores themes of decadence, idealism, resistance to change, social upheaval and excess creating a portrait of the roaring twenties that has been described as a cautionary tale regarding the American Dream.

Picture Books

Some of the most beloved picture books of all time are:

Goodnight Moon by Margaret Brown. A Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle, Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak.

Fairytales:

I found that it was difficult to separate fairytales and children’s books. I chose to call the following fairytales on account of them being older or more timeless than other children’s books: Arabian Nights, Unknown, Grimm’s Fairy Tales, Hans Christian Anderson’s Fairy Tales, The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood.

Children’s Novels.

Some of the most beloved children’s books of all time are: Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maud Montgomery, King Arthur and His Knights by Howard Pyle, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carol, Gulliver’s Travels by Johnathan Swift, The Little Prince by Antoine De Saint-Exupery, Charlotte’s Web by E. B . White, and Peter Pan by J.M. Barrie.

Fantasy Novels

Fantasy novels, some also children’s books but not all, can range from classic fantasy to urban fantasy to magical realism. The Lord of The Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien has been the foundation for high fantasy from it’s publication to today. Other wonderful books that spark the imagination are: The Colour of Magic by Terry Pratchett, The Sword in the Stone by T.H. White, A Wrinkle in Time by Madeliene L’Engle, A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin, and The Princess Bride by William Goldman.

For this exercise, I was challenged to think about the future of the book and present it in a interesting way. So instead of just writing it on here, I chose to create an image in Photoshop instead, using my text, some images, an interesting font and a textured background.

Artists books are both art objects and books. They combine experimental art with publication, lettering, binding, etc. and create something new.

The very structure of the book can be redesigned like in the above shown 360^o books. They unfold and then the two covers are tied together to create a carousel. (Pieńkowski, Jan., The first Noël : a Christmas carousel, Cambridge, MA : Candlewick Press, 2004.) (Ōno, Yūsuke, Snowy world : 360° book, Kyōto : Seigensha Art Publishing, Inc., 2017)

They are essentially something like pop-up books with a more artistic edge.

There are also books that re-think the structure of book binding by being foldable and creating interesting shapes. The Quilt of Gee’s Bend (Carolyn Shattuck, The Quilts of Gee’s Bend Volume 2, Rutland, Vermont: Shattuck Studio,, 2012) has what they call a rotating ring flexagon binding or an Infinite Rotating Tetrahedron. The book has no text, only the pattern of Alabama quilts from Gee’s Bend.

Aunt Sallie’s Lament (Kaufman, Margaret author, Van Vliet, Claire designer, Newark, Vt. : Janus Press, 1988) This book is about a similar subject, but has text, a poem to be precise. “The poem tells the story of a southern American quilter reminiscing about a love lost but not forgotten. Each stanza of the poem is accompanied by a muttering, one or two words printed at the edge of the page, which remain in view as each subsequent page is turned.”

The variously shaped leaves are made up of a complex series of cut out pastel paper shapes that mimic the patterns of a quilt. This diamond-shaped book designed by Claire Van Vliet is in an accordion fold format that can stretch to 105 inches revealing all the stanzas. The book itself is housed within a floral fabric covered box.

Artist’s books seem to have a range from the no-text foldable, quilted patterned to the more simple books like those by Four Corners Publishing, which are each designed uniquely. Either the book has no title, which is replaced by and image (The Noseby Nikolai Gogol, art by Rick Buckley, Four Corners Familiars, 2015), but the inside is fairly regular, with text and photographs. The same with Bram Stoker’s Dracula (Stoker, Bram, Dracula, Four Corners Books, 2008) ; it is bound regularly, and the illustrations are in pencil, but the typefaces change depending on who is writing the letter in the story. (The story of Dracula is mostly composed of a series of letters, thus when the typefaces change it feels unique but not random.)

What is the Zine?

It’s a small publication made by either a single or just a handful of people outside the system of regular publishing. They usually have a handmade look achieved with photocopying, pasting, and hand-binding or folding. Zines can come in multiple shapes and sizes from A5 and stapled to A4 and bound to A6 or smaller and simply folded. There are even examples of zines which come in envelopes containing unbound cards.
Zines have a long history, some tracing the practice back to pamphlets first made when the printing press was still new. But what we would call zines have their origins in a post WWII world, when teenage culture and counterculture first arose.
Zines can be about literally anything. Music, comics, celebrities, one’s own life and story, politics, social movements and counter movements, humor, etc. The only thing that connects zines is the self-published low-budget trait.
The look of a zine can thus range from obviously “clumsily” put together to nearly professional-looking. It simply depends on who is making them and for what reason. Art zines and comic book zines tend to range on the better-designed side of the spectrum. While punk or political or humoristic zines tend to opt for a more low-fi approach. But this is completely arbitrary observation and could be proved wrong with countless examples.
On a different note, there are also online zines, taking the form of an internet blog/magazine publication.

I was challenged to create my own zine covers using an approach similar to the lo-fi cut and paste style many zines have. In my sketchbook, I have made three types of zines: one with commentary on current events (newszine?), one about a band, and one about comic books.

For the News Zine, I combined three elements that I found are common in zines like cutting and pasting, misspelling, and adding speech bubbles to pasted characters. I first cut out text from a newspaper and pasted it around where the heading would be in order to give it a newspaper aesthetic, then deliberately misspelled “Daily” in “Dayly Groan”. The letters for the title were also cut from that same newspaper. Lastly, I gave the character in the corner a speech bubble to bring him to life and give the reader an idea of what the article inside will be about.

For the music Zine, I used some of the same techniques, cutting out the band name and their photograph from the magazine, but this time I chose to create the title of the zine myself in simple pen. Here, I also incorporated more sneak peeks of what the zine contains by writing the article titles on each side of the photo. (I included a lot of unnecessary exclamation points, I think they add to the fan-made look of the zine.)

And lastly, the comic book zine. Most modern comic book zines tend to contain some sort of original comic, but I chose a more old-fashioned sort of comic books zine, which discusses existing comics instead of containing an original one. I haven’t seen many of these anymore, possibly due to the fact that such discourse has been moved to online media, where it is much more effective and instantaneous. But I still wanted to re-create the idea, so I started out with a light sketch, a bold title and a (as accurate as I could get it) drawing of the superhero/show discussed in the zine. Again, I chose to write both an article title on the side of the drawing and also some advertising of how the article is approached (“Reviews and Honest Opinions”).