However, an encouraging recent tendency has been towards a more equitable
distribution of costs and care and attention between the ‘bookblock’ or inside, and the
outer jacket or cover, of casebound and paper-covered books alike. This can be seen as
a recognition that glossy and colourful covers are no longer enough if the contents are
visually uninviting; and that the reader now has more exacting expectations of the book
as a leisure purchase. In concrete terms this is leading to improved print and paper
quality, lively use of newly introduced typeface designs, more generous and practical
paperback margins, and greater sophistication in the approach to text design as a whole.
Many other categories of children’s book have of course pioneered excellent structural
features, visual exposition through colour printing, and value for money generally; but
this latest design development has been stressed above all for the hope that it holds out
to the beleaguered novelist or creative writer. But for most branches of children’s book
design, thankfully, the question of illustration still arises at the initial reading stage if
not earlier. At a practical level, the scale and weight of the text page and a particular
illustrator’s style have to be adapted and attuned to each other, and so it becomes
pointless to proceed until an artist has been selected and briefed. No category of books
other than those for children uses such a wide range of illustrative styles and
techniques to so many different ends, or lays down such varied visual-verbal pathways
for the reader to follow. Therefore the field is particularly open to those book designers
who are drawn to these issues, who will generally find that authors and illustrators
welcome the creative involvement of a skilled typographer.
In complete contrast to the situation with unillustrated fiction, it is natural for picture
book artists to wish to tell a story in a sequence of tableaux as Hogarth did for The
Rake’s Progress, and to resent having to leave suitable holes in the picture surface for
the words. Brian Wildsmith remains the master craftsman of the wordless picture book,
where questions and answers are stimulated in sum and in detail through the pictures,
and he has continued to pioneer and augment the mechanics of picture book design.
Syntax and word order as preserved by Gutenberg’s linear discipline are challenged by
the multi-track possibilities opened up through the comic strip; and these developments
have found personal echoes in the work of the Ahlbergs, Raymond Briggs, Shirley
Hughes, Posy Simmonds and Jan Pieńkowski among many others. The aleatorical
message structures of computer-generated graphics are breaking though into printed
advertising almost as these words are being written, and so, new as these methods are,
they are likely to shape the child’s televisual environment and thus create their own
resonances within the picture book world.
The final area I would like to consider is the design of non-fiction informational or
reference titles, however complex. Book printers refer to straightforward novels or
biographies as ‘sausages’—wherever you slice them open the texture is uniform —and
this describes an essential precondition for continuous reading. It facilitates several
recognisable modes of reading: vocalisation or reading aloud; the assimilation of pure
intellectual meaning or apparent dialogue with another mind; study and recapitulation;
the sporadic perception of typography as shape devoid of semantic content; and broken
or fitful reading leading to a final break in concentration. These may be likened to
alternating states of sleep, with the added awareness that one is travelling on a single
track and relying on the system to give only vital signals and to keep the line clear of
CHILDREN’S BOOK DESIGN 461