Too Loud A Solitude

A book is composed of not only the cover and the pages but also the spine, fore-edge and the binding etc. It is a three-dimensional object and so, if all the elements that make up a book are taken into consideration when doing a book design for a novel, is it possible to achieve better results? The question was my starting point and leads me to my outcome.

The design is based on a short novel by a Czech novelist Bohumil Hrabal. In my project the way of telling the story is by using different formats. Thus, the formats within the pages would change to follow the content.

For example, In order to convey a feeling of heaviness and solitude in the main character's inner soul, cement was chosen for the outlook. The background of the story is a wastepaper factory, so that a wide range of paper was used to mimic the real wastepaper and trying to make a reader easily to imagine a pile of wastepaper at the very beginning. Through changing the size and texture and image the intention is to disturb the readers, and to create the feeling of anxiety and irritability. Beside, different shapes of rectangular holes were die-cut on black papers to represent the conversion of different space. Moreover, the hallucination was presented by printing the text on tracing paper. And by cutting out the words ‘book’ and ‘ books’ to represent the devastation of knowledge.