Feature Book design
referring to what comes next: a rotating and occasion- ally disorientating tpographical adventure. The text turns: on its side, upside down, at an angle, as the book advances, mirroring the “the turns a walker makes in a seven-path classical labyrinth”, Eliot says. The whole text moves—page folios, chapter headings— to mirror these movements, with the layout also evolv- ing appropriately: when the text is set at a 90-degree rotation, it is oſten done so in a two-column grid, because a single column would render the line length too long for comfortable reading. “There is room for the line-lengths to be longer on
the ‘wider’ pages, but this didn’t feel like a comfortable solution,” Stoddart explains. “The design of the rotated pages needed flexibilit to accommodate different ratios of text and illustration, so sometimes the number of columns varies.” This ratio of art to tpe does vary, and I ask if it was an intentional atempt to stagger or dictate the pace of the publication, much as a magazine editor would look to orchestrate their content to keep readers engaged. “Henry paced the text very carefully,” Stod- dart answers, “The first half of the book represents the journey into the maze. The red double-page is the centre [the duo credit the book’s editor, Cecilia Stein, with the idea of the red line dissolving into a full-bleed red spread], and the second half of the book is the way back out. The halves of the book mirror each other, so each page is specifically placed: we discussed how and when the book would rotate, and exactly where the illustra- tions would fall.”
re-trace his steps aſter slaying the beast with the sword Ariadne also equipped him with. And so, Ariadne’s single trailing thread that guided Theseus to the heart of the maze became the illustrative brief for Follow This Thread. Enter Quibe, a French illus- trator whose “work immediately struck me as special”, Eliot says. “He has an extraordinary abilit to distil an evocative image and express it with a minimum of detail... [He] iterates his artworks, craſting and refining the perfect line for each image.” (Join one of his 75,000 Instagram followers and you will see his aesthetic has found favour among fans of minimal tatoos.) The draughtsman was largely given “a free hand”, says Eliot. “He followed some of my suggestions, adapted others and added some of his own.” The standalone drawings were then “brilliantly
incorporated into the layout” by Stoddart, the author says, “joining them together with a continuous line and seting the text around them”. And with the text—set in elegant serifs Garamond and Baskerville—begins the real labyrinthine fun. “The book starts in quite a traditional tpeset grid,
representing how ‘normal’ you might feel when you first enter a maze,” Stoddart says: by which he means, the text is in orthodox vertical columns, much as they would be in a regular book. “But soon there are turns and unexpected events which allow the design to evoke the evolving experience of exploring a maze,” he adds,
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Reading between the lines The art director says the content informs its form, too, citing a passage describing Icarus falling which is, correspondingly, tpeset appearing to fall down the page. Stoddart says that while it was “such a pleasure to design” and that he is aware of “no other book like it”, he accepts that the format might be “challenging”, especially as “the coherence of the design intentionally unravels through the book, as the reader gets deeper and deeper”. But, he says, “this is part of the joy of exploring a maze”—presumably a straightforward one would not give its navigator much satisfaction. Gladly the edition’s Ariadne thread runs throughout
its entiret, including the covers and endpapers. The line continues uninterrupted and infinitely throughout the book, and informed the cover design, executed by designer David Pearson. “It’s always great to work with him,” says Stoddart, who gave Pearson his first break in a cover design role, offering him a junior designer role when his remit in the publisher’s text design arm was curtailed aſter just six months. “[David] always brings an exciting and unexpected
approach to tpographic solutions,” Stoddart continues. “In this case, rendering ‘Follow the Thread’ as a series of holes was a lateral leap from two-dimensional mazes and echoed the approach to maze books that one of the book’s protagonists, Greg Bright, used. “It’s a simple yet surreal ‘maze-green’ book cover,”
Stoddart concludes—and it’s also the starting point—or end point, or central point, or any point of the binding thread—of a remarkable feat of creativit.
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