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Design

The Beauty of the Printed Book

Blaise Cendrars’s 1919 book ‘‘La fin  du monde, filmée par l’ange,’’ designed and illustrated by  Fernand Léger.Credit...Special Collections of the University of Amsterdam

LONDON — Some things seem to designed to do their jobs perfectly, and the old-fashioned book is one. What else could be quite as efficient at packaging so many thousands of words in a form, which is sufficiently sturdy to protect them, yet so small and light that it can be carried around to be read whenever its owner wishes? The pages, type, binding and jacket of a traditional printed book do all of the above, as well as giving its designer just enough scope to make the result look beautiful, witty or intriguing.

Anyone who wishes to be reminded of quite how beguiling old-fashioned books can be should visit “The Printed Book: A Visual History,” an exhibition running through May 13 at the Special Collections department of the University of Amsterdam. Drawn from the university’s book collection, which is among the world’s finest, the exhibition traces the evolution of book design through some of the most compellingly designed books of the last 500 years.

From the oldest exhibit, which was published in Latin in 1471 by the French printer Nicolas Jenson, to the newest, “James Jennifer Georgina,” Irma Boom’s poignant compilation of the postcards sent by a mother to her daughter every day for a decade, “The Printed Book” presents a resounding defense of its subject. And it does so at a delicate time, when the traditional book is under assault from e-books, by which I mean both the electronic books that are downloaded on to dedicated readers like the Amazon Kindle, and the more sophisticated interactive books read on computers.

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Jennifer Butler’s 2010 book,  ‘‘James, Jennifer, Georgina are the Butlers,’’  designed by Irma Boom.Credit...Special Collections of the University of Amsterdam

Many of the publishers of e-books also produce printed books, and have adopted the new formats, just as record labels once diversified from vinyl to cassette tapes, then compact discs and, now, digital files. But some traditional publishers are shunning e-books on principle. The owners of Steidl, the art publishing house, recently issued a statement explaining why. “Doubtless there are some wonderful e-books out there but it is something of a misnomer to call them Books,” it declared. “Our philosophy is straightforward and unique — we will remain 100% analogue.”

Even the bibliophiles at Steidl expect e-books to continue to grow, largely at the expense of printed books. For starters, they are incredibly convenient. Just think of the hundreds of e-books you can pack on to a single digital device. They are environmentally responsible: saving trees from being felled to produce paper, and fossil fuel from being burned to transport boxes of books. Interactive books can also dazzle their readers with sound, film clips, animations and data visualizations as well as words and images. And if their readers are puzzled by a word or factual reference, they can check it on the Internet within seconds.

Yet so far, the design of e-books has been disappointing. Most of them look suspiciously as though their publishers have simply shunted their contents from print on to the screen. But some of the newer titles are more promising, largely because their designers have explored the technical and aesthetic possibilities of the new media.

An example is a new series of interactive university textbooks from Nature Publishing, the first of which, “Principles of Biology” was introduced last month. As well as explaining its subject in films and visualizations, it includes short quizzes to test students on what they have learned. Another is “The Numberlys,” an interactive children’s book developed by Moonbot Studios in Shreveport, Louisiana, whose co-founder, William Joyce, once worked at the animation studio, Pixar. Modeled as much on movies and video games as on traditional books, “The Numberlys” is filled with interactive games and was visually inspired by Fritz Lang’s 1927 silent movie “Metropolis.” The images even shimmer gently, like the film.

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The Numberlys interactive book iPad app.Credit...Moonbot Studios

Yet there is still something very special about an adroitly designed printed book, perhaps because it is so simple and devoid of technological trickery. The Amsterdam exhibition proves the point by showing off some wonderful books by Christoffel Plantin, John Baskerville and other historic printers, and ones by 20th-century designers and artists such as El Lissitzky, Jan Tschichold, Herbert Bayer and Fernand Léger.

The exhibition comes at a propitious time, when smart publishers are responding to the onslaught from e-books by adopting a more adventurous approach to design. Some of my favorite recent examples of book design come from mainstream publishers, including Coralie Bickford-Smith’s witty illustrated covers for Penguin’s “Great Food” series of paperbacks, and Graphic Thought Facility’s beautifully subtle art direction of another food book, Bloomsbury’s “Heston Blumenthal at Home.”

Not that independent publishers, who have traditionally been bolder on the design front, are slacking. Walther König recently released an ingenious pair of “split” books, designed by M/M (Paris) so that one stands up when slotted inside the other, for the Serpentine Gallery in London. And Visual Editions, a young company set up to develop a new genre of visual books, is to publish its fourth title in May: “Kapow!”, a book on the Arab Spring written by Adam Thirlwell and designed by Studio Frith.

Even so, the printed book faces an uncertain future. The most probable scenario is that it will become a niche product with high design values, and is likelier to be an artist’s monograph or a special edition of a literary novel, rather than a textbook or pulp fiction. The critical question is how much market share it will be forced to cede to e-books, and whether the surviving publishers will be able to sustain the fragile cottage industry, which supplies the specialist materials and finishing services required to produce high-quality printed books.

Not that technological threats are new to the book trade. As well as illustrating the beauty of its subject, “The Printed Book” traces its history, starting with Nicolas Jenson, who produced the earliest book in the show. In the late 1450s, he was sent to Mainz, Germany, by the French king, Charles VII, to compile a report on Johannes Gutenberg’s revolutionary printing press in a spot of industrial espionage.

A correction was made on 
Feb. 28, 2012

A previous version of this article rendered the name of the M/M (Paris) design studio incorrectly.

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A version of this article appears in print on   in The International Herald Tribune. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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