books without words

Message Bookmarked

Bookmark Removed

well, not those exactly.

rather, books with words and - other things. pictures, illustrations, typographical deviations, sigla, icons, visual devices...

list some 'serious' or 'grown-up' books that have these sorts of things, contrary to the norm for their type of book.

― Josh (Josh), Sunday, 12 February 2006 06:06 (twenty years ago)

i came across the good soldier svejk in a bookstore tonight and was delighted to find it contained illustrations by josef lada.

― Josh (Josh), Sunday, 12 February 2006 06:12 (twenty years ago)

i'll leave some of the obvious ones to others unless i'm made to wait and get too impatient!

― Josh (Josh), Sunday, 12 February 2006 06:13 (twenty years ago)

it may be obvious, but The Tunnel. also, vollmann does this a bunch. the typographical devices generally piss me off but the sketches he did back in the thirteen stories/butterfly stories days are really great and i can hardly imagine the books without them.

― Sterling Clover (s_clover), Sunday, 12 February 2006 16:14 (twenty years ago)

i always wonder what the process is with these... like did kurt vonnegut submit the same drawings with his cat's cradle manuscript that ended up in the published book? or did he send rough sketches and do them again all nice-like? did sebald give photocopies of his photos to his editor and paste them in where they were meant to go?

ok i know this is an incredibly mundane question but i always think about it when i read enhanced adult books

― s1ocki (slutsky), Sunday, 12 February 2006 16:36 (twenty years ago)

well, i don't know if the drawings in 'breakfast of champions' were all that enhanced. as in, nice-like.

sterl, what are you saying about the tunnel? i've never actually looked inside a copy.

'enhanced adult books' makes them sound kind of like diapers.

― Josh (Josh), Sunday, 12 February 2006 20:29 (twenty years ago)

Sigla? I think there's only one book allowed to have anything referred to as "sigla".

― Casuistry (Chris P), Sunday, 12 February 2006 20:43 (twenty years ago)

<cough>

― Josh (Josh), Sunday, 12 February 2006 20:47 (twenty years ago)

Novels with typographical deviations: Federman's Double Or Nothing [and a few other pieces by him]; Danielewski's House Of Leaves, and, uh, why am I not thinking of any others? The end of Dhalgren, the marginalia chapter of the Wake, sure. Hm.

― Casuistry (Chris P), Sunday, 12 February 2006 21:38 (twenty years ago)

well, i don't know if the drawings in 'breakfast of champions' were all that enhanced. as in, nice-like.

i know!! i still wonder though!

― s1ocki (slutsky), Sunday, 12 February 2006 22:09 (twenty years ago)

i'll give you tristram shandy for free, chris.

― Josh (Josh), Sunday, 12 February 2006 23:06 (twenty years ago)

I don't think TS has much in the way of typographical deviations, although it does have drawings and inserted graphic element oddness. But is there even a page that's upside-down? There are the "deleted" pages...

― Casuistry (Chris P), Sunday, 12 February 2006 23:40 (twenty years ago)

I think Sebald is the major recent example of this kind of thing. Whether you wish to take his books as fiction, essays or "speculative non-fiction" is a whole other skillet of sardines, however.

― Jerry the Nipper (Jerrynipper), Monday, 13 February 2006 00:28 (twenty years ago)

black pages are good enough for me!

― Josh (Josh), Monday, 13 February 2006 05:23 (twenty years ago)

Also, Alasdair Gray.

― Archel (Archel), Monday, 13 February 2006 10:21 (twenty years ago)

I just thought the tunnel by gass was an obvious pick coz.. i dunno, it was sorta notorious for this sort of thing? and especially as a "why, god, why!?" example of it?

― Sterling Clover (s_clover), Monday, 13 February 2006 13:46 (twenty years ago)

Where is the Humument love?

― Paul Eater (eater), Monday, 13 February 2006 20:40 (twenty years ago)

Oh, and Hypnerotomachia Poliphili!

― Casuistry (Chris P), Monday, 13 February 2006 21:42 (twenty years ago)

Jonathan foer's "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close."

― pepektheassassin (pepektheassassin), Thursday, 16 February 2006 16:00 (twenty years ago)

http://ilx.p3r.net/newanswers.php?board=62

― chap who would dare to be drunk on the internet (chap), Friday, 17 February 2006 03:48 (twenty years ago)

contrary to the norm for their type of book

― Josh (Josh), Friday, 17 February 2006 03:58 (twenty years ago)

barthelme's collage stories

― tom double you, Saturday, 18 February 2006 00:51 (twenty years ago)

The hardback version of Toby Litt's Finding Myself has handwritten-style notes scrawled in the margins from the author's editor.

― Navek Rednam (Navek Rednam), Saturday, 18 February 2006 07:29 (twenty years ago)

not Toby Litt's editor, but the fictional editor of the fictional writer in the book.

― Navek Rednam (Navek Rednam), Saturday, 18 February 2006 07:30 (twenty years ago)

when did it become the norm that books for grown-ups wouldn't have pictures? i thought it was a fairly standard 19th-century deal that they would; maybe you could draw some kind of connection with a step forward in printing technologies somewhere. this might be grasping at straws tho

― tom west (thomp), Saturday, 18 February 2006 14:15 (twenty years ago)

I guess that pictures are everywhere, where a person might not know what something or someone might look like, it was necessary to furnish the reader with an image. Now you just go to Google or look at a newspaper, magazine.

― Navek Rednam (Navek Rednam), Saturday, 18 February 2006 15:34 (twenty years ago)

Most of the pre-19th C. books that I've seen didn't have pictures beyond a frontispiece illustration.

― Casuistry (Chris P), Saturday, 18 February 2006 17:03 (twenty years ago)

obv you don't have a civilized collection of illuminated manuscripts.

― Sterling Clover (s_clover), Saturday, 18 February 2006 17:04 (twenty years ago)

Far too true, almost all the older books I've dealt with have still been those pathetic mass-market post-Gutenberg books.

― Casuistry (Chris P), Saturday, 18 February 2006 17:33 (twenty years ago)

huhh.

i wonder if there's a distribution thing. i was thinking partly of all the reprinted mark twain first eds. i'd seen in the school library, altho come to think the illustrations were more common in the children's stuff, just stuff like the travel books (which i guess = a separate category.) i vaguely can picture kinda catalogue pages - "386 pages with 48 illustrations", sort of thing?

howabout mass-market publication and 'the pulps' &c.: too expensive to print interior pictures, but the printed cover was a forum for illustration: at what point did it become fairly uncommon for it to be one?

(is the fact that, say, 'the da vinci code' doesn't have a picture on the cover, meant to make it "classier" than SF novels and such? the s. lem i've been reading lately has a bunch of pen-and-ink drawings which struck me as odd, being sort of vaguely connected, kinda, to the stories - it's the cyberiad if anyone's following..)

― tom west (thomp), Saturday, 18 February 2006 18:18 (twenty years ago)

You must be logged in to post. Please either login here, or if you are not registered, you may register here.