A reminder about the collaboration required to produce a beautiful book:

Within the best book competition, we need an award for good editing. And it would be interesting to test the thesis that good design is only possible with books of substance, their material intelligently sorted out. The only fetishistic books would then be books that are actually about fetishism.

I don’t need a test to prove this; a book design can be attractive regardless of the substance of the text, but it can’t be beautiful. A beautiful design occurs at the intersection of great design and great writing.

Typographic disorder inevitably follows from disorder in construction; and, equally, typography by itself (if it could be ‘by itself’) cannot be effective with bad copy.