ghostofamerica book design

Selected Spreads

Spread showing a vintage transistor-amplifier circuit schematic rendered in thin white linework on a near-black ground, spanning the verso and bleeding onto the recto
I love collage. Sometimes a collage can be incredibly simple. The cover is a digital collage constructed of original photographs, pen and ink drawing, and found sculpture. The image on the first page of the chapter is a reduction, context has been stripped from the schematic, allowing a reader to insert their own meaning.
Title spread with the words 'Library', 'o', 'f', and 'branches' broken apart and stacked in a thin, wide-tracked sans-serif on a white field, beside a solid dark left-hand page
This is a book of poetry, and my goal is to use the balance of white-space and type to build semantic meaning into the page. In the case of this poem, the words on the page are a frame, a bit literal perhaps, but I don't think a design needs to be obscure to be effective.
Pages 20 and 21, each holding two short stanzas set in a thin, evenly spaced typewriter-style face, surrounded by wide margins of white space
Enjambment and stanza breaks play with the way the words enter the reader's mind, page breaks force contemplation of phrases, creating delayed resolution across the gaps.
Pages 22 and 23, continuing the same spare typewriter setting, with one line of text lifted into italics
I like Baskerville for many projects. It's an elegant and nearly invisible serif typeface.
Pages 24 and 25, holding the same spare grid of short-measure stanzas and generous white margins
Pages 26 and 27, the closing spread of the excerpt, set in the same restrained typewriter face and open field of white as the rest of the section
There is one more page to the poem. To read it, just download the PDF sample. The button is above the cover image, beneath the title. I think it's interesting how the justification of the lines breaks the letters apart. A major theme in the book is "interval", so this is a serendipitous artifact.