Book design in Melbourne

Book design is a somewhat unusual form of design practice. It might appear today to be just another kind of graphic design practice, one specialisation amongst many, alongside branding, strategy, illustration, wayfinding and so on, but its history tells a different story.

The evolution of books goes something like this: carved tablets, then writing on scrolls, then printing, which begins, in the Western tradition, in the fifteenth century CE in Germany with Johannes Gutenberg. The form of the book as we know it today – a stack of pages bound along one edge, a form that is formally known as the ‘codex’ – only superseded the scroll in the first century CE. Paper existed for many centuries before Gutenberg’s innovation, but it only became the substrate of choice from the nineteenth century onward. Until then, writing and printing was done on parchment or vellum, made from animal skins.

What is important about all of this is that the basic appearance of books hasn’t changed much since the codex form first rose to prominence. Perhaps the most famous book in the Western canon, Gutenberg’s Bible, was modelled on earlier handwritten books that were considered to be the most beautiful of their time. Gutenberg reproduced certain formal elements of earlier books that we, in turn, continue to reproduce today. As the Czech-born American type designer Zuzana Licko once said, ‘we read best what we read most’.

But what does this have to do with book design in Melbourne in 2023? Perhaps unlike other kinds of graphic design, there is a lived tradition of practice that is felt strongly amongst book designers, yet the tenor of this dance with history has changed in Melbourne in the past ten years: book design practice here now is characterised by a renewed sobriety, a quiet concern for an iterative exploration of the importance of nuances across series of projects. 

Many other book designers from Melbourne might have been featured here, but it is important, too, to see multiple titles from many of the designers on show, so that comparisons might be drawn within and not only across practices. And it is important to see a range of perspectives spanning established and emerging practitioners, namely: Zenobia Ahmed, Stuart Geddes, Kim Mumm Hansen, Tal Levin, Hope Lumsden-Barry, Paul Mylecharane and Žiga Testen. The often-collaborative nature of book design in Melbourne is such that you will see different pairings of some of the above names among the volumes on display, as well as contributions to certain titles by other collaborators including Trent Walter and ARM Architecture.

The books featured here include cookbooks and works of poetry, but there is a prevailing majority of illustrated books for and about art, reflecting the fact that this sector remains the most fertile for innovative explorations of the form of the book from cover to cover.