BOOK DESIGN

Each APOSTROPHE book design, unique to each title, will emphasize typography as the only artful quality of the covers. We want to utilize the cover (front and back) as an extension of the manuscript instead of as the more typical intermediary face for the market (meaning simply: no cover art, no author photos, and no blurbs). This is not a new idea, we realize, but it is an idea we find compelling. We are not antagonistic to the concept of blurbs, photos, cover art—we just envision the book spilling over its covers—a last poem, a repetend, a fragment, a paratext.

Another design element that presents a kind of challenge to the ‘boundary’ of the physical text as well as the boundary and limitations, symbolically perhaps, between reading & writing, author & reader, poetry & criticism, philosophy & pataphysics, is the A-P-O-S-T-R-O-P-H-E Series concept. As part of the mission, objectives, and aesthetic, our tenth book in each series will be an anthology of all new work by the authors of the first nine books in the same series. This set of ten books, each of the same dimension, has an individual letter printed on the binding from the word A-P-O-S-T-R-O-P-H-E. In other words, there is a letter from the word ‘A-P-O-S-T-R-O-P-H-E’ on the lower spine of each book. When stacked together, and in order of publication, the entire series will spell ‘APOSTROPHE.’ After we reach 9 authors, the final book to finish the series—the “E”—will be an anthology of ALL NEW work by all of the Apostrophe authors in that particular series.

With the idea of promoting a community between our writers and our readers, we contribute to this effort via a symbolic—and physical—representation in our book design. Of course, we know we are also building a product image. Although we like to think the work itself is the primary way to make the connection between authors and their readers