Beautiful Books: WJD

The impetus for the design of WJDbegan right from our very first conversation with the author, Khashayar Mohammadi. We had published Khashayar’s previous collection of poetry, Me, You, then Snow, and we really liked the new manuscript too, but Khashayar wanted to include his translation of Saeed Marvi’s The OceanDweller, and we weren’t quite sure how to do that best. We didn’t want it to feel tacked on to the end like an afterthought, but we also didn’t want to print it as a completely separate title, and so, after we talked about it as a team, we felt that the ideal approach might be to have a two-sided volume, with Kashayar’s own work reading from one side and his translation of Saeed’s work reading from the other.

I had never typeset a book like that, but I’ve always loved double sided books, ever since I first discovered them as a child, and it seemed like the perfect form to reflect the relationship between the two halves of Khashayar’s project in a way that honoured them both and that would also create a beautiful, unique physical object. It took me some time in YouTube University to get it done, I’ll admit, but I think the final product was well worth it.

With the interior design, I wanted to contrast detailed title pages with a very clean and spare layout for the actual poetry. On the title pages, I used a border design that referenced the Persian influences on the volume, but let the border be cut open by the page edge, to signal how the authors were pushing beyond the traditions in which they were working. The poem titles and page numbers have a slight ornament, but the poetry itself is very simply set, with margins as large as Khashayar’s line lengths permit, large leading spaces to open up the page, and no headers of any kind, which makes for a very clean and readable experience.

What really makes the project work, however, is the beautiful artwork by Mehraz Karami. Obviously we wanted cover art that would reflect the contents of each half of the book, but we wanted both covers to feel unified as well, and Mehraz’s work suits the task perfectly. Though the two cover images are very different in subject and colour palette, both are similarly structured around reflected images, which makes them reflect each other in a sense, and also makes them stand as figures for the reflected structure of the two halves of the book itself. Printed offset on the matte felt cover stock we use, they help create a book that both looks and feels gorgeous.

People are constantly picking it up and flipping it around at shows and festivals, and then they open it and find the heavy black endpapers and feel the felt paper stock and see the layout, and they’re sold. One woman who bought a copy at the ArtsEverywhere Festival in Guelph told me, “I don’t even read poetry. It’s just so pretty, I have to have it,” and this more or less sums up the response that people have to WJD. They love it even before they’ve read a word, and once they’ve read it, they love it even more.

* * *

Many thanks to Gordon Hill Press for providing us a behind the scenes look into the making of WJD.