Mar 23, 2017

JOSÉ SARAMAGO - Vintage Classic Backlist

José Saramago’s writing has a surreal, dystopian feel, and the books often have a magic realism element to them, which can be difficult to illustrate in a conventional way. Some early Harvill editions of his books incorporated Saramago’s initials into the cover imagery. So, for these Vintage Classics re-issues, we wanted to see how far we could take the idea of ‘illustrating’ the books using just the author’s initials. This immediately suggested the idea of creating colourful covers using old wooden letterpress characters.

Using only ‘J’ and ‘S’ woodtype blocks, we hand-printed them in-house, and then combined the results to create striking designs, inspired by the content of each book. The first few titles have just been published with the rest of Saramago’s backlist to follow soon.

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