Book Design

Each APOSTROPHE book design, unique to each title, emphasizes typography as the only artful quality of the covers. We 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 challenge to the ‘boundary’ of the physical text as well as to the confines and limitations, symbolically perhaps, to the conventions of book publishing and the gap 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 our mission, objectives, and aesthetic, the 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’ printed 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 more recent work by all of the Apostrophe authors in that particular series.