Blog Assignment #4

For this assignment, I found this book called The Glass Castle: A Memoir. It is an autobiography by a writer named Jeanette Walls. From what I gathered from Amazon's review of the book, it's mostly about the author's unusual upbringing.


The book design is done by a well known book designer Rodrigo Corral. The format is the same as the book I am working on, 8 x 5. The publisher is Scribner in 2005, and the ISBN is 0-7432-4753-1. As for the type faces:



For the front cover as well as the chapter headings, it looks like a script face, similar to the face used in the body of author's info, as seen above. From what I can tell, that type face is probably Mrs Eaves by Emigre. The giveaway is probably the uppercase G, C, and R.


Looking a little closer, it seems that the body of the text is set in Times Roman. The big indicator's are the short descenders on the P and the Q's. I imagine the designer chose this typeface largely because of it's ability to save space. As to why he chose Mrs Eaves for the titles, cover, and author page, probably because it's a very elegant face, reinforcing the fact this book is about a young girl's troubled upbringing.

It's a bit difficult to tell the size of the text without the actual hard copy, but my guess is around 9-10 points. I'm guessing the leading is the same size of the type face, given the nature of Times Roman. The indent appears to be maybe 2 ems, pretty close actually to what I did in my books. The line length looks like it's about 65 characters long, which a perfectly comfortable line length for extended reading.

Many of the design decisions this designer made are similar to mine. Mainly the line length, the text size, and the same leading size. However, he utilizes two different faces for this book. In my books, I chose one type face, and used color to indicate heading or titles.