Digital might be the literary future, with e-books on an inexorable rise, but a new trend for old-fashioned print craftsmanship - albeit a small one - must be giving printing press inventor Johannes Gutenberg some solace in his grave. German design agency Blotto Design's project 'All The World's a Page' is a case in point.
Ian Warner, a partner at the studio, has embarked on printing some of the icons of world literature on single sheets of paper. It started out as a graphic experiment - 'how long can James Joyce's Ulysses actually be?' he asked himself - and ended up a typographer's wet dream. Presently eight books have been made into posters - among them Darwin's The Origin of Species, Shakespeare's Macbeth, and Karl Marx' Das Kapital.
From a distance they appear like homogenous grey walls of text but up-close they are typographical works of art. Examine them carefully and you will spot patterns and structures, with the words and paragraphs having a visual character in keeping with the stories. All the books come printed on high-quality paper and can be ordered from all-the-worlds-a-page.com
Macbeth by William Shakespeare
Moby Dick by Herman Melville
The King James Bible
The Iliad by Homer
Faust by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The Origin of the Species by Charles Darwin.
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