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