About a week ago, an illustration student contacted me with some questions about my laser cut book Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Unfortunately I get mailer daemons ('mailbox unavailable') whenever I reply to her email, so instead I'm going to include the questions with my answers here on this blog. Hopefully she'll find them here and they'll be of some use!
I was just wondering if there was a reasoning for the book being a concertina form?
I think I wanted something that could be as small and compact as a book, and something that could fold out in to a small landscape as well. I thought that the setting of this story is something that should somehow be incorporated in to how the book looks too. The concertina format worked well for that.
What have you found this brought to sequence?
It lets me include the landscape in a way that's more physical than a regular book that's stitched together at the spine, and I really like that dimension to it. It lets you include all kinds of other things. Though having said that, the concertina format can also be quite limiting. Hopefully it makes me a better editor in deciding what to include and what to leave out. You can't include everything in a story, but it does allow you to accentuate other little details.
And finally, does the form effect how the sequence is read?
I sort of hope that it gets read left to right like a regular book, but it doesn't always happen! Some people start looking at the book in the middle pages and work their way backwards in the book. I also designed some of the pages in it so that it could be read like a comic as well, so you'd start by looking at the top left of each page and work your way to the bottom right corner.
