Lovely review of The Pale King over at The Hipster Bookclub, The Pale King and I. This one is by Marie Mundaca, who I had the amazing opportunity to catch up with when I was in NYC for the Footnotes conference a year or so ago (Hi, Marie!).
If you don't want to know anything about The Pale King there are quite a few little spoilers in this review. But make sure you come back and read it once you're done. There's some neat stuff about the design of the text... did I mention Marie designed The Pale King? Super cool:
The Pale King is the most recent David Foster Wallace book I’ve designed. It may be the last, but who knows what will pop up? (3)
When I design books, I usually read most or all of the book before I start designing—not a close read, but I want to know the plot and the characters so I can think about what fonts would best represent them. Do I want a dense, gray page, or a light, airy page? Are the characters more masculine or more feminine? If there are long sections of letters, how will the reader react to the italic font of this face? And can I use Dalliance? I love that font.I knew pretty much what I wanted to do with TPK(4), but I also was anxious to read it in manuscript form. We Wallace fans had been hearing about “this longer thing” he was working on, “a brick”—those were two ways he referred to it. And we’d all followed the story of his widow, Karen Green, along with his agent Bonnie Nadell and editor Michael Pietsch, gathering up years of disks and manuscript pages, piecing everything together. I even had a dream about it once, running into Pietsch getting off a bus with a duffel bag full of pages.
When I design books, I usually read most or all of the book before I start designing—not a close read, but I want to know the plot and the characters so I can think about what fonts would best represent them. Do I want a dense, gray page, or a light, airy page? Are the characters more masculine or more feminine? If there are long sections of letters, how will the reader react to the italic font of this face? And can I use Dalliance? I love that font.I knew pretty much what I wanted to do with TPK(4), but I also was anxious to read it in manuscript form. We Wallace fans had been hearing about “this longer thing” he was working on, “a brick”—those were two ways he referred to it. And we’d all followed the story of his widow, Karen Green, along with his agent Bonnie Nadell and editor Michael Pietsch, gathering up years of disks and manuscript pages, piecing everything together. I even had a dream about it once, running into Pietsch getting off a bus with a duffel bag full of pages.
As it turned out, it was too distracting and sad for me to read while I was designing it. Wallace’s tiny, pointy notes were all over the manuscript copy, mostly name changes and corrections and small additions...
Click through to the The Pale King info page with links to all reviews so far.
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