The Startled Land was produced in-house for Wind River Press. As a book of poetry, it presented a special challenge. Rochelle takes risks with her work, and everything from very short stacatto stanzas to extended prose poems are included in this collection. The line widths differ drastically throughout, and creating a coherent "look" required special planning, in particular as to the quantity and location of white space on the page.
We wanted readers to see the pages as spreads, not as seperate entities. Poems that flow onto more than one page are continued below the title on the recto page. The title and page number are carried beneath a ruled line at the bottom of the page. If your thumb blocks them as you're reading, so much the better. We don't want the reader to think about how much she has read or how much more there is; we want the focus to be on the content.
The white space above the poems opens the page tremendously. Due to generous leading, your eyes are free to run from line to line—but the bottom-heavy page succeeds in drawing them through the work. Outdents on each first line underscore the title and block in a column of white space that contrasts with rag right justification.
Titles are given special treatment with ten percent grey caps bleeding into the background. The font, Zaphino, is full of flourishes that would threaten to overwhelm a page containing more text. Here, however, the size and nature of the font face are in elegant contrast to the controlled body font.
Rochelle's vision for the book was one of simplicity and directness. We discussed many different options, running through dozens of photographs and perhaps ten different cover proofs in the process. In the end, we settled on the use of a striking stock photo manipulated to create the impression of a watercolor painting. The quaint serenity of a North American farm scene bleeds into storm blackened skies. The sodden earth, heavy with stalks of autumn corn, descends into a pitch background for the book's title. This is truly a startled land.
Fonts: Zaphino, Elegant Garamond
Applications: Adobe Photoshop, Adobe InDesign, Macromedia Fireworks
Formats: PDF for print and screen
edieval bookmakers created precise geometric formulas to map a page's text and empty space in the hope of creating a perfectly balanced page. They knew that the untrained eye knows its proportions as well as any sculptor, and their formulas continue to serve them well. Today, it is the beauty of these priceless medieval manuscripts as much as their content that to makes them equally desirable to academecians, art enthusiasts and book collectors.
