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ANATOMY OF DESIGN
In a typically hilarious Seinfeld episode, Kramer proposes to write a coffee table
book (the term used to describe large-format illustrated books) that is a real
coffee table with folding legs. It may have sounded absurd at the time, yet in
recent years books have been designed more as objects (read with haughty
French accent) than traditional page-turners—and a few are indeed so huge they
can be mistaken for coffee tables. Objectness among certain trade publishers,
which has roots in the more rarified artists’ book movements of the early to
late twentieth century, has two goals: (1) to transcend ordinariness while (2)
testing the ...