This was my graduation project at the Book Design Studio of the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, Poland. I graduated with Dean's distinction.
I used the original text of "Women" by Charles Bukowski.
To increase the readability, I used wide margins and designed dialogue lines with an indent to make them stand out from the main text. The book is illustrated with the original still films from the 50s and 60s black and white Hollywood movies. I took the stills from the archives and, unfortunately, the photography credits were unavailable. I bound a few copies of the book myself.
The book design is based on the idea of certain play with the reader. The stills that show up in the book while we turn the pages cover some parts of the text, which creates confusion. however, as new pages come up, the reader sees the reprinted pages with fully visible text. This play makes the readers focus on pictures and distract them from the text.
Bukowski's novel is a dark humor story about a typical macho that uses his position as a successful writer to have numerous encounters with women. The main character does not seem to hide his tendency to objectify women. To illustrate the book, I took stills from a period in American cinema – mainly the 60s – that is a full of stereotypes about women. The close-ups show the most intimate scenes from movies like "All About Eve" (1950), "Sunset Boulevard" (1950), "A Streetcar Named Desire" (1951), and "Pillow Talk" (1959).
