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Invisible Cities

Design Category
Book design, 1974
Art director/designer
Arnold Skolnick
Collection
(1975) Fifty Books of the Year
Description

This is an imaginary dialog between Venetian traveler Marco Polo and Kublai Khan, melancholy ruler of the Tartars. Polo creates jewel-like images of cities he has visited, but gradually his tales encompass elements of the modern world and the visions become tainted. The emperor is left brooding unhappily over cities which could come, such futuristic nightmares as Brave New World.

Credits
Jacket photograph: Ryszard Horowitz
Production manager: Raymond G. Ferguson
Author: Italo Calvino
Size: 5.25 x 8 inches
Pages: 176
Quantity printed: edition of 5,000
Price: $6.50
Typeface: VIP Garamond #3 Regular and Italic, 11/15, with display in Letraset Buster
Typesetter: Vail-Ballou Press Inc.
Printer/binder: Vail-Ballou
Printing method: sheet-fed offset
Jacket printer: Algen Press Corporation
Papers: Special Book Offset (Glatfelter), 55 lb., White, Jacket: aluminum foil laminated stock
Paper supplies: Perkins & Squier Company
Binding materials: bound in Holliston Kingston Linen Gray (spine) and Multicolor Textured (Process materials) Black (sides) on 72 pt. binder’s board
Binding method: Smyth sewn, round back
Endpapers: Multicolor textured Algarve Gray
Endpaper supplies: Lindenmeyr Paper Corporation
Publisher: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc. (New York, New York)