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Design Category
Book design, 1996
Design firm
Drenttel Doyle Partners (New York, New York)
Collection
(1997) 50 Books/50 Covers of 1996
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The Book of Lamentations documents a 1930s Mayan uprising in Mexico. It chronicles, at the same time, a boy’s life from his unlucky birth during an eclipse to his death by crucifixion. The lamentations are songs for the dead. By hand painting the title typography on a cloth and photographing it, we have taken the simple typographic cover and turned it into a shroud, evocative of the lyrical and mystical nature of the book. The typography is twice distorted—once because it’s painted by hand, and second, because the cloth hangs in space, reminiscent of sculpted or painted folds of cloth in art throughout the ages.