The Best German Book Design 2022

“He swapped his millions for a lottery ticket, put the ticket on a shelf and forgot his bonus number.” ...

“He swapped his millions for a lottery ticket, put the ticket on a shelf and forgot his bonus number.”

Who says time only goes in one direction? In this visual experiment, things are not so much turned on their head as allowed to develop in reverse order.

This thinking in reverse inspires innumerable rhyming couplets, via which the author and illustrator paints an entire backwards world with its own backwards language (the paper’s masthead, for instance, reads “SWEN”). The verses are printed in a bold sans serif font with lively variations in line weight. This links nicely to the line drawings in the two-column picture sequences. Layering, nesting and a pronounced horror vacui are the key compository principles here. Every space has thus been divided up into secondary spaces and filled with fine strokes, wavy lines, diamond patterns, prismatic hatching and positive or negative dots. Spiky edges in particular are a recurring theme. The splash pages, meanwhile, are even more mindboggling. These bled-off, full-page panels show the bold-hued palette to optimum effect, boasting colour in every inch, though the specific tonality varies from one episode to the next.

What to make of all of this? Perhaps in an age where much is already back to front and fake narratives abound, we can seek solace in a place where strange beginnings give way to happy endings.

“What if I am not the only I / I have?” ...

“What if I am not the only I / I have?”

This book brings together poetry by writers from around the world.

A particular feature of the unpretentious design is the generous expanses of blank space on its ivory-white, open-pore pages. That effect is made even more striking by having every text element – writer, title, poem, page number – set in one uniform type size. The page design eschews traditional conventions of the craft, not least the use of black ink for text. Instead, a violet hue was chosen that liberates the lines from the associations of factuality that come with black and white, while also transforming each double-page spread into an imagined tableau. The pages are held together via a Swiss binding, which echoes the minimalist typography’s unburdened and easy-going feel.

The pared-down aesthetic is based on the online design, a website having been developed in parallel with the print publication. Be it in analogue or digital form, this bimedia magazine was established to allow speech impaired poets to share their creative output. Work is constantly added to the archive, with a selection printed in a new issue each year. The verses may first see the light of day online, but the appeal of a “real” book is still hard to beat.

“Once truth had become oracular rather than factual, evidence was irrelevant.” ...

“Once truth had become oracular rather than factual, evidence was irrelevant.”

Over the course of 20 chapters, the author of this book, originally published under the English title On Tyranny, describes the mechanisms that allow states to become totalitarian systems, drawing lessons from them to offer a blueprint for individual resistance.

So wholeheartedly has the illustrator embraced this call to arms that her work resembles a kind of visual retelling of the text. Collages of pictures from old flea market albums, symbolistic drawings rendered in coloured pencil, cartoonish short stories – time and again, her imagery offers a side-ways look, presenting a personal take on the subject matter and making every page unique.

The contents page, meanwhile, offers a coded message: between the rows and columns of chapter headings, a flower withers in stages until all that remains is a structure of disintegrating fine veins. It’s a theme echoed later on by a fold-your-own guide in which the paper head of a paramilitary soldier is transformed into a skull. Fittingly, that bloom is a blue flower, a motif the Romantics used to represent longing and sensibility, though here it should be read more as a warning than a symbol of hope.