Márai Sándor Füves Könyv

Fraktur book design Bookbinding handmade lettering suminagashi

Coptic stitch binding.
170 g offset, 90 g tracing paper for the inside pages.
3 mm chipboard and Gmund 925 Black Silver 290 g paper for the cover.

My diploma work is a book of Sándor Márai, the Füves könyv. This book is about life and the people living it.

For this reason, I chose suminagashi and calligraphy as my visual approach for this project. Calligraphy is closely related to gesture painting which relies on our emotions. The illustrations carry sensuality defined

by the feelings which I was experiencing while working with the text and reliving all the emotions that the author captured in his work. Reading the book, and in some ways living through it, can lead to a more meaningful relationship between the reader and the book.

While I was reading the book multiple times, I kept thinking that the words are so powerful that they illustrate

the meaning already and why not use them to deliver the feelings when the book is about life and its sensations?

I decided on Fraktur for the calligraphic style I wanted to experiment with. Later I would use only parts of the letters or just lines to find a way of communication between the sentences and the letters.

I combined the calligraphic letters and the suminagashi technique to create a sense of coursing of the ink to compare it

to the flow of life.

The book I own, published in 1999, doesn't have a table of contents.
And when I was looking for a specific writing/essay, I couldn't find it, so I decided to categorise the 202 pieces by topics.

The topics are:

1. Humans, Life, Death, and War

2. God and Work

3. Nature

4. Traveling

5. Your Country

6. Reading, and Writing

7. The Writer, Creation, and Masterpieces

In the case of the layout, I also envisioned a kind of dynamism and alternation that aligns with the mood of the texts.

This dynamism can be observed through several defined layouts. The margins of the pages are 12, 17, 35, and 10 millimeters. The positioning of the headings can be both horizontal and vertical. The distance between the headings and the body text is always 19 millimeters. The text box moves within an area that is 130 millimeters wide and 221 millimeters high. The two chosen primary typefaces that I used are Piazzola Regular and Italic. For the secondary typeface, I selected the Boogy Brut typefaces, which exhibit distinctive calligraphic features. Boogy Brut is a contemporary typeface created through a collaboration among artists, combining calligraphy and lettering.

I used tracing paper for many pages to display the illustrations that were originally created on a large surface, allowing them to be viewed when unfolded. Additionally, I made the book more colorful by using a crimson color for the background.

For the slide case, I vectorized one of the illustrations and used a laser cutter machine. I choose this illustration because I wanted the design on the cover to be seen through it.

I wanted to complement my thesis work by turning it into a series of books, so I created two additional philosophical books.

For the design of both book covers, I used Japanese sumi ink. In the case of the cover for "Tao Te King," the illustration refers to the wheel of life and I used a cylinder for it. In the case of "Meditations", I visualized human thoughts and reflections.