Bartleby the Scrivener, a Visual Book
Valeria Piccioni Bachelor's Thesis
Bachelor Degree in Communication Design, Polytechnic University of Milan
Supervisor: Prof. Mario Piazza
My degree project consisted in the design of a visual book, whose aim is to increase what the reader experiences while reading it. This year’s theme was the absurd. My thesis is based on the book “Bartleby the Scrivener”, by Herman Melville, which tells the story of a clerk, hired by a Wall Street lawyer, who, after an initial bout of hard work, refuses to make copy and any other task required, with the words "I would prefer not to."
“Bartleby the Scrivener” is one of the most difficult to interpret. For decades, critics have argued over numerous interpretations of the story and wrote about this unusual refusal.
So I made a book, whose pages are die-cut: indeed, Bartleby’s words are completely removed.
This way the book can physically communicate Bartleby’s silence and the emptiness that he leaves; on the other hand, the reader can feel the incomprehensibility of his refusal: the reader, as the lowyer, cannot understand it or find a meaning and is blown away.
But I decided to give the reader the possibility to rebuild the book, trying to find the “lost” words. In order to reconstruct the text in its entirety, the reader will use special card that he can find at the end of the book: putting the right card behind the cut page, you will complete the text. There are different cards: to understand what is the correct form for each page , the reader will be helped by symmetrical inkblots, similar to the ones in Rorschach’s test. Half of the inkblot is in the card, the other half si on the back of the cut page
