Book as text, or book as object? To the great debate of form vs content let me just add the following pair of recent data points. In his review of the first two volumes in the Pléiade edition of Camus’s Ouevres Completes Robin Buss digresses from his thoughts about the content — the writing of Camus, in other words — to dwell upon the form:

Bound in their traditional livery with gold tooling, preserved in a clear plastic jacket, each [Pléiade] volume [is] individually housed in [a] white slipcase. […] Sliding the first volume of Camus out of its slipcase on a train to Cambridge the other week felt inappropriate, especially in second class, like reading a leather-bound folio in McDonald’s. One should be sitting in a private library, able to open each volume on one’s knee or on a table, and turn the pages slowly, with respect. […] The Pléiade’s physical presence (not to mention its price) demands reverence both for itself and for its author. You would not want to underline anything, jot down page numbers on the flyleaf or put a sceptical query or even an amendment in the margin (for example, beside the incorrect page number given in a reference to Olivier Todd’s biography of Camus in a footnote to Volume One, page 1,273).

while Almeda Glenn Miller takes a more tactile position in her review of Marilyn Bowering’s What It Takes To Be Human (from this weekend’s Globe):

When Marilyn Bowering’s new novel, What it Takes to Be Human, came across my desk, I caressed its cover. The design, the weight of the book, the way it felt when I opened it, confirmed for me immediately that my relationship to this novel would be complex. I knew I would have to rearrange myself to accommodate its ideas.

And when a reader just can’t keep their hands off a book, they’re already more than half way to buying it; what further evidence do you need of the crucial role played by the book designer? Speaking of which: check out the clever design of this website, which focuses on the work of one of the greats: Chip Kidd. Other favorites? Barbara Hodgson; Peter Cocking; and Louise Fili come immediately to mind.