Canadian poet, linguist and typographer Robert Bringhurst vents some spleen in a mini-jeremiad on the current state of book design:

In the twentieth century, books were turned, to a large extent, into typographic tenements: page after dreary page of badly spaced letters in sickly grey ink lying weakly on the surface of bleached white or bilious yellow paper frozen in a bed of brittle glue and wrapped in a gaudy color cover which cost more to design and manufacture than all the dreary pages it was able to conceal.

— from “The Voice In The Mirror,” one of thirteen talks collected in The Tree of Meaning

As might be expected, Bringhurst’s book bucks that trend: a model of typographical modesty bound in textured wraps with french flaps, the front cover decorated with a stylized tree in barely-discernible silhouette; another tasty offering from Nova Scotia’s own Gaspereau Press.