Last night
Amy described this blog as the “wild west” so I thought it’d be kind of funny to
start the blog off with that in mind and go back to the first American books,
the dime novel, and discuss book design for tales of the Wild West. According to The Library of Congress,
dime novels “were patriotic, often nationalistic tales of
encounters between Indians and backwoods settlers” and were most popular from the late 1800s to as late as the
1940s.
What strikes
me most (from a design perspective) is the typography… it is so awesomely bad (or maybe horribly awesome?).
There are about 80 different fonts, competing with each other for space and
attention. Looking at the covers I attached, which span from 1860 to 1922, though,
really shows me how design actually improved over those years. The color and
illustrations became brighter, so printing clearly improved as well. The
typography choices were slimmed down; white space is used more appropriately.
I’m still not saying these are well designed, but seeing the advances made by
1922 does show me the early improvements that eventually led us toward better
design.
This has
sparked some curious follow up questions for me: How has ‘western’ book design
changed for modern times & how do these early dime novels still inspire
today’s novels? How do similar fonts show up in new & modern ways? To what degree did these designs inspire the next generation of books and book design in the 1930s through the 1960s?
