Ahnasariah Larsen - Crime and Punishment

Crime and Punishment

This book is huge - almost 700 pages - so realistically, the only options for actually printing and binding it would be to (1) perfect bind, or (2) separate it into two or three parts. This is partly because, like Alice in Wonderland, the body pages are artwork-heavy, which reduces the number of words per page. (Also, it's 5x8 trim. That's trade paperback size. C&P has the kind of wordcount that calls for a larger trim.)

That being said, I am happy with how the design came together. A lot of designs (that I have seen) for Crime and Punishment lean one (or both) of two ways: sophisticated 'this is classical high literature,' or 'murder thriller.' But the book wasn't about being high literature, nor was it really about the murder. It was about poverty, the ways people come together and break apart under the pressures of money and survival, the tension between intellectual vs religious moral compasses, and finding redemption when you cannot escape the cruelty around you.

So I went for shabby wallpaper in the body (yellow, because the color is a repeating motif). Bloodstained front matter (blood is textually tied to both sin and redemption). Floral dropcaps and a floral motif in the wallpaper (nature is also related to redemption; the city is associated more with sin and intellectualism). And a serif font that felt old and worn.

Title Page I

My favorite of the two title pages.
100% original artwork

Copyrights

100% Original Artwork in all Front Matter pages
Left and Right pages have distinct (rather than mirrored) designs

Title Page II

I like the concept (the gold in the red; a spreading stain), but the execution could be better. I don't think the title reads as well as I'd like. And the artwork isn't quite as dynamic as hoped. Would probably rework this page.

Blank Page Left

Used to pad chapters so that new chapters always start on the right

Section Title Page

Used to separate parts (see: ToC)
The flowers came from the same embroidery folio as the wallpaper design, dated 1800
Not 100% satisfied with the design; would add a colored paper texture to the background (similar to the body pages) for continuity. Would also maybe fiddle with the relative size ratio of text:illustration, because the text is getting lost between the giant flowers.
Went for a clean, sort-of-elegant vibe on these pages because one of the themes in the book is finding redemption and beauty within suffering (rather than by escaping it)

Chapter Start

Chapter Title arranged vertically, along wallpaper, in a low-contrast color to minimize visual competition
Heaviest element on the page is the drop cap, to anchor the eye at the start of the text

Body Page Left

Left and Right Body Pages have distinct designs rather than mirrored; I wanted the spread to feel like a continuous stretch of wall, rather than just the page.
Header (right, book title) and Footer (left, Author) positioned to (1) occupy wallpaper space instead of valuable text-body space; (2) feel a little bit like brackets, for structure; and (3) work with the text body, the wallpaper, and the page numbers to create a compositional line of focus/movement/visual attention

Body Page Right

The floral design for the wallpaper came from an embroidery folio dated 1800.
Deliberately chose a motif that would mimic wallpaper designs at the time the book was published
Giving the wallpaper so much visual space was deliberate. Crime and Punishment has long paragraphs that become large blocks of text in-frame, which can be difficult for modern readers to get through. The wallpaper was designed to break up those blocks and make them more readable.

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