Book jackets, paperbacks, cloth cases, schoolbooks, exercise books, diaries and comics, 1860 to now — laid
out flat the way a printer receives them, with the spine as wide as the pages make it, the price in the money of
the year and the ISBN and bar code only when they existed. Every title, author, publisher and series is invented.
Part of Chronotype · Free to use.
Licence for paid productions ·
the research behind it
The object — what the scene needs
Year & country
Genre
The house style — dated
The words on it — all invented
Titles, authors, publishers, series and the papers that reviewed them are
made up, in the language of the country. Type over any of them; the Checks panel flags a real house by name,
and the ↺ beside a field takes it back to the invented one.
Colours — the inks the year had
The picture
Size, pages & spine
Years on it — drawn at size
A sunned spine, fox spots, rubbed corners, the white creases a paperback
gets from being read. All vector, all at true size — they show in a print and not on a thumbnail, which is the
right way round.
What the year asks for — and why
For the printer
The flat view is the sheet a printer lays down: trim in rose, folds and
scores in blue, the width of every panel in the margin. Print it at 100% / actual size. For a jacket,
wrap it round a real hardback of the same trim; for a paperback, glue it to the book block at the scores.
Checks — what an audience could catch
Variants — the same book, several ways
The same piece, several ways, in one pass. Everything you are not
varying is held still, so the “same” design really is the same design.
Print at 100% / actual size, margins none. Every title, author,
publisher, series and review is invented — see the Checks panel for what dates a cover.