A Mammal's Notebook — BA Project

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This project is the result of one year of work for my batchelor's degree. As my final course I have chosen the Editorial Design final course because I wanted to confront myself with a finished product, from the concept to the physical creation of the book.

Each student was assigned with a book about music and the brief was to think of a new edition leaning more towards the visual book and less towards a regular ediotrial series edition. I got "A Mammal's Notebook", a book edited by the renowed musicologist Ornella Volta that gathers a lot of writings of the french composer Erik Satie.

This motto can easily sum up the idiosyncratic character of Erik Satie. He spent most of his life experimenting not only with music and art but more broadly with himself while changing his direction every time he achieved something.

His life has been a truly complex and fascinating journey going from being a socialist-anarchist to founding his own personal church, from being a composer, scriptwriter and literary man to being arrested multiple times, from being a lonely crazy alcoholic to being one of the fathers of contemporary music.

But he constantly lived his crazy life through the filter of humour that he often pushed to the limits of nonsense. This is the key that the reader has to keep in mind approaching a book that puts in one place an heterogenety of texts from different times of his life: from music sheets notations to magazine articles, from composition descriptions to personal letters, from satirical proclamations to small notes found in his apartment after his death.

Approching the complex nature of this book I found myself exploring the relationship between the protagonists of the storytelling process. Going through the body of work of the composer I came up with the idea of repourposing the roles, reanacting the relationship that Satie sets with the performer through the pages of his handwritten music sheets.

His music sheets are little pieces of calligraphic art (another of Satie's many passions) on their own not only because of his taste for composition but because he was used to enrich them with ironical and nonsense execution notes that were listed in the first part of the original italian edition.

So I have decided to use the execution notes as a way to set a meta-dialogue between Satie and the reader by assigning one to each different text in the book while highlighting the complex construction of the storytelling made by the editor using a typographic code that instantly shows the nature of the single document.

Finding the right typeface was the key in this project. It needed to be consistent with Satie's style but flexible enough to create a system in wich I could catalog every single text. After researching through Satie's calligraphy produciton and his contemporary printed production I choose the Portrait family from Commercial Type and I begun creating the code that is presented to the reader at the beginning of the book through a reading guide.

The color palette comes from some considerations about Satie's graphic taste and personal story. He was a conflicted man, with a deep spiritual dimension that he often displayed in his costant research for purity, but he was also a dissolute man like many of his bohemien friends. So I wanted to show this inner contrast through the book by using just two colors: white and red. The choice of red also comes from his personal graphic taste, he was used to write a lot using red ink as it's testified by his vast manuscrpit production.

The book cover immediatly introduces the reader to the style used for the execution notes. They're placed on the edge of the page that slightly cuts them. In this way they can be perceived by the reader as notes or simply as decorations because I wanted to create a metaphor for one of Satie's most important inventions: the musique d'amaublement, or furniture music.

The layout grid dynamically chages depending on the type of text. All the published ones follow a narrower and centered grid reminiscent of the late XIX century printed publications. The manuscrpits in italic follow a broader grid intead, imitating a handwritten arrangement of the words.

The book is divided in 3 parts: I - To his interpreters, II - To the others, III - To himself. The editor decided to organize the texts in thematic chapters based on the audience trying to differenciate the public Satie from the private one. There are also a Warning section at the beginning with the reading guide and a Chronology section at the end with a timeline of his life.

The execution notes create a constant decoration emerging from the red tint of the page edges.

I decided to manifacture the book with a coptic binding because of the religious assonance and also because it makes the cover plate "float" on the red block of the book.

This visual book is not easily reproducible but this is a conscious choice. Analazyng the selling numbers and reading the book multiple times I came to the conclusion that this book is aimed to a very narrow portion of the marketplace. Only Satie's fans and experts can truly enjoy this book that does not facilitate the reader in understanding its contents. For this reason I decided to create a sort of collector's edition that will please the connoisseurs.