Read Like a Book Designer with Mary Austin Speaker

Welcome to Read Like a Reader! Have you ever made a book? Stitched some binding? Drawn an illustration for a favorite scene?

This week we hear from poet Mary Austin Speaker, who is the Art Director at Milkweed Editions in Minneapolis, Minnesota. “Books are objects we live with,” she says.

In this conversation, Mary and I spoke about book design, and the publishing apparatus; how page-size and bookshelves inform that design; Braiding Sweetgrass, Milkweed’s current bestseller; “resonant images,” and her process; “hurts;” typesetting; reading on phones and what thumbnail images demand; her preference for paperbacks in bed; books as objects and gifts; the case for chapbooks; the aid of margins; audio reading; serif and sans serif weights; how she learned to make books; the book as a technology, but one that does not surveil; and why design should support meaning, “gray out,” and respond to the human body.

Mary recommends Fournier and Jenson typefaces; Just Us: An American Conversation, by Claudia Rankine; Alvin Lusitg’s designs for New Directions, and making commonplace books.

Thanks as ever to Jacob Keough-Mishler for his original music, editing, and sound design.