Gimmicks

Walking late at night by the window of a bookstore in Amsterdam, this display for the book Marionet caught our eye, so we shot this picture through the window.

The book has no printed spine. There has been a black-and-white imprint with the author and title, and then the book was laminated over.

There’s an article about the manufacture at this link, along with some copyrighted pictures I couldn’t include here.  It translates as:

I have a weakness for eye-catching book covers. Nice to see that the publisher has kept the same binding method as Ragdoll. But this time, blue wire has been chosen. Both on the outside and inside you see the blue binding. And what I personally find very nice is that the book remains open effortlessly without clear reading folds in the back. In this way the book will look new for longer.

Of course that got me curious so I checked out Ragdoll.

It was done with red stitching, whereas the new one was done with blue. (A third book in the series, Hangman is currently hardcover-only.) The stitching is visible from the inside with each page turn because of the lay-flat binding.

Nice to see people being creative.