Reject Convenience Forum

I've read many books throughout the course of my (nearly quarter-length) life, and while most of them are simply printed in an ordinary, standard manner, there have been a few I've picked up that used something I'd never really seen in a book before in terms of layout and structure. I could give the example of my particular copy of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, where the left page is in English and the right page is in Italian, but I feel the books that take the cake for most interesting layout are the Charlie and Lola series.

Yes, I know, these are children's books, which means they aren't as pressured to conform to a certain standard, but even among children's books they stand out. Looping sentences (and by that I mean literal looping sentences), words turned into staircase steps, font and size changes, the list goes on. And all of this really helps the reader, however young, to hear what tone the speech is being talked in and how the characters are saying what they're saying... I just find it really cool, props to Lauren Child.

So, anyways, any particular quirks you found in a book that stood out to you? A formatting style, a pop-up... anything.

Well, everyone is going to say it, but I guess I get to be the first! I really love house of leaves which is famous for being an unusually formatted book! But it's not just the formatting the story and themes are excellent and the formatting is used to enhance them.



(sidenote... does anyone know how to set image size so I'm not posting giant images?)

Not sure it's exactly what you mean, but for me it has to be The Book With No Pictures by B.J. Novak:

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/book ... -bj-novak/

It is, as advertised, a children's book that has no pictures. The humor is entirely in the delivery. It's my absolute favorite icebreaker - it even works on teens. (I'm a librarian.)

I bought a hardback copy of Julia and the Shark a few years ago, purely because the illustrations looked gorgeous and I also have an original character with the same name.
What I did not expect was that some of the illustrations would be present on translucent pages! For example, early in the book, there's a map of the route that Julia's family take, from Cornwall to Shetland. When you flip the translucent page over and align it with the map, you can see a line of their route, all the way to the lighthouse they're staying in for the summer with birds in yellow decorated all around it.

There are a few more pages like that, buuut that would be spoilers for the book
Apologies for the massive images below, I can't be bothered to shrink them right now :/

In my early childhood, I recall owning a series of four books: introducing the earth’s interior, the regions of the ocean, the human body and the solar system. In the books’ centres, there were overlapping cutaways which would be lifted off with each page. This included the book’s cover, which might have been covered in protective, clear plastic. Hence, the geology book would depict all the earth’s layers, its first page would concern the crust and show the same as the cover, but the next page would discuss the upper mantle and the crust imagery would have been lifted away and so on. I know that the volumes on the earth, sea and space were also compiled without this fun feature into an ordinary, much smaller book, but I had the giant, fun volumes first.