Tactile and seeped in memory, the grey linen of Herder’s 1976 edition of zoology tome Der Farbige Brehm by Alfred Edmund Brehm and Theo Jahn can’t help but transport Lisa Lorenz, the editor and art director of Manchester-based magazine Nous, back to childhood.
At the weekend while my parents were asleep, I would get up early and climb up our wooden bookshelf like a monkey in order to get hold of this book – Der Garbage Brehm by Alfred Edmund Brehm and Theo Jahn.
Its cover is an early childhood memory. I remember it had a book jacket which got torn due to my sister and I putting it back on the shelf, between our folklore books. The jacket showed the picture of an angry-looking tiger, which I had never liked. What I found more interesting about the book was the big, dark debossed letters and the plain grey book linen that were hidden beneath the glossy wrapper. To me this book was almost like a pillow. It had a comfortable thickness, enough to put on the living room carpet as a child, lie down and then rest my head on it.
Der Farbige Brehm felt rough and soft at the same time. The words flaunted on the rather sad cover promised a treasure trove full of colour. And indeed, I can still spend my time quite comfortably flipping through the pages, enjoying the changing tactility of the sheets, some glossy, some rough.
This cover stuck with me and finally became the inspiration for the book cover of my final project at university in Mainz. There is not much to it if you look at the cover from a distance, but the moment you touch it, you want to learn more. What this book taught me is to go back to basics sometimes. Design can be beautiful and calm at the same time. Der Farbige Brehm will probably never look dated. Maybe its horrible cover will look passé, but never the beautiful, grotesque typeface on its cover. The memories of my German home in Neckargerach come back to me whenever I touch stuffy, grey book linen.
nous-magazine.de
Nous
Calling itself a magazine for mind culture and empathic thinking, Manchester-based Nous is a self-published, non-profit publication which covers social issues, especially in relation to mental health. Its first two issues were crowd-funded and number three was partially funded by art prints of Tracy Emin and supported by MMU Arts For Health. So far it has covered the themes of insomnia, disconnection, renaissance and misunderstanding and its fifth issue – themed around panic – will launch next month, and has been riso-printed in flat gold and fluorescent pink.
Alfred Brehm
Brehm, who gave his name the the zoological book Der Fabige Brehm (Brehm’s Life of Animals), was a German zoologist and writer born in 1829. Studying to become an architect, he became obsessed with bird watching and soon jacked in his studies to go on a five-year expedition to Egypt Egypt, the Sudan and the Sinai Peninsula to study and document the country’s floral and fauna. His discoveries were so important that he was inducted into the German Academy of Natural Scientists at the age of just twenty. Many publications, scientific expeditions and lecture tours followed, not to mention a stints as Hamburg zoo’s first director, but sadly Brehm died in 1884 of malaria, which he’d caught some years before on an expedition to Africa.
