Meet A Book On One Page

As part of our #OfficeStory giveaway, we’ve teamed up with the well-read folks of A Book On One Page.

They say a picture paints a thousands words. Well, the posters from #ABookOnOnePage are a lot wordier than that.

Their idea is simple but clever. Take literary classics and turn them into striking posters that contain every word from the book in question, all artfully arranged and carefully printed. The concept came from designer (and the firm’s founder) Brian Power.

“One day I was designing a poster for George Orwell’s ‘1984’ just for fun. The poster’s central design was the numbers in a huge bold type, in this case ‘Gotham’, the font used by Obama in his campaign posters. The idea of having the numbers as negative space surrounded by words came to me, and I gave it a go. From that, I refined the method with the ‘Great Gatsby‘ design, which remains our best-selling piece.”

Brian is actually an engineer, so could that be where his eye for detail and precision springs from? At first glance the posters seem simple, but that belies the enormous amount of work and attention that goes into creating them. The Jungle Book print alone took more than 50 hours to design.  

The irony is that all the viewer sees is a perfectly composed print and not the thousands of tiny adjustments to the spaces between lines and words that came beforehand. As Brian says:

“Sometimes I wonder if people truly notice the tiny details, but it is important to me as a designer to make every piece as perfect as possible.”

(This is even more impressive when you consider that some of the prints are a massive 100cm x 70cm / 39″ x 27″.  At that size, any imperfection would be easy to spot.)

But once a poster is designed, who makes sure it reaches the public? That’s Daniel Black, in charge of sales and the other half of this two-man team.

Under Daniel, A Book On One Page ships more than 50 designs to 26 countries. With that many different climates to contend with, making sure you’ve got a quality product is important. That’s why the posters are made of silk paper and use lightfast ink, which doesn’t deteriorate in sunlight.

Closer to home, you can find them at the Spitalfields market every week, from Friday – Sunday, where you can pick up extra pieces, and smaller prints that only feature extracts from a book. (As an example, you can buy four Alice prints that make up the whole book.)

And if you’re heading down to London for the Ideal Home Show At Christmas at Earls Court from 19 – 23 November, you can find A Book On One Page there too. Or, if you want to browse their shop from the comfort of your sofa, head over to their website.

If you fancy a chance of winning some of their prints, enter our #OfficeStory competition. What better inspiration could you have than a classic book?

Many thanks to Brian and Dan for answering all our questions and giving us a chance to share their lovely work.