Wednesday, 9:20am
24 September 2008

Revelations in style

New Critique by Rick Poynor – now published in Eye 69

In the early days of Eye, we ran an article about the New Horizons series of illustrated introductions to the arts, culture and science published by Thames & Hudson.

Our writer considered them as an example of how book publishers threatened by supposedly more appealing media – television, video, computer games and CD-roms (remember them?) – were having to rethink their old-fashioned, bookish conventions …

New Horizons … is still going fourteen years later and 84 volumes are currently in print. This is nothing, though, compared to the French publisher Gallimard’s Découvertes (Discoveries) series, from which New Horizons draws its titles. Découvertes … now boasts a list of more than 500 volumes. By any standards, this ambitious, encyclopedic undertaking is one of the great projects of contemporary popular publishing …

To read more see the new Critique by Rick Poynor in Eye 69 and on the front page of eyemagazine.com.

Above: Covers from Gallimard’s Découvertes series. More spreads and covers in the latest (printed) issue of Eye, no. 69 vol. 18.

Eye is the world’s most beautiful and collectable graphic design journal, published quarterly for professional designers, students and anyone interested in critical, informed writing about graphic design and visual culture. It is available from all good design bookshops and online at the Eye shop, where you can buy subscriptions and single issues.