Marian Bantjes’s new book, I Wonder, is hard to categorize, and harder still to put down. It’s a deeply personal, absurdly ornate series of illustrated essays and observations on typography and graphic design that looks, to us, like a 21st-century illuminated manuscript.
Bantjes, a typographic illustrator who lives and works on a small island off the coast of British Columbia, is fascinated by Middle Eastern mosaics, Pop Art, Roman architecture, medieval heraldry, modernist design, Jewish mysticism, and a million other styles, idioms, art forms, symbologies, and belief systems in between: The sense her title alludes to is on brilliant display in these pages. But we’re also taken with Bantjes’s sentences, and with her knack for conveying just why it is that certain images cut us to the quick, or kick our imaginations into a higher gear. This eye-catching book is chock-full of brain candy.
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I Wonder (the Monacelli Press; hardcover; 208 pages)
Marian Bantjes’s website
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