Night-flight

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s international bestselling novel Night-flight comes to life in Mary Reynolds’s inventive binding. She encased the book in a night-blue cover and included one of Marcel Duchamp’s rotorelief designs on the endpapers. Duchamp’s rotoreliefs were a series of inventively printed discs designed to create optical illustions when spun on a turntable. This one, titled Corolles, features a spiral motif that evokes a sense of vertigo, foreshadowing the moment in the novel in which a pilot gets lost in a cyclone.

Although the bookbinding’s design is simpler than Reynolds’s other creations, it nonetheless conjures a sense of unease. Readers might feel as if they’re falling through the cover’s indigo night only to be swept up in the typhoon of Duchamp’s spinning optical illusion.