“It may be that the raison d’être of […] [singular] books is the merciless struggle they wage against ordinary books.” Ulises Carrión, “De la critique”, Quant aux livres/On books, Genève, Héros-Limite, 1997, p.83 (First published in Plural, n° 41, Mexico DF, 1975)

When we speak of singular books, we mean books that are strange, peculiar, bizarre, surprising, funny… These terms encompass both the object of book creation, but also their unexpected, non-conformist shaping. As John Morgan explains in A Systematic Book Design, “the aspects that interest me most in book design are precisely those that are most difficult or impossible to describe.” Indeed, the primary function of editorial graphic design is to make the text visible - or more precisely, the content, which may contain text and/or images. To achieve this, several levels of writing are called upon: textual writing, typographic writing, graphic writing and editorial writing. An analysis of these different strata leads us to believe that they themselves contain other writing actions that are not necessarily specific to them, and which are potentially real creative sources for the design of singular books.

These books take advantage of these different levels, hijacking and shifting them to create special reading conditions. In this way, they depart from the traditional linear reading scheme. Writing levels, thresholds and paratexts are all prisms through which writing, and therefore reading, can differ, enrich and intertwine. Reading is understood here as an active practice that can itself produce singular forms, situations and experiences. It’s as if each book proposes a different way of reading.

The great classics of French literature are potentially the antithesis of single editions. Indeed, many of them have been reissued en masse, in small, inexpensive formats, to make them accessible to all. It is therefore interesting to study them and observe the various mutations they have undergone over time. Madame Bovary is a fascinating case in point, having been republished over 242 times, it has given rise to much controversy and is still studied in schools today. Proposing a republication of Gustave Flaubert’s work in 2022 raises a number of questions, including the different states of the text, censorship, feminism and the notion of Bovaryism, as well as the study of illustrated and film adaptations. So many avenues that would enable a singular editorial shift, i.e., the deployment of a process by which content adapts to new conditions of existence.