Homemade – Perqueneau? – Esercizi di stile

Raymond Queneau’s book “Esercizi di stile” is a collection of 99 different short stories that actually tell the same story, each one of them is narrated following a different logic, defined from a specific keyword. “Perqueneau?” is a book design exercise that follows the same logic: a keyword is assigned and a “book” will be designed coherently with the term either in style and output.

“Homemade” is this book keyword. In order to satisfy the idea of handcraft I decided to manufacture the paper. It is completely handcrafted at home. The text printed on it obviously contains Queneau’s recurring story, it is written in  Italian dialect. The whole project follows one idea inspired from Boccaccio’s Decameron “frame”. A fictionary niece finds in a garret these old paper sheets on which her grandfather wrote with a typewriter (therefore the typeface choice) the memory of one specific day. He recalls what happened that day as if he was talking about it, hence the language is colloquial and includes mistakes. This frame is a further remark of the idea of home, as long as it deals with memories and a homely environment.