The World in Play:
Luxury Cards, 1430–1540

by Timothy B. Husband
The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Books like these can easily turn dry and academic, which is a pity given how interesting the material really is. The World in Play displays a delightful selection of decks of playing cards from the Renaissance. It presented quite a few challenges, most notably the need to control the scaling of groups objects that were all nearly – but never exactly – the same size. To keep things tidy, I developed a fine-grained grid on which to hang all the images. One image from each group would set the scale for the rest, each of which was then placed so that it was optically aligned with its neighbors. Quite a change from illustrated books where everything is neatly squared up and snapped to the guides. Jeremy Tankard’s Kingfisher types kept the text readable but gave it a lively, contemporary feel on the page.

Softcover with French flaps, 8.75 × 9.5"