I love Charles Dickens and Great Expectations is one of my favourite books (and films) so I'm eagerly looking forward to seeing this new collaborative project from GraphicDesign&, the creative partnership of Lucienne Roberts and Rebecca Wright. Page 1: Great Expectations brings together seventy designers and typographers’ interpretations of the first page of Dickens’ novel with a brief to 'explore, challenge or celebrate the conventions of book typography'.
Contributors include: A Practice for Everyday Life, Phil Baines, Experimental Jetset, John Morgan studio, Fraser Muggeridge studio, Spin, Robin Kinross, Ellen Lupton, Morag Myerscough, and Erik Spiekermann.
Incidentally, in 2003, I contributed a piece for a group show, Definitively Provisional, curated by Kristine Neilson and Cecilia Canziani at Whitechapel Project Space, that was based around my well-thumbed Penguin Classics copy of Great Expectations. Unfortunately (or possibly fortunately), I have no visual documentation of my piece - I glued postcards in the book to highlight certain sentences, making an autobiographical reading of Dickens’ text. The exhibition itself looked at the idea of the library and was the first - and probably the last - time I showed with such eminent artists as Lawrence Weiner, Joseph Kosuth and Haim Steinbach.
