Belletrism, Bigotry, and the Bummel: Six old books

I've been reading some older books lately. Here are my quick reviews of:

• How to Shoot an Amateur Naturalist
• The Unexpurgated Code
• A Century of Humour
• Three Men in a Boat (to say nothing of the dog)
• Three Men on the Bummel
• Men, Martians and Machines

With a scattering of ideas that might be tabletop-gameable.

How to Shoot an Amateur Naturalist. Gerald Durrell (1984).

I read a bunch of Durrell's zoology-memoir books as a teenager. The prose is purpler than I remember it being! Sometimes that hits (describing a mole as a "furry ingot" is just delightful), but a firmer editor would have cut every other adjective.

Various pat little details also made me suspect that some of the anecdotes have been, shall we say, punched up. I don't think the stories really matter though. If you're reading this book, you're mostly in it for the descriptions of animals, and the author does just fine there. 

The Unexpurgated Code. J. P. Donleavy (1975).

This is a parodic "complete manual of survival and manners". It's infuriating. The premise (providing utterly cynical etiquette advice for social climbers and bastards) is such a good one.

In practise, that deep potential for humour is completely ruined by the violent misogyny (and several other forms of bigotry) which intrude on the text at every turn.

I opened this hoping to find unusual mid-century turns of phrase for a future project. Unfortunately the turns of phrase I found were unprintable. Avoid. 

A Century of Humour. Edited by P. G. Wodehouse (193?).

A book too old to bother printing its own publication date! Wodehouse mentions in the introduction "It is a bare thirty-four years since I started earning my living as a writer", so I infer the book was produced c. 1934–1939.

This is a hefty thousand-page tome that's been sitting on my bookshelves since forever. It's 77 short from almost as many authors, many of them former Punch editors. Notables include A. A. Milne, Oscar Wilde, G. K. Chesterton, H. G. Wells, Charles Dickens, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Wodehouse himself. The front matter strongly implies that the choice to include some of these works was in "better to beg forgiveness than ask permission" territory. Yikes!

The book's main weakness is that almost all the authors are middle-to-upper class, highly educated, white male Brits, so there's shall we say a narrow band of perspectives. Anyone from another country or class has their accent written phonetically and that sure ain't the worst of it. William Caine's "Spanish Pride", for example, is a touching story of human goodness. It's followed immediately by another story by Caine that is so revoltingly racist I don't even want to type its title.

But some stand the test of time. My favourites were:

• The Shooting of Shinroe (Somerville & Ross)
• Family Faces (Herbert) 
• Chapters from Three Men In A Boat (Jerome) 
• Biffin on Acquaintances (Graham) 
• The House-Warming (Milne) 
• The Gold Cup (Darlington) 
• The Toy Dogs of War (Emanuel) 
• Soaked in Seaweed (Leacock) 

Almost all the stories are laced with that characteristically British styles of humour: sardonic-to-droll tiptoeing into absurdism with a focus on institutional incompetence.

When it comes to comedy, it's interesting to see what holds up and what is rendered bewildering by age. Take for example The Whole Truth, by Inglis Allen. On just page 734 alone we get

• an adverb for almost every verb: somewhat intricate, tolerantly rapping, looks down jocosely, silently contemplates, excessively jocund, assents with indulgence, taps mysteriously, says protectively, etc
• six instances of 'jocund' or 'jocosely', and a policeman who is described as 'stout' three times
• instead of 'says': observes, observes, observes, inquires, queries, assures, assents, says protectively, inquires, returns, cries, whispers

Pair this eye-rolling writing style with a slice-of-life plot and I have no idea what about the story is meant to be funny. I can only assume that it's some lampooning that's gone over my head.

I take it a a lesson for world-building that big cultural divides can spring up in only a few generations. Even societies that are close to us in absolute terms are full of now-inexplicable tics and customs. Would things be different if supernatural longevity meant a few of these authors were still around, providing a long thread of cultural touchstones and explanatory power? 

Side note: Spare A Penny (F. E. Baily, originally published 1932) uses the phrase "pack a gat", making the phrase at least 50 years older than I would have guessed.

Three Men in a Boat (to say nothing of the dog). Jerome K. Jerome (1889).

I found the extracts of this book in A Century of Humour so fun that I went and read the whole thing. Three friends go rowing (and towing) up the Thames, with a travelogue itinerary of the towns and villages on the river. It's all wrapped in humorous anecdotes and tall tales.

The language, humour, characterisations, and situations are bizarrely relatable. Half of the jokes feel like they come from Tumblr! But then it hits you with a line like

"There is no more thrilling sensation I know of than sailing. It comes as near to flying as man has got to yet—except in dreams."

Or they just find a corpse in the river like that's something you have to deal with now and then.

The dry/wry humour is counterbalanced by loving descriptions of the riverside country that remind me a little of Tolkien.

Jerome has a very endearing trick where his first-person authorial voice tells you something with a false earnestness that is part of the joke.

For example, in Chapter 13 there are some passages roundly condemning steamboats on the river, and talking about the tricks the protagonist uses to deliberately hinder them:

There is a blatant bumptiousness about a steam launch that has the knack of rousing every evil instinct in my nature [...]

They used to have to whistle for us to get out of their way. If I may do so without appearing boastful, I think I can honestly say that our one small boat, during that week, caused more annoyance and delay and aggravation to the steam launches that we came across than all the other craft on the river put together.

“Steam launch, coming!” one of us would cry out, on sighting the enemy in the distance; and, in an instant, everything was got ready to receive her. I would take the lines, and Harris and George would sit down beside me, all of us with our backs to the launch, and the boat would drift out quietly into mid-stream.

On would come the launch, whistling, and on we would go, drifting. At about a hundred yards off, she would start whistling like mad, and the people would come and lean over the side, and roar at us; but we never heard them! Harris would be telling us an anecdote about his mother, and George and I would not have missed a word of it for worlds.

and then three chapters later, this turnaround:

At Reading lock we came up with a steam launch, belonging to some friends of mine, and they towed us up to within about a mile of Streatley. It is very delightful being towed up by a launch. I prefer it myself to rowing. The run would have been more delightful still, if it had not been for a lot of wretched small boats that were continually getting in the way of our launch, and, to avoid running down which, we had to be continually easing and stopping. It is really most annoying, the manner in which these rowing boats get in the way of one’s launch up the river; something ought to done to stop it.

And they are so confoundedly impertinent, too, over it. You can whistle till you nearly burst your boiler before they will trouble themselves to hurry. I would have one or two of them run down now and then, if I had my way, just to teach them all a lesson.

 Delightful.

 

Three Men on the Bummel. Jerome K. Jerome (1900).

The sequel to Three Men in a Boat is a bicycle tour of the Black Forest, sporadically illustrated.

It starts off with a promise: "I have come to restrain my passion for the giving of information; therefore it is that nothing in the nature of practical instruction will be found, if I can help it, within these pages."

The book has sequel problems. There's no dog, for a start! It's less funny and characterful than the first. It also deviates frequently from anecdote into much longer reports about 'what the Germans are like as a people'. This is slightly eerie, given the burgeoning historical context, with passages like:

In Germany to-day one hears a good deal concerning Socialism, but it is a Socialism that would only be despotism under another name. Individualism makes no appeal to the German voter. He is willing, nay, anxious, to be controlled and regulated in all things. He disputes, not government, but the form of it. The policeman is to him a religion, and, one feels, will always remain so. 

and 

Hitherto, the German has had the blessed fortune to be exceptionally well governed; if this continue, it will go well with him. When his troubles will begin will be when by any chance something goes wrong with the governing machine. But maybe his method has the advantage of producing a continuous supply of good governors; it would certainly seem so.

Overall, where Three Men in a Boat is entertaining and funny, Three Men on the Bummel mostly just feels like one historical English writer's account of a German bicycle journey.

(By the way, a 'Bummel' is only explained in the book's final paragraph. It is a journey "without an end; the only thing regulating it being the necessity of getting back within a given time to the point from which one started. Sometimes it is through busy streets, and sometimes through the fields and lanes; sometimes we can be spared for a few hours, and sometimes for a few days. But long or short, but here or there, our thoughts are ever on the running of the sand.")

 

 

Men, Martians and Machines. Eric Frank Russell (1955).

I enjoyed this book as a kid and went into the re-read with nostalgia goggles. It's slightly Wodehousian – Russell was British but writing for American readers, and that shines through. The language feels even older than the mid-century, and the descriptions of action are quite convoluted. It's hard to believe I got through this as a child!

I was tickled by the nonsensical futurism. There are friendly chess-playing Martians, tobacco and beef ranches on Venus, and spaceship cargos of watch-making tools and radium needles. The objects 'duralumin gangway' and 'rawhide suitcase' appear in consecutive sentences.

I love this whole aesthetic and might draw on it if I ever make a SF game. Crewmembers carry a needle-ray projector, mud-skis, "thin, multi-purpose oil", a jar of graphite, a microwave radiophone powerpack, and "nutweed pellicules". There are audiojournalists, astro-computators, plate photography, grenade-sized atomic bombs, and pervasive cigarettes. To my surprise, a "quasi-arc welder" turns out to be a real thing.

The book establishes its main characters with a very short story on the delightfully-named spaceship Upskadaska City. The remaining three self-contained chapters are set in an experimental FTL spaceship which provides the framing device (first contact on three different worlds). To the modern eye the protagonists in these situations come across as inept, aggressive, and basically 'would-be colonisers'.

Men, Martians, and Machines hasn't aged well. There's casual and direct racism throughout, plus coded forms: the Martians read in several ways as problematic Asian stand-ins, and newly discovered aliens are immediately labelled "greenies" despite having other notable physiological differences from humans. There are no female characters. Of the two mentions of women in the whole book, one is sexist.

The actual stories aren't particularly good. The ship has a dedicated radio operator... who didn't think to check the radio waves upon landing on a new alien planet. Radio is presented as being centrally important, and then in one story the Martian crew members turn out to have been telepathic all along, saving the day. In fact the Martian and robot characters have such huge advantages that the human crew are rendered narratively worthless. I was also annoyed by Captain McNulty's inconsistent characterisation: he is by turns understated and taciturn, opinionated and bloviating, risk-averse and non-committal, or self-assured and overconfident.

The final story of Men, Martians, and Machines is by far the best. At this point Russell seems tired of his central conceit: many characters resent or regret going on another mission, and several (including the narrator) want to retire. The setup is more of a science fiction horror story. It's a sort of proto-antimemetics trope, and also made me think of Arnold K's false hydra. The weird ending is a high point, tying together a couple of the book's throughlines.

1d20 wizardly afflictions

In the vein of 1d20 spells from a cursed spellbook, here's 

1d20 wizardly afflictions

Art by Perplexing Ruins

1. Localised portent. The patient's viscera rearranges into meaningful forms. Small objects nearby may transform into birds or comets.
2. Mano-a-manomania. An uncontrollable obsession with magical duels. Treatable with high dosage antimagic.
3. Sympathetic polymorph. The patient reflexively takes on the forms they magically impose on others.
4. Partial possession. Intermittently under the control of imps or quasi-elemental spirits. Contagious.
5. Cetaceanthropy. Transmitted by bite (usually a disease of krill). The patient swims amok on the night of the full moon.
6. Antimitosis. Sometimes called 'void disease'. Incurable reverse aging accompanied by disintegration of bodily tissues.
7. Clone narcissism. Obsession with the perfection of one's own form, growing in a vat.
8. St Belthin's Fever. Infection occurs during thunderstorms. Symptoms include glowing eyes, shivers, electrical discharge.
9. Intestinal bookworms. Ubiquitous parasitic reminder about proper hand hygiene while reading mouldering tomes.
10. Persistent featherweight. A lingering spell reduces the patient's mass. Prolonged affliction causes brittle bones and muscle atrophy.
11. Psychic papercut. Stinging pain in the mind brought on by telepathically reading recklessly fast.
12. Orb-gazer's wrist. Strain caused by the weight of an overheavy head resting chin-on-upturned-palm.
13. Oak gall stones. A solstice-time disease, thought to be caused by mishandling of galls during preparation of magical inks.
14. Chronic hubris. Pathological egotism characterised by challenges offered against the gods. However, see also early onset apotheosis for differential diagnosis.
15. Transitive curse. A tomb-hex heritable from mentors, yes-men, and ideological allies.
16. Wand splinter. Burrows deeper to get away from any tweezers not made of meteorite iron.
17. Petridermis. Overuse of protective spells leads to gradual stoneification of the patient's skin. Very bad for the pores.
18. Prophetic bones. Generally benign. Affected bones have a telltale ache on planes where the concept of weather does not exist.
19. Component magnetism. A lingering magnetic attraction to moss, sulfur, dried spiders, guano, and so on. Brought on by reckless overreliance on telekinesis.
20. Early onset apotheosis. A traumatic rupture in the godhead leads to total or partial deification.

I had been thinking about Discworld's magical afflictions (like 'planets'), and that made me wonder what sort of bedevilments the Thirty Wicked Wizards would suffer from.

 

For more build-your-own wizardly fever-dream content, check out my zine, Wiki Articles Are Wizards [citation needed].

Meggs' history of graphic design: Reviewed

For the last couple of months I've been reading

Meggs' history of graphic design (fifth edition). Philip B. Meggs & Alston W. Purvis. 2012 revised (1998 original).

This is a 600-page book, with several thousand individually captioned images (I ran out of library renewals and had to rush, so didn't end up getting many pictures of them). Imagine a heavy encyclopedia crammed full of all kinds of visual design from history.

Structure 

There are so many overlapping movements, eras, styles, schools, and flourishings of (what would come to be called) graphic design. Meggs & Purvis choose to divide history into chunks, and their book into corresponding parts. Each part has a few chapters, each separately covering concurrent developments in different movements or countries.

Each section opens with a summary of the chapters it contains, in the form of a timeline. Useful for a reference book, although I only glanced at them in reading this book cover to cover.

 

Production quality

Let's get a few issues out of the way first because there's a lot of good to say about Meggs' history! This was the longest and densest book I've read in a long time. It is expertly written and edited. The rate of textual errors per word is hundreds of times better than in some books I've read recently. I saw just thirty typos over the course of the entire work.

(Page 12, a full stop for a comma creates sentence fragments. Page 135, accidental line break. Page 136, 'either' in the wrong spot. Pages 224, 398, 482, and 553, "wich" for "which". Page 271, "has been" for "have been". Page 287, 'Figs' for 'Fig'. Page 290, unclosed parentheses. Page 350, redundant "also". Page 357, accidental sentence break. Page 389, "COBAL" for "COBOL". Page 417, "if" for "of". Page 479, "te" for "the". Pages 538 and 539, "florescent" for "fluorescent". Page 554, repeats the figure from the epilogue. Page 556, misapplied boldface.)

Curiously, 13 of these 30 errors occur in Chapter 23 specifically, giving the impression that the whole chapter missed the copyediting step:

Page 485, calls Japan "an island". Page 489, figure 23-16 is captioned as 22-16. Page 506, figures 23-77, -78, and -79 are called 24-77, -78, and -79. Page 508, "potography" for "photography". Pages 513 and 517, missing subheadings. Page 517, figures 23-113 and 23-114 are called 24-113 and 24-114. Page 521, misplaced comma. Page 529, "than that" for "to that".

I took issue with the block quotes, which are indented very similarly to the paragraph indent, use the same font, have no extra vertical space, and indent the following paragraph normally. Altogether this makes them hard to distinguish from the text. Fortunately the book only uses block quotes a few times.

Meggs' history usually prefers its figures to appear after they are discussed in the text. I dislike this because you can't properly understand text that is discussing an image you haven't seen yet.

Sometimes the figures appear in a different order to their textual references, e.g., 5-10 through 5-15, so it's puzzling that some full-page examples weren't just moved and renumbered to appear on the facing page to the textual reference.

I know from experience that laying out figures is extremely difficult. I wouldn't have mentioned the ordering, but it's made so much more of a hassle by the fact that...

The book has broken gutters!

One severe shortcoming made Meggs' history really hard to read.

At 600 pages, the hardback is so thick and heavy that when you open it on a table (unless you open it at the middle) the lighter side is lifted into the air. This makes ~30 mm of the page curve into the inner margin or "gutter". But the text columns continue to a margin of ~10 mm!

This is a huge obstacle to comfortable reading. On every line, at least one word disappears entirely into the gutter, and a couple more are distorted! It's even worse at the start and end of the book, where the curve of the pages is so pronounced that they obscure part of the opposite page!

I had to read this enormous book with two workarounds:

• I can hold the thicker side of the book up vertically, putting my head down sideways to read those pages then sitting up to read pages on the lighter side normally.
• I can press down really hard on a page on the lighter side while trying to read it (the book is so heavy that this requires both hands or the full weight of my arm).

This is completely stupid to begin with, and then the text constantly asks you to refer to a figure on a different page!

This issue affects all but the middle ~150 pages, i.e., this book cannot be read by opening it flat in front of you. The first note I made for this review called this a 'hassle'; now that I'm writing it up I'll upgrade that to 'accessibility nightmare'. It's frankly unacceptable and I can't understand how it happened.

Chock-full of content

Part of the allure of books like this are the graphic design examples. You could delight in it as a picture book, completely devoid of context. For example, there are some striking pieces by A. M. Cassandre (you can see more of his work catalogued here: https://www.moma.org/artists/1015-a-m-cassandre#works):

But of course the book is meant to be about the historical discussion, which is very engaging (sometimes enrapturing) and comprehensive. The history of paper and printing in the first few chapters helped tie together a lot of areas in which I had vaguely known a handful of facts. Meggs' history traces the development of the written word from antiquity of Christian manuscripts, the throughline of Chinese printing to the Italian Renaissance, Celtic influences on Charlemagne's manuscript reforms (through English scholar Alcuin of York), and so on.

Here's an eye-opening fact. As of 1450, there were an estimated 50,000 volumes in European monasteries and libraries in total. In the next 50 years, with the advent of printing, nine million more books (35,000 editions alone) would be created. And that doesn't include printed ephemera (tracts, pamphlets, and broadsides), of which there were a lot. That's what a difference even early printing made in cost and production speed.

Meggs & Purvis give a concise explanation of the Industrial Revolution, discussing how it indirectly led to an explosion of typography and invention of 3D, decorated, and reversed fonts by typefounders in the early 1800s. The return to wood type for large display-sized printing (which metal was ill-suited to) was enabled by the invention of a new router in 1827 for producing the type. 

A few interesting specifics:

• Some very familiar names popping up in discussing the people behind the typefaces: Bodoni, Baskerville, Playfair, Garamond, Caslon, Goudy...
• I felt a certain kindred spirit in the authors' dissatisfaction with the numerous mistakes in the Book of Kells (~800 CE) juxtaposed to the "visual delight" of its "noble design" and "beautiful, carefully lettered half-uncials" (page 50).
• The word "stereotype" originally comes from a printing plate production technique.
• The first sans-serif font was by William Caslon IV, 1816, and called "two lines English Egyptian". These typefaces started spreading a decade later – but what to call them? Caslon used 'Doric' (presumably because a Doric column lacks the base and flourishes of an Ionic or Corinthian). Thorowgood said 'grotesque'. Blake and Stephenson, 'sans-surryphs'. The Boston Type and Stereotype Foundry, 'Gothics'. Vincent Figgins used 'sans serif' in 1832 and it stuck.

I especially enjoyed the chapter on the Art Nouveau movement and its various consequences for the West. I hadn't known about its roots in the ukiyo-e tradition ("pictures of the floating world") of Japan's Tokugawa period.

Art Nouveau disappeared in the ashes of WWI. Those numerous chapters on the early to mid 1900s were grim reading at times, even as all the different art and design movements of the era blossomed.

But history will remember Lucian Bernhard's adorable trademark and poster made for Hommel Micrometers (1912):

Also I don't care for the futurists, but check out this iconic book bound not with thread but enormous bolts. Fortunato Depero's Depero futurista, 1927:

Tricky history

I was a little bit concerned by some mild whitewashing of history, or at least oversimplification of the kind that feels like a repackaging of high school history. It shows up regarding Charlemagne and the 'feudal system', and the intersection of Christianity with the Celts, areas where I've read a little bit from modern historians; I wouldn't be surprised if there's a lot more I didn't notice.

Also, Cadmus of Miletus may have brought the Phoenician alphabet to Greece, and possibly also killed a dragon then planted its teeth to grow an army, sure. The authors' hypothesis that "the power of Cadmus to raise armies from nowhere could have been due to his command of the alphabet" as "[t]roop movements, scouting reports, and orders from the field could be delivered by writing" (page 25) seems completely speculative for this quasi-historical figure.

There's a weird moment on page 434 where Meggs says "the memory of" a historic atrocity "was redeemed by the modern graphic design, architecture, and of course the fraternity of sports presented in the Olympic Games in Beijing". I hope this line is some kind of bizarre typo or fumbling for a word other than 'redeemed' because yeesh.

These are just the flies in the 600-page ointment, of course. Over all, the whole book appears to be extremely well-researched.

Modernity

I'm just barely old enough that I briefly had my hands on an electric typewriter when I was a kid, courtesy of my grandmother, although even then it was really only a curiosity. So I was tickled to see this: 

Hanging punctuation (and hanging T crossbar) in an old IBM advertisement. The letters are tightly-tracked; is that an underscore or a really tightly-tracked ellipsis?

Meggs' history has some neat examples of electronically created collages from the 1980s as the predecessors of the digital graphic design revolution.

Chapter 22 covers postmodernism and the retro. It was neat, in a slightly recursive way, to dissect how designers started deeply examining the history of their art and calling back to famous bits of graphic design. I was tickled to see the book reproduce some of their works and then casually instruct the reader to turn back hundred of pages to see the sources they were inspired by. For some reason this feels fun even in a world of hypertext.

The fifth edition of the book adds a few chapters to take us all the way up to the early 2000s. By this stage I was burning the midnight oil to finish it, so I have few notes, but I enjoyed seeing the transition into the digital world, and a new explosion of graphic design possibilities and affordances on par with either Gutenberg or the Industrial Revolution. 

(Also shout out in passing to Exocet, the instantly-recognisable Diablo font.)

In summary 

I can't easily compare this to the other books on graphic design that I've read in 2026. Most of those have been modern and highly accessible instructional texts, not reference books. I will say, though, that it's refreshing to read a design book without constant textual mistakes.

Compared to the books on specific 20th Century areas of design, Meggs' history is obviously less able to get into all the fine details for a particular creator or movement so systematically, trading breadth for depth. But it still goes into detail for particular case studies, and is very professionally produced.

Meggs' history delivers stellar content but is a damn trial to deal with as a physical object. If I ever come into money, I will buy a copy of this book and have it cut up and expertly rebound in multiple volumes.

Overzealous

A new and powerful game has manifested in our reality! Overzealous, the pen-and-paper solo RPG of tactical cult management and heretical hijinks, is now available!

1. Be an outsider god yearning to manifest in the mortal world
2. Notice that a small cult has formed to worship you
3. Try to guide them towards the ritual
4. Discover that they're all complete frothing zealots

You'll have to navigate the troubles your cultists bring upon themselves using your limited reach into reality. Manage the cult's Divergence, Fervour, Cultists, Monstrosity, and Imminence stats to prevent it all devolving into knives and tentacles, and hopefully blaze a trail to your manifestation.

Pick up Overzealous now at DriveThruRPG (print and digital editions) or at itch.io (the digital edition)! 

Become a part of something bigger through rolling dice and grimacing as you push tokens around. 

Reviewing Graphic Design For Dummies

I've been reading and reviewing (here, here, here, and here) books about graphic design.

For book number fourteen, I picked something different. It's produced for a very different teaching style, and was published just last year.

Graphic design for dummies. 2025. Ben Hannam.

I haven't more than flicked through any of the For Dummies books before. I was curious how simple they could actually make the topic.

I ended up having a lot to say about this book, hence a dedicated review post. Not until we get to Meggs' history of graphic design (spoilers) will we see a book with such a contrast of highs and lows!

Writing style and repetitiveness

Graphic design for dummies is extremely readable, in a way that suggests there's a manual of style for this series. The vocabulary is basic and the sentences themselves are seldom complex.

The author often repeats the same thought twice in a row, sometimes with minimal rewording. On page 154, two paragraphs in a row recommend picking a palette of two to five colours. On page 156, the idea that even subtle textures can reinforce design concepts is written two different ways within a paragraph.

Sometimes author Ben Hannam repeats short phrases within a sentence. On page 71, one paragraph states twice that some creatives may feel "threatened" by generative AI; the same paragraph contains the sentence "There are legitimate concerns about copyright and authorship, the quality and uniqueness of the work, and other legitimate concerns" (emphasis added). Page 177 says: "In Figure 8-9, the concept of position hierarchy has been illustrated to help show the concept of position hierarchy." The pinnacle is page 221:

That one is clearly a mistake, but there are so many instances of repetition that I'm not sure it's all errors or filler. It might be Hannam's personal style, or something required by the For Dummies series. Or it might be an artifact of LLM generation — not a possibility I like to bring up, but this is a recent book and the author is deeply pro-AI, as we shall see.

A lot of the repetitiveness serves to reassure. About half of the book's first eight pages of text is just reiterated reassurances for a novice. This returns several times, e.g., on page 75, and I expect it is a feature of the For Dummies series.

Hannam's writing is accessible and clearly-written, with high explanatory power. However, there are a number of awkward phrasings along the lines of "especially if you're first starting out or at the beginning of your journey" (page 2) which align with both the text's repetitiveness and, yes, its grammatical problems.

Errors

What is the state of modern publishing? Usually I reduce it to a few lines of complaints, but this time I'll list the errors that jumped out at me (and then only when I had my notepad nearby).

• "to communication" for "to communicate" (page 41)
• "you may in interested in sharing" (page 53)
• "creating" for "creative" (page 57)
• A cost is itself described as being "pricy" (page 65)
• Page 72 says 360 KB is 180% of 20 KB
• "likes" for "like" (page 74)
• Stray commas (pages 80, 141, 193)
• Wrong product names (page 86)
• "hone in on" (page 96)
• "This may be the first time the client has worked with a graphic designer before" (page 108)
• "ready to go until needed" (page 116)
• Mistaken insertion of "what" (page 131)
• "place" for "placing" (page 134)
• A sentence that's just a collection of verb phrases (page 138) 
• "holes" for "wholes" (page 144)
• "more [...] rather than" for "more [...] than" (page 147)
• "but it can" for "but can" (page 149)
• "a disconnect between [single thing]" (page 151)
• An unnecessary "for you" (page 151)
• "when done so" for "when done" (page 160)
• "ration" for "ratio" (page 164) 
• "land" for "land on" (page 193)
• "technically be" for "be technically" (page 176) 
• "Repetition movement to move to help move your audience's eyes" (page 172)
• Missing "that of" results in comparing a binding method to a book (page 182)
• it/they confusion (page 184)
• "horizontal likes" for "horizontal lines" (page 186)
• "software [...] has already begun to adapt AI tools into their software" (page 241)
• A list of verbs ends with a noun (page 242)
• "of" for "from" and "make" for "take" (page 244)
• Missing "that" (page 197)
• "not to" for "to not" (page 198)
• Missing capital (page 199)
• "in" for "is" (page 206) 
• "and" for "with" (page 220)
• "Chapter 1" for "Bonus Chapter 1" (page 222) 
• Accidental sentence break (page 236)

This was far from a close reading. I doubt these were even a quarter of the errors in the book. There might be a mistake per page on average.

...But no typos that a spellchecker would have picked up. That's the best I can say about it. Anyway, my heart goes out to the book's credited proofreader Debbye, who must have either been under an impossible time crunch or been given a truly nightmarish manuscript if this many errors made it into the final work!

Maybe this is just the new normal. I've gone on about the textual problems in other teaching design books. I've seen elementary typos on official communications from my bank. And at the meta level, even some of the real-world design examples shown in Graphic design for dummies are full of errors, e.g., you can see typos in the barely-visible text in the Raskal packaging and brand guidelines infographic (page 136).

The book's style

Graphic design for dummies spends less ink on real-world examples than the first dozen design books I read. At the same time, it's more pedagogical, and it has a good number of simple illustrative examples. There's a greater focus on presenting and then applying its lessons.

Also unlike those other books, Graphic design for dummies is clearly not laid out spread by spread. Over and over again it breaks examples across spreads, has explanations begin on the spread before the diagrams they refer to, asks you to compare two figures requiring a page turn, and so on. This is more irritating than it sounds, and really drives home the value of designing spreads instead of just flowing the text.

Other parts of the design are good, and it's all teaching-oriented. I like the simple structure, the chapter summaries, and the consistency of chapter layout.

The book's content

Graphic design for dummies covers all the topics I've been reading about for months, and then some. If this was the first text I'd picked up, I think I would have been completely riveted. Even so, I found it engaging and useful.

Ben Hannam has an interesting view of creativity as an additive, expansive process, to be followed (iteratively) by what he calls logical thinking as a process of evaluation and narrowing down. I think 'logic' is the wrong word but see what he's gesturing at. "The goal of logical thinking is to identify the best or right solution. Often, logical thinking is a selective process where constraints dictate certain outcomes". I reflected a lot on how this opening-up / narrowing-down process might relate to game design.

Graphic design for dummies also lays out a seven-part design process which is cyclical and iterative:

1. Project brief and goals

2. Research and planning

3. Brainstorm concepts

4. Sketching and refining ideas

5. Design development

6. Feedback and revision

7. Finalisation and execution

This is reinforced by some incredibly actionable advice given for each phase. This is exactly what I've wanted more of from the design books. For example, phase 4 is about sketching ideas, combining and refining them, and has a really thorough worked example. The book's downloadable bonus chapters (more on them later) continue in this vein.

This is the high point of the book, and it's really strong. I wrote down a lot of notes. Hannam talks about iterating ideas early and often, and brainstorming widely, and I was struck by the sheer extent he recommends. For example, he has his design students make 150 thumbnail sketches for a project, and says he's observed a sketch ratio of 100 likely dead ends : 45 not particularly inspired/exciting/unique : 5 with great potential. I'd really like to take this and run with it as an exercise for both visual design and other creative activities.

Hannam gives solid advice on actually making decisions during the design process. He discusses ways of actually establishing hierarchy in Chapter 9 on layouts, and ways to actually pick a palette (with useful guidance on accessibility) in Chapter 10 on colour. Along the way he scatters in links to online tools, and the book is published recently enough that they work.

If only that was all. 

Design-by-numbers

Generative AI is mentioned throughout, beginning on page 26. Hannam makes his position clear: it is "impressive", "powerful", "extremely easy", etc, and tasks like "editing images [...] can be automated with powerful AI tools."

He uses Adobe Illustrator text-to-vector once for demonstrative purposes (page 71), but then wouldn't you know it, a couple more slip through unlabelled. For example, specimens on page 174 are likely made with the same text-to-vector, because they're grotesque. Graphic design for dummies features characters wearing skin-tone belts and one-and-a-half hats, with misshapen hands, ankles that extend behind instead of into their (mismatched) shoes, and so on.

The book closes with a brief tacked-on chapter on generative AI. Here, Hannam sets out to annoy me with:

• Relentless enthusiasm tempered with a tiny dash of mealy-mouthed both-sides-ing
• Referring to generative AI just as "AI", an acronym he defines then neglects to use
• Remarks about [generative] AI being able to "understand" things

This chapter makes a lot of claims that are, frankly, false.

• "AI can help deliver the content that users need more quickly and accurately than you could by using a set of static variables [in a traditional web storefront]."
• AI will "increase accuracy" and "can analyse data [...] more accurately than humans".
• AI can be used to reduce bias in things like "broad representation of different groups".
• AI can be used to "simulate" user interactions and A/B testing, i.e., fake data instead of gathering it.

This is nonsense, of course. Generative AI increases accuracy? It reduces bias? It's faster than serving static content? Anyone who understands the technology is shaking their head. Hannam loses the last of his credibility in this area by urging you to use [presumably generative] AI to track file changes, do file management, organise assets, and manage versioning. I would uhhhh. Advise against it.

Finally, there's a ton of pandering "will be able to" and "one might imagine" and "are likely to become" which I'm just sick of by now. There's a whole subsection on "AI-Powered Design Assistants" which the author admits is essentially fanfiction! Why on earth did the book get implausible, depressing, futurist fanfiction when a bunch of actual content got delegated to downloadable bonus chapters?

It's a good thing I'm not in the habit of giving numeric scores in reviews, because this chapter completely depleted my goodwill. It's hard to imagine a sourer note to end on... except wait, we're not done. Let's quickly download those bonus chapters.

Oh wait oh no

You thought the AI chapter was a bad look? Check this out.

This book was published less than a year ago. It promises in multiple places, including boldly on the back cover, that you can get six bonus chapters online at dummies.com. Nope! Actually you can't. You can go there and (a) buy this book, or (b) "engage with this book", i.e., type text into a chatbot. There is no way to (c) get the bonus chapters it promised.

Now, Graphic design for dummies provides two publisher links, so I checked those just in case. The first one is for support, booksupport.wiley.com, and it's a dead link! Again, this book was published last year! The other link also doesn't have the bonus chapters. You can send the publishers a message there... but only if you subscribe to them. WTF.

So I looked up author Ben Hannam's website to ask him about it. He has a message box, which formats your message in all caps like you're shouting. Then the Send Message button just throws an error.

 

At this point you just have to laugh. 

I was all set to compare this book to the Ambrose-Harris Vortex, in terms of the density of mistakes and parts of it being fundamentally broken. But ended up going back to the publisher's website on a whim and after some more digging I did find the bonus chapters. Notably not at the dummies.com domain which is where they're meant to be, and where several other For Dummies books have bonus chapters.

The bonus chapters, finally 

There's six bonus chapters, all very consistent with the rest of the book, full of grammatical errors but with some pretty useful content.

Chapter one: Walking through the process of designing a logo and a business card. I really liked these hands-on, in-depth examples. There's a funny typo in the quote on Hannam's mocked-up business card (Figure 9) but it does get fixed in the final result in Figure 10.

And it is so on the nose that it beggars belief that the personal logo Hannam ends up with at the end of his design process appears to read more like the acronym "AI" in lowercase than it does his initials "BH" which it's meant to be:

Chapter two: Strategies for success. Hannam repeats at length the old canard about "Roman war chariots" having led to railway track gauge and thence constrained the design of the Space Shuttle. This is false. Repeating it undermines his point about design constraints and makes the reader wonder what else he's got wrong.

Aside: Ten minutes of proper research puts the myth to rest. But maybe not if you "fact check" it with generative AI. I looked at Google's "search" "results" out of morbid curiosity, and the chatbot both-sides'ed it.

This chapter also has a section called "Escape the pitfall of repeating yourself", which is hilarious in the context of a book which repeats itself so often.

Chapter three: About avoiding common mistakes. It covers aspect ratios, working with images, file management, compression, colours, rich black, and going to press. Nothing new for me personally, but all good simple solid advice.

Chapter four: Exercises to test a new design student's skills. Also really good! I think the intended audience would find it exceptionally useful. I wish it had been included in the physical book instead of hidden away where most readers will never see it.

Chapters five and six: On receiving and giving critique. Mostly in the vein of career advice for a university student.

Hannam wraps up the bonus chapters with a protectiveness about graphic design students being exploited. It helped get me back in his corner a bit after the AI rubbish.

In summary 

What a rollercoaster. Graphic design for dummies has some of the most high-quality practical and focused advice, given in plain language and without talking down to the reader. It's probably the best graphic design teaching text I've read so far, and also stands up okay as an illustrative text. It doesn't really set out to be an inspirational text. And then of course it's error-riddled and full of AI slopaganda, and trying to find the bonus chapters was deeply frustrating.

Despite such deep flaws, I have to say that on the whole, I can recommend this book. But I'm still hoping to find something better.