The Page as an Instrument of Thought
Diana-Rada · 2026
At the gate of every book sits a sphinx with a single question: what can a page do that a sentence cannot? I have spent four books trying to answer her, and she has not yet let me pass.
Diana-Rada, book designer.The claim
I make books, and I hold firm opinions about where you sit while reading them. The craft I practise rests on a modest conviction: that thinking happens in the hands, and that a grid, a margin or the trace of a letter can carry part of an argument, above all when a text refuses to behave like ordinary prose. The four books that follow are a working record of that conviction, with their decisions, their constraints and what each one cost me.If you publish essays, plays, catalogs or poems that need an object around them, I would like to work with you. I am most useful to independent presses with awkward manuscripts and short print runs, to typographic studios, to curators of book exhibitions, and to committees that read process rather than decoration.
Project-based collaboration
1 · Salome (Read)
The Column Takes Off Its Veils
A play in three acts, set as a dance.
A time to mourn, and a time to dance. Ecclesiastes 3:4
A play reaches the designer as a script: one voice running down the page, stage directions lodged in the same paragraph, nothing that behaves like a theatre. The theatre has to live somewhere, and it cannot live in the text. In Salome the difficulty has a precise address. The dance of the seven veils is the climax of the play, its brightest action, and a script can only announce that it takes place.Constraint.The book had to be set cold, for a reader who has never stood in a rehearsal room, and the dance had to happen on the page itself.
1.2 · Salome (Look)
Anyone who has worked with a tool knows that material holds opinions. A line of type, I found, has a strong opinion about staying in its row. So I took the column apart and made the veils out of the text itself: lines loosened into cloth, and the cloth spread into fields of letters, until every page read as a canvas woven from the play. Each character was given a colour of his or her own, and the voices add up to one bright canvas.
1.3 · Salome (Linger)
A page can be a stage. But a stage needs an audience. Where does the reader sit?
Three acts, three densities. In Act III the type abandons the column and takes the whole sheet, and the reader, who has been walking in single file, is suddenly allowed to wander. The dance is on the page, and the reader watches it there.
Shown in Moscow, third-year exhibition.
A page can be a stage. It thinks in density.
But a stage needs an audience. Where does the reader sit?
2 · Maxim Savva (Read)
The Best Time: a catalog that is one meeting.
Better the meetings that never took place. From the catalog
A catalog is usually a warehouse of reproductions: flat, square, scanned. I came to Maxim’s studio on a single day with a camera in my bag, and I wanted something larger than a catalog, a total book that invites the reader to the meeting itself. Constraint. A small book, built to be held in one hand, closer to a devotional object than to a catalog.
2.2 · Maxim Savva (Look)
We talked in armchairs, which put us low. When Maxim spoke of a painting he lifted a hand toward it, and our eyes climbed the wall after his fingers. So the photographs are taken from that same seat, looking up, and each painting hangs where it hung that day. Some canvases are hard to see: they faced the window, and the afternoon’s reflection stays on them. The conversation is transcribed as it went, about art and equally about the plain business of an ordinary day.
Because the talk is recorded and the paintings he points at are shown, the reader can join the meeting simply by reading. It is also a fragile record, since many of the paintings have since been sold and the studio looks different now.
2.3 · Maxim Savva (Linger)
At the end of our meeting Maxim gave me ten postcards, and the book ends with exactly ten. They sit behind the colophon, at the point where a book declares itself finished, on heavier paper, printed on both sides and perforated at the spine. The book seems to be over, and it is not. The reader who has finished the dialogue and looked at the paintings may tear the postcards out and carry home the material remains of the meeting, and so end up entirely with us.
A page can be a room. It thinks in position.
A meeting happens once. What can a page keep of the days around it?
