Marie Mundaca on her art direc­tion for a num­ber of David Fos­ter Wallace’s books:

It’s a lit­tle odd to design inte­ri­ors for fic­tion and lit­er­ary non-fiction. It’s just text—what is there to do? There are the obvi­ous things, like leav­ing enough space at the mar­gins. Basi­cally, the designer’s job is to pick a font that enhances what she thinks the book con­veys, make all the text fit in the amount of pages edi­to­r­ial thinks it will take up, and decide what to do with the chap­ter open­ers and any strange ele­ments, like lists and sub­heads. Design­ing Obliv­ion was easy: I picked a clas­sic font that fit a lot of words on the page but was still easy to read. I wanted to empha­size the den­sity of the thoughts, but still allow the reader the oppor­tu­nity to linger on the page. I decided on gen­er­ous gut­ter and outer mar­gins, and a slightly longer than aver­age lines-per-page count to high­light the struc­tural aspects of the book. Obliv­ion opens and closes with sto­ries that fea­ture giant, impos­ing women. They reminded me of cary­atids —the columns in female form that stand out­side ancient Greek tem­ples. The pages are the columns of that tem­ple. The words are what read­ers come to wor­ship, med­i­tate, ponder.

Con­sider the Lob­ster was a lit­tle dif­fer­ent. Most of the book was very typ­i­cal, but there was one par­tic­u­lar essay called Host that required some spe­cial treatment.

Mundaca talks pas­sion­ately about the design of Wallace’s Host and how well the essay was pre­sented in The Atlantic.

I found this quote par­tic­u­larly affecting:

I always knew we would work on another book together. I didn’t know that he’d be dead when that happened.