[For one week in July 2009, I took over as a guest blogger at the Electric Velocipede website while editor John Klima was away. This was the third of the four posts I contributed. My prompt was: “Was there ever a book that you bought merely for its design?”]

Having stumbled across a copy in one bookstore or another, I bought the trade paperback edition of House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski entirely for the design. The book comprises something like 700 wonderfully designed pages, including different fonts, different text orientations, spiraling text, different colors of ink, and more than ample use of footnotes. I love flipping through that book and sampling all the different possibilities of the way words can be arranged on a page to evoke meanings that words alone could not achieve. Though I haven't seen it, the hardcover edition is supposed to be even more spectacular, with four colors of ink instead of just two.

I gather that the book, in a macro sort of riff on Nabokov's Pale Fire, is a horror novel extensively footnoted by the manuscript's fictional editor. I say I gather this because, as many times as I've leafed through it, I must admit that I haven't actually read it. This book has been on my shelf for years, but somehow its typographical flashiness has put me off from actually reading it. Maybe it's only big-book syndrome, which has delayed my reading of other doorstops that I keep thinking I'll get to someday (e.g., Infinite Jest, Harlot's Ghost, The Baroque Cycle), but something about House of Leaves has raised a very high barrier to entry for me. I think I'm afraid that the content can't possibly live up to the container.

This is exacerbated by the fact that the book has a companion work, Haunted by Poe, which was one of my favorite albums of 2000. Poe is the stage name of Annie Danielewski. She's Mark Danielewski's sister, and the album was released concurrently with the book. The music on Haunted is based around a series of cassette recordings their deceased father Tad Danielewski (a film director and Brigham Young University professor) had made as audio-letters to his children over the course of their lives. The commercial failure of Haunted seems to have mortally wounded Poe's recording career, but one of these days I'll cue it up, crack open House of Leaves, pour myself a libation, drink a toast to dead things, and start reading.