1915

By Roger McDonald.

University of Queensland Press

The dustjacket designer Christopher McVinish has given the title of this novel an unforgettable identity, with the figure of a soldier superimposed in red on the second one of 1915, which is in black. It is a powerful image that immediately announces the subject of the novel. Most of what follows is disappointing, and apparently not due to McVinish. The muscular Plantin Bold Condensed of the jacket is replaced by a pouting, effeminate display face (I couldn’t identify it) on the title page, and for the chapter titles. With a twenty-one-pica measure, a yawning five-and-a-half-pica back margin and a six-pica fore-edge, the text has been teased out to 426 pages – a big book. It may be good publishing, but it is not good design. The book is sewn in thirty-two page sections, which gives it an air of awkwardness and unease. Apart from the jacket, it is in many ways like an Australian novel of thirty years ago. Nevertheless, and because of the jacket, two picas.