Crania

by Adalber Salas Hernández, translation by Robin Myers. 2023.

Formally, the book is meant to be perceived as a medical guide or as a small encyclopedia. It comes inside a gauze sleeve and is wrapped like an envelope, similar to when medications are prescribed in the U.S. We wanted to evoke the rawness of the texts in the binding details—the sewing and the thread, the exposed spine with printed signatures—and in the typographic selection: Public Sans, a geometric sans, and Labrada, a serif by Omnibus Type. One might think that there’s a fixed relationship between language and typographic style, but as the book evolves, these lines blur.

The cover of the book speaks to our failure as a society founded on colonialism: “In May 1864, a member of the Dakota people was shot to death in the Minnesota countryside. His body was dragged into the center of a nearby settlement. He was pummeled by its inhabitants, who had congregated for the occasion.”

“This is a book-museum with an exhibition about the cranial vault (…) It would be accurate to define Crania as a conceptual map that is at the same time the display of several diagrams / sculptures / performances, in which narrative and documentary aspects are sometimes accentuated (…) That variety makes the book bold and noteworthy, in the Letra Muerta editorial tradition.”