This book was designed to accompany Miroslaw Balka’s Turbine Hall commission at Tate Modern in 2009. Taking its title from Samuel Beckett’s poetic novel, the design for How It Is responds to Balka’s installation – an enormous steel shipping container, the darkness of whose interior is so absolute that the experience of walking inside the space is disorienting and almost sinister. The book includes texts from Zygmunt Bauman, Paulo Herkenhoff, Julian Heynen and Laszlo Krasznahorkai, as well as photography of the finished project. For the cover design, we visited a letterpress studio to create a typographic design in the spirit of the original cover of Beckett’s novel, using wood type.
We were pleased to be able to seek, and gain, the permission of the estate of Roy Kuhlman, the designer of the original Beckett cover, for our homage for this book.
