Coralie Bickford-Smith

Graphic Designer / United Kingdom / Penguin Books UK

Coralie Bickford-Smith’s Book List

Books surround me. I have piles of them waiting patiently for my attention, some for work, some for pleasure or inspiration. Each book has its own memory of how and why it ended up in my consciousness and what it taught me. My book list contains the favorites that I find in my hands time and again when starting a project or feeling a bit lost.

6 books
Alan Fletcher

A visual feast for the creative mind.

Lewis F. Day

A manual which is perfect for dissecting the fundamental elements of pattern and for learning the rules from the beginning. I return to this book time and again to get to grips with designing patterns from this incredible wealth of technical information.

Karel Martens
WIth Jaap van Triest
With Robin Kinross

A stimulating monograph of Karl Martens’s work, it is beautifully bound and full of visual inspiration.

Michael Twyman
Foreword by Ruari McLean

An overview of 200 years of printing history wonderfully illustrated and categorized. Michael Twyman was my professor, so I remember it being printed at Reading University—it was an exciting event for a wanna-be book designer.

Beryl McAlhone
David Stuart

Perfect for those creative blocks, here is design showing off its sense of humor to its best advantage.

Ruari McLean

McLean is a hero of mine and his books on Victorian book bindings (including his Victorian Book-Bindings in Paper, 1983) have been integral to my research in this area of book history. This title is lusciously illustrated and historically informative.

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