Experimental book design: "1001 Arabian nights"

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Experimental book design,
Arabian Nights

We had to pick a book of choice and design it in a traditional and experimental way. I picked "1001 Arabian nights", a collection of traditional arabian and oriental stories. This is my interpretation for the experimental design of the book.

The main plot revolves around the famous story of the persian king Shahryar who, finding out that his wife had been cheating on him, decides to marry another virgin every night and kill her in the morning. But when he marries his Grand Vizier's daughter, Scheherazade, she manages to occupy him with her stories which she keeps telling from night to night, always cuting them at the most interesting part so that Shahryar keeps her alive to finish the story the next night.

The main inspiration for the design was the "framing system" of the stories: the main character, Scheherazade, narrates a set of tales, but the characters in her tales also tell tales of their own (and so on), creating a complex system of "stories within stories".

I decided to emphasize the frame-story system of the book by choosing different paper formats for each of the "levels" of the story (maximum of three - Scheherzad's story, stories that the characters in her stories tell, and the stories that the characters in their stories tell) and placing the navigation by nights on the margins, over all the layers that they apply to.

But when we read the book, only the number of the current night is visible, as shown on the pictures.

The typography used for this projects was an experimental "Fakir". At first I wanted to use it only for the headings, but it showed surprisingly good for a continuous text as well.