Mary Arantes – As Preciosas Coisas Banais
As Preciosas Coisas Banais (loosely translatable to “Precious Trivial Things”) is Mary Arantes’ first book. A compilation of different stories with a poetic approach to everyday life, written in an informal style, as if the author were speaking directly to the reader.
The book is all set in Alegreya Sans, a typeface with features (oldstyle numerals, small caps, italics with the right amount of ‘distinction’) that were useful to translate the author’s style to the typeset environment. The book uses only the lighter weights of the family, whose delicate and humanistic touch resonates well with the author’s writing and also the illustrations’ thin strokes. The titles are set in a way that they use a bigger font-size with a lighter font-weight in order to match the thickness of the stroke between both sizes.
Though most of the stories are quite short, the book has a lot of them. To solve that issue, the book was made with narrow pages to accommodate the text well and with an exposed binding to allow it to fully open despite of its odd ‘page size’ to ‘page number’ ratio.
