I have trouble reading long handwritten texts and consequently have never gotten into graphic novels and comic books, so the fact that I read Lauren Redniss's 2007 book Century Girl in a single sitting attests to her abilities both as an artist and a storyteller. Century Girl traces, as the subtitle describes it, "100 years in the life of Doris Eaton Travis, the last living star of the Ziegfeld Follies," through a collage of drawings, clippings and images of Eaton's own ephemera, surrounded by Redniss's handwritten prose. The book left an impression; while 3 years later I can't recount every detail of Eaton's life, I will never forget the wonderfully engrossing visual and visceral experience I had reading it.
So it was with great excitement that I read an article in Vogue about Redniss's latest book Radioactive: Marie & Pierre Curie: A Tale of Love and Fallout, in which she takes on the evolution of nuclear physics through the focal point of the Curies' romance. To meld the medium and content, Redniss used a camera-less photographic technique called a cyanotype to create most of the art (which consequently, as the name of the process suggests, is mostly blue-based) because, she says, "photographic imaging was critical to both the discovery of X-rays and of radioactivity." And as an added bonus, the cover glows in the dark. Unlike Century Girl, her new book is not handwritten, but instead uses a font that is, Redniss writes, "based on the title pages of 18th and 19th Century manuscripts in the New York Public Library's collections [and] named Eusapia LR for the croquet-playing, sexually ravenous Italian Spiritualist medium whose séances the Curies attended. Yup."
I tried to whittle down the images for this post (all courtesy of Redniss's website), but with her work it was hard to pick just a few. In any case, you can find more images from both books at laurenredniss.com as well as her Pulitzer Prize-nominated illustrations for the New York Times Op-Ed page.
Radioactive will be published in December, and can be pre-ordered now. (Family members please note, you can handily find it on my Amazon wish list.)