Pentagram – Black Book

It’s nine years after the monstrous volume Five, post-dotcom crash, and the 2007 sub-prime home loan crash. Times are dark. Time for an austerity Pentagram: The Black Book.

Printed as a smaller, more modest size it still packs in the work. 800 pages covering 400 projects. In their own words, “arranged in alphabetical order, like a dictionary, and printed on Bible paper, like a Bible, complete with tabbed sections and ribbons for bookmarking.” It’s a beautiful object (indeed, it won a book design award) and was never available to buy, with a few copies given to clients and friends.

It contains a wildly varied selection of work – and even the odd website. Most interesting, for me, is the appearance of the Pentagram GUI - the Sugar UI work for the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project, but I’ll return to that another time.

This book was never available to buy, and is therefore very rare with used copies turning up only occasionally on Amazon or Ebay.