Istvány Örkény’s One Minutes Stories / Bookcover

Istvány Örkény’s One Minutes Stories is a staple of Hungarian humor. Written in 1968, in an age of censoring authors, the sorties length is confined to the limits of Örkény’s time to write while working in a chemical factory. The stories paint a grotesque picture of society and ordinary life. The stories length and humorous tone are the qualities I wanted to highlight on the cover design and on the pages. On the cover I designed a chess board-like structure, built up from small 2×2 linocut icons of the stories, therefore illustrating the quantity of stories in the book. The author’s name and the chapter titles are organised in letter-matrixes and by oddly dividing them up into rows, making the hardly legible, I wanted to make the reader think outside the box, preparing them for the sense of dry wit they’ll need to understand the following anthology.