One Day I Will Write About This Place by Binyavanga Wainaina (Granta)
Granta Paperbacks, October 2012.
“A strange, allusive, tender memoir about growing up in middle-class Kenya.” — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Binyavanga Wainaina’s book debut was published by Granta Books in 2011. The cover for the hardback edition (shown below) features modular letterforms, with the individual modules printed in two shades of blue, imperfectly aligned. It’s either lettering or a typeface I don’t recognize. The paperback cover from 2012 (shown above) picks up the modular theme. This time it’s definitely a typeface: LL Cobra was designed by Cornel Windlin and issued by Lineto in 1996. Here it is used exclusively in uppercase. The decorative pattern separating the title from the author’s name is composed from elements of the typeface, too, further emphasizing its modular nature. The typeface used for the blurb is ITC Lubalin Graph.
Wainaina is probably best know for for his satirical essay “How to Write About Africa”. The Kenyan author and gay rights activist passed away in May 2019 at age 48.
Hardback edition by Granta Books, Nov. 2011. The small type is ITC Avant Garde Gothic.
2 Comments on “One Day I Will Write About This Place by Binyavanga Wainaina (Granta)”
A completely revised version of Cornel Windlin’s LL Cobra (1996) was just released by Lineto. This new design was initiated by Samara Keller. It’s now as a lowercase-only design with many alternates and comes in five weights as well as in variable font format.
The lettering (or typeface?) used for the 2011 hardback edition might be inspired by Takenobu Igarashi’s logo for Parco, a chain of shopping centers in Japan.
Here’s the logo as reproduced in Graphis Annual 82|83, edited by Walter Herdeg, The Graphis Press, Zurich, 1982, via Letterform Archive. The A and R (and the details) are different, though.