The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro (Folio Society, 2007)

The Remains of the Day has been described as Kazuo Ishiguro‘s masterpiece and surely played no small part in his winning the Nobel Prize for literature. It’s a rich novel of many overlapping themes—service, a changing class structure, the search for purpose in life, British fascism, unrequited love—all woven into an elegant prose and wistful but well-paced narration with emotional impact. No wonder it’s held up as an example of literary fiction at its best. The Folio Society published this Book Prize-winning work in 2007 and that’s the edition I’ll be looking at here.

The plain brown slipcase conceals a book elegantly bound in cloth printed with a wraparound design by illustrator Finn Campbell-Notman. The design is further embellished with gold blocking and these gentle gold and brown hues beckon us to the nostalgic world of early post-war England that awaits within. The title and author’s name are blocked on the spine. Overall, I consider this a handsomely designed volume.

Within are brown endpapers enclosing 226 pages of Caxton Wove paper. This is a fairly bright white paper with an ever so slight roughness to its surface. Opacity is good. Printed upon that paper is text set in Bembo. Chapters open with a title page incorporating a typographic flourish. Otherwise, the type design is relatively straightforward. Printing and binding were both handled by the Cambridge University Press.

Somewhat unusually, the book includes no introduction. But we do have seven more illustrations by Finn Campbell-Notman. Each is a full page image worked in what could be described as a comic book style. This may seem like an odd choice for a fairly serious piece of literature on some heavy themes, but the muted colour palette and skillful rendition of the last vestiges of aristocratic domestic life do a good job of bringing the story and it’s era to life. ■

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