Painting the Medium: Difference between revisions

** Fortunately the 'moon letter' version of the map has been created in the 2004 deluxe edition.

* In some editions of Daniel Handler's book ''Watch Your Mouth'', {{color|brown|the second half of the story is printed in burgundy.}}

* ''[[The Neverending Story (novel)|The Neverending Story]]'' uses two different colors for the two reality levels in the book, or two different typefaces in cheaper printings.

* ''[[House of Leaves]]'' is printed in three colors, although there are some variations between the different [[wikipedia:House of Leaves#Colors|versions]] of the book. Normal text is printed in black, the word "{{color|blue|house}}" appears in blue, and {{color|red|references to mythology}} or <s>{{color|red|struck out passages that are somewhat threatening to the reader}}</s> are in red, with the addition of colored and Braille plates. "{{color|red|Minotaur}}" may or may not be struck out, depending on whether it's used during one of the aforementioned mythology references. In addition, there are a few instances of purple in the book as well, including the phrase "{{color|purple|A Novel}}" on the front cover, the {{color|purple|edition number}}, and one instance of a {{color|purple|struck-out purple phrase}} in Chapter XXI. There are two different typefaces, which are used to represent the contributions of the elderly blind man, Zampano, and the twenty-something slacker, Johnny Truant, with a rare third typeface for "The Editors"—and even the accuracy of the typefaces is called into question. Mirror text is used on occasion; some pages have only a few words sparsely placed, and in odd orientations. A labyrinth is represented by a chapter consisting almost wholly of footnotes which refer to each other in a way that can only be described as labyrinthine. The vote is out on if it's good surrealism or pretentious crap.

** Danielewski also wrote a book called ''The Fifty Year Sword'' in which he uses different colors of quotation marks to indicate different speakers.

* The web novel ''[[Sailor Nothing]]'' is, of course, not content to mess only with [[Deconstruction|genre]] and [[Anachronic Order|storytelling]] conventions. The color and font of headers reflects the mood of a particular section; Chapter 5 is split into four subpages, presented in a random order that changes on refreshing the page, each written in first person from a different character's perspective; Shin's journal entry uses a monospace font; the title for Cobalt's entry is the periodic table cell for cobalt; and Chapter 7 is rendered entirely as an [[Interactive Fiction]] game with sprites, although the author has provided a text-only "walkthrough FAQ" version. Even in the "normal" chapters, the narration switches between first person, third person, diary entries, et cetera. The little divider graphics between sections of a chapter contain one-liners if you squint just right.

* The children's book ''[[The Monster at the End of This Book]]'' has ''[[Sesame Street]]'''s Grover going to greater and greater lengths to keep the reader from turning the page (as he's afraid of the titular monster at the end of the book). He tapes pages together, attempts to nail them down, builds a brick wall, all to no avail. (It's okay, though, as the monster at the end of the book turns out to be {{spoiler|himself}}.)

** ''[[Dinosaur Comics]]'' [https://web.archive.org/web/20090501052254/http://www.qwantz.com/archive/000265.html homaged] this one.

** In ''[[The Demolished Man]]'', telepathic communication is represented by creative typesetting, sentences that can be read up, down, left or right simultaneously, rebuses, fonts and other trickery. Bester seemed very fond of this sort of thing in general.

*** An example: Two of the characters in this book are named @kins (Atkins) and 1/4maine (Quartermaine).

** Another occurs in the short story ''Fondly Fahrenheit'', about a schizophrenic mass murderer and his robot. At times the guy thinks of himself simply as himself, other times he thinks of himself as the robot, and then there's the times he thinks of them both as one person. All of this is accomplished by Bester constantly switching his use of pronouns.

* In the ''Turing Hopper'' series by Donna Andrews, different typefaces are used for third-person narration vs. Turing's first-person commentary.

* Walter Moers does these quite often. To name a few examples:

** In the ''13½ Lives of Captain Bluebear,'' the font changes when the titular character is having an encyclopaedia moment and grows when a giant spider is running after him.

** A similar thing happens in ''Ensel and Grete''. Whenever the [[Literary Agent Hypothesis|Author of the book]] disrupts the flow of the story to digress and talk about what he feels like, the font changes. At some place several pages of the word Brummli are written to terrorize the reader.

* Bram Stoker's ''[[Dracula (novel)|Dracula]]'' is a series of letters between many of the characters. The reader is intended to interpret the novel as [[Epistolary Novel|a bound collection of letters]], and each includes headers with dates and signatures. It's very effective at drawing some readers in, especially since the viewpoints sufficiently show different characters' personalities, but it can also seem disjointed, since it switches around a lot and (usually) looks like normal fonts pretending to be letters.

* In the [[Real Life]] "[http://www.purplehell.com/riddletools/bacon.htm Baconian Cipher]" (not actually a cipher, rather, a steganographic code), developed by Francis Bacon, two different typefaces ('''bold''', ''italic'', {{smallcaps|a different font}}, {{color|blue|a}} {{color|red|different}} {{color|green|font}} {{color|blue|colour}}, etc.) are utilised, one standing for the letter "A" and one standing for B, so that messages can be hidden within the fabric of some plaintext, i.e. literature, be it fictional or not. It has, therefore, been suggested by some that Bacon in fact might have hidden clues to the supposed "fact" he wrote [[Shakespeare]]'s plays by using this ciphe-er, steganographic code.

* In ''[[The Years of Rice and Salt]]'' by Kim Stanley Robinson, the format of the book changes to match the historical era each section is set in. At the beginning, chapters have [[In Which a Trope Is Described|elaborate descriptions]] and the prose is frequently interrupted by poetry. Gradually, the prose becomes more solid, the chapters shorten to just titles, then numbers, and then nothing but a blank spot between them and the next chapter.

 

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