Crafting the Print Novel: Book Design and Narrative Content in Zachary Thomas Dodson’s Bats of the Republic: An Illuminated Novel

The journey across multimodal novels continues with a stop at Bats of the Republic (Dodson 2015), a text that not only experiments with multimodality but represents a more complete authorial vision in terms of its narrative content, as Zachary Thomas Dodson has both written and designed it. Unbound by dependency on designers and artists to fulfill the rendering of his envisaged print-based text, a regular collaboration in multimodal fiction which comes with its own opportunities and constraints, Dodson approached the printed book as a blank canvas, deploying his combined skillset to craft Bats of the Republic. Dodson’s novel may seem less revolutionary than S. (Abrams and Dorst 2013) as regards its print output, remaining faithful to the typical format of a bound book, for the most part. But the ways in which Dodson wields the instrument of color throughout the text, as a device of structuring narrative content and representing storyworld properties, produce an extraordinary outcome on the page surface.