The Science Project

Let me introduce Pick Me Up, from everyone's favourite non-fiction publishers; DK. It's a sort of encyclopedia aimed at teenagers. Except it's not a standard encyclopedia. Structurally and visually influenced by commercial and digital culture, one press release memorably described it as a 'shufflepedia'.

The cover appeals to a sense of a book as a desirable design object (or even toy) as much as anything literary. A big, heavy box-shaped hardback, the cover contains a plastic ridged optical illusion, changing its image as you change the angle you view it at (perhaps alluding to the dynamism of a flickering computer window)

Unlike the Eyewitness Guides, which sell themselves on a pretty old fashioned (or timeless) quality, this is expressively 21st century and youth orientated. Pick Me Up has it's own rhetoric of timelessness going on too though, though its historical allusions tend to be a bit more recent that the Enlightenment values of Eyewitness. They balance the digital culture images (such as the one on the cover) with a range of mid-20th imagery (often from commercial culture, interestingly). For example:

References to digital culture are sometimes anachronistically humorous, as with this 'Weblog of a Viking'. Such a device is used widely in Horrible Histories and Horrible Science, but it is noticeable that these books tend to use a 'dairy of a viking' set up instead; the Horribles would never reference anything so contemporary.

The allusions to digital culture come down to a very structural level, as the whole book is organised around a very hypertextual sense of 'the link' (unlike DK's previous attempts at co-opting rhetorics of online knowledge, which didn't seem to understand what links were). Pick Me Up's 'shufflepedia' approach swaps you incongruously from subject to subject , with words in text sometimes in bold (like a html link) which it suggests you look up in the index to find out more. It actually requires a users guide at the start of the book (I'm really not sure this application of digital culture works, but its fascinating to see it attempted):

Very much children's non-fiction as a glossy magazine to flip through. This hypertextual approach reflects the philosophy of knowledge embodied by the book (it starts with the words 'everything is connected') and also adds to the very playful style.

It's really hard to describe this book in something as static as a blog entry. Go 'pick up' a copy and have a a browse in a bookstore. It's a crazy, fascinating approach to non-fiction (though in it's own way, not especially new in any way). I'd would love to hear what anyone has to say about it.