Book Design
Morten Hammerborg Bergenseren
Client: Universitetsforlaget
Design and illustration for the academic book Bergenseren (The Bergenser). The book is about the culture and history of the city of Bergen. What is it with the people from Bergen? Can the construction of them be traced in the city’s history? The people of Bergen play a special role. No other Norwegians can insist that they are not really from Norway. No one else worships themselves, their city and its declared difference as the people of Bergen. How did that happen? For many hundreds of years, Bergen was the largest city in Norway. But In 1814, Kristiania became the capital of independent Norway, while the proud Hanseatic city on the west coast became a Norwegian municipality ruled from Oslo. In this book, historian Morten Hammerborg argues that this fall largely explains the Bergen resident’s self-understanding and why its citizens are fundamentally offended.
Scroll down to see more of the project
The endpapers are covered with fish, more specifically cod, swimming eastwards. But with one exception; the monkfish which swims westwards to his beloved Bergen.
The book is typeset in Utopia for two reasons apart from the beauty and legibility of this particularly font; the somewhat utopian attitude of the Bergen community and its origins based on transitional serif typefaces from the city’s heyday.