Full book design, typesetting, and production for a collected volume of essays by architect-essayist Dariush Sarem. Bilingual Latin and Persian, printed in two editions.
The Quiet Garden collects fifteen years of Dariush Sarem's writing on the Persian garden — not as a heritage subject, but as a living way of thinking about light, water, and enclosure. The manuscript arrived in two languages that had never shared a page, and the central design problem was how to make them coexist without one becoming a translation footnote of the other.
We built a single twelve-column grid that holds Latin and Persian on facing columns, with a shared baseline and a shared hierarchy. The Persian body is set 8% larger than its optical Latin counterpart to balance the weight of nastaliq against a humanist serif. The margin is generous — almost a third of the page — so the reader's eye has somewhere to rest.
"The margin is where the garden is. The text is just the path through it."
The book is printed on a slightly warm uncoated stock at 100 gsm, sewn in eight-page signatures and bound in a cloth-wrapped cover with a blind-debossed title. The endsheets are a single deep oxidised green — a colour that does not appear anywhere else in the book, so that opening it is always a small event.
The first edition of 2,000 copies sold through in four months. A second, enlarged edition shipped in spring 2024 with an added portfolio of Sarem's own sketches.
