Eye Magazine

John Morgan’s Baskerville’s Teardrop Explodes is an unabashed and unironic love letter to print. Morgan, who died of a brain tumour on 2 September 2025, aged 52, described the books in his library as his ‘muses’ – mystifying objects of admiration and adoration. The texts that accompany each item, set alongside calm spreads and covers photographed by Ed Park, reveal that Morgan did not claim to understand fully such books, that his relationship with them was ‘superficial’.

He loved them unconditionally, in the way only a dedicated book designer could. His awe at these books, his ‘reverie’ in their presence seems visceral, beyond words. Morgan’s introduction describes a typographer’s relationship with contents as both shallow and deep; adjusting the fine details of book typography creates an uncanny intimacy with both writer and words. ‘And yet, for the typographer,’ he writes, ‘there is still a kind of depth as we often go inside the word, between the letters. We can look deep into a teardrop serif just before it explodes.’ …