11. ONE9INE
“As a designer, I didn’t want to do anything that would take away from the fetishistic aspect of the robots,” says Warren Corbitt of the book he designed on Japanese robot toys, Super #1 Robot. “These robots are collected as kind of sacred objects. I was thinking about translating that idea into trading cards; each individual page becomes a card for a robot.”

To that end, Corbitt also created an information grid for the edge of each heroic photograph, which oÙers data critical to collectors, such as the toy name, television show, and manufacturer. The book is divided up by year of issue. “The idea of the divider pages was to objectify the year,” explains Corbitt, “and turn it into something that is not pure type.” According to Brett MacFadden, art director at Chronicle, one of the biggest challenges was to create something that would be credible with the core collectors, while also intriguing to others: “The hope of a book like this is that you start out with a very specialized audience, but by presenting it in an interesting way, you expand to noncollectors who appreciate the toys as kind of visual candy.”
Laurel Saville