Collection Brook

Brook is an independent publisher specialising in hybrid forms of contemporary writing, poetry, essays, fiction, critique, and theory. Led by Rosanna Puyol Boralevi, it focuses on translating into French texts engaged with and nourished by feminism and anti-racism.

We have been art directing the collection since 2019. The logo and opening pages of each book are hand-drawn. Each cover, printed on textured paper, features a gradient, a sunrise, as a metaphor for change to come. The inner pages’ layout is simple yet refined, with generous margins for comfortable reading.

Every publication explores French inclusive punctuation. French grammar traditionally follows a rule where the masculine plural prevails for mixed groups (even if mostly female) rendering women linguistically invisible. The inclusive dot (·) is commonly used as a more equitable sign to denote both male and female versions of a word.

We explore this dot as a space for power and better representation. In Jill Johnston’s book, we replaced it with a “lesbian splash”, an expression used by Clare Croft to describe Johnston as disrupting and hacking the public space given to her. It also refers to a text where she describes making a literal splash by swimming topless in the pool at her book release party. We turned the dot into an asterisk — a “queer sparkle”, as Sam Bourcier calls it — to overcome the male-female duality and also represent non-binary gender. For Muñoz’s Cruising Utopia, we worked with Roxanne Maillet (Bye Bye Binary) to produce a series of inclusive sparkles.