The Mighty Book of Boosh: Dave Brown’s Graphic Design
So Bollo's a graphic designer!? Back in 2008 that came as something of a surprise to me. Dave Brown, who played the ancient gorilla in The Mighty Boosh television and stage shows, was also a graphic designer and photographer – and he art directed and designed The Mighty Book of Boosh.
Maria and I had loved the first television series. She even bought me the earlier radio series on CD. By the time this book appeared, though, I had rather fallen out of love with the Boosh. Series two had been an immediate disappointment for me and I never even attempted series three. By then it had also become much more of a cult badge to wear, and some of that strange little sense of discovery that had appealed to me at first seemed to have disappeared. The magic had gone for me.
Oddly, perhaps that made the book more interesting as a piece of graphic design than simply another bit of Boosh merchandise.
Published by Canongate in September 2008, the book gave Brown the opportunity to translate the very particular world of the programme into print. He designed and art directed it and contributed much of its photography, but rather than giving everything one consistent house style, he allowed the characters and writing to determine how the pages looked.
Brown later explained that a conventional grid and consistent typography simply wouldn't have suited the variety of the show. The result is closer to a collection of objects, notebooks, photographs, stories and bits of ephemera apparently gathered from inside the Boosh universe than a conventional television tie-in.
These 'books within the book' are still the part I like most. Howard Moon gets things such as his battered Arctic Journal and jazz detective novel A Trumpet Full of Memories, while Vince Noir has his wonderfully unlikely Childhood Tales From The Jungle. Brown doesn't just put a different title on the front; the typography, illustration, ageing and whole visual language change to fit the person supposedly responsible for it.
Much of the Boosh's visual excess still isn't really to my taste. I tend to prefer surrealism when it quietly pushes reality slightly off-centre rather than abandoning it altogether. Perhaps that is exactly why these parody books work so well for me: they begin with something utterly familiar – an old journal or children's storybook – and then allow the character to take over.
It was also good to see the design coming from within the core of the show rather than being handed to a publisher simply to capitalise on its success. Brown worked with other creatives associated with the Boosh too, including illustrator John Chandler, whose illustrations for the Dixon Bainbridge story particularly caught my eye when I originally wrote this post.
That approach runs throughout the book. Alongside the fictional publications are photographs, comic strips, postcards, watercolours, crimps and deliberately battered-looking pieces of graphic ephemera. Canongate's contents include Bollo's letters to Peter Jackson, Bob Fossil's postcards, Ol' Gregg's watercolours and Naboo's guide to black magic. It feels deliberately unruly, but importantly the disorder has been designed.
Brown has since said that they were particularly keen not to make a standard television spin-off annual. The attention given to the smallest details is probably why the book still feels like part of the programme's world rather than simply something carrying its logo.
There's a nice conclusion to something I wrote in 2008 too. I ended the original post wondering what Dave Brown's work away from the Boosh might look like. The book itself helped answer that question: Brown later said that it led directly to further book commissions and design work, while he continued to juggle graphic design and photography with his involvement in the Boosh.
The original hardback was followed in 2009 by The Pocket Book of Boosh, a smaller paperback edition of the same wonderfully overstuffed world.
I still don't love every aspect of the Boosh aesthetic, and I hadn't changed my mind about the later television series by the time this book appeared. But I have considerably more affection for the book as a designed object. Its great success is that it doesn't look as though somebody designed a book about the Mighty Boosh; it looks as though the Mighty Boosh somehow made a book itself.
You can read the contemporary Creative Review preview, or a later interview with Dave Brown about his approach to design.
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