28/10/2025

The Weary Blues – Langston Hughes

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Langston Hughes’ poetry collection The Weary Blues (1926) marks an important moment in the Harlem Renaissance. This renaissance was a period of cultural and social flourishing among African Americans in New York during the interbellum.
Hughes wrote about the everyday lives of African Americans with humor and pride, without concealing their suffering. The collection blends poetry with the rhythms of blues and jazz, for example through repetition of phrases and the use of overlapping narrative voices.
Hughes led a nomadic life; his travels through Africa, Europe, and America enriched his perspective and gave his poems a universal dimension.

For the design, I carved into the text block to shape the book like a grand piano. Fortunately, none of the text is lost in the process, as the poems have quite generous margins.

For the title, I used bold yet playful typography; the irregularity in thickness reminds me of the rhythms of jazz music.

On the endpapers, you can see the brownstone facades of Harlem. The blue background still shows a painterly texture. In the past, I would have been tempted to smooth out all the layers of paint into a flat color; now I allow the brushstrokes to show through. Jacob Lawrence used a similar approach in his paintings. To me, this gives the work a looser and more dynamic quality compared to the use of purely graphic shapes and clean lines.

✷ Genre: Poetry
✷ Themes: Urban life, nomadic existence, African American history
✷ Recommended? Yes, these poems dance right off the page!