Look at the way on the dust jacket the title touches the silhouette at just that one telling point. And how the shadow cast by the letters of the title returns in the space for the bar code. And how the image on the dust jacket is repeated on the cover protected by it. An author whose work is published like this – and in translation, too – can congratulate himself.

In Bericht vanuit het Innerlijk Paul Auster writes about the things that mattered to him in his youth. Turning to the pages of text themselves, there is nothing exciting in terms of their presentation – but that’s the point: this is pure typography, and the essence of pure typography is that it moves in the background and remains inconspicuous.

The text pages are printed on relatively smooth paper. In due course the reason for this becomes apparent: the book ends with an Album of images which bring Auster’s story home to us in a different way. Because they are on the same paper they are not isolated into a photographic section: they become the fourth story in the book, a story in a different form.

One member of the panel felt that on some pages the space between the main text and the footnotes was too narrow. And there you go: put the notes at the bottom of the page in the old-fashioned way for a change, and it’s still not right!