Completed shortly before John Morgan died in September 2025, Baskerville’s Teardrop Explodes: A Selection of Books as Muses presents his selection of 31 books as Muses. Chosen primarily for their visual appearance and associative value, they are books that have touched him and his work as a book designer in some way or another. Collected together as a Library of Muses, they express all the contradictions and compound sensibilities found in John’s work. The criteria for selection are numerous and variable. Some were chosen for the title alone, or for the colour or materiality of the book, for the feel, the weight, the lightness, the rightness, the wrongness, the modesty, the excess, the charm, the humour, the attitude or bite of a book, the memory it conjures. Each Muse has its own magic and energy. Some bring reverberations of romance, others of fear, anxiety, humour or tragedy. Some are heroic. Some fail in technique or just miss the mark; they are imperfect. Some are chosen as signs, others as votives for direction.
