I have always been surprised that, as omnipresent as books are, hardly anyone thinks about how they are designed or even comprehends that they are. The more mundane the object (a pencil, a book), the less we think about its design. The more efficiently it works and the more often we use it, the less we think about how it came to be. But the simplest object often has very complicated specifications for making it.
Richard Hendel, On Book Design