New Work: ‘Life List’

The book trailer for Life List, Olivia Gentile’s new biography of bird enthusiast Phoebe Snetsinger.

What is life? That, ultimately, is the question posed by Life List, journalist Olivia Gentile’s new biography of Phoebe Snetsinger. If the name means nothing to you, you’re not a bird enthusiast: Snetsinger holds the record for birds seen over a lifetime, over 8,500 of the world’s 10,000 species. She began her quest in earnest after she was diagnosed with terminal cancer at the age of 49. Confounding her doctors, she lived for nearly twenty more years before dying in an accident in Madagascar—on a birding expedition, of course.

Pentagram’s website for Life List begins with a book trailer which features the names all 117 of the bird species that Gentile mentions in the book, in order, in less than 45 seconds, starting with the Blackburnian Warbler that got Snetsinger hooked on birding in the first place. (Had we listed all of the birds Phoebe saw in her lifetime at the same pace, it would take 45 minutes.)

Trying to spot the names as they fleetingly appear and disappear has become a typographic version of birdwatching, with some enthusiasts racking up impressive tallies even on initial viewing. To make the game a bit easier, illustrations from the book by Austin, Texas-based artist Rebecca Layton are interspersed with the Bodoni Book.

Project Team: Michael Bierut, partner-in-charge; Katie Barcelona and Daniel Becker, designers. Developer: Michael Barbano.