author of two volumes of ('History of Book', and ), and co-author of the title , explained his experience of working for the collection: "For an author, to write a Découvertes title is to be trapped, to put oneself in a situation of being obliged to go beyond his/her own formulation." The cover design is one of the specificities. The old covers are glossy with black background illustrated in colour, the newer covers are matt-laminated rather than glossy, but more colourful, with different colour codes according to the subject matter. It differs from other reference books by its visual: a full-size picture, with its framing and the power of figurative elements, also a picture well-matched to the inside page layout, with a tiny, relevant picture illustrating the spine. The visual identity is strong, one can even easily recognise the collection's international editions. However, there are some exceptions, for instance, the Barcelonese publisher Ediciones B adopted a completely different cover design for their collection . Each title contains 128–224 pages with approximately 120–220 illustrations printed in four, five, six, or seven colours, both matte and glitter, and sometimes even gold, as in the title , the metallic gold heightens Carl Otto Czeschka's illustrations from . Each book begins with 8–10 full-page illustrations or photographs, prefaced by a pull-quote on the inside front cove, which Thames & Hudson director Jamie Camplin calls it a "cinema-influenced trailer" (designated as pré-générique in French). For the title Champollion : Un scribe pour l'Égypte, this book opens with a succession of reproductions of Champollion's manuscript Grammaire égyptienne; in L'Europe des Celtes (), the reader is greeted by a series of bronze masks and hoary faces carved in stone; the "trailer" for () evokes the tragic launch of the Space Shuttle Challenger in 1986; while that of () presents the Eiffel Tower at every stage of its construction. The novelty lies in the subtle orchestration of the text and the illustration, where successive sequences, inserts and foldouts overlapping in double pages. According to the subject, the body text (designated as in French) is structured into three to eight chapters, consisting of 64 (in the case of the title ) to 128 pages (most of the titles). Each chapter is built using journalistic methods, with a lead paragraph and intertitle. The is punctuated by double-page spreads of images, known as inserts, sort of a halt for pictures. For