All that has just gone out the window. Graphic design has become a major priority amongst publishers over the past couple of years, especially where covers and dust jackets are concerned. The literary section in the Saturday edition of Melbourne's broadsheet newspaper got sufficiently excited about the subject last month to run a three-page feature about it. The idea is that if you can be induced to like a book before you've even opened it, then a fair chunk of the hard work is already done. People will want to pick it up in a bookstore to have a closer look, and once it is in their hands then it is only a short walk to the counter to hand over some cash.

And then, if a person is well-disposed toward a book when they begin to read it, then the publisher hopes that the feel-good vibes can be translated into a good overall impression, which will result in the reader telling all of their friends about it, or a review waxing lyrical about what a gem they've stumbled upon. It is an approach which seems to have been lost on a lot of motorsport publishers however, which only serves to make this particular reviewer get more excited when something comes along that has clearly had a lot of sweat spent in putting it together. I told you I was easily bought.

This long-overdue account of Ronnie Peterson's life and career is stunningly presented. Crucially, the appearances are backed up with a superbly-crafted body of text from veteran writer Tipler, but I'll get to that after I finish gushing over how damn good this thing looks.

All books are 'designed', but very few are 'conceptualised'. In this case, the graphic element of the book has been integrated in such a way as to make it an intrinsic part of the whole experience. From the subtle Swedish yellow and blue colour scheme to the gorgeous use of photos, you could go through all 220-plus pages of this book without reading a word and still feel like you'd spent your money well.

But of course if you did that then you would be a fool and people would point at you and laugh, because Tipler has done a cracking job of translating Peterson's life into the written word. The thing about books like this - meaning, biographies of drivers from three decades ago - is that unless you are writing about someone with seemingly endless sales potential like Moss, Fangio or Clark, you are probably only going to get one shot at putting out a comprehensive account of their life. Tipler seems to have recognised this, and seized the opportunity with both hands. Tipler has struck a good balance in his research between dry statistics, race reports, and interview material, and the end result is a book that does the rare job of covering all of those aspects fairly well.

But not only does Tipler handle the regular biographical details more than competently, he also proves that it's possible to do a little bit of investigative work almost 30 years after the fact. The way he handles the circumstances surrounding Peterson's death was particularly intriguing, as was his account of Peterson's time at Lotus. There's probably a case for arguing that the latter is made especially valuable by the fact that many other popular accounts of this period of the team's history have been written by authors whose sympathies seemed to lean a little toward's Peterson's teammate Mario Andretti. Tipler stops short of being a Peterson apologist, but his take of things does balance the historical ledger a little more in the Swede's favour.

By the end of the book, the reader does have some sense of having gotten to know something of Peterson's personality - quite an achievement, given that he was seemingly quite hard to get close to. He was very much a driver of his time - a guy who wasn't exactly a Rhodes scholar, was more or less useless at setting a car up, but had a knack of getting into anything and finding ways to go unspeakably (and spectacularly) fast.

It's interesting to wonder how he'd get along today. On one hand, it's easy to assume that his lack of technical precision would see him eaten alive, but on the other hand I can think of at least one current driver who is widely considered to be World Championship material - and yet team members will privately admit that he too falls some way short of genius, and is also just about the worst test driver they've ever worked with.