When you think how many books are published every year in the UK (typically somewhere between 180,000 and 200,000, according to the people keeping score) it’s remarkable how little they vary in terms of physical format. Front cover? Check. Back cover? Check. Pages sandwiched in between? Check. That’ll do – next! Clearly there’s an element of “if it ain’t broke” at play here, yet given the sameness of most books, attempts at innovation, however modest, are surely to be celebrated.

Over the years I’ve always kept half an eye out for books which try to do things a little differently. One of my favourites is Feathers & Lime, a collection of contemporary German poems translated into English by the Scottish poet Ken Cockburn. Rather than releasing them as a conventional slim volume, the publishers, Caseroom Press, instead created a six-foot long paper concertina, which folds up between two elegant grey cardboard covers. Experiments in typography have always fascinated me too. Fifteen years after I first read it, I still take Steven Hall’s novel The Raw Shark Texts down from the shelf every now and then and marvel at the way it mixes the conventional text format of a novel with snippets of concrete poetry and even, at one point, a flipbook-within-a-novel, with the images made up entirely of text.

Meanwhile, another corner of the publishing universe that has been very much on my radar in recent years is the so-called Dark Mountain Project – launched in 2009 by the award-winning novelist Paul Kingsnorth among others, and conceived as “a network of writers, artists and thinkers who have stopped believing the stories our civilisation tells itself.” Their manifesto called for a new kind of writing – “Uncivilised Writing” – which the Dark Mountaineers defined as “writing which attempts to stand outside the human bubble and see us as we are: highly evolved apes with an array of talents and abilities which we are unleashing without sufficient thought, control, compassion or intelligence."

Tarawa, capital of the Republic of Kiribati and one of the many islands featured in Sea Change by Christine Gerhardt PIC: Torsten Blackwood / AFP via Getty Images

There’s nothing in the Dark Mountain Manifesto that calls for this new kind of writing to be housed in a new kind of book. However, this month sees the publication of two books which are both written from an "uncivilised" point of view, and which also offer novel ideas about what a book can be, and what it can do.

The first, Sea Change: An Atlas of Islands in a Rising Ocean, is by Christina Gerhardt, Associate Professor of Environmental Humanities at the University of Hawaii. In her introduction, Gerhardt explains that the book is an attempt to “provide a glimpse of the islands and nations whose histories, cultures and languages, flora and fauna are at risk of being lost” due to rising sea levels caused by climate change. Her approach is impressively multifaceted. On the one hand, each entry on each threatened island is rigorously scientific – maps, diagrams and statistics are there in abundance, and at times her descriptions of the islands’ physical and human geography read with the kind of careful, studied precision that wouldn’t look out of place in the CIA Factbook. Yet alongside all this, Gerhardt also offers poems from the communities and cultures under threat, as well as images of works of art and historical artefacts: a stick chart from the Republic of the Marshall Islands, for example – not a physical map, as such, but an aid to remembering important seafaring information as passed on via the oral tradition. At one point, brilliantly, she uses three transparent map pages overlaid one on top of the other to show how Deal Island off the coast of Maryland looks now, and how it is projected to shrink by 2050 and 2100. The same trick is repeated on the cover, using a transparent dust jacket. The overall result is a detailed and visually impactful inventory of all that we stand to lose as the world’s low-lying islands slowly vanish beneath the waves, which somehow manages to be very businesslike and very moving all at the same time.

Also published this month is The Language of Trees, by the artist Katie Holten – an expanded edition of her 2016 book About Trees. “The climate emergency demands that we learn the language of trees and speak on their behalf” she writes – a sentiment with which the Dark Mountaineers would surely agree. In this case, however, the innovation comes in terms of the typography. The book is a collection of essays, poems and more by an array of scientists, writers and artists, concerning everything from the biology of trees to their cultural significance. Holten has created a “tree alphabet”, with a pictogram of an apple tree standing for “a”, a beech tree standing for “b” and so on, and beside each piece of writing there is a facing translation using these sylvan symbols. Does this add to your understanding of the texts? Not really. But does it help you make the mental leap required in order to “stand outside the human bubble”? Very much so.

Sea Change: An Atlas of Islands in a Rising Ocean, by Christina Gerhardt, University of California Press, £20. The Language of Trees, by Katie Holten, Elliott & Thompson, £16.99.

Book reviews: Sea Change, by Christina Gerhardt | The Language of Trees, by Katie Holten