Ink, paper, décentrement

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I make books and I love books. I didn’t say that I write books and read books. No, I say that I love to fashion paper and ink into softbacks and hardbacks, to discuss new forms of representation for novels, blogs or poems, to set titles and footnotes in different styles. Where does this platonic relationship with books and their publishers come from? How did I end up buying publications that I don’t read, courting printers for a swatch of paper and locking color charts in dark drawers? 

Of course I have always been overly excited about « beautiful » books on display in bookstores and museum shops, but there was definitely a very specific turning point for me and for many graphic designers living in the Netherlands, I suppose. Each year, in the middle of fall, when Amsterdam is wet and cold, the Stedelijk Museum and the Stichting De Best Verzorgde Boeken (The Best Dutch Book Designs Foundation) present « the most beautiful and most inventive publications of the previous year selected by a jury ». Sidelined by the main exhibitions, the presentation takes place in a small room situated somehow at the second and a half floor of the Stedelijk. Each year, I enter it as if I’ve stepped into an abandoned chapel. About thirty books await, lying still but imbued with moving dimensions like the kaleidoscopic stained glass of a cathedral. Next to each volume, a short text shares the considerations of the jury. Beyond my own book collecting economy, it is through the lens of this selection and its collegial report that I keep alive my little religion. Outside, all things change. This perpetual transformation, instability, uncertainty, I try to face with reason and passion. A reason and passion I find in making books, where the forms of things can change into new bodies.

The process of making a book starts and ends with a physical book, a generic term to identify a bound volume of printed paper. Most common binding techniques include the « perfect binding » where individual pages are bound together at the spine using glue, without the use of staples or stitching. But which glue should be used? The choice will dictate the book’s flexibility, production speed and durability. Take hot glue. It refers to solid polymer-based adhesives that are melted at high temperatures. It cools down and hardens in seconds, making it the industry standard for commercial printing. While traditional hot glue can become brittle over time, PUR (Polyurethane Reactive) hot glue offers more flexibility, allowing books to lie flatter. The jury of the Best Dutch Book Designs (2014) noted about Ligne B — a book that I designed: