Order Subscription, 31st to 38th issue

Issues 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37 & 38
8 × 20 pages and sometimes more
21 × 29,7 cm, CMYK
Design: Syndicat
2021-2022
Order Subscription, 31st to 38th issue
Issues 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37 & 38
8 × 20 pages and sometimes more
21 × 29,7 cm, CMYK
Design: Syndicat
2021-2022
n°21 — An original: The Most Beautiful Swiss books 2004–2006. Authors: James Langdon, Laurent Benner & Adrian Samson
Interview with Laurent Benner by James Langdon
Photos: Adrian Samson
20 pages, 21 × 29,7 cm, CMYK
25th March 2020
ISBN: 979-10-95991-16-8
ISSN: 2558-2062
Interview with Laurent Benner by James Langdon
Photos: Adrian Samson
20 pages, 21 × 29,7 cm, CMYK
25th March 2020
ISBN: 979-10-95991-16-8
ISSN: 2558-2062
The awards programme The Most Beautiful Swiss Books has been organised almost without interruption by the Swiss Federal Office of Culture since 1943. A book design award with such history, particularly in a book-making culture as rich as Switzerland’s, offers insightful perspectives on Graphic Design for publishing, the culture that commissions and values it, and the critical discourse that surrounds it.
Each year the awarded books are documented in a substantial catalogue, made by one of the graphic designers awarded in previous years. The inherently self-reflexive tendencies of such catalogues—books about books, Graphic Design in the context of Graphic Design—present stimulating yet rather fraught conditions for graphic designers to work in. Looking back over the catalogues produced during the last two decades, a conversation-through-practice is clearly legible. After a conceptually sophisticated catalogue or series (often designers have been commissioned for series of two or three catalogues) follows a simple visual document. After a modest, finely-crafted production comes something more lavish or experimental.
The 2004–2006 catalogues were conceived by Laurent Benner, a Swiss designer working in London, and designed with English designer Jonathan Hares. Laurent’s proposition for the 2004 catalogue was audacious. He contacted the printers of each of the 20 awarded books from that year and asked them to reprint a section of their book. These reprinted sections were then transported to a single Swiss bookbinder and bound, with some additional pages of front- and back-matter, to comprise the catalogue.
16 — A reproduction: what El Lissitzkzy wants. Author: James Langdon
Sold out — Only available with season 2 subscription
Author: James Langdon
12 pages, 21 × 29,7 cm, CMYK
+ 1 A2 poster, CMYK + 1PMS
7th November 2019
ISBN: 979-10-95991-15-1
ISSN: 2558-2062
Sold out — Only available with season 2 subscription
Author: James Langdon
12 pages, 21 × 29,7 cm, CMYK
+ 1 A2 poster, CMYK + 1PMS
7th November 2019
ISBN: 979-10-95991-15-1
ISSN: 2558-2062
I am rarely convinced when I see graphic design that was originally printed in two inks reproduced in four- colour process. Before the advent of commercial colour offset printing, the elementary colours of printing — from Gutenberg to Tschichold — were black and red. In the early twentieth century, black and red were used by graphic designers not to attempt to recreate the spectrum of colours that appear to the human eye, but as graphic forces in themselves. To make a distinction. To create dynamism. To embody ideology on the page. In particular, the combination of black and red on white paper has become synonymous with Suprematism and revolutionary Russian graphic design.
A contemporary imaging workflow can enable extraordinary reproductions of these historical aesthetics. A high- resolution digital photograph of an original black and red printed book from the 1920s can be processed using a colour profile to calibrate its appearance across design, colour correction in computer software, proofing, and printing. This workflow can ultimately achieve a beautiful and precise image of that graphic artefact as it looks today, down to small details of its patination, its discoloration by exposure to sunlight, and the many more other subtleties that define it as an archival object.
But such a reproduction exhibits a strange technical anachronism. What about the constraints that originally shaped the design of that bookk — the implicit connection between the two colours of its graphics and the architecture of the one- or two-colour printing press on which it was printed? Are they not important? Can they even be reproduced?
I compare printed reproductions of the proud black and red cover of the book ‘Die Kunstismen’ (1925), designed by Russian artist and designer El Lissitzky. Published between 1967 and 2017, these images treat the material characteristics of the original book’s colour in different ways, appealing to contradictory notions of fidelity.
n°19 — A history: graphic designer-publishers. Author: Thierry Chancogne
Sold out — Only available with season 2 subscription
Author: Thierry Chancogne
20 pages, 21 × 29,7 cm, CMYK
5th February 2020
ISBN: 979-10-95991-16-8
ISSN: 2558-2062
Sold out — Only available with season 2 subscription
Author: Thierry Chancogne
20 pages, 21 × 29,7 cm, CMYK
5th February 2020
ISBN: 979-10-95991-16-8
ISSN: 2558-2062
In 1275, the kingdom of France ruled on the rights of stationarii (copyists) and librarii (librairies, the French for “bookshop”), newly emancipated from the yoke of the Church (Friedrich Karl von Savigny (author and publisher), Histoire du droit romain au moyen âge, Tome III, Charles Hingray, Paris, 1839 (1815), p. 415). The main question was and has always been, even before the invention of printing, the regulation of the circulation of writing, and the designation of those responsible for their inscription and distribution.
Robin Kinross identified the emergence of the modern figure of the typographer in the 17th century, with The doctrine of handy-works: applied to the art of printing by Joseph Moxon (Robin Kinross, Modern typography: An Essay in Critical History, Hyphen Press, London, 2004 (1992) pp. 15-16). But long before this, graphic artists, copyists, and typographers such as Geoffroy Tory and Henri Estienne the elder were both booksellers and publishers who gave much thought to their practice and the contents that they released into the public space.
It would seem that the time has come to reassess this ancient tradition, with more and more graphic artists and designers choosing to establish their own publishing houses in order to defend their editorial approach in both senses of the word—that of “editing” and the choice and organization of graphic material, but also in the sense of “publishing”, applying a certain ethic to the distribution and advertising of the contents.