Visual Editions

Great Looking Stories

Happy Holidays from Visual Editions

We’re back in the Visual Editions HQ on 5th January 2015. We’ll be sending books out all this week from our warehouse, and we’ll probably also sneak in the occasional email check after this week. So please bear with us if we take a bit longer getting back to you than usual.

Thank you for all your support this year. Happy holidays and here’s to a fantastic new year. Read this.

Tree of Codes "Hurt Shroud": Going Going Gone

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We got a call last week from our American distributors. And they told us they have been storing copies of Tree of Codes in what they call a “hurt shroud”. A place we can only describe as a place where books go when they are slightly damaged before they are pulped. And we asked for these hurt copies to be sent (SAVED!) to our London office before their imminent warehouse death in Jackson, Tennessee. Read this.

Jeremy Leslie On Magazine-ness

We asked the almighty talented “go to designer about anything you ever wanted to know about magazines”, the designer behind our Writers in Residence set of books, Jeremy Leslie, to tell us more about his thinking behind the ambition to design a set of books that live somewhere between a book and a magazine. For the first time in our very short life span we thought you’d want to hear from someone other than us. Read this.

Books Meet Mags Meet Books

From the word go, we’ve been super excited about our Writers in Residence set straddling a third place between book and magazine. These titles they’re big, they’re photographically heavy, they’re full of non-fiction long form writing, they’re timely in subject and they’re all about making us think about the world we live in. So where better than the sticky roof tops of Soho’s Wardour Street News to holler that excitement from? Read this.

Generation X, Sorry about that

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We’re THIS close to sending out and showing off in mass-scale the brilliantly playful and thought provoking third title in our Writers in Residence set: Douglas Coupland’s Kitten Clone. With poptastic photography by Olivia Arthur, Kitten Clone looks inside Alcatel-Lucent. Read this.

Happy Days at Port Eliot Festival

Mud baths, sweaty tents (for us at least), Moro food in cardboard boxes, Fortnum and Mason coffee, The Idler Academy by the river banks, music, cocktails and readings. Read this.

Spreading the Love

Ah air for breathing and eyes for looking. Yes. And damn how we all get so caught up in the everyday. So we’ve been coming back up for air and doing some more looking, and we like what we see. There’s some exciting work from some of the amazing people we work with and we felt the need to spread the love. Read this.

Hey from Hay Festival

We lost our Hay virginity this weekend, decamped for two days to the Welsh town of books and experienced The Hay Festival of Literature for the very first time. And what’s our verdict? Read this.

WiR: Another Great Day at Sea

We are Crazy-Excited to be talking about our latest book: Another Great Day At Sea by category-defining writer Geoff Dyer, the first book in our brand spanking new set of books, Writers in Residence, exploring seemingly closed institutions and opening them up through the eyes of some of the greatest writers and photographers on the planet. Read this.

Where You Are: getting lost at Ace Hotel Shoreditch

We’re still reeling a bit from last Wednesday night’s unveiling of our installation of Where You Are at the Ace Hotel Shoreditch in London. Read this.

VE at Ace Hotel Shoreditch

We are exploding our book of maps, Where You Are, in the new London outpost of Ace Hotel in Shoreditch, working with their great “cultural engineer” (now there’s a fantastic title we would love to have thought of) Vickie Hayward to create a VE/Ace style literary conversation. Read this.

Brewing, Brewing: Writers in Residence

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Whoa. Now there’s something we haven’t shared yet. It’s mega. And now feels a good time. We have a brand new set of books coming out this year. A set, originated by contemporary thinker Alain de Botton. A new set of books that live under the umbrella name Writers in Residence. Read this.

Dear Readers

“A beautiful calamity” is what Tom Uglow said when we told him we had completely sold out of Where You Are over the holidays. Oh. And running out of stock of Tree of Codes and Tristram Shandy All. At. The. Same. Time. One reader emailed us, understandably tired of having to wait 3 weeks for their copy of Where You Are to arrive and said this: “Don’t you care about your readers?!” Oh yes we do. We do we do we do we DO. Read this.

Ding Dong Don

We’ve been blown away by the response to Where You Are: printed book and its open access website. The amazing (and patient) writers, designers and programmers we’ve worked with have made our hearts throb and our brains ache. Read this.

Did You Draw That Yourself?

The last couple weeks have been fantastically Where You Are-ful. We hung out with Tao Lin and his burrowing lunar hamsters with Sheila Heti and her re-imagined every day decision maker I Ching, and Joe Dunthorne and his literary landscape map with Geoff Dyer and his Cheltenham childhood map before black screens sent Geoff into a technological ether. Read this.

www.where-you-are.com

Today is our official tadada day for Where You Are. We’ve talked about the maps in their treasure box, all those lovingly produced paper maps. The book in all it’s epic Chinese production is a few days away from physically landing on shelves in shops and hands at home. And there’s another epic something. Live. Today. www.where-you-are.com. Read this.

Where You Are Live Events: With Geoff + Joe; Sheila + Tao

Our Where You Are live events gives you the chance to hear Geoff Dyer and Joe Dunthorne, and Sheila Heti and Tao Lin tell you all about growing up in Cheltenham, mapping literary landscapes, modernising the I Ching to help find your way when you’re lost, and mapping crazy sci-fi hamsters in 2027. Read this.

First Look Inside Where You Are

For those of you who loved our new look Tristram Shandy, our tactile experience Tree Of Codes, our delightfully disorientating Composition No. 1, our turnable Kapow!, here is a first peek inside our latest and very nearly on our shores Great Looking Story, with 16 very different maps to make sure we all get fantastically lost. Read this.

Where You Are IS ON

It’s our first ever collection of writing. It’s our most ambitious feat to date: bringing together so many different voices and amazing talents, each one responding to and expanding on the concept of what a map can be. Each writer, artist, thinker sending us their very own unique personal map. Read this.

Publishing Next in Goa, India

A week back after a monsoon heavy, hot hot hot weekend in Goa, adding to, prodding and hopefully providing stimulus to a packed two day discussion on the future of publishing through the Indian lens, and my ears, eyes and heart still feel full of the open, warm, most times heated conversations, fuelled by a passion and love for books. Read this.