Books in Glass Cabinets

07 October 2010

If we really wanted to, we could be making our books in super small editions. When I say super small, I mean no more than 100 copies. And if we really wanted to, we could sell them in Printed Matter in New York or BookArt Bookshop in London. Not like we have anything against those kinds of books, or those stores. We think they’re amazing: book art institutions.

The thing is, we think there are plenty of beautiful, handmade, crafted books being lovingly made all over the place. And we know how tough it is to make them, let alone sell them. But we thought it would be interesting (fun even) to make books that have a high level of design and production, dare I say craft, that can also be mass produced.

When we started talking to the printers who could make Jonathan Safran Foer’s entirely die-cut Tree of Codes our first question was “Can you make this book?”. Our next question was “Will you be able to make a lot of it?”

Why?

Well, because we think that beautiful books can be read and appreciated by a lot of people. With people becoming increasingly visually literate, and with visuals being ever more woven into our everyday, it seems a shame (or worse: a waste) to think of anything that is visually rich as something that has to be elitist.

So while we love books that deserve and should feel proud to live behind those glass cabinets, our ultimate dream is to find people on the tube with our books. Because that would mean that people are looking at our books and reading them, too.

That’s the dream anyway.

—Anna

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