Visual Editions News

See You On the Other Side

2015-12-16T15:47:00+00:00

See You On the Other Side

2015 has been our year of collaborations: from Tree of Codes being made into a wholly new thing in the shape of a contemporary ballet by Wayne McGregor; to our just-wrapped-up Bedtime Stories at Ace with Ace Hotel in London and LA, where we commissioned London and LA based authors to write bedtime stories for grownups for Ace’s in-room radios; to working with Google Creative Labs in Sydney on setting up a digital bookshop for books that cannot be printed, sold on Google Play (called Editions At Play, naturally), which we can’t wait to bring to you in January 2016 when it launches with books by Joe Dunthorne and Sam Riviere, and Reif Larsen.

Until then, you can still grab our very own Don Quixote, re-imagined with photographs alongside the original Ormsby translation, designed by Fraser Muggeridge with hand-lettering by Jon Gray, published to celebrate this notoriously dense, bonkers, completely ridiculous multi-layered story, with an introduction by Ali Smith as icing on the cake. We love it and feel like it’s always been part of our book shelves. We think it might be our biggest spine.

As a general helpful hint to all your postage needs (because we have spent an unusually large amount of time with Royal Mail this week), the last Christmas post for the US was yesterday (sorry guys), last post for Europe is today (oops), and the last post for anywhere in the wide isles of UK is 21st December (loads of time).

Happy Holidays. See you bright eye and bushy tailed in 2016 on the other side. And thank you.

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Our Don Quixote is Here

2015-12-02T17:08:00+00:00

Our Don Quixote is Here

While our re-imagining of Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy was about breathing life back into one of the earliest examples of visual book experimentation, our edition of Marc Saporta’s Composition No. 1, a book of loose pages, was about showing the continued relevance of non linear storytelling, our re-imagining of Cervantes’ Don Quixote aims to celebrate this famously bonkers, completely ridiculous multi-layered story while getting visually lost in La Mancha along the way.

It’s been a long journey. That’s for sure. We’ve been to La Mancha and back with photographer Jacob Robinson, we’ve lost ourselves in 936 pages of lush design with Fraser Muggeridge Studio and seen again through Ali Smith’s great introduction “in which Ali Smith attempts to write an introduction to Don Quixote without actually reading it” that here is a classic that will push on and inspire new interpretations forever.

So here is ours. It already feels part of our Visual Editions family. And we hope it will become part of yours too. Cervantes fans, visual fans, and just lovers of beautiful objects.

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PS We’re wrapping every book in one of Jacob Robinson’s photographs. Send us your pics pics pics please when you get your copy. Or share wherever you like to do that sort of thing. We’d love to see and hear what you think.

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Pre-order your Don Quixote. Now.

2015-11-05T16:03:00+00:00

Pre-order your Don Quixote. Now.

What with photographer Jacob Robinson trailing around La Mancha, Ali Smith introducing the book but not having read it, Jon Gray hand lettering away the perfect D and Q, Fraser Muggeridge and his team designing a Don Quixote font and typesetting the book based on the original Ormsby translation covering a whopping 936 colourful pages. 936.

Ridiculous and very long and completely overly ambitious, and only made possible with the help of our Kickstarter supporters (thank you all of you), and heaps of patience (thank you universe).

We have been in this Don Quixote fog for too long to have retained any real perspective and believe us when we tell you that absolutely nothing has gone to plan. But here is proof, literally and symbolically, that this bonkers beauty of a classic with our visual re-imagining is finally seeing the light of day.

Books are being delivered to our warehouse in three weeks, which means plenty of time to get them wrapped and ready and quite perfect, we think, for the holidays.

We’ve given it all so much heart and love and mean it when we say we hope you’ll love it too.

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Writers in Residence: A Short Film

2015-10-13T11:04:00+00:00

Writers in Residence: A Short Film

The books - by the very great Geoff Dyer, Douglas Coupland and Liaquat Ahamed - take us into and behind places, because, as the series’s creator Alain de Botton puts it, "There are many places in the modern world that we do not understand, because we cannot get inside them.”

Writers in Residence takes us inside.

Have a peek, check out the series, pick up your wrapped set and get inside while they’re still in stock.

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PS. Oh and we couldn’t resist letting the film take you inside our studio too. Fans, wool covered branches, grubby walls and all.

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Landed: Editions At Play

2015-09-08T11:08:00+00:00

Landed: Editions At Play

And while a part of us would love to say “scroll there!" and “press that” and “do this” or “hang on, you missed that.” But then we wouldn’t be sending it out into the world would we. So try it out, have a play, tell us what you think, sign up for October launch if you like what you see*.

Oh, and no it won’t work beautifully on every single device.

It’s the internet after all. And some people are sitting at their desks as they read this, while others might be reading while walking.

We will tell you that it was designed and built to work on your mobile phone. Because we love the idea of unprintable books that you can hold in your hand.

But tell us if it doesn’t work on whatever device you’re on, so that we’ll know more about what works and what doesn’t and so that we keep doing our maddest to make it a very delightfully unprintable reading experience.

Google Creative Lab, Sydney do you hear us, Universal Everything in Sheffield too: thank you for making this with us.

We think it’s completely amazing.

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*We’re crossing every bone in our bodies that you will.

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Bedtime Stories in Downtown LA

2015-08-20T13:48:00+00:00

Bedtime Stories in Downtown LA

Following the London launch in Shoreditch’s twilight hours a few months back, our Bedtime Stories with Ace Hotel launched its West Coast stories in gorgeous sunset from the rooftop of Downtown LA.

Authors Aimee Bender, Brian DeLeeuw and Jessica Garrison did fantastic one-off live readings of their Bedtime Stories now broadcasting bedside from in-room radios, and Skylight Books - normally serving readers’ needs in the historic Los Angeles neighbourhoods of Hollywood, Los Feliz, Silver Lake, Echo Park, and Downtown - hosted, with a brilliant Bedtime Stories pop-up bookstore.

Judging from the photographs, well what can we say, oh wow, we so damn wish we’d been there alongside parents, friends, supporters, listeners and gorgeous readers :)

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Tree of Codes: The Ballet

2015-07-10T10:27:00+00:00

Tree of Codes: The Ballet

Making Jonathan Safran Foer’s vision a reality four years ago, with the help of the incredibly talented Sara De Bondt, not to mention the only printers in the world who would do it, Die Keure in Belgium, and Jon Gray’s cover design, has been a big emotional part of Visual Editions: a benchmark for how far we, through the collective creative power of ambition and can-do-ness, can push the boundaries of how we read and what a book as an object can be.

Being witness to that collective vision and creativity inspire a whole new wave, a new lease of life, in a entirely new art form feels, well, it feels pretty mind blowing.

We’ve been getting so many wonderful emails from people saying they’ve just seen the ballet and would love to read the book, to which we can only say that we would love you to read it too but the intricate nature and uniquely complicated production of this book means it is frequently out of stock, as it is right now. We’re working on getting it back in stock soon, to tie in with the production going on tour to NYC, Miami, Chicago, Copenhagen, Paris, and London between now and 2017.

And until then, hold on to your copies if you do have them. Hold on to your nerves if you don’t. Buy a beautiful original limited edition poster, signed by Jonathan, here, which is from the very first print run of the book. And watch this space for more book news.

And go see the ballet. It’s a very great thing.

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In Bed with Ace: London Launch

2015-06-18T12:27:00+00:00

In Bed with Ace: London Launch

The menu of cocktails were flowing (and we’re pretty sure they got stronger throughout the night thanks to Bulliet). And the launch seemed hands down much ruder than what we usually get up to on a Monday night, thanks not just to the fantastic readings and their writers and the lethal cocktails but also to everyone for coming and listening and talking and laughing.

The London stories are part of our Bedtime Stories at Ace Hotel collaboration, where we’ve invited six authors local to both LA and London to write bedtime stories. Los Angeles writers Brian DeLeeuw, Aimee Bender and Jessica Garrison are reading their stories live in the Downtown LA Ace Hotel later this month, after which all six stories will be woven together with soundscapes by Seattle-based musician Thomas Meluch (aka Benoit Pioulard), and broadcast on a dedicated Bedtime Stories radio channel at Ace Hotels from 1st July. Boom.

The incredibly talented design team Julia developed the whole concept and the design too, and you can still catch their big lush walls of writers’ quotes in the Ace Hotel Shoreditch lobby now, and in Downtown LA soon.

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Bedtime Stories on Ace Hotel Radios

2015-05-20T12:02:00+00:00

Bedtime Stories on Ace Hotel Radios

From raunchy escapades to claustrophobic fantasies to a story about a dog, Bedtime Stories will be recorded in Ace Hotel bedrooms and live on a dedicated Ace Hotel in-room radio from 1 July.

With bedtime stories by London writers Will Self, Joanna Walsh and Zoe Pilger, and LA writers Brian DeLeeuw, Aimee Bender and Jessica Garrison, along with design by the very talented Julia, we’re bringing together local writers to their London and LA hotels and guests with the brief to explore (explode and maybe even exploit) bedtime stories.

OK, now all you Londoners, come join us for a one and only live reading of their London Bedtime Stories: Zoe Pilger, Will Self and Joanna Walsh on 1st June at 7pm, in the Ace Hotel London lobby. Look out for the bed. RSVP to Ace. We’ll see you there. And watch this sunny spot for more on LA’s one and only live reading.

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Cyclone Sydney

2015-05-01T09:27:00+00:00

Cyclone Sydney

We really do mean it when we say the team (headed up by the very wonderful Tom Uglow) are passionate, committed, super smart and amazingly humble and we’re all feeling very excited (and a little nervous too) about this great new Editions at Play space we’re building together.

Matt Pyke and his Universal Everything shared their idea for Editions at Play’s identity, which we all loved. And between meeting Basil the receptionist parrot, talking brain hurting technological possibilities and constraints and sharing early concept (we’re calling these 0.5 prototypes) ideas with authors, it all felt slightly out of body and ambitious and really very very fun.

We posted this blog before we left, and reading back on it now we can see just how much the idea and scope has already moved on. We’ll fill you in on what we mean exactly before long (first we have more to figure out). Go on, have a read, in case you missed it the first time round or even another read if you still have no idea what we’re on about.

We thought we would share with you a few glimmers of our week there — including Britt’s Bear Grylls’ capturing a cockroach highlight — while we keep developing Editions at Play ideas over here and get ready to share those with you as soon as we possibly can.

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Editions at Play

2015-04-17T10:06:00+00:00

Editions at Play

Here’s the low down. Editions at Play is the brainchild of Visual Editions and Google’s Creative Lab. There will be a sprawling Library of Possibilities and the books we make will be distributed by Google Play Books. We’re aiming for (at least some of it) to launch later this year, in the Autumn.

The idea behind it is to create a place to showcase, celebrate, and bring out digital books that are immersive and were written and developed with the idea of being digital. A place that makes the most of technology, that pushes the reading experience, that you can read wherever you are. A place that is, hopefully, absolutely pioneering and innovative. Phewey.

In our minds, rather than trying to work within the usual e-book constraints, which plenty of people and places already do, Editions at Play will have a URL that transports readers to a digital location or even into the real world (well why not?), or chase you across the internet; we imagine digital literature that has no beginning or no end, or landscapes that can travel in any direction or have any number of characters, plots, side plots and inventions. We like the idea of books that mutate or disappear, that change depending on readers’ circumstance or location, or books that let you uncover material through different kinds of challenges.

There are many many ways we can explore the vessel, and the context of reading without damaging the integrity of the reading experience. In fact, we hope, we believe, quite the contrary.

How long will the books be? How will the writing influence the technology and how might that work the other way around? The thing is we don’t know yet. What we do know is that Editions at Play demands a different approach than everything to do with how we approach the making of physical books.

We have a great mix of authors on board with projects ranging from a story that changes, a story that takes sides, a story within a story and a story that builds the future.

And you can see some of Universal Everything’s early visuals to give you a tantalising taster for how it’s probably going to look. Oh and so much more. Can’t wait to show and share more. Once we know more. Soon.

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PS It’s about time too we make active our inactive Instagram account, and we thought when better than next week when we’re in Australia working with the Google team.

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Don Quixote: Here We Go!

2015-02-27T15:35:00+00:00

Don Quixote: Here We Go!

This means that the Arts Council grant in combination with the amazingly generous support from our Kickstarters (making it possible to send photographer Jacob Robinson to follow in Don Quixote’s footsteps in La Mancha) helps to get the book’s full making under way now. We’ve hit the year running and set the publication date of September 22 2015.

The aim for our re-imagined Don Quixote has always been to create a different experience of the book and to use photography and design as a new entry point into this beast of a classic. And yesterday was our first picture selection day, getting together all of Jacob’s photographs, getting them printed cheaply on nasty glossy photo paper and plastering them onto our walls. Here for the first time, we could see the selection as a whole set, off screen and in print and began the gruelling editing and selection process. Working with themes that appear in the book and grouping them thematically. Making sure there are plenty of “landscape shots” and “night time scenes” and no doubt plenty of “castles” and “windmills” too.

Fraser Muggeridge, who is designing the book, joined us a little later on in the day, and together we went from 175 pictures to 60 that we love on their own, that work as a collection and that are true to the spirit of Don Quixote, faithful to our ambition of capturing the epic landscape, the fantasy laden layers of the prose and the classic La Mancha journey throughout contemporary Spain.

It looks and feels incredibly exciting. We can’t wait to show and share more with you over the next few months. We hope you like it too.

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We're Having a Sale!

2015-01-13T17:38:00+00:00

We're Having a Sale!

So get in there, get those sweet goodies wrapped in candy bag stripes for a change.

You know what they say: offer available while stock lasts subject to change etc.

Happy 2015. Now get in there before we sell out or change our minds.

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Happy Holidays from Visual Editions

2014-12-15T12:31:00+00:00

Happy Holidays from Visual Editions

3-in-1: Toast Those Kittens

Douglas Coupland wrote about the plumbers of the internet in Kitten Clone with photography by Olivia Arthur, Geoff Dyer wrote about the biggest aircraft carrier in the world above and below deck with Chris Steel-Perkins’ photographs, and Liaquat Ahamed wrote about missions and Chanel suits that make up the IMF in Money and Tough Love. We called the Writers in Residence series a third space between a book and a magazine, single subject photo heavy and long form at a time when we’re not. It comes beautifully wrapped as a set of three, each book designed by Jeremy Leslie, the magazine lover’s magazine designer. Go get a set. We love them. And so will you.

Close to Extinction: Get Lost in Maps

Our production bonanza that was the totally unique book box of maps, Where You Are, designed to make you feel completely lost, is very nearly out of stock. Launched a year ago, 16 writers, thinkers and artists each gave their own vision of what a map can be. A curated box, designed by the illustrious Bibliotheque. We have less than 20 books left, and then we have no more, so here is your chance.

Tree of Codes: To the Rescue
Tree of Codes copies came and went in a blur last week with copies from the dramatic sounding Hurt Shroud discovered in Tennessee, and shared amongst waiting listers and patient fans. All the copies have now gone, but with the book featuring as a contemporary ballet in the Manchester International Festival next year, watch this space for its return and [email protected]">get your names down here for more copies being produced in 2015.

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.

With much love
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PS A very warm and heartfelt thank you to the super talented Rosa Nussbaum for our festive dingbats this year and for showering her desk in icing sugar.

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Tree of Codes "Hurt Shroud": Going Going Gone

2014-11-28T14:08:00+00:00

Tree of Codes "Hurt Shroud": Going Going Gone

We’ve meticulously been through each and every copy this week. Some, not all, were still in fantastic condition. And not hurt or ready for pulping at all. Others were well and truly halfway to the other side.

So we emailed those of you who have been waiting patiently for your pre-ordered copy since January (January!). And we emailed all you waiting list-ers who wanted to be told as soon as we got more copies back in stock and offered all of you a chance to get your hands on a rescued copy on a first come first served basis.

And over night, our inboxes exploded, with every single Hurt Shroud Rescued Copy in their various stages of health from first editions, to perfect, to a little bit worse for wear (the beyond repair and production misfits will get their own show one day) and all but 5 have gone. In less than 24 hours. Unbelievable.

The thing is, we spend a lot of time talking about the power of the book as a physical object and the possibilities of exploring new platforms. And seeing the continued love and support for this wonder of a book full of holes, amongst you existing fans who just keep on and keep on, and you new fans or even through new art platforms like the recently announced Contemporary Ballet adaptation by choreographer Wayne McGregor, with visual concept by Olafur Eliasson and music by Jamie XX in next’s year’s Manchester International Festival. That is what this is all about. Mind blowing writing with surprising, disruptive form. Appreciated by you.

So keep the love flowing. It makes everything possible. We’ll be looking for some serious funding to get a new batch of Tree of Codes back into production in time for Manchester International Festival July 2015. Because, quite frankly, we would be crazy not to.

Meanwhile, we have only FIVE first editions available. We’re offering them as a gift set: one limited edition book, with one medium sized poster signed by Jonathan Safran Foer. Get it while you can. It’s only £100 a whole lot cheaper than first editions on sale through Amazon.

And thank you.

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Jeremy Leslie On Magazine-ness

2014-10-09T11:18:00+00:00

Jeremy Leslie On Magazine-ness

Much of what I do revolves around the common theme ‘what is a magazine?’ It’s a question I often deal with in passing on the magCulture blog, since so many of my favourite magazines regularly test standard definitions of what we call a “magazine”. The question earned an entire chapter in my book The Modern Magazine and continues to exercise people when I talk at events.

One way of defining magazine-ness is to look at the magazine in the context of other forms of publications. Where does a magazine sit in relation to newspaper and book? Right now it appears newspapers are morphing closer and closer to magazines, another subject for another day, but the relationship between magazines and books is far more intriguing.

Many of today’s independent magazines test the line between magazine and book, both in volume of content and appearance. If the weekly celebrity mag occupies one end of a spectrum of visual cacophony, the quarterly/biannual independent magazine sits at the very opposite end. Calm, graphically sophisticated and generous in their use of space, these magazines can be mistaken for books. Some even reach for made-up words to emphasise their bookish-ness. So we find ‘bookazine’ and ‘mook’ being applied to print publications wanting to acknowledge their debt to both forms. These words are fake. Make your mind up!

All of this was on my mind when I sat down with Anna and Britt over a year ago to discuss a new series of publications that were to apply a magazine sensibility to the book. If the prospect of working with great writing and photography was exciting enough, playing around with the crossover between magazines and book for Visual Editions even more so.

During development we moved up and down the magazine-ness scale, the page size, paper stock and cover design all being informed by the desire for crossover. Inside, the approach to the words and images sought the same, the photography being given a larger role than merely illustrating the texts and magazine-like page furniture being applied where possible.

The result is a series of publications that I hope speak for themselves. Magazine design has informed each edition of the Writers in Residence series to varying degrees, but in the end they are books. Not bookazines, mooks, or even magazines. Books.

Jeremy

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Books Meet Mags Meet Books

2014-09-19T13:29:00+00:00

Books Meet Mags Meet Books

It’s, as we see it, one of the best news agent around. And we’ve filled one their windows, below the Creative Review awning with the three Writers in Residence titles, and said to hell with conventions, this is about trying out new forms of writing, new ways of peaking and new ways of talking about Douglas Coupland flying into town for next week’s official publication date of his funny, on the ball writing matched up with Olivia Arthur eye-opening photography on the home of internet as we know it.

Kitten Clone, inside Alcatel-Lucent is here. And it’s time to toast those Kittens.

Happy weekend news reading.

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Generation X, Sorry about that

2014-09-12T13:32:00+00:00

Generation X, Sorry about that

Alcatel is the home of the Internet as we know it, best captured by Coupland in last week’s FT Magazine mega-spread: “Where did the future of the future go? It went thataway…”.

Each book in our Writers in Residence set marries literary giants with world class Magnum photographers, and together they go to otherwise very closed, very big places. The series is about peaking behind doors and looking in. We’ve been let inside aircraft carrier USS George HW Bush with Another Great Day At Sea by Geoff Dyer in May and the IMF with Money and Tough Love in July, and now inside the home of the Internet.

Writers in Residence as a series is about looking, knowing, and thinking. It’s also about collapsing boundaries between long form journalism and non-fiction, finding a third way between a book and magazine to reveal stories and places as they’ve never been seen before.

And Kitten Clone with Coupland’s famously cultural barometer language (“Is there anything in our culture quite so deserving of scorn as recently outmoded technology?”), coupled with Arthurs’s jaw droppingly insightful photographs, does just that.

Go get it. We love it. And hope you will too.

You can buy it here. And in the best bookstores across the globe. And if you’re in London we have a treat in place for you with Douglas Coupland at LRB Bookshop and RSA both on the 23rd September, Whitechapel Gallery on the 27th September, and the complete Writers in Residence set spread out in all its glory in Soho’s Wardour Street Newsagent windows from the 18th-24th.

Kitten Clone. Out 24th September 2014.

Bang.

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Happy Days at Port Eliot Festival

2014-07-29T15:47:00+00:00

Happy Days at Port Eliot Festival

Readings by Adam Thirlwell and Joe Dunthorne rustling maps from Where You Are on the Five Dials stage like a garden party re-imagining of our Ace Hotel event thoughtfully guided by the delightful Lauren Elkin.

What a treat. Thank you for asking us to come along and for letting us sticker the audience with mini maps (biggest thanks to our kids in tow).

And thanks too to the weather Gods for shining happy summer nights and hot days on this messy crew of first time Port Eliot festival goers. We’re pretty sure we’ll come again. We kinda miss it already.

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Spreading the Love

2014-07-10T10:44:00+00:00

Spreading the Love

There’s The Workers and their After Dark robots prize winning project for Tate Britain, with robots literally roaming the gallery for everyone to see. After dark.

And Jonathan Safran Foer’s stories on paper cups for food chain Chipotle, together with other writers, because “wouldn’t it be cool to just put some interesting stuff on [cups]. Get high quality writers of different kinds creating texts of different kinds that you just give to customers as a service”.

Universal Everything created what they called Infinity Room, an immersive experience for Microsoft, exploring the power of big data through data analysis tools, in collaboration with journalist Simon Rogers and Roundhouse (Portland).

Douglas Coupland has just opened the first major exhibition of his work as an artist in Vancouver Art Gallery, called in vintage Coupland style, ‘everywhere is anywhere is anything is everything’.

And then there’s this tweet by Joe Dunthorne which had us in stitches, shorthand biography in tone and self depreciation alone, it goes like this:

me: citric acid please
pharmacist: what’s it for?
me: elderflower cordial
her: oh ok. some people use it to make crack
me: now i feel boring

Beautiful stuff.

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Hey from Hay Festival

2014-06-02T16:05:00+00:00

Hey from Hay Festival

If the fresh air and green rolling hills bring lifted heads and rosy apple cheeks to human-kind, then Hay brings a light glow, a fresh bounce and a glint of romance to the world of books. Here is a truly optimistic, utopian world where everyone is brought together by their love of books, their love of reading and a shared love of wanting to be enveloped in a world of storytelling.

From music to beer to burgers to polite queues of Welly-clad people proudly sharing their muddy footprints to get into their chosen tents of chosen talks (and gently clashing in opinion on stage and outside afterwards); from Chris Evans to Kate Fox to Alex Bellos to Siri Hustvedt to Horatio Clare to Jamie Byng and co’s Letters Live and not forgetting Benedict Cumberbatch; from our very own Geoff Dyer making audiences crack up with stories of him trying to score steroids from the gym instructor onboard the USS George Bush; to London’s Groucho Club relocating in pop-up fashion inside the Hay Castle complete with their head-host in his customary red suit, from Richard Booth’s grandest wood panelled bookshop, to the Honest ’browse, grab, put money in the box" Bookstore.

In the words of one of the locals: “Mud, we do that well in Hay”. Yes you do, and a lot more than mud. Getting people, en masse, to take a few days out of their cities and towns and creating a space for everything about, inside, and around the world of books.

What an apple cheeked glow. Thank you Hay.

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WiR: Another Great Day at Sea

2014-05-02T12:39:00+00:00

WiR: Another Great Day at Sea

Another Great Day at Sea chronicles Geoff Dyer’s experiences, with humour, ticks (Geoff is the second tallest person on the ship), and everyday tender human stories, on the largest aircraft carrier in the world, the USS George H.W. Bush, complete with sometimes surprising, full-colour photography by award-winning Magnum photographer Chris Steele-Perkins.

The idea for the Writers in Residence set was originated by Alain de Botton, who came to us about a year ago with the idea of bringing the series to life in a way that truly celebrated the marriage between the long form journalism writings of literary giants with photo journalism as captured by great Magnum photographers.

We’ve been working like crazy cows ever since, together with magCulture’s Jeremy Leslie, on finding a new space for long form content and space-requiring photographs, in a way that heroes each book as well as the set as a whole. What we’ve ended up with (and are really excited by) is a third space, something that lives between book and magazine, making sure each title is to be read, to be looked at, to be kept and to be collected.

Another Great Day At Sea, the launch title, published 27th May, with first peek pics here.

We’ll make sure we get an early bird offer in before then, maybe even a subscription deal as, hot on the heels of Geoff Dyer, we’ll have Liaquat Ahamed and Eli Reed’s Money and Tough Love: On Tour With The IMF in July. And then Douglas Coupland and Olivia Arthur’s Kitten Clone: Inside Alcatel in September. Oh yes.

Each book in the set is being printed by the mighty Taylor Brothers in Bristol, our first and belated chance to work with and champion a UK based printer.

So there, go look inside. We hope you’ll love what you find.

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PS Photographs by the as ever talented Andrew Corrigan with Chris Mosey.

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Where You Are: getting lost at Ace Hotel Shoreditch

2014-04-07T11:16:00+00:00

Where You Are: getting lost at Ace Hotel Shoreditch

The Joe Dunthorne / Adam Thirlwell / Stuart Hammond chemistry, the wallpaper, the place, the crowd.

We wallpapered the walls of their Lobby Bar with pages from the book, and kicked off the month-long exhibition with readings by Where You Are map makers author and poet Joe Dunthorne and novelist Adam Thirlwell in very funny conversation with Dazed’s Stuart Hammond.

From crumbled diagrams of writing productivity, to the importance (or not) of journeying outside your everyday, to the merit of drawing vs writing maps, and the “other map in Where You Are I wished I’d done” game, it was an evening of constant microphone grabbing, map folding, insights, thoughts, jokes, love-ins and first class swearing.

We loved every bit of it.

Thank you beautiful people for coming and making it all it could be.

And of course to team Ace for providing such a gorgeous home for our maps, free reign on the walls, and cold beers too.

If you missed it, go have a peak at those book pages, up all over the Ace Lobby Bar walls till the end of April.

Here’s to the next one.

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PS photographs by Sophia Spring and wallpaper designed by our brilliant design intern Kathryn Evans-Prosser.

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VE at Ace Hotel Shoreditch

2014-03-20T12:27:00+00:00

VE at Ace Hotel Shoreditch

Dazed’s Stuart Hammond in conversation with local London residents and map makers author and poet Joe Dunthorne and novelist Adam Thirlwell.

Making for a live Great Looking Story, hopefully, full of insight and energy. And there’s always the rooms upstairs for later, or who knows, our next literary conversation. Now THAT would be something.

It’s all happening on Wednesday 2nd April, with doors and drinks at 18.30 and readings and conversation at 19.00 at Ace Hotel London. [email protected]">Email us if you fancy joining, just so we can manage numbers a bit. Or if you can’t make it then, come see the literary explosion throughout April.

We’d love to see you there.

A + B

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Brewing, Brewing: Writers in Residence

2014-02-25T17:12:00+00:00

Brewing, Brewing: Writers in Residence

The big idea behind Writers in Residence is this: each book marries together literary giants (like Geoff Dyer and Douglas Coupland) with world class Magnum photographers and together they go to otherwise very closed, very big places. It’s all about peaking behind doors and looking in. Seeing somewhere like the United Nations or the IMF in a way that it’s never been seen before.

Non-fiction, yes, but not purely. Long form writing but not reportage. Photographic documentation but not in a linear way. Current, yes, but also timeless.

We’re playing with the idea of magazines looking and feeling a lot more like books (think: The Gentlewoman or Monocle), and maybe even, books learning from magazines. And we thought who better to design each Writers in Residence title, looking at ways to collapse book and magazine boundaries than Mr. Magazine himself, the almighty Jeremy Leslie of magCulture.

Before we tell or show you anymore, we thought we’d share a sneak into Jeremy’s world with you, all in keeping with the set’s ambition of looking in and going behind the scenes.

We’ll be sure to show more over the next few weeks. For now, we’ll leave you with this, as Alain said to us in one of our early conversations, “there are many places in the modern world that we do not understand because we cannot get inside them”. Soon we’ll come pretty close.

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Dear Readers

2014-01-28T16:01:00+00:00

Dear Readers

You readers are the reason we publish books at all. You readers are the very lifeblood of our business. You are Visual Editions because without you we would be nothing but an exercise in making books as cultural objects. A) we’re not interested in the idea of publishing as an exercise and B) we’re not rich enough to even if we wanted to.

But beautiful calamity holiday season it was, and we’re sorry if you had to wait longer than you had hoped or if your copy got lost in the post. Rest assured, post December calm is here, at least in terms of the postal services, and more books have arrived from China (we visited our distributor’s warehouse this morning and the boxes have arrived, Where You Are is back in stock, and any late orders or replacement books to lost orders are going out as we write). Shandy and Tree of Codes are still in the printing pipeline.

Thank you all for your good natured patience, waiting for your lovingly printed, folded, stitched, wrapped books. We’ll keep improving as long as you keep caring. And try as we might, we doubt we’ll ever totally know how to avoid calamities, especially the beautiful ones.

Happy 2014 to you all and thank you for your support and (sometimes extra) patience.

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Ding Dong Don

2013-12-19T15:12:00+00:00

Ding Dong Don

And readers buying, playing, emailing and calling have put such smiles on our faces. We’ve sold out completely (with more on the way) and www.where-you-are.com has had 55,000 visits in just 4 weeks. Wow. More books en route and hitting UK stores again on 25th January. Feels glorious.

Meanwhile, we’ve been working closely with magCulture’s legendary Jeremy Leslie and some eye popping amazing writers and photographers on a new series of books we’ll be announcing in the new year.

And we’ve been singing Ding Dong for Don, our new Jacob Robinson adventure: photographer travelling around La Mancha in a camper van #CapturingDonQuixote under the design direction of Fraser Muggeridge for the epic new Visual Editions production of Don Quixote, out later next year.

Jacob, Fraser, and film assistant Remy’s Spanish caper was made possible through successful and exhilarating Kickstarter funding, and we thought how better to show our gratitude than to pair the cold London skies with the warm Autumnal La Mancha ones and share the very first behind the scene pictures of Jacob capturing Don Quixote in all its epic fantasy. Did we mention Bob on his bike who believes he is the “real” Don Quixote? More on that to come.

We’re shutting down for the holidays. With much eating, sleeping, slumming. Our warehouse will still be posting out your orders up until 23rd December and then again on the 2nd January. And we’ll be back up and running at Visual Editions HQ from 6th January.

Until then, love and happy wishes all round for another caper of a year full of twists, turns and many a Great Looking Story.

With love and very merry holidays to all.

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PS With a big thank you to Fraser for sharing his La Mancha iPhone pics with us. And now you.

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Did You Draw That Yourself?

2013-11-29T10:44:00+00:00

Did You Draw That Yourself?

Yes, our first venture into the world of double-act Google Hangouts with authors, viewers, and us - via New York, Toronto, London - to talk about our latest book of maps Where You Are, was a fitting mashup of hanging out and hanging up, personal readings and map pointing, Twitter questions and unexpected answers.

Sheila and Tao chose to read each others’ maps and Joe read from and got lost folding out his. Joe admitted to telling lies, especially around everyday fine dining instead of the suffering artist’s cheap and simple meals. Sheila explained how she consulting the I Ching about whether she should even do the I Ching, and used Google Translate to make sure she pronounced Tao’s hamster character “Ryokan” just right. And while we’re on hamsters, Tao told us that hamsters have always been easy for him to draw, “even when they’re happy or sad”.

Two Google Hangouts with very nearly two double acts (Geoff really was there in spirit), talking about and reading from wildly different and personal maps, that will no doubt leave you feeling completely lost.

It was fun. Watch this space for more around Where You Are. We’re scheming already.

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PS. Answer: Yes, Joe and Tao draw their maps themselves. And Sheila had talented illustrator Ted Mineo as her trusted I Ching partner.

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www.where-you-are.com

2013-11-14T12:56:00+00:00

www.where-you-are.com

Designed by The Workers, www.where-you-are.com pushes the reading experience online, gives each map its own screen based life. Staying true to Bibliotheque’s design vision for the printed book, both are interactive in different ways, with the website as a sociable-dynamic-playful screen twin to the intimate palms-itching-to-dig-in paper one.

www.where-you-are.com plays with our data, shows us how many readers are viewing, mapping the digital journey of how you got there and who else is reading the maps while you are.

With 16 maps treated individually: some pan like Google maps, some play with the text, others lay contemporary satellite maps over the top of historic ones. All the while making these maps on screen scrollable, infinite, playful and most definitely making sure you stay lost.

A big thank you to The Workers for shifting our comfort zones. To Bibliotheque for curating such beautiful design vision. To our friends at Google’s Creative Labs who helped make it happen. And of course to all the writers, artists, thinkers without whom this beautifully crafted treasure trove and open access website wouldn’t exist.

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

2013-11-08T12:15:00+00:00

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

It’s our very first venture into the world of Google Hangouts. We’ll be hearing from Geoff in Miami, Joe will join us in the office, Sheila from Toronto and Tao in Manhattan.

Nov 14th at 4pm GMT/ 11am EST with Geoff Dyer and Joe Dunthorne
Nov 19th at 4pm GMT/ 11am EST with Sheila Heti and Tao Lin

Join us if you can. Should be fun. And watch out for more mapped out live events too.

We’d love you to get lost with it all.

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PS You can still pre-order your copies through us.

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First Look Inside Where You Are

2013-10-24T14:28:00+00:00

First Look Inside Where You Are

When you open up, start to unpack these maps, they feel sprawling, tactile, textured, some might even say slightly insane.

So. What. Is. inside?

Chloe Aridjis — Map of a Lost Soul
A short story tracing the footsteps of a lost soul in Mexico City.

Lila Azam Zanganeh — A Map of Six Impossible Things
A fantastical mapping of all things impossible.

Alain de Botton — On the Pleasure of Maps
A historical precis of maps: from the Garden of Eden to Marco Polo.

James Bridle — You Are Here
Cultural, technological and visual mapping of global positioning systems.

Joe Dunthorne — Ghost Pots
Mapping the mess of every writing day.

Geoff Dyer — The Boy Out of Cheltenham
Mapping growing up in Cheltenham: from taking drugs to first jobs and having sex.

Olafur Eliasson — Subtle Nows
Visual and poetic meditations on space.

Sheila Heti/Ted Mineo — How to be Good When You’re Lost
Finding different ways to make hard everyday choices.

Tao Lin — The Lunar Hamsters of 8G-932
It’s 2027 and a group of scientists are rushed to see a network of hamsters working on the moon.

Valeria Luiselli — Swings of Harlem
A map of daily trips to playgrounds around Harlem, with reflections on what it means to be a mother.

Leanne Shapton — Tablescapes
Paintings of objects or “desk still lifes” on her tabletop at the end of every day.

John Simpson —Nature’s Valley
A trip to South Africa as a reminder that GPS’s recommended route isn’t necessarily the “best” one.

Adam Thirlwell — Places I’ve Nearly Been To But Have Not
All the places he would liked to have been to, but hasn’t.

Peter Turchi — Roads Not Taken
Life as a series of What Ifs. What if this had happened. What if that had happened.

Will Wiles — My Atlases
A love letter to the nearly hundred year old Nelson Hand-Atlas.

Denis Wood — The Paper Route Empire
Mapping the joint memories of a group of boys’ newspaper route trails.

Gorgeous, bespoke wrapping paper and warehouse guys are at the ready. Pre-order button for impatient souls just on.

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Where You Are IS ON

2013-10-17T10:55:00+00:00

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.

Made with the support from our friends at Google’s Creative Lab, it reads beautifully. And, designed by Bibliothèque, it looks it too.

Advanced copies from China are nearly at our shores, we’ve just switched on our pre-order button, and the accompanying open access website designed and developed by The Workers will be live in time for our November launch date.

As Will Gompertz put it so well in his introduction to the book: “Its contents delight the mind, it’s composition the senses. Losing myself has been a pleasure.”

We hope you’ll all lose yourselves in the best possible way too. Now, what would your map be?

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PS. Beautiful photographs all by the hugely talented Chris Mosey

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Publishing Next in Goa, India

2013-10-07T08:50:00+00:00

Publishing Next in Goa, India

As the third largest market in the world for English language books, the Indian publishing industry has been a saviour to many publishing houses in the UK and the US over the last few years, whilst itself remaining an industry in a stage of flux, still finding itself on the cusp of validating and defining itself, still not recognised as a ‘proper industry’ by the Indian government.

As flux and cusps go, filled with a deeply enterprising spirit, one where building new models is second nature — all deeply inspiring.

Questions like, how do you create your own distribution and find smarter ways to bring books to where people actually are? You get shelf space for your titles in every grocery and home shop in your neighbourhood. Or, how do you overcome the focus on English language and nurture the publication of local languages? You start thinking about apps and eBooks as a way to allow smaller markets to flourish rather than a singular unifying reach for the mass. How do you make yourself a greater force to be reckoned with? Simple, you collaborate to make the few feel like the many.

At times, the weekend held all the contradictions and paradoxes of India, I’ve always loved and never stop to be amazed by, under one conference roof. With panel debates sparking conversations around the need for energy vs strategy, chance vs intent, on books having their own “kundalini” vs the industry needing more government legitimacy.

There’s a need to build a distinctive Indian publishing industry for sure, with an established infrastructure for books to reach readers, a healthy balance between English and local languages, and a recognised support structure for publishers who work so hard and care so much.

There’s also a need for the rest of us to look to India and remind ourselves of the benefits of looking sideways, being creative and open in the broadest sense, and not to undermine what it means to work through communities and not in isolation.

As with all my other trips to India, I came back from Goa, feeling inspired, feeling as though my narrow lens had been stretched and probably more than anything, a yearning to go back.

A big thank you to The British Council for inviting us to be part of the travelling delegation. And to Publishing Next for creating a space and opportunity to meet and talk to such wonderful people. To Leonard, Praba, Bibin, Mamta, Anil, Anusha and so many others, you all pushed me outside my London bubble and made us all think about what it means to be a real self starter, how far can-do can-get, and the always talked about but not often enough truly applied sense of community, reaching inside and outside industries and across to achieve what we hope for all the while celebrating wonderful books and getting closer to our readers.

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Be Part of the Journey: Capturing Don Quixote

2013-09-13T11:19:00+00:00

Be Part of the Journey: Capturing Don Quixote

We’re publishing it in Spring 2014. And we’re excited.

Be part of the journey.

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Publishing Bitches

2013-08-16T11:59:00+00:00

Publishing Bitches

The whole film made us giggle, it made us feel warm inside and it also made us think, Hell Yeah! Publishing bitches is just what we love and just what we need more of. You know, we’re thinking, the kind of publishing bitches than can be brilliant, smart, bitchy, courageous and vulnerable too.

So we’re heading to the beach for a couple weeks while publishing bitch Kathryn and our team of intern bitches hold the VE London fort.

We need to rest us bitches, dance in the street and find some more courage.

Happy rest of August all you bitches.

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16 Writers x 16 Maps

2013-08-06T09:42:00+00:00

16 Writers x 16 Maps

Damn it Bibliothèque, you were right about those colours.

That was one helluva arm wrestle and we can admit we’re happy you won it. ;-)

16 writers, artists, thinkers x 16 personal maps = 1 mammoth Where You Are.

Coming soon.

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Our Printer Says: "I Have Good News and Bad News"

2013-07-11T11:38:00+00:00

Our Printer Says: "I Have Good News and Bad News"

The good news: our book of 16 individual maps with all their intricate hand-folding can actually be produced (and at an affordable cost). The bad news: the hand-folding department have had a workload melt down and production will be delayed by one month.

Hmmmmm. Not sure if that’s worse than finding out that UK boy band One Direction are bringing out a book and tour in time for the holidays called, yep you guessed it, Where We Are.

Now, we don’t claim to be in any celebrity level league, nor are we talking to the same audience (although B is a closet boy band pop fan), but we’d be damned upset to see any Google searches for our map book ending up lost in a dark hole on page 20 of a Google Search, or quizzically looked at as “One Direction? I didn’t think that was visual writing”.

We’ve had a NASA crisis-panic moment (a polite way of saying “Shit!”) but we’ve got two solutions: a new pub date, 14 November 2013, and a title tweak from Where We Are to Where You Are. We always said it’s all about YOU. And if you lovely lot couldn’t find our next book, then there’d be no we, now would there.

YOU YOU YOU #whereyouare out 14th November, it’s looking good, we’re feeling scared, as it should be, NASA crisis mode and all.

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VE Does Don Quixote

2013-07-05T13:55:00+00:00

VE Does Don Quixote

Don Quixote is that classic. Wonderfully bonkers, truly innovative and still very much culturally relevant. A classic we want to champion for its progressive meta-story narrative and celebrate as a contemporary cultural object.

Widely said to have been the first European modern novel, influenced more contemporary writers than any other novel, re-imagined as a graphic novel, a brilliantly failed film, rumoured to be attempted as another film, published in numerous editions, and with its very own Spanish Institute of Culture named in honour of its author, Cervantes.

(No pressure then. But at least we wouldn’t be the first to fail.)

So we thought who better to design it with colourful playfulness than the award winning Fraser Muggeridge, who’s planning on sending recent RCA graduate Jake Robinson to La Mancha to metaphorically trace and visually interpret the journey of Don Quixote in an epic (and most likely comic) way.

Juan Blas Delgado Ramos, Head of Cultural Activities at Cervantes Institute has given us his “this is a worthy project” blessing and opened up the Institute’s Archive. And Jake is planning his journey with a mate and a camper van, on the look out for large scale La Mancha romanticism in the everyday, quite possibly with the odd non-cliched windmill thrown in.

It’s a huge book. In more ways than one. And we’re crazily excited about it. Will be sure to share Jake’s journey with you when that happens. And can’t wait to bringing the book in its epic and re-imagined guise out next Spring.

A + B

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Mason Wells Mapping Geoff Dyer

2013-06-07T13:26:00+00:00

Mason Wells Mapping Geoff Dyer

Geoff Dyer popped by Bibliotheque’s studio this morning to make sure his Cheltenham was mapped from memory in the right kind of way, finding just the right kind of mix between precise and ambiguous. And even said to Mason at one point: “You’re geeking out on me now”. Which we liked a lot. Looks like the Google Map team in California are helping out with Geoff’s satellite images and no doubt will help with the geeking out too.

So we’ve still got another 15 maps to geek out on and then, before we know it, the summer will be here and Where We Are will be in full scale print production.

Making Mason breathe out a sigh of relief and, hopefully, landing on shores soon, giving us all a new, thoughtful and playful look at what maps can be.

A + B

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TedX Talk: Re-inventing the Book

2013-05-17T12:52:00+00:00

TedX Talk: Re-inventing the Book

And if we’re honest about the whole experience, the best part without a doubt has been having a reason (an excuse really) to look, dig around and gather our favourite visual and contextual stimuli around the idea of what a book can be. And then be able to bring it all to life and meet and speak with the students and TEDx team at Farnham.

There’s some amazing stuff happening, a wonderful flurry of activity (publishers exploring, writers inventing, designers innovating), so we thought we would share some of what we found, some of the stuff that makes us feel like we’re not the only crazy ones out there.

We think that’s a good thing.

Enjoy.

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Credits for Stimuli Here:

The Real Cookbook, published by Gerstenberg Publishing
Alicia Martin
Black Box by Jennifer Egan, published on Twitter by The New Yorker
Atlas by Alida Rosie Sayer
McSweeney’s Issue 36
Building Stories by Chris Ware, published by Pantheon

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Prize Winning

2013-04-26T13:32:00+00:00

Prize Winning

“Didn’t that turn out amazing” we say, and we tweet away, and we make stickers to share Adam’s accolades on the book. All because we want as many people to know about it as possible.

And for just a second, we forget the collective Adam/ Studio Frith/Visual Editions journey (sometimes bumpy). That journey of trying to be as innovative with great writing and great design as possible, while staying true to our belief of making Great Looking Stories. And a collective amnesia sets in, forgetting the “Oh fuck” “What if” “NO. Not there” “Shouldn’t we instead” “Don’t like” “Don’t understand” “Think I actually hate it” “Sweat” “Tears” “Why can’t we!!?” that was all such a part of that journey. (All of that came from us, by the way).

But that’s kind of the cycle, we’ve realised. Making all the hard work and collective soul-searching come together and end up looking easy, happily collecting prizes with smiles all round, in the end.

Well done Adam. Well done Studio Frith. See, that was easy.

A+B

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Are You Changing the World, Mama?

2013-03-28T16:04:00+00:00

Are You Changing the World, Mama?

And it got us thinking: can you change the world by publishing books? Can you change the world by helping to produce and spread: great literature, culturally relevant writing, crafted and considered design and ground-breaking innovation?

We get it. Making books, even if that means re-inventing the book, doesn’t change the world in the way that say, the Morph folding wheelchair by Vitamins Design does. A wheelchair that folds and allows for greater user independence and accessibility. Wow.

But, the fact that our fourth book, Kapow! by Adam Thirlwell, designed by Studio Frith has been nominated alongside The Morph as part of The Design Museum’s Designs of the Year makes us proud.

“Sweetheart, we’re working on how we can change the world,” was the honest-ish answer.

The more honest answer is this: We’re trying our damnedest to produce beautifully designed cultural objects that are keepable not throw away, objects that have a culturally relevant point of view (which, for Kapow!’, is writing about and showing the dizzying Arab Spring) and while that might impact differently to the Morph wheelchair, it impacts nonetheless.

So we’ll keep working on the world changing ambitions, but for now, we’ll take The Design Museum’s word for it: “Intelligent, challenging and fun. And great looking too.”

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PS To help spread the fun and challenging, we’re offering a special Design of the Year Kapow! price of £10, while stocks last.

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Push, Shift, Shake: Bookshops as Experience

2013-03-08T14:19:00+00:00

Push, Shift, Shake: Bookshops as Experience

So we’ve been watching and thinking about how books can be accessed and experienced in public spaces in different ways, how and where physical books can live and what kinds of reading environments we’re opening ourselves up to.

There’s the British bookstore as institution, Foyles, who seem to be exploring the future of the bookstore experience and what that can contain apart from books, with their forthcoming shift into their new space in Central St Martin’s old one, building stories around the books as much as a new place for the books themselves (plans for a Hemingway Bar one of our faves so far).

And on a more intimate scale, there’s the Izu Book Cafe designed as part of a couple’s house on the outskirts of Tokyo, which is shifting the old idea of what would have been a local bookstore run with passion into an open private designer house with a gorgeous add-on of books and cafe and tea nattering neighbours.

Thinking the sky’s the limit, the Book Mountain library in the Netherlands, soon to be seen as part of the Design Museum’s Designs of the year, have been pushing physical book environments boundaries to the max by opening the library’s insides up to the sky through a glass covered pyramid of bookshelves from recycled plastic bags now stocking over 50,000 books. You literally climb the shelves around the building to borrow and read.

And then, of course there’s the library with no physical books at all: the proposed public library in San Antonio, Texas, questioning if libraries need books as objects at all.

So whether it’s about shifting the idea of a bookstore to a space as experience or bringing a local bookshop into the home open for the public or building structures around bookshelves or doing away with physical books altogether it looks like it’s all shifting, changing and hopefully adding some kind of value to our lives along the way. Exciting.

Push, shift, shake. Yep. More, more, more.

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Mapping Out

2013-02-08T12:45:00+00:00

Mapping Out

The book looks at everything we map. It’s about planting the flag at the crossing over point, looking at how maps are shifting from being about geography to something that’s more like life-mapping. And how, it seems, that our lives are increasingly being guided by stories and information that behave a lot like maps.

And it’s all a bit of a mash-up. It’s about maps and it’s also about stories; it has words, and also pictures; it is an edited physical anthology and will also be a digitally collaborative one. It’s probably a HUGE mess, in the way that life is a huge mess.

We’re calling it Where You Are. And our hope is that it will leave you feeling entirely lost.

So who’s in the book?

Chloe Aridjis
Lila Azam Zanganeh
James Bridle
Alain de Botton
Joe Dunthorne
Geoff Dyer
Olafur Eliasson
Sheila Heti
Tao Lin
Valeria Luiselli
Ted Mineo
Leanne Shapton
John Simpson
Craig Taylor
Adam Thirlwell
Peter Turchi
Will Wiles
Denis Wood

And how will it read? What will it look like?

Let’s just say the release date for the physical book is set for November and right now, we’re in early editorial shaping and design phases with the talented Bibliothèque and The Workers. And how will it all hang together? Well, that’s still a bit of a blur. Fitting really, for a book that will most likely get you entirely lost.

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Museum Moment

2013-01-31T15:22:00+00:00

Museum Moment

We’d be totally lying if we said we weren’t proud of our books being admired by, and included as part of, a curated world of ideas and objects.

So it’s damn nice to get a letter from the Art Institute Chicago confirming that our first four books are now part of their permanent collection. And to find Kapow! by Adam Thirlwell, designed by Studio Frith, on the list of nominations for the Design Museum’s Designs of the Year 2013. Not to mention seeing Tree of Codes and Tristram Shandy in LA’s Hammer Museum as part of their travelling Graphic Design: Now In Production show.

At least they’re in glass cabinets to be viewed by the many. So we’re sitting back enjoying our books having their moment.

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Knocking Down Walled Gardens?

2013-01-15T16:02:00+00:00

Knocking Down Walled Gardens?

Kicking up a lot of that frustration is the fact that we’re in the final iPad app development phase for Seonaid MacKay’s Thump and we’re feeling uneasy about the walled Google playing field we’re not serving (at least not for now). And being forced, through financially controlled markets, to pitch our selling stall (are you Android or Apple?), as opposed to simply producing the best looking screen story we can and let it be available for everyone.

Yeah yeah, we know we can release the Android version once we’ve finished our iPad version (we can’t afford to do both simultaneously, we’re not that big and while world domination is on the agenda, it takes a while to achieve). But come on, in the old retail world it’s the shopping experience and all those add-ons that call for the biggest difference, not a whole range of uniquely tailored products.

So call us naive if you want (it won’t be the first time), but are we being made to feel forced to choose one experience over the other? Surely readers should have both.

Okay. So Thump is coming soon to the App Store. And then soon again to Google Play (when we can afford it).

Here’s to an anarchic new year, one full of breaking down or climbing over plenty of walled gardens.

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PS If you fancy reading more, from people more clever than us, check out what @bbhlabs and @tomux had to say as part of their SxSW 2012 talk, Battle for the Future all about open and anarchic vs closed and controlled digital environments.

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Wrapping up 2012

2012-12-19T14:23:00+00:00

Wrapping up 2012

This year (our second, whoop whoop), we sent Kapow! into the world, had a party in a Soho sex shop, shifted Thump from paper to screen, planned a map to get you completely lost, and grew our own Førest.

Next year, we’ve got Thump and Where We Are coming to fruition, plus loads more stuff we either still don’t quite know how to talk about or can’t yet share. You can be damn sure we will as soon as possible, and we can’t wait to see what you make of it all.

Our warehouse team are closed from 21st December to 2nd Jan. And we’ll be pretty shut down then too. Although throw us a note at [email protected]">[email protected] if there’s a panic or query, we will keep an eye there in-between eating and sleeping.

Thanks for this year. Wishing every one of you super happy holidays, and here’s to a wonderful 2013 for all.

A + B

P.S. Our latest lovely dingbats made by the talented boys from The Entente. Thank you!

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VE at Forest

2012-12-13T15:41:00+00:00

VE at Forest

VE at Førest marks our second store partnership: finding different ways of bringing our books to life in physical spaces and teasing people to look sideways as they pass the shop windows in their December rush.

Our partnership last year with Vitsœ was all about exploding pages onto Dieter Ram’s 1960s shelves, quite literally. And this year it’s all about unwrapping the fruits of the Scandinavian mid-century home.

And being in a store called Førest, we felt the need to grow our own, with just a tiny bit of fluorescent thrown in (clearly the 1980s beckon). And we even got a forest inspired short story sent to us by one of our readers (Robert Whitfield) who joined us in some glögg toasting. Thank you.

VE at Førest is open until the end of the month, and if you’re in London, go on, pop in, meet the amazing Eva, see our branches grown by the fantastically talented Sabrina Lee Hammon, and smell the sweet fruit of book giving where the forest fairies never bite.

Keep warm everyone

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PS All warm and glowy photographs by the brilliant Andrew Corrigan

VE at Førest
115 Clerkenwell Rd
London EC1R 5BY

Opening times: Mon-Fri : 11-7; Sat: 12-5

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Where We Are

2012-12-07T16:12:00+00:00

Where We Are

Where We Are looks at everything that we map. How we don’t just map from a to b, but we map ourselves, we map our days, our thoughts, memories, what we want to mark, save and share. Because today it seems, that most of the time, despite all this mapping, we actually don’t really have a clear sense of where we are.

We have a brilliantly talented mix of writers and thinkers and artists involved. 18 to be precise. And the ink is just about to dry on those 18 contracts. As soon as it does, we’ll be sure to share all those names with you.

Speaking of talent, the brilliant boys at Bibliotheque are busy thinking how the hell we make the book feel beautifully whole, and The Workers are thinking about how we best make the printed work a brilliant screen-based one, too.

So that’s where we are with Where We Are. It’ll be out in 6-9 months time. Now what time is it, and where were we going?

A + B
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Deadline Tears

2012-11-16T10:12:00+00:00

Deadline Tears

Truth be told, we love the adrenaline of that hourglass panic and the feeling of very nearly falling off the cliff. Unhealthy? Likely.

But the thing is, it’s also just then, at that falling off, deadline tears point, when some of the best creative thinking and execution actually happens. It’s that last bit of magic, Jonah Lehrer writes about it his book Imagine and it’s also something we talked about at our talk for Typo London, and keep coming back to when we talk deadlines and who-does-what-when with Seonaid MacKay for her new Thump and Other Places app. Or it keeps coming up when we nearly have chickens over whether or not we’ll get those last four contributors in time for our forthcoming book of collected work to let the book and digital space take full flight in production terms come January.

See, we’re straight back to the hen pen again. Panic, deadline tears, magic and all.

A + B
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PS. We have Toothpaste for Dinner to thank for the diagram and Alison for knowing to share it with us.

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Thump: Whoaaaaa, It's an App

2012-10-24T11:53:00+00:00

Thump: Whoaaaaa, It's an App

The collection’s life started out in print, but not contentedly. The stories simply didn’t want to flourish there, something we only realised when Seonaid came bouncing in with Thump 6 weeks ago with about fifty hand written and drawn story boards on her iPad, and we all shouted “Whoaaaaaa! It’s an app!”. So there.

As programmer Simon Thompson has since said: “It’s kind of more movie-ish, dare I say that, than book-ish?”. Yep. Great looking stories on whichever platform works best. And this one ended up being on screen.

We can’t wait to keep tweaking and bring it out. End of this year is the plan. Till then, have a peak.

A + B
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Opening and Sharing

2012-10-11T10:55:00+00:00

Opening and Sharing

To help with all that thinking, we’ve been turning our gaze outwards and checking out examples of great social design players right now.

We’re finding it nearly impossible to contain our excitement for Jonathan Harris and his quest for all things human in technology, social interaction in the digital sphere, all best embodied in his Twitter bio: “Cards down antennas up”.

And there’s guerrilla librarian John Locke, turning NYC phone booths into small city landscapes with his bookshelves and nick-able books.

Not to mention Web Lab at the Science Museum asking outside viewers to join in and become part of the fun action inside the world online.

They’re all playful, all open, all about inviting people in. And all that social design thinking has inspired us big time and even got us to make something: it’s a little Kapow! 12 second home movie, showing every single page of the book (admittedly really fast, but that was part of the fun).

No, we don’t think you can read the whole book on the screen. Or can you? But really, would it matter if you could, because that wouldn’t make the book any less of a beautifully crafted physical object full of narrative surprises. Just a playfully shared one. Right?

So here’s to sharing. It’s always better that way. (And our mums told us to).

A + B
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Birds Watching Birds

2012-09-20T15:37:00+00:00

Birds Watching Birds

And this Friday and Saturday we’re opening our studio door for people stopping by for Birdwatching’s annual LDF Design Walk as part of their ambition to “connect, support and promote women in graphic design everywhere”. We’re in one crazy maze of a building, so we thought we’d help people find us by stencilling a few of our dingbats here and there. We’re actually not so sure they’ll help anyone find us at all, but we sure had fun spraying them.

Next week, it’ll be smelly boys all round. But this week, hell yes to celebrating the not so gentle gender.

A + B

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Public Storytelling

2012-09-14T15:08:00+00:00

Public Storytelling

And with the Olympics also came inspiration from other places: there’s been Tino Sehgal’s magical, intimate storytelling in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall, the welcomed chaos of books in mazes at the South Bank aMazeme, the eight hour marathon Great Gatsby performance Gatz from a few months back and even smaller but definitely not insignificant surprises like stumbling upon a bookshelf tucked behind a German bus stop.

It’s gotten us thinking more about public storytelling. Different ways that reading and telling stories can be more open, more social, more public. In our minds, it opens up the role of the book (and its potential) as we see it today. Looking at different ways we can create reading experiences that go beyond what’s on the page. And taking storytelling as something that is seen, read, shared in its widest possible sense.

Don’t worry, we’re not shifting into performance art, and we’re not really good at any sports either (neither are our kids), but we are gonna push our forthcoming books (we’ll be lift lidding soon), a new app and maybe even a few events as far into and beyond the page as we humanly can.

A + B

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London Calling

2012-08-21T10:57:00+00:00

London Calling

We’ve been getting stuck back in, looking at new and old stuff we like right now. And we thought we’d share some of our faves with you you here:

Amaze-ing books at the South Bank

Brilliant small branding and building in Japan

Clever mapping in Manhattan

Impossible to resist peaking

Addictive, smart and marginally fashion related reading

And what awe inspiring Weiwei watching

Ah, it’s good to get stuck back in.

A+B
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It Would Be, It Would Be So Nice

2012-07-25T16:38:00+00:00

It Would Be, It Would Be So Nice

Having said that, we’re feeling pretty London loving today (amazing what a bit of sun can do), and wanted to share some of what we’ll be missing:

The worlds’ flags on Oxford Street, the breezy open windows at Soho House, Weiwei’s Serpentine Pavillion, the Secret Garden on the Hayward Gallery rooftop (with edible marigolds no less), Martin Creed’s London’s church bells chiming at 08.12 this Friday, and that crazy cool dress sense that only Londoners seem to be able to pull off.

We’re really excited about all the things we have to look forward to when we’re back to and thought we’d share some of those with you too:

We’ll keep spreading the Kapow! love, especially Stateside; working on releasing Seonaid MacKay’s exciting first short story; developing a magazine app; orchestrating another live reading event; and hopefully publishing two new books next year with something seamlessly digital thrown in too. Don’t get over-excited now, it might not all come off, but you know we’ll do our damnedest trying. :-)

While we’re away (Britt will be on the Danish coast in her white socks and Anna will be in Paris wearing all black), our very lovely Kathryn will be keeping the fort, looking after those “heys” and tweeting on Twitter too (look out for #kathryntweets).

Enjoy your hot hot summers. We’re so ready to go.

A + B
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Looking For Stupid

2012-07-05T11:00:00+00:00

Looking For Stupid

The crazy books (difficult as hell to make) the insane app (forcibly infuriating for some) the tote bags that are strong enough to hold 12 bottles of gin (how can quality totes take so long to source?) the mass live reading (the would all 150 Reader Outlouders actually turn up anxiety) the Vitsoe collaboration (how the hell do you do a shop window?) the party in a sex shop (messy on all fronts, especially the cleanup) and the across the board writer/designer collaboration (chicken or egg scenario in eternity).

The thing is not knowing is exciting because it forces you to be creative on all fronts, because you learn shit loads in the process, because you do stuff (hopefully) that’s more original than if you did know to begin with. Otherwise you’re just doing stuff that’s already been done and that would just be stupid.

So, right now we’re looking for stupid. Doing stuff we know nothing about. To keep us away from becoming too knowing, always looking to bring great looking stories in everything we do. And making sure we take our readers with us on that bumpy journey.

That’s the rough plan. To keep our stupid. The rest we honestly don’t know.

A+B
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All Wrapped Up

2012-06-22T13:14:00+00:00

All Wrapped Up

Which is why we put so much craft and care into each and everything we do. Now one thing we didn’t show or talk about yesterday is how we have a bespoke wrapping paper that’s designed to go with each individual book we send out to all our gorgeous readers through our online shop.

So each book gets swaddled and sent off looking, well looking like nice, we think, like these pics here. And you just know they look pretty fine in person, too.

A+B
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What Bertie Did Next

2012-06-13T12:33:00+00:00

What Bertie Did Next

And what’s not to love:

Angular shapes
Rounded edges
A sharp suit
Blue socks
And impressively choreographed London pigeons

All so very British.

A new film by Studio Frith featuring Bertie Portal and Kapow!.

Thank you team Frith, whatta treat.

A + B

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Soho Martini Kapow!-ing

2012-05-24T16:08:00+00:00

Soho Martini Kapow!-ing

A few months back Adam planted the seed, we remember him saying and us talking about how at a time when there are so few launch parties, we should definitely do one. And with us having first met Adam over a few too many martinis, and Kapow!’s narrator meandering round gritty London streets, we thought if we’re gonna celebrate Kapow! let’s do it the gritty-street-martinis-only-Kapow!-way.

And it was great.

Okay, so the best bits? Wondering if anyone would actually turn up, then suddenly watching people come together and just having a good time. Running out of booze and running out to get some more. The brothel Madam next door throwing water (on The White Review boys no less) because our party crowd was keeping customers from seeing her ladies. Opportunistic tourists and generally random people (junkies included) trying to wander in for the free drinks. And the spilling out of Kapow! crowds, first on the pavement and then finally onto the road. Turning our dive bar into our very own street party. The weather helped too. A warm sunny and slightly smelly Soho Wednesday evening.

Summer in the city and Kapow! celebrations: we’re so so happy we were proved wrong.

A + B
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And a very important PS. A big thank you to Andrew Corrigan for the gorgeous photography. And to Ben Harvey and his stripy crew for all those beautiful martinis.

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Today is Kapow!

2012-05-17T14:13:00+00:00

Today is Kapow!

And the date looms as a big whoop whoop deadline early on in the process, the cliff we always very nearly fall off from, because every stage always takes that bit longer than we think.

But the weird thing is, the date is totally arbitrary, ridiculous even. It seems as outdated as the idea of “an exclusive” in an age of Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Flickr, Pinterest. We all own it, whatever it is we produce. And we all launch it to our own audiences in our own time. And, in turn, our audiences discover and marvel (or not) whenever they’re ready.

As Adam said when we met the other day and starting talking pub dates: “Well, a pub date is never really about one moment or one place”. And for us, regardless of press, blogs, stores, screen, UK, US, or the world, we chose today as our pub date for Kapow! because it felt doable and it happened to be the same day as Britt’s mum’s birthday.

So, go get our latest great looking story (or order it from us and it’ll come specially wrapped), tell us what you think, send us your pics, and have a look at our new film with Adam and Frith talking brilliantly about both story and process in the back of a London black cab.

Now, where did those celebratory martini glasses go?

A + B
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Cab Kapow!

2012-05-04T10:34:00+00:00

Cab Kapow!

The thing is we couldn’t exactly fit Adam, designer Frith, film-man Anthony, camera gear and us into the back of a mini-cab (we’re nimble, but not that nimble), and anyway, we have a ridiculous love of the London black cab. Who doesn’t, right? So instead, we got cabbie Jim to drive us round London town while we were chatting, staying dry, all the while getting more and more car sick.

We’ve just seen the first cut of the film. And it’s looking really great. Coming soon to a small screen near you :)

Thank you Jim for driving, Adam and Frith for chatting, and Anthony from BOSH for filming.

A + B

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Kapow! A Great Story. That is Also Great Looking

2012-04-26T09:19:00+00:00

Kapow! A Great Story. That is Also Great Looking

We’re excited because everyone who’s read it so far, has come back saying how it hooks you from the first line and won’t let go of you until it’s swept you away with its big, giddy camera work, wind in your hair, ending. And, well, that makes us happy because that’s every bit how we felt when we first read it too.

So the story’s about a London based writer watching and reflecting on the events of the Arab Spring and the broader global unrest that forked off it (the London riots, Occupy Wall Street, the Syria uprising) through reports and news from his computer screen, newspapers and taxi drivers too. From the perspective of his pop culture heaped everyday London life, he tries to make sense of it all: blending verite style real-time commentary with a dreamed up almost Bollywood style love story set among a gallery of characters in Egypt living through the revolution.

Throughout, as the story ping pongs back and forth between London and Cairo, digressions wreak merry havoc and increasingly take over and become the story, making good on Zadie Smith quoting Laurence Sterne in her introduction to the Best American Non-Required Reading: “Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine; they are the life, the soul of reading.”

It’s a cheeky and poignant and very, very clever read and we’re thinking and hoping that you’ll love it as much as we do.

A+B
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Kapow! in Pics

2012-04-20T15:52:00+00:00

Kapow! in Pics

The best part of this week, we’ve spent sending review copies and presents left right and centre.

And the incredibly talented (and equally lovely) David Sykes has been busy photographing it for us.

So we thought we’d share some of his early pictures with you. We think it’s a real beauty. But then again, like all parents talking up their childrens’ merits, we are of course ridiculously biased :-).

Here’s to you now. We hope you like it.

A + B
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To Fit or Not to Fit

2012-04-05T14:38:00+00:00

To Fit or Not to Fit

So what’s the trick to a really good one?

Is it about something unexpected happening? Or all about finding a good match? Or best when purposefully clashing?

Or even more simply: is it about having a good enough reason for hooking up in the first place, something that goes beyond reach and volume and instead about reaching more towards meaning, feeling and value? Doing things because they’re worthwhile.

And us? Well, we’re gonna keep reaching for the feeling.

A + B
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Tokyo Tokyo

2012-03-29T08:24:00+00:00

Tokyo Tokyo

And it made us shriek with joy. Really.

The thing is not only do Shingo, Cathy and Mona share an excitement for our books, our ethos and get that our books are designed so that the design is an integral part of the storytelling itself, as opposed to just being decorative. That’s already amazing. But they’re also planning to showcase all of our books, films, posters, and tote bags in a little Visual Editions event they’re hosting in their Tokyo flagship store in May and June this year. Wow.

Who was it that said that fans are the life blood of any creative business? Well, as big time fans of all things Japanese, we’re chuffed to bits that we can count the team on the 6th floor of Tokyo’s Kinokuniya as one of ours.

Thank you Shingo, Cathy, Mona and all. Let’s roll out lots of ideas for showcasing Visual Editions to your Tokyo-base and see if we can earn the fandom of some more in the process.

A + B
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PS If you happen to be in Tokyo in May or June, check it out here. And [email protected]">send us some pics too. We’d love that.

Books Kinokuniya - Shinjuku South Store
Foreign Books section on the 6th floor
Takashimaya Times Square
5-24-2 Sendagaya, Shibuya-ku, Tokyo 151-0051
Phone: +81-3-5361-3316

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Houston, We Have a Cover. Houston, We Have Stopped Falling

2012-03-23T10:33:00+00:00

Houston, We Have a Cover. Houston, We Have Stopped Falling

Our printer man, Wouter in Belgium, told us a few days ago that the dummy book he was holding in his hand (and scheduled to start printing this week) couldn’t be made. Months of planning and it couldn’t be done. So with manual production becoming a last ditch solution and up against the wire cover nearly killing us, serious mood swings, this week was best summed up with an email from Adam saying “just checking you’ve not checked into the Priory yet.”

Puuuuuuuuh.

Followed by wheeeeeeeeeee.

Because we reckon we’re there. The cover is loved all round. Blue lines are checked. Plates being made. Production under way. On press next week.

Who ever thought a book this giddy to read and great to look at could be this damned tough to make.

We really hope you’ll love it (and definitely not because it was hard to make but because it’s an amazing read).

Bring in the drinks trolley, it’s well and truly Friday.

A + B
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PS Oh and that’s not the cover there, just a little peak at the inside. We’ll share cover soon. Promise.

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What Is it About Book Covers?

2012-03-12T08:19:00+00:00

What Is it About Book Covers?

Everyone in our little Kapow! bubble that is: the amazing design team over at Studio Frith based over in the picturesque Borough Market, the charming and talented Adam Thirlwell himself, printing maestro (and sometimes unintentionally funny) Wouter from Die Keure, the calm and energetic (in equal measure) PR guru Jessica Jackson and us lot from VE.

And the cover? Well, we thought it was there. We really liked it, Studio Frith liked it, Jess liked it. Wouter didn’t really care to be honest. But Adam did care. And as Frith put it so perfectly after hearing his thoughts: “I think he really hates it”.

And that’s the thing about covers. They need to be loved. By everyone. Not just us, not just designers, not just readers, and journos, but especially by the authors themselves.

Not simply because a lot of us judge a book by its cover and in a lot of ways covers act like mini-posters for books. But more than that because the cover needs to bring the book’s personality to the fore and who knows that personality better than the author. So Adam loves the inside but he hates the cover.

We’ve got one week to crack it as a team and then we hit the absolute production falling-of-the-cliff deadline. Plenty, plenty of time we tell ourselves, we’ve worked as a four-legged team animal for a year now.

And see the thing is there’s no way we’re gonna lose one leg in the final race corner. Because we’ve all got to love it.

A&B
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Kapowing Kapow!

2012-02-24T16:19:00+00:00

Kapowing Kapow!

It’s the brilliant title of our next book.

Kapow! by Adam Thirlwell. Out in May.

The very talented Dan Britt has made a little film for us this week, Kapowing Kapow!

Well, you gotta, right? with a title like that.

Enjoy.

The book and more screen fun will be ready to share soon.

’Til then, Kapow!

A + B
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Gearing Up and Going Out

2012-02-17T16:15:00+00:00

Gearing Up and Going Out

If we could, we’d have sent the book out. But as it is, the physical book is still deep in print production land, the app idea still deep in our heads, so we thought we’d make the press release feel as special as we could until we can share the real thing.

We had to stop short of tying pink ribbons around the envelopes. It is a book about revolutions after all. And called Kapow! but much much more on that soon. We’ve got another special something coming next week.

Can’t wait to share.

A + B
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Naughty Excess Here We Come

2012-02-10T15:44:00+00:00

Naughty Excess Here We Come

Style goddess Katie Grand hammered it home for us with her brilliant editor’s letter in this month’s popped-out-gorgeous-looking Love Magazine, proclaiming utter boredom with the nudes, the whites, the neutrals, and a crying out for bright styles and good old clashings of colourful bad taste.

Let’s be honest, our own bad taste has never gone away. What we don’t want to go either is our sense of play and, dare we say it, 90s learn by doing and trashy fuck-ups either.

It’s about not being so considered. It’s about making sure that everything doesn’t always end up looking the same. And it’s about making sure we don’t all end up acting so damned cool that we don’t even get excited anymore.

Time to swig a bit of naughty excess from the 90s? That’s our thinking for sure for the next project beaming away in VE towers, desperately crying out for bright colours, outrageous pairings, and a spray tan and blow-dry thrown in for good measure.

Feeling happy and filthy (no, fluffy) already.

A & B
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Dreams Really Do Come True

2012-01-27T13:11:00+00:00

Dreams Really Do Come True

1. We have been gathering some amazing people around our long, long awaited Ercol table, bought just for gathering more amazing people.

2. We saw our VE1, VE2, VE3 books on display as a full range in a beautiful shop full of beautiful things: The Shop at Bluebird.

3. Our forthcoming book by Adam Thirlwell is in production stage now with printers scratching heads and the rest of us building up on our excitement nerves.

Dream on dream on we say, and more head scratching, too, no doubt.

A&B

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A Year of Revolutions

2012-01-13T17:04:00+00:00

A Year of Revolutions

We’re in the midst of the final proofing and design dummy testing and and we just can’t wait to tell and show more in the next week or so. Proper like.

So, until then, Happy New Year everyone, and here’s to a 2012 full of revolutions (the cultural kind) and exciting new adventures.

A + B
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Oh Whatta Ride

2011-12-21T16:24:00+00:00

Oh Whatta Ride

And we learned that Summer is a great time for babies, and obviously holidays too. The life of Composition No. 1, in both book and app (our first ever whoop! whoop!) really took off in September. And October. And November, hell, even December.

We had a spread in GQ (no, not that kind, remember the babies). Had crazy fun (and crazy help) with our first ever live reading-out-loud event at the V&A. And our first ever Visual Editions shop via Vitsoe.

And then Kathryn, our studio manager, joined us, too. Hallelujah. Bringing some serious order into our chaos.

We are so very happy, cannot wait to meet more lovely people, hook up more with well known ones, bring out Adam Thirlwell’s book in May (that’s the plan, production permitting) and a few other very exciting surprises beaming away in the VE pipeline.

Happy holidays y’all, illustrated here by the wonderful Verity Keniger. Here’s to another awesome ride in 2012.

A+B

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Mass Live Reading Event at the V&A

2011-12-12T08:49:00+00:00

Mass Live Reading Event at the V&A

So here’s what we came up with: (though sometimes, many times, we questioned whether or not we could we actually pull it off) we staged what we’ve called our first ever mass live reading event. We took our third book, Composition No. 1, in all its 150 loose and self-contained pages glory and married that up with 150 brilliantly keen Reader Outlouders. The idea was simple: each Reader Outlouder read out a different page from the book. And each Reader Outlouder was asked to read from a different spot in the museum (galleries, stairs, corridors, even the National Art Library). And the thousands of Friday Late visitors were given the chance to have the full book read out loud to them in whichever order they fancied.

Did it work? Yes we think so, performance heavy or not. Was it fun? Oh, hell yes. Check out all the gorgeous pics, courtesy of Harry Watts, and judge for yourself. Would we do it again? Yeah, why the hell not. We’re thinking of doing something again next year sometime.

A big thank you to everyone who took part, the reading as much as the being read to. Clearly couldn’t have done this without you. It’s thanks to you that the event had more unpredictable magic than any of us could have planned or hoped for. With it being very nearly end of year time, feels like it’s time to rest voices and souls, too.

A+B
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First ever Visual Editions shop: Open for Business

2011-12-01T09:00:00+00:00

First ever Visual Editions shop: Open for Business

It’s definitely a first for us to be able to say “hey, come visit our shop, we’re just behind Selfridges”.

Elke from InkValley with Sabrina spent two days and two nights, with a lot of help from the clever Vitsoe installation guys, moving, hanging, adding and sticking. And the result is, we think, absolutely gorgeous.

There’s floating paper exploding delicately in the windows, and plenty of books beautifully packed on the shelves. Oh, and a signed Tree of Codes poster hung up, too.

Come come. Have a peak, buy a book, or just say hello.

We’d love you to see it.

A + B + InkValley, too
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Open: 30th November 2011 - 3 January 2012
Opening times: Monday to Saturday, 10am-6pm
Address: 3-5 Duke Street, London W1U 3ED

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Chaos in the North Room at Vitsoe

2011-11-24T16:22:00+00:00

Chaos in the North Room at Vitsoe

We’ve teamed up with some amazingly talented people to make it all happen: the gorgeous Elke from InkValley and with Sabrina’s prop making genius. And together, we’ve taken over the windows and one side of the Vitsoe store to quite literally pull our books apart and bring them back together again for what we’re calling “Visual Editions at Vitsoe by InkValley”.

Sabrina picked up the final books and pages from our studio yesterday. And the models are all signed off by Vitsoe. So, “all” that’s left now, is for Elke and Sabrina to bag a few knee protectors and crawl around in the windows on Monday and Tuesday, hanging, bending, starching and twirling book pages and paper.

We’ll be whoop whooping them on with coffee and pizza. And we’ll take plenty of pics too. We are hugely excited, so much so, we thought we’d share their early ideas before we get to the real deal next week.

Chaos indeed. How we love it.

A + B
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Shuffling People Not Pages at V&A Friday Late

2011-11-16T10:24:00+00:00

Shuffling People Not Pages at V&A Friday Late

Seriously.

We’ve got 150 readers (if they all show up), to read out loud from Composition No. 1. Each Reader Outlouder will be dotted throughout the museum and will be reading out from a different page of the book.

It’ll be up to the people who come to the event to create their own order, to find their own narrative by looking for (or no doubt discovering) Reader Outlouders in different rooms, on staircases, even in one of the bathrooms (come on, we couldn’t resist that one). If you’re around and fancy coming along, you’ll be given a map to help find your way round. And the order you choose to read or experience or listen to the pages being read outloud will be entirely up to you.

We like to think of it as people being shuffled this time instead of pages. And of course we’d love to see you there. If you can’t make it or aren’t in London, don’t worry, we’ll take plenty of piccies. And if you fancy being a VE@V&A Reader Outlouder, get in [email protected]">touch here. There’s always room for more.

A + B
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Signed Tree Of Codes Posters For Sale Now in New VE Shop

2011-11-15T10:50:00+00:00

Signed Tree Of Codes Posters For Sale Now in New VE Shop

Sure, it’s taken us much longer than we wanted to get the posters sourced, marked, shipped to and from Bruges-London-New York and signed by Jonathan. The real reason though is way more simple: we wanted to give the posters a new online home, a proper shop (our first proper shop), with beautiful photographs and quality ease of use.

And we think we have that now. So, one year on since Tree Of Codes was first published, and just over a year since our dingbat website first saw the light of day, we finally have signed posters in our brand spanking new Visual Editions shop.

We’ve tried to make it as home feeling and functional as possible, we’re still tweaking and adding, so do tell us if something isn’t working in general or if something just not working for you.

Either way, have a peak at those posters, large and medium sized. You’ll have to get them framed yourself. But the one we have on our wall, simply framed, does look great in its hole glory. Sure yours would too ;)

A + B
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Look, D&AD Wood

2011-11-10T17:32:00+00:00

Look, D&AD Wood

Not a coveted yellow or black pencil but a damn fine piece of wood none the less.

Well done JSF/ SdB/ JG and thank you D&AD panel. We look forward to looking through everything else in there soon.

A + B

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!!#*^¥!! Shopify (and Tote Bags Galore)

2011-11-04T15:55:00+00:00

!!#*^¥!! Shopify (and Tote Bags Galore)

But whoop whoop, at least we got our tote bags in time to include them on our site. Ridiculous how much a bit of lovingly crafted shoulder cloth can make you feel so excited and proud. Thanks to Nina and her awesome, fresh and fun design (and her patience, too, as we ploughed through more tote bag samples than you could imagine).

Check them out next week when our fabulous new and improved shop goes live, and the rest too. And don’t be shy of telling us what you think of them (and it).

Right, better get that pallet shelf freighted down the road to Airside. With a few free tote bags thrown in.

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Look, Look! Composition No. 1

2011-10-11T13:49:00+00:00

Look, Look! Composition No. 1

It’s beyond great seeing something we’ve put so much love, sweat and tears into standing out so beautifully fifty years after it was first published. Really really great. We think Marc Saporta would have been proud.

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Kristen Stewart's on the Cover

2011-10-11T11:38:00+00:00

Kristen Stewart's on the Cover

We kind of wish we looked a bit more elegant and grown up to be honest, but it’s not everyday you find yourself in a leading men’s magazine. Fronting the cover? Fingers crossed and here’s to hoping for our Kristen Stewart reincarnation (in this life or probably more likely, our next one).

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Carry on Moving

2011-10-07T13:46:00+00:00

Carry on Moving

But we got here. New studio space. With 7 year old Bella packing, 3 month old Frida directing, and grown-up Kate helping us shuffle through the door and install.

It’s slightly smaller. But a helluvalut less noisy too. Most importantly it’s in a building that’s not being torn down.

Clerkenwell hello, we’re SO happy to be here.

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Too Hot To Reason

2011-09-30T16:38:00+00:00

Too Hot To Reason

Too hot to function or reason. But maybe that’s a good thing. Yesterday, we spent the afternoon wandering at the V&A, not reasoning. And the morning we spent talking experiences and spotting celebrities, not reasoning.

Next week we’re moving studio. Must sort that hire van out. Shit we’ve got a lot to do.

That’s enough reasoning. Friday evening here we come. Sunshine is enough of a reason.

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So, What is the Future of the Book?

2011-09-23T16:29:00+00:00

So, What is the Future of the Book?

Partly because the simple answer is no one really knows. Partly because the evolutionary change to the book world as we know it, is already well and truly under way. But also partly because we never understand why people don’t ask what the future of the iPad or the Kindle or the Nook and why the book is always seen in isolation.

The short of it is this: it will all change.

Will the printed book die out entirely? No, we don’t think so. Will printed books become more niche to the e-mass? Most likely, you’ll definitely need a solid reason to produce and buy printed books that are most likely books to be loved and kept. Will the printed book need to exist happily and contentedly alongside new platforms? Yes, absolutely, even more than it currently does.

But maybe the question that should be asked is not about books at all.

We live in a world where we now talk about post digitalism and take the technology around us for granted. Where it’s less about what technology can do and more about what technology can do for us as human beings.

Where creativity and openness through the internet is the world new generations have already grown up in. A limitless playground with more power to us as people and as readers.

So maybe, with all that in our minds, the focus should be less about the future of the book as we know it, and more about the future of reading. The future of different ways of reading. How we as publishers (or better yet: producers) can stay true to great looking storytelling in a way that will keep people excited about stories and excited about reading.

And that’s a future we’re feeling pretty pumped up about.

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Nordic Bakery, Storytelling, Vitsoe and V&A

2011-09-12T10:27:00+00:00

Nordic Bakery, Storytelling, Vitsoe and V&A

Fittingly then, or quite likely inspired by that tray, we ended up spending the morning over our coffee and smoked salmon scheming and talking all about storytelling. Making sure all our projects, from books and beyond, are always about producing the greatest looking stories and experiences. It’s never just about that cup of coffee or even that book, but it’s about everything that comes with it. It’s about that gorgeous plastic perfect grey tray.

Right now, we’re figuring out exactly what that means for what we do with our in-store installation at Vitsoe as well as one of the Friday Lates at the V&A in November. We’ll tell you more when we’re a bit closer to sorting those out.

Okay, think it’s time we squeeze in another coffee.

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PetPunk Presents: Our News In Pics

2011-08-22T09:03:00+00:00

PetPunk Presents: Our News In Pics

Putting it bluntly: we don’t like newsletters ourselves. This might not be fair and it may just be showing us up as the impatient and time-poor people we are, but we’ve got this feeling that it’s not just us and that very few people ever bother to read them.

So then we got thinking. When either of us get newsletters, all we do is look at the pictures. And every once in a while, we follow a few links too. So we thought, okay, we’ll do the newsletter thing, but we’ll do it VE style.

Every so often (not as often as every week, but definitely more often than every August and December), we’ll send out a newsletter but we’ll just have images (images that tell you what we’ve been up for the past few months) and each time, we’ll invite a different design studio to design our newsletter for us. Their brief every time will be this: design something that uses the word “newsletter” spelled out in our dingbats.

First up is Lithuanian-based design studio PetPunk, introduced to us on very warm recommendation by Matt Pyke who said “I just love these guys”. And the fun, weird image here is PetPunk’s 3D rendition of the newsletter spelled out in our dingbats.

So there you have it, our very own why-we’re-not-crazy -about-newsletters logic, PetPunk and their crazy 3D dingbat creatures and our very first August news in pictures following on from Thereza Rowe who designed our December one.

We’ll try to make them more regular, but we also promise to always have nice pictures and work with great designers and all their funny, weird, beautiful, unexpected takes on our dingbats.

August, PetPunk, Newsletter. Tell us if you read it or if you just looked.

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Composition No. 1 Book + App film 1-2-3 ready for lift off

2011-08-09T15:00:00+00:00

Composition No. 1 Book + App film 1-2-3 ready for lift off

With one film for Composition No. 1 the book, and one for Composition No. 1 for the iPad, we like to think of these as part inspiration and part user manuals (the VE way, of course).

We cannot wait to see what you make of them. Tell us, share them, and more than anything have a play.

Composition No. 1, we’re ready for lift off.

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Composition No. 1 Pre-order button well and truly ready for action

2011-08-03T15:36:00+00:00

Composition No. 1 Pre-order button well and truly ready for action

All we’re waiting for is that ‘official’ proper publication date of 11th August.

And we were talking about it all yesterday, and realised it suddenly felt too proper, too organised, all focused on one date, when really it’s nothing more than a collection of talented people coming together for the fairly long term event of celebrating a brilliant book from the 60s, which, we think, is now more relevant than ever.

So really, we thought bollocks to the planning, let’s get on with the doing.

The book is now live to pre-order and copies will be with you a week from now (beautifully wrapped in its very own wrapping paper). So go on, go get it, even before the film shows you what to do with it :)

And be sure to tell us what you think of it. (It goes without saying we hope you love it.)

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"I Hate You": A VE Fan Letter

2011-08-03T10:15:00+00:00

"I Hate You": A VE Fan Letter

I’m from Mexico. I’m in Paris for a little while, then I go to The Netherlands to study a master’s degree in history. I left around 400 books stored in boxes back home (I’m thinking of relocating to Europe). I brought about 12 very heavy books over here (in spanish, mostly poetry, some classics). I swore I was not going to buy any more books. I couldn’t. I can’t. It’s too heavy. I have enough. But I saw your edition of Tristram Shandy today in Shakespeare & Co (I have a horrible edition back home). Damn you! It’s so incredible. Damn you! It’s astonishing. I hate you. My back hates you. So beautiful. Why didn’t I buy it today? I’m going to dream with it tonight and go back for it tomorrow.

bless you,
a fan for life,
Patricio López

We heart you Patricio.

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Now, here's our first app (and not just because it's called Composition No. 1)

2011-07-18T18:20:00+00:00

Now, here's our first app (and not just because it's called Composition No. 1)

It’s a really playful app, which we, for what it’s worth, have a full-on crush on. Designed by Universal Everything who also designed the book, it’s our first because:

a) well, we’ve never ever done an app before but this book begged to have one

b) it’s a new platform for us to champion great looking stories in a way that lets you have a different experience to what’s already out there.

You see, we never wanted to do an app simply because everyone else is at it. And let’s face it a lot of people are. That would be a waste of money we haven’t got, and a wasteful opportunity too. When even the UK Apprentice has a Do Your Own App episode, and Apple reckons they now have more app downloads than music downloads, then there’s rather a lot of apps already out there. And just like our printed stories: we feel like we’ve got to have a damn good reason to produce them.

So, our Composition No. 1 app is not just a copy of the book on screen. Far from it. And it hasn’t got those curly cornered pages (we never got the idea of those, it isn’t a book made of paper so why pretend to be one?). It’s a book app inspired by the squeak feeling we had when we first saw two of our faves: Alice for the iPad that came out about a year ago and the Myfry with all its rotating wonderous madness.

Ours is, we hope, an app that is deeply rooted in the book. And it does stuff on screen you just can’t do in print. For Composition No. 1, that means it’s about taking away the sense of preciousness that the loose pages in the printed book makes you feel. So where we, the readers, in the printed edition end up having to force ourselves to shuffle and “mess up” the book at random, in the app version, the opposite is true. The randomising is actually forced upon us. Here, the pages shuffle and they shuffle at a serious speed. And it’s up to us, the readers, to have to make it stop.

As we said, we are totally in love with it, can’t stop playing with it, but we cannot wait to hear what you make of it, too. Shared crush? Fingers crossed and here’s to begging and hoping :)

11th August is our date day.

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Crafting Composition No. 1 (Thanks to Universal Everything)

2011-07-04T10:55:00+00:00

Crafting Composition No. 1 (Thanks to Universal Everything)

It’s no wonder then, that when Sam Renwick, from Universal Everything, went on press to Belgium to check in on Composition No. 1, rang us and in between questions about colour saturation and stock quality, said “I just love this stuff.”

So why did Sam go to Belgium for the day? He went to check on the colour: to see if the red was really red enough and the yellow pop enough. And to see how the black sits on the paper: too dense, not dense enough. He talked through how Salvador Plascencia’s diagrams would be folded: text out or text in. And checked (for what seemed like the hundredth time) if the paper inside the box was big enough, not too small, that there was enough room around the paper, but definitely not too much.

So back to this question of craft, the thing is, when we think of craft, we think of it as extending to everything we do: there is a craft to writing books, a craft to designing them, but also a craft to how author contracts should look and feel, there is a craft to telling stories as much as there is a craft to how those stories are shared.

And, well, lame as it may sound, there’s just a whole lotta love, too. (Not too much though, and not enough, but just the right amount).

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Safran Foer's Writing on Our Walls

2011-06-30T12:46:00+00:00

Safran Foer's Writing on Our Walls

And they were beautiful. We played around a bit, hiding behind them, in a mix of delirium, 5am Eurostar trains and perma grin. Perma grin because we knew we could actually make this book but there was something else too. These sheets were jaw droppingly stunning: they seemed so fragile and delicate, poetic even, but more than that, like nothing we had ever seen.

A few months later, we thought, wouldn’t it be amazing to frame one of those sheets on our studio wall. To remind us of the process, the book’s journey and story, but also as a way to capture some of that poetry in a different way. Then we told Jonathan about them and he said he’d love one for his house, too.

So we thought, why not see what the printer still has and what they’re willing to send us and maybe, just maybe we could sell them too, so that other people could also frame part of the story and put it on their walls. You never know if you don’t ask, right? So, the printer sent us what he had.

The thing is we don’t have very many of them — only 100 large ones and 250 medium sized ones. So we thought we’d make them extra special. Jon Gray designed stamps for them, to tie in with the cover’s typography, we’ve numbered each one and Jonathan has signed each and every single one of them. There’s a picture of him here signing them in his agent’s kitchen in New York. We thought it would be nice for Jonathan to hang 1/100 and we’re keeping 100/100 for our own walls. But the rest, well, the rest are for you guys and for your walls.

Because we don’t have that many and because they’re very big and fragile too, we’ll only be selling them through our site. They’ll go on sale in a couple of weeks and we’ll be sure to let you know as soon as they’re (and we’re) ready.

We are so excited for you to see.

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VE3 Here we come (and we cannot wait)

2011-06-16T09:32:00+00:00

VE3 Here we come (and we cannot wait)

All just in time to be around for Composition No. 1 going on press today. As Mathew from With Associates put it so perfectly: “last week must have been full of too many good labour inducing meetings on all fronts”. Spot on.

In all our busy-ness to get VE3 to this stage, we’re worried we’ve forgotten to tell you what’s actually in the making. So here goes: Composition No. 1 follows on from our re-imagined Tristram Shandy last September, and our sculpture-esque Tree Of Codes last November. It’s a little known classic by French writer Marc Saporta. And it’s lovingly called the first ever book in a box because well, that’s what it is. If you’re familiar with the term, you’ll immediately think BS Johnson’s The Unfortunates which many claim was inspired by Composition No. 1. If you haven’t heard the term before, Composition No. 1 is a book made up of loose pages, with a self-contained narrative on every page, allowing you shuffle and read the book in any order (or length) you want. It begs the question: what makes a book a book, and more than anything brings the interactive messing, shuffling, and sliding we’re so familiar with on our screens into a physical book.

We’ve been working with some pretty incredible talents on the book, making the whole project such a treat: there is Tom Uglow of Google and YouTube who’s written the introduction, digital design maestro Matt Pyke of Universal Everything who is behind the book’s design (his first ever book no less) and California-based writer Salvador Plascencia who has drawn little diagrams showing the anatomy of a book.

Sam from Universal Everything is on press today in Belgium with our friends at Die Keure to double-check everything, especially the 2mm vs the 4mm, the digitised landscape imagery, and make sure the colour is nice and bright, bright, bright. There’s a little film here showing some of the detailed printer discussions from this morning, and a peak at how it’s all taking shape.

Okay, back to new baby and box printing now.

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We won something!

2011-06-07T22:24:00+00:00

We won something!

So there you have it, an award for films promoting books, nicely captured by The Wall Street Journal. And with all awards, something of a thank you speech beckons. So thank you to the Moby Awards for considering us, for Jonathan Safran Foer and Sara De Bondt for making the book what it is, for Mathew at With Associates for filming and having the idea in the first place, and for Anthony at BOSH for doing the beautiful editing. Last but not least to the almost 7 year old Bella for sorting out all the admin.

Here’s to hoping we’ll never be there with a worst :)

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Wiping the Sweat off our Brows

2011-05-24T20:52:00+00:00

Wiping the Sweat off our Brows

What we do know is that we mostly tried to stay true to our motto of sharing great looking stories with the odd ridiculous, random even, thing thrown in. And we also know that we ended up adding more Twitter followers to Creative Review’s existing Twitter fan base.

For those of you who missed it, or didn’t dare look in case, well in case it all went horribly wrong, here’s some of what we posted:

Loving Jennifer Egan’s awesome use of a crappy power point chapter in her new book. #GuestEd #AnnaBritt

This George Jensen film makes us smile so much our cheeks ache. #GuestEd #AnnaBritt

Bed what we miss most on a Monday morning. We haven’t read it yet, but cover is fun. #GuestEd #AnnaBritt

So we’re going to the @OrangePrize: what the hell are we supposed to wear? A Chelsy Davy tan? #GuestEd #AnnaBritt

We are in love with this #bookdress @OrangePrize #GuestEd#AnnaBritt

The gorgeous APFEL girls designed super sleek identity at just opened Hepworth Gallery #GuestEd #AnnaBritt

When even a chair calls for a good looking story, by @Vitra of course #GuestEd #AnnaBritt

Composer Edward Jessen is next up to give @Vitsoe talk #GuestEd #AnnaBritt

New blog by our favourite critic Will Gompertz with a strapline that says it all #GuestEd #AnnaBritt

We wanna go to Hong Kong and see @universaleverything “reinventing itself forever” video wall #GuestEd #AnnaBritt

Excited about seeing Pete Doherty lookalike Adam Thirlwell’s upside down pages tomorrow, designed for us by Studio Frith. #GuestEd #AnnaBritt

Fawning over Su Blackwell’s ornate, hyper-crafted paperwork: #GuestEd #AnnaBritt

While we’re on the “amazing things you can do with paper” theme, check out this paper record player #GuestEd #AnnaBritt

What hard core criticism should be all about. #GuestEd #AnnaBritt

Writer, artist, film maker @Miranda_July’s The Future’s out in 30 days. Counting down already. #GuestEd #AnnaBritt

Before we go, our proofs for Composition No 1 arrive tomorrow, intro’d by Google’s @tomux #GuestEd #AnnaBritt

Thanks for having us in the tweet seat CR. We hope your followers have enjoyed our company… #GuestEd #AnnaBritt

…Now back to the reality of making IKEA chairs. Over and out xx #GuestEd #AnnaBritt aka @visualeditions

So, would we do it again? Hell yes. Are we glad our day in their Twitter seat is behind us? Oh yeah. Here’s to a guest editor’s well earned Twitter pint.

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Twitterhappy

2011-05-20T14:37:00+00:00

Twitterhappy

Of course we would! Exciting and fun stuff Tweeting (hopefully not just total garbage) to a design loving audience.

All that remains to be said is let’s see if we can add followers and fans to the CR design bible (rather than losing existing ones) by the end of play Monday. And if you feel like playing, too, then just add this to your twittering #GuestEd#VE.

Oh, and a nice photo too of our favourite critic Will Gompertz gracing the cover of CR all the way back in December 2007. See, we do keep ’em all.

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@VisualEditions
@CreativeReview

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Out with the old, in with the new

2011-05-13T14:31:00+00:00

Out with the old, in with the new

Yes, moving, we’re moving, in fact we’ve moved! From the tiny tiny space lovingly called The Toaster (for no more than two people you see), down the corridor to a much bigger space we’re so far calling The Butter for no rational reason at all. And we love it. Space for a bigger desk, more than two chairs and a bin, for posters, books, packaging and well yeah just space for space.

So here’s to more sunshine over the weekend, and nice long bath tonight after all the moving grime, and lots of our VE friends popping by to have chats and coffee at ours, instead of us always clogging theirs up.

Happy Friday, it really is out with the old and in with the new.

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Filling the Core, Not Just Making More

2011-04-27T13:40:00+00:00

Filling the Core, Not Just Making More

Vitsoe have been making shelves since the 60s. Correction. Vitsoe have made the same shelving system since 1959, designed by the German industrial design God Dieter Rams. Instead of adding new models, introducing new lines or even bringing out updated designs, these guys have stuck to their guns and thought about new ways of making the same core product relevant to new people in changing contexts.

The idea of sticking to one product for so long and keeping it not only relevant but also successful got us thinking about the book world. It reminded us of something Kevin (one of the great guys at our American distributor) said to us in the suffocating Earls Court heat of this year’s London Book Fair. He said that the way forward in book publishing isn’t about making more more more, it’s actually just the opposite: it’s all about publishing fewer books. We like that.

So here’s to thinking about relevance not re-invention, making fewer but better books and more coffee with the guys at Vitsoe.

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Jane Austen Matchmakers

2011-04-12T10:18:00+00:00

Jane Austen Matchmakers

Adam is the author of Politics (a book more about sex than about politics), The Escape and Miss Herbert (with a few beloved Shandy squiggles sprinkled throughout) and we are just so damned excited to be working with him.

We’ve matched Adam up in true Jane Austen style with Studio Frith to design the book, which we’re thinking will spark some real innovation and passion. Frith’s work has graced the likes of the V&A and the Serpentine Gallery, and one of our personal faves, her very sexy design of the "_Rose Bakery_ ":http://www.phaidon.co.uk/store/food-cook/breakfast-lunch-tea-9780714844657/ cookbook.

And seeing that we’re just about to head out to the bizarre world of publishers, distributors and agents at the London Book Fair (for the first time in our lives), we think innovation and passion is just what we hope to take with us to Earl’s Court.

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Changing Landscapes

2011-04-07T16:35:00+00:00

Changing Landscapes

So, we wanted to give you a sneak peak at what the guys at Universal Everything have been working on. The backs of every single page in the book will have a unique, computer generated text based artwork on it. Giving each back page it’s very own typographic landscapem using the narrative from the fronts of the pages. Yum! We’ll tell you more, how, and why in a few weeks. But it’s fitting for a book first published in the 60s, the first ever book in a box where the narrative is contained on loose pages you can shuffle in whichever order you want. Begging the question what makes a book a book at a time when all we do is shuffle, scroll and click, changing our own landscapes on and off the screen.

On the home front, we’ve seen our own little landscape change too. Our brilliant studio manager, Gemma, got poached by the guys at Damien Hirst’s studio. We’re super proud of her, but also sad to see her go. The gorgeous and self-proclaimed “amazing cook”, Elsa Beckmann, started with us this week. Elsa made home-made caramel for us as a thank you on her first day. We’re feeling pretty spoilt already. One of the first things we’ve asked her to do is to help us find a new studio space, one where we can finally find space for that long wooden table we’ve always dreamt of having.

So bring on all the new landscapes: new books, a new space, new people. And caramel too.

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Boxes, Cakes and Doodles

2011-03-25T16:57:00+00:00

Boxes, Cakes and Doodles

The more bizarre was a couple of “winner” medals. We’ve spared showing you what they look like, but suffice to say they’re medals that say winner on them, complete with yellow ribbon. We wore them around the studio for the afternoon. Really.

We’re also in the thick of working out how to make the box for our next book: Composition No.1 by Marc Saporta. Check out this amazing drawing the printers sent us, trying to work out dimensions of the box and how they’re going to make it. Brilliant.

And we ended our week at the lush Cocomaya with the style mag worthy spread of tea and cakes. And they tasted nice, too.

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A new VE in the making

2011-03-17T16:00:00+00:00

A new VE in the making

Call us crazy, but we’ve always thought that contracts (most contracts we’ve seen at least) are such a let down. They’re usually drawn up in Microsoft Word, printed out onto standard white A4 sheets and all the energy goes into the legalities, but not much else. And it makes them feel pretty drab and very uneventful.

But here’s the thing, if you think about it: contracts aren’t uneventful at all. They’re quite the opposite. They’re ceremonious. They’re saying, “Here we go. Let’s do something amazing together.” So it only seems logical for them to look that way, too.

Which is why we asked our lovely intern, Lisa Finch, to design something special for our next author. And here’s what she’s done: hand-sewn, hand-made crafted contracts complete with their own little orange slip-cases.

We promise to tell you who the contract’s actually with, as soon as that ink’s dried. But for now, we wanted to share some of that giddiness with you.

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Any Day Now

2011-03-07T12:54:00+00:00

Any Day Now

Rather than tell you all about how these books are made, we thought, this time we’d show you. The guys at Canvas in Belgium made this little film to show you just what it takes to get Tree of Codes made. We call it production porn.

So here’s the last three months in just three minutes. And finished copies of the books are making their way to our warehouse any day now.

Enjoy.

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Shandy, iPads and Boris Bikes

2011-02-22T10:58:00+00:00

Shandy, iPads and Boris Bikes

Nestled among shiny new interactive inventions (everything from the iPad to Boris Bikes to Angry Birds) is our very own re-imagined The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy designed by A Practice for Everyday Life.

It’s fair to say we’re feeling really chuffed about the nomination and super proud to be in such great company.

Anna + Britt

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Over-funning it in NY

2011-02-20T16:09:00+00:00

Over-funning it in NY

So we were one of the keynote speakers, the last to speak on Tuesday night. We definitely weren’t as funny as Margaret Atwood who talked about technology from an author’s perspective, or as effortlessly cool as Lonely Planet’s Gus Balbontin (Director of Transformation — what a title!) talking about moving from books to new content platforms. We said most of what we had planned to say, we showed stuff from existing to future books, we talked about the need to think about visual culture and how people read rather than just technology and we talked about always being innovative with and around the book as a necessary cultural object.

We rolled off the stage not quite sure if we’d made any sense but we got some amazing feedback, kisses, contacts and a fantastic stage sketch from Pablo, which we still laugh at and totally adore.

We crammed the rest of our time with 10$ breakfast at the deli across the road, meeting up with old friends over long brunches, having coffee with the fantastic writer/illustrator Lauren Redniss and a lunchtime talk to the super nice design team at Landor.

What a great trip. And so nice to be home again.

Anna + Britt

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Books in Batches

2011-02-11T15:15:00+00:00

Books in Batches

So here’s the thing. The book is really, really complicated to produce. It goes through a lot of different stages of production (printing, trimming, die-cutting, collating and binding) and most of those stages are outsourced. That means that there is a special die-cutter in the Netherlands who handles all the cutting, a protected workplace in Belgium that collates the pages. You get the idea.

The entire production process from start to finish takes 3 months. But we didn’t want anyone waiting as long as 3 months to get their hands on the book, so what we’ve worked out with the printers is that they send us the books in batches, as and when they’re ready. We got the first batch just 5 days ago, which is what has just sold out.

The good news is our second batch will be with us end of February and then a third batch in March. As our warehouse guys put it to us this morning so perfectly, it’s a really good problem to have. All it means is we need to wait another little bit for more books to come. You can still pre-order through us (we kinda think that’s a good idea seeing how it’s been going so far).

Oh! And we’ve got a stunning film the printers sent us which we’re going to show you where you can see just how many stages the books goes through to be made.
More on that very soon. Promise.

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Great Ladies

2011-02-04T20:37:00+00:00

Great Ladies

Enter our brilliant two “new” team members: Kate and Gemma. Kate’s not new at all, in fact she’s a big reason we’re here at all. We have Kate to thank for setting up and running all our social media communications. The difference is that now, finally, we can say, we need you to keep doing this and be a “proper” part of our team. Gemma, on the other hand, is totally new. She’s got a background as a curator and is sorting out our studio systems and keeping us on our toes with our forthcoming posters and exhibitions.

We just love having them on board in what feels like such a “real” and “grown-up” way. If you talk to us sometimes, chances are you’ll talk to them too, so now you know that A and B also have a K and G. :-)

A + B
x

hello

Book Un-wrapping Video

2011-01-18T10:43:00+00:00

Book Un-wrapping Video

hello

Back to Reality

2011-01-17T15:03:00+00:00

Back to Reality

We’re super chuffed with it all, but it’s meant a helluva back log to sift through. We’re also starting to get ready to put posters up for sale on the website. More on that super soon.

So while the snow was falling in London and books were quickly selling out, Anna was in California chilling out at The Standard Hotel in downtown LA admiring the naff 70s organ on show and popped into the brilliant 826 Valencia community writers’ centre in San Francisco, too. Britt hung out with her family in more snow in Denmark and loaded up on one too many dumplings, smiling all the way.

We’re full of energy and new ideas (more books, some films too and you, know, some general mayhem) for 2011 and can’t wait to share it all with you. And even promise to be more organised, too. Seriously.

Anna + Britt
x

hello

Happy Holidays!

2010-12-20T11:30:00+00:00

Happy Holidays!

And then there was Jonathan Safran Foer’s Tree of Codes. There were times we thought the book wouldn’t see the light of day, but Sara de Bondt and the guys at Die Keure made it all happen and then Erica Wagner from The Times told us she read the book in the bath and it made her cry (no: weep).

We’re taking a little break over Christmas: Anna’s getting some LA sun and Britt’s getting some Danish snow. In the New Year, we’ll be bringing out Saporta’s book in a box, Composition No. 1, which might just end up being more than “just” a box.

We’ll also be coming out with the second edition of Tree of Codes and bring you more videos from the Belgian printers (hopefully no more of paper getting jammed though) and Tree of Codes posters to celebrate more books hitting stores. And we’ve been working on Seonaid MacKay’s eerily dark and beautiful childrens’ stories, designed by the guys at Praline.

Thanks for all your support over the last year.

We’re super excited about what we’re bringing out in the new year. We really hope you like it, too.

A + B
x

hello

A Secret, Sylvia Beach and a Bookshop

2010-12-17T13:25:00+00:00

A Secret, Sylvia Beach and a Bookshop

They’ve been absolutely wonderful and have sent us these photos, which feel almost too good to be true.

So thank you, Shakespeare and Co. for keeping a dot of that romanticism alive and well. And thank you for including Tree of Codes as part of that dream in Paris.

It’s made us feel incredibly proud and even a little overwhelming. No, actually, very overwhelming. In the best possible way…

- Anna

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The Laddeeez at Skylight Books

2010-12-10T09:49:00+00:00

The Laddeeez at Skylight Books

It made us happy not just because we know and love the store and it’s amazing seeing Tree of Codes in there, to be honest it very nearly made us cry, because they’ve nearly sold out and want some more.

Goodness. Getting Tree of Codes out to people, hearing from gorgeous bookstores, in LA and all over, it really must be Christmas.

:-)

A + B
x

hello

Dorothy Parker's Martinis

2010-12-06T12:01:00+00:00

Dorothy Parker's Martinis

hello

2 feet of snow

2010-12-01T16:37:00+00:00

2 feet of snow

hello

Plastic Fantastic

2010-11-30T09:17:00+00:00

Plastic Fantastic

As you can imagine, production for this book is far from straight forward, which means getting books out is, well, not very straight forward either. So we’re sending books out to stores in batches when they come through from our beloved Belgian printers. We’ve also just pressed the button to reprint more books, which will be released, again as they’re ready, in the new year. We’ve still got books left in our warehouse, for now, so you can order through us (and your books come gift wrapped year round when you do).

Phew.

So here it is, Tree Of Codes, out and about in its first two weeks of publication, coming to a great bookstore near you, and we love it: plastic or no plastic. We hope you do, too.

Anna + Britt

hello

Beautiful Trash at Artissima

2010-11-22T11:11:00+00:00

Beautiful Trash at Artissima

Hi Anna and Britt!

As you know, I was asked to curate the literary section of the cultural programme for the 17th Artissima Art Fair in Turin. My section was called “All the Rest is Literature” and it included a programme of talks and conversations, and two book shows: one was curated
by myself, the other by Maria Fusco. As a novelist, I tried to focus my show on the elements, or genes, in the history of the novel that
seemed to represent attempts at evading the purely textual, linear form “novels” tend to be bound to.

There can be much more, to the novel, than that: visual, poetic, structural modifications that would seem to bring it closer to the domain of visual arts than that of literature; but it is literature nonetheless, and at its best. My final exhibition checklist included both titles out as of now by Visual Editions (Laurence Sterne and
Jonathan Safran Foer), as well as books by Daniel Spoerri, Raymond Queneau, Marc Saporta, Nanni Balestrini, John Barth and Leanne Shapton. Everyone loved your books.

If it hadn’t it been your strapline, I could have used it
myself as the title for my exhibition: Great looking stories. Instead, I chose “Whims with an Army”. On my website you can read the short exhibition text. Here are
some pictures, too. As you will see, the cultural programme took place in a structure built wholly out of beautiful trash - and yes, it’s broken fridges the books are displayed on.

I hope you like it half as much as I like your work.

Ciao,

Vincenzo

hello

Consider the Palette

2010-11-14T19:52:00+00:00

Consider the Palette

So, I go downstairs, and standing there is a man with a palette. You know, one of those big wooden slatted things with an even bigger orange mini-crane thing on wheels to help move the heavy wooden slatted thing.

And the man says to me, “Where do you want it?” So I start to laugh and explain to him that he’s got to help me bring it all upstairs. Up four flights of stairs. Britt was out at a meeting, so here I was on my own with this palette and this orange thing and a lot of stuff.

Palette fixation aside, I have to tell you about all this stuff. We had asked Die Keure (our beloved Belgian printers) to send us everything they had kept while making Tree of Codes because, we told them, we “wanted to use it somehow”. So they sent us everything:

Reject cover sheets (which is what I thought to take photos of on my phone)
Massive un-trimmed die-cut sheets
Long die-cut sheets
Unused pages from books

I don’t need to tell you that I made it upstairs with everything okay and it’s sitting nicely in enormous piles in A&B Towers as we speak. The lovely tall and super talented Jon Gray stopped by the other day to take a look at it all and we’re going to make some pretty incredible stuff out of it.

We’ll let you know. You know we will. And it’ll be stunning. We’re really excited about it all. And I’ve got to admit, I’m kinda relieved I finally know what it means to get a palette delivered.

-Anna

hello

Future:Content

2010-11-12T22:42:00+00:00

Future:Content

Anyway, we got there, with 10 minutes to spare, got equipped with our mics, had a coffee to calm down and gear up. And we talked about the continued relevance of story telling and physicality, and also about the future of content being not just about the output (however much we love it) but as much about how you get to that output and with whom (because then we’ll love it even more).

We ended with a nice photo of Matt Pyke from Universal Everything, because they’re working on our next book which we’re hugely excited about. This is the first time they’ve ever designed a book.

Russell Davies (from Newspaper Club and Oglivy and Mather) was on next, talking about and thinking about to use or not to use screens; then Sanky (All of Us) showed and told and inspired us to think about creating our own happiness and having fun in the process.

We couldn’t stay for the whole day, but heard it was great. Thank you, Will and Alex for asking us to talk, and sorry for being late, we’ll be on time next time ;-)

Britt and Anna

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Eye 77: Photography/ Publishing/ Paula Scher/ Bikes/ Tactile books/ (Un)cool apps/ David Pearson

2010-11-08T00:11:00+00:00

Eye 77: Photography/ Publishing/ Paula Scher/ Bikes/ Tactile books/ (Un)cool apps/ David Pearson

Apologies for the rough kitchen photos of the beautiful photos in the mag, we just couldn’t help ourselves. We are well proud. Of the book, the work that Emma and team did at APFEL, and of seeing it in the 77th Autumn International Review.

Eye oh Eye.

Nite nite for now.

Britt

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We're live! Well, our little film is.

2010-11-07T22:12:00+00:00

We're live! Well, our little film is.

The film has cemented two things for us: that we’re reallllly close to pub date, but more importantly that we’re onto something really special. So, we’ve got another week to go before the book is published, but until then, have a look at our film, and help us get it up there from the deep dark dungeons of YouTube where it’s currently sitting with 447 views ;-)

But more than anything, enjoy. And let us know what you think of it.

A big thank you to Mathew for filming, to Jamie for designing our title boards, and to Anthony and Charlie from Mother’s BOSH for editing.

And of course to everyone who helped us out and were happy to appear on YouTube.

Britt and Anna

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VE @Glug in Shoreditch

2010-10-30T18:50:00+00:00

VE @Glug in Shoreditch

Maybe it was simply that this is so much more than a job, it’s something that we’ve been living with, dreaming about and working so intensely on for close to 2 years. So going out and realising that “no one really knows what the hell we’re up to or about” and Oh my God will it even make sense" brought out a few nerves.

Our talk went into what visual writing is all about, we showed our “bad news” film from our Belgian printer, shared our finished Tristram Shandy and how that all came about, introduced some of the beautiful final images from Tree Of Codes and some snapshots of the brilliantly crazy reactions that book has yielded so far.

We think, afterall, it did make sense, we got some lovely inspired feedback afterwards (from strangers, not just friends being kind, honestly). There’s definitely room for improvement in setting up what VE is all about when we talk about it to a bunch of 400 strangers, let’s be frank about that, but once the books were on screen we think our babble came to some kind of fruition.

What was really really nice was being out there with other people talking about what they do, and getting inspired by their talks too. Jamie showed some gorgeous work from Airside, Sean from FAT made us laugh and think about the validity of copying, Mark Fisher made us realise that we know very little about capital political storytelling from a philosophical point of view, and Richard Hogg brought the house down with his observations and love of being contrary.

First one done and dusted, here’s till next time.

Britt

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Amazing", "You're mad", "What the f***?

2010-10-28T13:21:00+00:00

Amazing", "You're mad", "What the f***?

With Mathew’s help and Bella’s assistance we went out on Friday and then again on Sunday, to show the book, have people look, touch, feel it, but most importantly: to open it up.

So, what did they think? Well, this is one of those times where pictures say more than words. Let’s just say that everyone reacted and everyone had something to say. “Mad”, “crazy”, “amazing”, “beautiful”, “unbelievable”, “utterly desirable”, “unreadable”, no one could ever say that this book, once you open it, is the kind of book you just read or look at. This is a book that makes you feel like you want to literally crawl inside and feel it.

A very big thank you to everyone who shared your instant reactions and emotions. We were delighted and more excited than ever.

We can’t wait to share the film and at long last, the book with you all.

Britt & Anna

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We like to go out at night, too. Sometimes.

2010-10-21T10:22:00+00:00

We like to go out at night, too. Sometimes.

And here’s what I saw: lots of G&T’s (more polite than Mad Men, though), perfectly triangular martini glasses, a big white and orange cake with flower on top, leather arm chairs and pizza, too.

Oh. And readings. By Craig Taylor, who was very very funny (despite being told by an overly eager punter that “it was clear his text hadn’t been edited”) and Zoe Williams who sounded every bit as witty as her Guardian columns and topped it all off by saying she was “too tired” to re-kindle any kind of fourth wave feminism.

There were probably a few too many “it’s the end of the day so I’ll loosen my tie now” looks and the formal bar stools and microphones seemed a tad too staged for my liking, but nice to spend a night at Shoreditch House with people so “into” the idea of talking about books: reading and writing them. A lot better than Facebook’s like button.

— Anna

hello

#Shandy, #Thank you

2010-10-14T15:13:00+00:00

#Shandy, #Thank you

Some of our Twitter followers have taken some great pics of the book. We just love them. Be sure to keep sending them in.

With an especially big thank you to:

@chrisclarkecc
@john_self
@simongoode
@jamessomerfield
@ewanpearson

Anna + Britt
@visualeditions

hello

Books in Glass Cabinets

2010-10-07T16:18:00+00:00

Books in Glass Cabinets

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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Goodbye disposable books! Hello new canvases!

2010-09-28T20:30:00+00:00

Goodbye disposable books! Hello new canvases!

These are the kinds of questions we’ve been asking ourselves (and people have been asking us) a lot. And the thing is, we don’t know. But we have been thinking about it and at least for now, our answer comes in two (related) parts.

First up is: why bemoan the loss of scrappy beach holiday reads, the environmentally unfriendly Tesco (or: Walgreens for you Americans) 3 for 2 paperback shelf fillers? We would rather those lived on Kindle. The thing is, books need a reason to be printed, there’s got to be something about that reading experience that can only live on the page. Our second book, Tree of Codes by Jonathan Safran Foer, is completely die-cut. It’s a paperback book on the outside, that when opened, is a sculptural object. A sculptural object that has a story, that you can read. That kind of tactile, sensory experience you just can’t have on screen.

The second part of our answer, though, is this. We keep thinking of our books as more than just objects, we think of them as experiences. So, we need to think about how best to bring a story to life in whatever form that is. Like IDEO’s imagining of Alice, or Jonathan Safran Foer and Orhan Pamuk talking about the book as an object at the forthcoming New Yorker Festival.

What we’re really talking about is the storytelling experience and how we can best add to those in a way that nurtures our minds and imaginations rather than taking away from them because of the usual constraints, formulas, or worse: down right dullness.

Page? screen? We’re in.

Anna and Britt

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The imperfection of noses

2010-09-20T23:35:00+00:00

The imperfection of noses

Books delivered, posters arrived, boxes unpacked. Nothing like a calm set of nerves mixed with a portion of excited hysteria while we wait for our Shandy microsite to be completed and our Pay Pal account to be test run.

The imperfection of noses looks pretty close to being launch perfect from where we sit.

Well, as perfect as imperfection will ever be ;)

Britt

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Kevin, Shirley, Shandy and PayPal

2010-09-16T10:24:00+00:00

Kevin, Shirley, Shandy and PayPal

Now what? Well, now, we’re putting finishing touches on a few things on our website. Airside are designing a micro-site for Shandy, complete with a lush animation and With Associates (our genius back-end guys…and gals) are helping us figure out the more complex end of PayPal. Who knew it could be quite that complex.

As it turns out, Jon Gray (from Gray318, who’s designing the cover for our second book, Tree of Codes by Jonathan Safran Foer) happens to work in the same building as With Associates. So when we popped by to say hello and started to tell him all about PayPal antics, he smiled and said, “I thought you just clicked on a button to buy books.” To which we said, “Yes, exactly! So did we!”

But fear not, those “coming soon” buttons will soon be replaced with “buy now” buttons and we’ll be opening up those boxes of books before you know it.

Anna and Britt

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OOCL-Soton here you come!

2010-09-04T21:29:00+00:00

OOCL-Soton here you come!

Super helpful as Stuart was, we’d have to get permission to film the event by the commercial department, permission to enter the port by the harbour department, and security checks by Stuart himself.

So we ran out of time. This is our vessel, OOCL-Soton from China. And wow is it big.

But it’s delivering a bunch of different containers a while back, not our Shandy’s this weekend.

We’d like to think out container would be the most beautiful florescent orange anyway.

Tristram Shandy re-imagined by APFEL, here you come!

We cannot wait to greet you.

Anna and Britt

hello

The Corporate Athlete Says...

2010-08-27T15:20:00+00:00

The Corporate Athlete Says...

We’re trying to stay sane. Trying hard to keep on top of things like distributor deals and discounts and magazine editors wanting to see books that aren’t ready and banks saying that it’ll take 3 working days before funds clear. But, hey, it’s Friday.

So we’re juggling contracts and business with wrapping books in labels and making love packs for those who need them. Like Vendela Vida at The Believer and Bill Godber at Turnaround (who, in our lovely phone call with him, kept talking about The Crumpled Map).

So, here’s to love packs, crumpled maps, distribution contracts, pink cupcakes that look like they’re made of wax, too much coffee, tweets about sanding floors from the @crazyladywriter and the Corporate Athlete. It’s Friday.

Anna and Britt

hello

Can Franzen do for us what Google can't?

2010-08-20T08:31:00+00:00

Can Franzen do for us what Google can't?

William Skidelsky begins by telling us that Franzen was the first living author to grace the cover of Time magazine in ten years. He calls this an event. Note: the event is not that Franzen has a new book coming out, the event is not that Franzen’s new book could be any good, no the event is that an author (who, later we are told is not the next JK Rowling or Dan Brown) is on the cover of a mainstream American title like Time.

Reading between the lines, the question that Skidelsky is asking is this: who gives a damn about an author who writes books about families. And, worse, he can’t even do it regularly: he does it once every ten years.

What about trying to get to better grips with what the Time piece was trying to do? As I see it, the article is all about asking us if it’s possible to (re)engage in a meaningful dialogue with literature in the age of the internet? Put another way, American culture is in a state of crisis and is it possible that someone like Franzen could give us any insight, or maybe even deep understanding of where American culture stands now. Can Franzen do for us, what Google can’t?

Of course it can. And of course Great Literature isn’t dying. It’s changing. Just like Google is changing. Just like we’re changing. I thought it was called (cultural) evolution. So many of these debates (most recently spear-headed by Lee Siegel’s Where have all the Mailers gone?) seem to present us with the idea that we have no choice. That over here we have an old guard musty library literary view and over there we have a world of disposable culture and Kindles on package beach holidays.

Call me an optimist, but I think there must be something in between. An exciting mix of the two. A deep, meaningful future for literature that might just not look like or be what we’re used to.

Bring it on.

Anna

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Late night Time Out thoughts on "e vs oldbooks"

2010-08-19T00:37:00+00:00

Late night Time Out thoughts on "e vs oldbooks"

Anyone bringing printed books into the world is probably thinking about ebooks too. Brilliant Mark Waites from Mother London is telling me nearly daily that we have to think about our VE books on iTunes. We’re not ignoring what’s happening technologically, we’re just going with our gut at the moment and believing in books, e or old, being able to live alongside each other and us figuring out along the way what that means for ours. Time Out had a No man, a Yes man and a Maybe lady talking for and against, with Hannah Westland as the Maybe saying “I hope writers, agents, and publishers will get more creative and nimble about how they can capture readers with interesting and timely content - and in ways that ensure we can still generate sufficient income for writers to keep writing stuff we want to read”.

We like that thought, and hope that ours will do just that.

Night night for now

Britt

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Friday Squirrel

2010-08-13T21:16:00+00:00

Friday Squirrel

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Too shy to face the camera

2010-08-12T20:59:00+00:00

Too shy to face the camera

Amanda and Jess who are helping us getting our books featured in the literary press added to Bella’s complaints by saying that it really was about time we got a proper photo taken. So we gave it a go, starting out by being too shy to face the camera, looking at the Redchurch Street graffiti instead. But finally got persuaded to turn around.

So, here it is, and here we are.

Hello there, or as they say in Denmark hej hej.

Britt

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A short film about dingbats

2010-08-05T16:18:00+00:00

A short film about dingbats

Dingbats are those funny symbols people used to use as spacers when typesetting text manually. People still use them now, but they’ve become more decorative than serving any other real sense of purpose. For those of you who are not designers, you will probably find that you have Zapf Dingbats installed as part of your Microsoft Word.

Anyway, when Sara De Bondt set out to design our identity she thought it would be a nice idea to design our very own VE typeface, made up of dingbats. So it’s a new alphabet, inspired by the dingbat idea as way to put into practice how writing can work in a visual way.

We wrote something about it for our website explaining the idea behind them. But the thing is, other than showing our VE alphabet, we weren’t quite sure what image to use or show to go with it. We thought it would be nice to show how dingbats used to be printed but we couldn’t really find anything that worked. So we ended up finding a bizarre and pretty irrelevant video of a latte printing machine and put it up. But, and this is coming back to my original point, the problem is I suspect that Britt and I are the only two people who a) found the latte printing machine funny and b) saw how it relates (if only a little) to the dingbat text.

We were talking to designer Lucy Brown about it all and she said, “Why don’t I make something for you guys?” Lucy ended up spending a day in her studio (a beautifully restored cabin in the middle of nowhere that Lucy shares with a woodpecker) and a box of colourful buttons and here’s what she’s come up with. A very sweet, lovingly made short film about dingbats.

It’s just what we needed.

—Anna

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A little dreaming

2010-07-27T11:54:00+00:00

A little dreaming

The reality checks have been about money and trying to make the numbers work. But it’s been bigger than that. Much bigger. At the core, the last few months have been about asking ourselves what our ambitions are, what we’re really setting out to do here and how we do that without getting stuck into the predictable ways of doing things.

To help clear her head, Britt ended up re-reading the Arts Council proposal we had written over a year ago. And it made us realise that we’ve been sticking to our guns with some stuff, but not everything. Britt sent me a few emails copying and pasting bits of the proposal and saying things like “we’ve done this, which is great”, but “we also said we were going to do this and we haven’t. Why not?” Turns out we got more side-lined than we thought, so we’ve been re-thinking those areas again and trying to get more focused.

My way to re-evaluate, digest and reflect, was to take the day off and go with my six year old daughter Bella to the Small Spaces show at the V&A yesterday. I was really blown away by most of it, but mostly the reading tower.

For me, the reading tower was all about feeling safe, protected, cuddled and carried away to some dreamy faraway place. And call me a dreamer, but I still think that feeling only seems possible when you’re surrounded by lots and lots of beautiful books.

I guess the point of all this rambling is to say: whether it’s Britt’s business brain going back to something we set out to do over a year ago or my head in the clouds brain hiding away in a tower of books, we both feel like, no matter what, we need to just keep sticking to our gut.

And not forget to do a little dreaming here and there.

—Anna

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Surprise visit from APFEL

2010-07-21T09:36:00+00:00

Surprise visit from APFEL

The good news was the pages looked gorgeous, but there were invariably a few problems. The funny thing is Britt keeps having nightmares that the printer will bind the book in the wrong order. Turns out the pages are still unbound, so we have to wait to see if Britt’s recurring nightmare comes true, but the guys in China mis-printed quite a few pages. Nothing terrible, but they definitely need to be re-done.

We went through them all together and it was this weird combination of oooohing and aahhhing over how incredible it all looked, while still keeping a discerning eye. Alex ended up shedding some great light on it all. He said something like this: It looks really amazing, to be honest, I’d be worried if the book was completely perfect. And of course he’s so right.

We have to wait a little longer while those pages get re-printed. Anna asked Louise to get the printers to send us the mis-prints so we can use them somewhere, somehow.

Who knows, we might end up lining our ceiling with them. I’m sure someone out there can think of something better. [email protected]">Give us a holler if you have any great ideas.

hello

Our very own bookshelf

2010-07-10T11:34:00+00:00

Our very own bookshelf

James and Elliot had designed this palette bookshelf while studying typography. I saw the bookshelf lying around in the studio one day and asked what they were planning on doing it with when they left college. They shrugged their shoulders and said, “I dunno know.”

So I asked if we could have it.

But of course I didn’t think about how they could or would bring it to the studio. They ended up walking it, using a trolley, from Elephant and Castle to Marble Arch. For those of you who don’t live in London, it’s not very close. It took them about 3 hours to get it here. I took them out for a mint lemonade as a thank you.

-Anna

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Shandy colours are here

2010-06-14T13:26:00+00:00

Shandy colours are here

Might be difficult to see from the pic but we spent quite some time deciding on just the right shade of flourescent orange. In the end we gave in and let the ladies at APFEL decide.

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Our trip to Die Keure, Belgium

2010-06-08T10:25:00+00:00

Our trip to Die Keure, Belgium

The first leg of it all, at least. We’re not going to print until everyone’s happy. We’re still tweaking small things (that are actually quite big) like the copyright page and Jonathan’s afterword.

Wouter started the meeting by saying “we have good news and we have bad news, which do you want first?”. We asked for the bad news first but ended up hearing the good news.

The good news was that they can make the book. They can make the book.

The bad news was that we can’t do it as hardback because of the way books need to rest on what’s called a saddle and the way the spine dries. We learned a lot about binding and different glues today. The gist of it is the die-cuts would rip on the saddle, making it way too risky to go down that route. But you know, we can live with that as long as the book can happen.

Phew phew phew phew phew phew.

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Making and cutting a dummy...by hand

2010-05-28T22:23:00+00:00

Making and cutting a dummy...by hand

We’re about to send it to Jonathan to see what he think of it. Sara doesn’t like how one row lines up perfectly, but we don’t think it’s a problem. Keep thinking what a relief it was to get these guys in and actually test it out before we go to press.

You can see more photos of our day and other Tree of Codes development work on flickr.

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A trip to the British Library

2010-04-26T22:37:00+00:00

A trip to the British Library

The volumes were all published separately, and we got to look through the first few editions of each of the nine volumes. It felt weird handling the originals: some of them were literally crumbling, others were in pretty good condition.

But the thing that struck us more than anything else was that trying to make sense of the editions (what was published when, in what order) was incredibly confusing. And suddenly, any sense of our own need to be precise or perfect about our own edition, started to wash away. It seemed less about “getting it right” and more about getting this book out there again in a way that will make people excited about it again. And when we say people, we don’t just mean the Shandy academics.

Much food for thought. Need to feed all this thinking back to Emma and Kirsty of APFEL tomorrow.

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Tea and cakes at Cocomaya

2010-03-18T14:47:00+00:00

Tea and cakes at Cocomaya

Serena was super encouraging, a great listener and is getting back to us about other like-minded people we should be talking to. As soon as we turned the corner and were out of sight, we just gave eachother a big hug. It was one of those “can’t quite believe it” kind of hugs.

Reeling.

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A pressie for Serena

2010-02-19T15:57:00+00:00

A pressie for Serena

Serena is one of those business women we really admire and respect. We bought her a few books and wrote her a letter about what we’re up to and who we are. And asked if she could spare a little time to meet up for a chat so we can share some of our thinking with her.

Would be wonderful if we could hear back from her. If nothing else, it’s nice to know that she’ll know what we’re up to.

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Wow. Look what we got today.

2009-11-24T11:44:00+00:00

Wow. Look what we got today.

We’re still flicking through to decide which is our favourite one. Nice to do a bit of recycling like this. And so much cheaper.

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We can't believe it, but we're holding a dummy in our hand.

2009-11-01T10:26:00+00:00

We can't believe it, but we're holding a dummy in our hand.

It feels sturdy which is what we had hoped for. And the most important thing, is they figured out a way to make it work. Can’t wait to hear what Jonathan thinks. Exciting.

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John Baldessari's Tristram Shandy

2009-10-29T11:16:00+00:00

John Baldessari's Tristram Shandy

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Problems at the printers

2009-10-05T10:26:00+00:00

Problems at the printers

What can we say. We’re feeling really bloody flat right now. Either we’re completely in denial or just beyond determined to make it happen. Probably a bit of both. Die Keure are giving it another go and we’re trying hard not to lose sleep over it.

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Looking at dingbats

2009-09-29T17:38:00+00:00

Looking at dingbats

Find out more about why we love dingbats!

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Sara De Bondt's work on our studio wall

2009-09-29T15:17:00+00:00

Sara De Bondt's work on our studio wall

The result is kind of the visual journey of all our meetings and conversations over the last couple of months.

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VE at the Barbican Gallery

2009-07-29T11:37:00+00:00

VE at the Barbican Gallery

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City cut-outs

2009-07-23T16:27:00+00:00

City cut-outs

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A book snake

2009-06-23T16:33:00+00:00

A book snake

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Over the moon

2009-05-21T11:25:00+00:00

Over the moon

We put a lot into it all: what the contract actually looks like, let alone what it’s inside. We thought about all the contracts we’ve ever seen or been sent and how it’s such a shame how dull and anti-climactic they always feel. So we wanted to bring some magic into the whole thing. We’re probably taking it all way too seriously, but it really feels like we should start how we mean to go on. And it goes without saying that this feels like a helluva (scary) start.

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Shoreditch Gallery as inspiration

2009-04-25T11:15:00+00:00

Shoreditch Gallery as inspiration

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Nailed it.

2009-03-29T11:14:00+00:00