Two at Once

I spotted both The Curatorial Conundrum and Olivia Plender, Rise Early, Be Industrious at last weekend’s Offprint art book fair at Tate Modern. The former at both the stand of the Luma Foundation and MIT, the latter at Sternberg‘s.

It’s always surprising to finally hold something in your hands after having engaged with it so intensely for often quite a while via a computer screen. On screen everything is backlit and the sense of actual scale, physical weight, the feel and colour and bendiness of the paper, how it actually falls when you open the book, and how the cover relates to the book block, are removed from the actual encounter.

With both books I was very pleasantly surprised by their scale and the paper, and the actual weight, holding them in hand. I’d picked some copies of Olivia’s book up a while ago in Glasgow, but The Curatorial Conundrum I hadn’t seen yet. And one thing is clear, orange is the new black also in book design…