| About Eve series (Extract) | |
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It was probably the spring of 2000 when Chiaki Yamamoto from Gallery Eve told me about a plan of publishing a collection of poems and paintings in sync with an exhibition. The plan I presented listed names of the staff members and their positions: Yamamoto as in charge of planning and production, Shirai of design, and Khori of editorial work. There were also notes saying, "a collection of poems and paintings (each volume includes different amounts of poems and paintings with different amounts of weight)," "rediscovering desirable qualities of books that cannot be merely reduced to information and images," and "reviewing the conventional components of books that are determined by the requirements of the publisher and the distributor." The plan - represented our desire to stop and look back at the history of books, and to confirm the uniqueness of books, which is something that has finally becoming clear through the spread of the Internet. The three of us wanted to create a minimal-style book consisting of only paintings and text for readers who will actually pick up the book and flip the pages. I believe that a book is completed when someone actually reads it; It might take a couple of year, or a decade, or may be even a century for the book to be complete in this sense. Together with Shirai, I did a brainstorming on what will be necessary and unnecessary for our new book. We knew that we didn't have to care much about the size of the book since it was not going to be displayed on a bookstore's shelf. But for an economic use of paper, we decided that a regular A4 size would be ideal. We figured there would be no need for printing the title on the spine of the book. Since we were only going to be making a small number of copies, we realized that we could print the text and drawing on different types of papers using black-and-white printing and four-colour printing, and later paste the painting into the page. We decided that front and back cover pages were unnecessary. But we wanted to use saddle sewing for binding so that the pages can be fully opened and read over and over again. |
Junichiro Kouri (Editor) |