Today the Stiftung Buchkunst announced the 25 most beautiful German books of 2013. Unfortunately, they didn't include any links. So here are the winners in the "general literature" category. Follow the link above to find out more about academic titles, non-fiction, art books, children's books, etc.
Katherine Mansfield
In einer deutschen Pension
Büchergilde Gutenberg – Frankfurt
Markus Färber
Reprobus
Rotopolpress – Kassel
Hendrik Jackson
Im Licht der Prophezeiungen
kookbooks – Berlin
Peggy Parnass
Kindheit
Schwarze Kunst – Grethem-Büchten,
Edition Klaus Raasch – Hamburg
JAK / Hamed Taheri
JAK
EXP.edition – Stuttgart
They'll choose one of the 25 as "most beautiful book of the year", a title which comes with €10,000 and is announced in September. One previous winner you may be aware of is Judith Schalansky, for her Atlas of Remote Islands. And you can read an interview with her on the subject of book design on the Goethe Institut website. Schalansky is a rather vocal proponent of the book as physical object, which is why I'm surprised by the headline - Books are not a form of fetishism. I'm surprised because I think that's pretty much exactly what she says in the interview - that physical books are fetish objects for her personally. In a sort of vaguely Marxist sense, you know? (I'm a little under the weather so I can't explain this properly.) And perhaps it sounds insulting but it's not really meant to be, because I suspect most of us feel the same way to some extent.
Schalansky is in charge of a series of books for the Berlin publishers Matthes & Seitz, called Naturkunden. They're books about nature, basically, with illustrations and good design. The latest is a collection of watercolours of apples and pears by a Catholic priest and pomologist. The book costs €98 and is no doubt a beautiful object. I wish my head didn't hurt quite so much so that I could draw a parallel to fetishism here without upsetting anyone.
Anyway, if you like your book porn in audiovisual form, there's a video about what the Stiftung Buchkunst look for in a beautiful book.
3 comments:
So pleased for Rotopol who are simply brilliant!
oh,oh,oh, and because this is a sort of Kassel post: Judith Schalansky discovered Korbinian Eigner and his apples and pears in Kassel at last year's documenta where a KZ-3 appletree was planted in the Karlsaue: one of the apples he grew in the Dachau concentration camp when he was a prisoner there.
Aha! It does look like a beautiful book.
My friends from Mairisch Verlag also made the rather long shortlist (http://www.stiftung-buchkunst.de/files/2013/dokumente/Shortlist-2013.pdf) with Stevan Paul's food book Schlaraffenland.
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