It is on the day one year ago that I wrote about the book fair in Leipzig and also this year I saw a bunch of in­spir­ing books there – con­tent-wise as well as re­gard­ing the de­sign and pro­duc­tion.  I spent hours ad­mir­ing the nom­i­nees and win­ners of the yearly award »Best Book De­sign From All Over The World« and the pre­sen­ta­tions of the stu­dents of dif­fer­ent Ger­man book art study pro­grammes, find some im­pres­sions in the pic­tures. An­other high­light was the Ko­rean Pavil­lon – every sin­gle book here could have won the best book award, in my opin­ion!
I con­cluded my week­end in Leipzig with a visit to »It’s a book, it’s a stage, it’s a pub­lic space«,  a meet­ing of small in­de­pen­dent pub­lish­ers, where I met friends who pre­sented their cool pro­ject »Pub­lish­ing as (part time) prac­tice«. Check it out here, I heard they will come to Berlin with it, soon.

The team be­hind Ger­man ty­pog­ra­phy and graphic de­sign mag­a­zine Slanted dis­cov­ered the amaz­ing power of Cuban poster art and is plan­ning on a spe­cial issue to give the Cuban artists an in­ter­na­tional voice. With 320 pages this Slanted issue will have an im­pres­sive cov­er­age and ex­hi­bi­tions in Berlin, Leipzig and Paris will give deeper in­sights into Cuban de­sign.
To make all these great plans re­al­ity, Slanted is de­pen­dent on the sup­port of all you de­sign en­thu­si­asts out there: Via crowd­fund­ing you can sup­port the pro­ject by or­der­ing copies in ad­vance or buy­ing hand-pressed prints signed by the artists. You can find the lat­est info on the pro­ject’s Face­book page.

What started out al­ready in 1966 as a com­pe­ti­tion for the best posters in the GDR has be­come a dear re­cur­ring event: The ex­hi­bi­tion »Die 100 besten Plakate des Jahres« (100 Best Posters of the Year) is once more on dis­play at Kul­tur­fo­rum at Pots­damer Platz. 53 posters from Ger­many, 45 from Switzer­land and 2 from Aus­tria were awarded for their out­stand­ing de­sign, whereof 23 of the prize-win­ning en­tries are posters de­signed by stu­dents.
We were great fans of the posters by the fol­low­ing de­sign­ers: Paula Trox­ler for a Moby Dick the­ater play, Va­le­ria Gordeew for a masked ball at Udk Berlin, Mark­wald & Neusitzer for an ex­hi­bi­tion of is­landic artist erró, Björn-Chris­t­ian Schiebe for the Mu­seum of Nat­ural Sci­ences.
Have a look at all win­ning posters here or check other dates of the trav­el­ling ex­hi­bi­tion.

We went out to see Sarah Il­len­berg­ers ex­hi­bi­tion at voo store in Kreuzberg. Some of the ex­hibits ap­par­ently were done just at the same day but a lot of her work was fa­mil­iar. Nev­er­the­less it was nice to see some of the orig­i­nals and the beet­root di­a­monds, the pome­gran­ate and the blonde apple just made us smile!

Ob­vi­ously, I bought these 1950s is­sues of »Coun­try Fair« be­cause I fell in love with their splen­did cover il­lus­tra­tions. But also the mag­a­zine’s con­tent is worth men­tion­ing: lessons on how to shoot pheas­ants, ar­ti­cles on bee­keep­ing and ads for har­vest­ing ma­chin­ery add up to an in­ter­est­ing read­ing. The ge­nius be­hind the strik­ing mag­a­zine cov­ers is named John Hanna. He was an Aus­tralian who ar­rived in Lon­don in 1947, mak­ing his liv­ing as a com­mer­cial artist and car­toon­ist there until 1962. Dur­ing his time in Lon­don he cre­ated over 50 cov­ers for Coun­try Fair, so the chances are quite good to hunt down some of them on Ebay!

On New Year’s Eve 1956, Czech il­lus­tra­tor Zdeněk Miler stum­bled over a mole­hill in the woods west of Prague. This in­ci­dent gave him the idea for an an­i­mated car­toon char­ac­ter that has be­come a dear com­pan­ion of our child­hood days: The Lit­tle Mole. Since the Fifties, the lit­tle crea­ture ap­peared in more than 40 books and 50 car­toon episodes, ut­ter­ing not much more than an emo­tional oh-oh or a wel­com­ing ahoi, but al­ways cheer­ful and eager to help his friends. Zdeněk Miler died yes­ter­day, aged 90.

All im­ages by Zdenek Miler
Photo of Zdenek Miler taken from www.​felsofokon.​hu

This funny sign is a win­ner – Bäck­mans shoe re­pair in Stock­holm, es­tab­lished in 1922.

On our trip to South-Ger­many and es­pe­cially at Lake Con­stance we saw a lot of beau­ti­ful in­scrip­tions and signs. The tech­nique is spe­cial: the names of places, maps and lit­tle draw­ings are carved into the walls and then painted, all in a typ­i­cal tra­di­tional il­lus­tra­tive style.

This was long over­due: Berlin-based pub­lish­ing house Gestal­ten fi­nally opened a shop/ex­hi­bi­tion space! But the wait­ing was worth the while: Sit­u­ated in So­phie-Gips-Höfe in Mitte, »Gestal­ten Space« spreads over more than 300 square me­tres and of­fers all the great books by Gestal­ten, cov­er­ing every­thing rel­e­vant in the in­ter­na­tional de­sign scene. Be­sides, you can buy se­lected prod­ucts by de­sign­ers & artists who have been pre­vi­ously pub­lished by Gestal­ten. The gallery space is in­auger­ated with the ex­hi­bi­tion »Cut­ters Edges« dis­play­ing con­tem­po­rary col­lages by 50 in­ter­na­tional artists.

This week­end, I vis­ited the book fair in Leipzig. Be­sides pre­sent­ing an over­whelm­ing amount of lit­er­ary nov­el­ties, the fair is also ded­i­cated to book art. At the yearly ex­hi­bi­tion »Best Book De­sign From All Over The World« arranged by Stiftung Buchkunst you can ad­mire re­ally beau­ti­ful books. Great lay­out, fan­tas­tic ma­te­r­ial choices (es­pe­cially the Asian peo­ple know how to work with paper), so­phis­ti­cated bind­ings and other extra de­tails lifted my spir­its. 14 books were re­warded, check out the win­ners here!

Pan­ther Club is an in­de­pen­dant pub­lish­ing plat­form from Lon­don that pro­duces lim­ited print edi­tions in col­lab­o­ra­tion with in­ter­na­tional artists and il­lus­tra­tors. Orig­i­nally, they started out as a blog cov­er­ing the field of Graphic Arts and il­lus­tra­tion. The blog is a fun source for in­spi­ra­tion where you’ll find a mix­ture of works by new tal­ents as well as in­ter­est­ing ma­te­r­ial from past decades.

1. Pan­ther Clubs sec­ond print
se­ries »Diony­sus, The Ec­stasy & Mad­ness«
2+3. Col­lages by Vir­ginia Echev­er­ria

If you are look­ing for some wise words about live, writ­ten in a straight­for­ward lan­guage with philo­soph­i­cal depth and a good sense of hu­mour, this book is for you! Ok, that’s not what you usu­ally ex­pect from a book mainly re­garded as chil­dren’s fic­tion, but then you re­ally do Tove
Jans­son wrong if you just see her as the cre­ator of some chubby trolls with funny names that en­ter­tain your kids.
At the be­gin­ning of the book, Moom­in­pappa is grumpy be­cause he thinks that his fam­ily does not need him any­more. They even ex­tin­guish a for­est burn with­out ask­ing for his help! He yearns for some dan­ger to pro­tect his fam­ily from, so he de­cides that the whole fam­ily should re­lo­cate to a lone­some, bar­ren is­land far out in the ocean. Here, he thinks, he can earn some re­spect with his great knowl­edge of the sea. What starts out as a big ad­ven­ture be­comes a story about a fam­ily in a cri­sis. Dis­place­ment, un­at­tain­able love, the loss of gen­der roles, mar­riage prob­lems and the chal­lenges of grow­ing-up, of friend­ship and of re­spon­si­bil­ity – all this is dealt with in this sim­ple lit­tle story that Tove Jans­son nar­rates with light­ness and lots of charm.

This is just so lovely!

Wilde Dieren / Wild An­i­mals from Rop van Mierlo on Vimeo.

The Bon­niers Cook Book from 1960 is the Swedish Holy Grail of cook­ing – every­body’s granny had it. It is a culi­nary and vi­sual trea­sure and you can spend a lot of time learn­ing how to mod­ern­ize your kitchen (to a mid­dle of the 20th cen­tury stan­dard), in­ter­pret­ing di­a­grams about how to blend sauces and ad­mir­ing table dec­o­ra­tions. I even dis­cov­ered a piece of Rörstrand chi­naware I have at home! The cover art is by Bo Lassen, un­for­tu­nately I do not know other works by him.

Out now is the lat­est issue of The Elec­tronic Beats Mag­a­zine with one of my favourite cov­ers so far, pic­tur­ing a re­ally ro­man­tic ger­man shep­herd pho­tographed by Mikael Kennedy. Re­ac­ti­vat­ing quill and ink and try­ing to per­form some se­ri­ous hand­writ­ing for the opener pages il­lus­tra­tions felt quite nos­tal­gic! If you want to have a look at the whole issue: Klick! And also past EB is­sues: Klick!!

Last week­end, the renowned book shop Motto Berlin and the neigh­bour­ing Chert Gallery in­vited once again to »Unter dem Motto«, a fair for con­tem­po­rary art pub­lish­ing where they dis­played the works of more than 70 pub­lish­ers from over 17 coun­tries. New for this year was a pro­gramme with films, talks and read­ings.
In mono.​kultur‘s De­sign Talk Kai von Rabenau very briefly in­tro­duced all 24 is­sues of his mag­a­zine mono.​kultur, NODE talked about the two is­sues they de­signed and Mario Lom­bardo showed us nearly every­thing he has done so far. After that we were over­whelmed by the quan­tity of spe­cial in­ter­est mag­a­zines, fanzines and other in­de­pen­dent pub­li­ca­tions. Puh, there´s so much out there, but we´re still ded­i­cated to add some more!