Anna Grass – Im Gebirge, 2018
Format: 15.5 × 22.5 cm
Pagecount: 124
Edition: 60
Design: Book Book
Print: Office Offset and digital print
Feature: Grafik
Im Gebirge documents a number of hiking trips in the Swiss Alps made during the 1980s and 90s by Anna Grass. She enjoyed exploring the mountainous landscape surrounding her house in Ticino and would frequently venture out into the valleys in the vicinity of Lago Maggiore with her partner, plotting the routes herself and writing detailed accounts of each excursion along the way.
Anna studies one of the precisely printed Swiss maps at our studio.
Anna’s collection of journals, hand-drawn maps, sketches, Swiss hiking maps and the typewritten manuscripts formed the analogue starting point for this project. Combining Office Offset with the fairly new HP Indigo digital print technology made this small edition possible.
From analogue to digital, and back to analogue.
A bespoke black ink mix gave the project a haptic quality – you can even smell the ink when you open the book.
Anna was fascinated by the technical aspects of bringing a book to life. Together we discussed ink, paper, book design and typography. This collaborative approach is indicative of how all of our projects are structured: we are not just a print shop where you send some data and receive the finished product. Instead, we work closely with a client in order to produce the best result.
The Swiss maps were pre-printed on an HP Indigo machine, and we received the pre-cut sheets for the Office Offset machine.
Dealing with some minor toning (aka scumming) issues.
Printing the book was a time-consuming endeavour in itself, involving 32 print runs, due to the small four-page signatures necessitated by the machine’s size. It was cloth-bound and foil-blocked at our bindery in trust in Leipzig. We took Anna along with us, to show her this final step in production. In the end she saw everything from start to finish, from concept to completed book. It is no understatement that the process was as important as the final product.
The book binder shows Anna the process of foil blocking on a Krause embossing machine.