During a recent trip to Vicenza, Italy, to press pass Tune & Fairweather’s upcoming book Blood Echoes, I was fortunate to sit down with our printer rep Mattia Galliera to record the debut interview of the Art of the Book podcast.

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More info on projects mentioned:

• The Divine Comedy (The Folio Society)

• Blood Echoes (Tune & Fairweather)

• Abyssal Archive (Tune & Fairweather)

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Title: The Fantastic Gustave Doré
Authors: Alix Paré, Valérie Sueur-Hermel
Art direction: Sabine Houplain & Benoit Berger
Publisher: Prestel
Printing and binding: Toppan Leefung, China
Dimensions: 8.38 inches x 10.56 inches

COVER

One of the most welcome distinctions between an art book and a piece of fine art is that the book invites you to touch it. And the cover of The Fantastic Gustave Doré is certainly a triumph of tactile design.

The heft of the greyboards (at least 3.5mm, if I had to guess) and dramatic elevation of the embossed details makes it feel like the sculpt was more likely to have been accomplished by a valley-carving glacier than a regular brass die.

I mean, just look at that impression…

The curvature in the leviathan’s neck is so pronounced that it feels like the creature is slithering up and out of the page’s surface. No 3D glasses required.

And the silvery foil streaks add a dreamy glisten to the sea foam.

The combination of the emboss treatment and foiling accents on this bespoke collage of Doré’s work might be dramatic in the emotional effect, but the designer accomplishes the work with admirable subtlety. The foil streaks are delicate in weight and never overpower or wrest attention from the beloved monochrome of Doré’s original etchings.

SPINE & PAGE EDGES

Foil blocking on cloth is a risky play.

Because the foil adhesion is much less reliable than with paper substrates, you’re often left with a slightly fuzzy, low-resolution effect. Or the occasional “dead pixel” where there’s a break in the foil continuity within a particular weave of the fabric mesh.

Also, I’ve been told by one of our print partners that the quality of available foils has gotten noticeably worse in recent years, which also contributes to adhesion issues.

Prestel’s production team deserves kudos in its material selection here. The spine cloth is velvety soft and, though less than perfectly clean in its registration, the gold foil sits snugly enough.

The black ink coverage across all three page edges is a handsome touch. And though I understand the enthusiasm for the elegant Saol display font used throughout the book, splashing the artist’s name along with “THE FANTASTIC” in all-caps across both spine and page edges creates a visual ruckus. It feels a bit like having a carnival barker shouting through a megaphone at you at close range.

ENDPAPERS

Oh man, I can’t even with these endpapers.

The psychedelic swirl of the printed marbling motif is a perfect opening to a collection of Doré’s art, given the visionary trippy-ness of the man’s imagination.

The moment I saw these, I crossed my fingers for a unique pattern in the book’s reverse. The book’s art directors Sabine Houplain and Benoit Berger from the French design firm Bureau Berger did not let me down.

Here are the closing endpapers:

EDITORIAL DESIGN

The display and body fonts in The Fantastic Gustave Doré strike a lovely balance between romantic in the headers and crisply legible in the body copy. The spreads are roomy, uncluttered.

Let’s look at a few examples:

ARTWORK

The book’s authors curate a wonderful selection of pieces from Doré’s immense oeuvre of more than 10,000 images. There is a wide variety here, from etchings to landscape paintings to caricatures to illustration. The book has a lively pace and never stays pinned down in a given style or period of Doré’s career too long.

CLOSING REMARKS

The most sumptuous collection of Doré art I’ve yet come across.

The Fantastic Gustave Doré elevates the master’s work by not merely reproducing it but aspiring to work its own spell through deft physical design, luscious typesetting and top-flight materials.

Richly deserving of your attention.

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During the printing and binding of Tune & Fairweather’s fantasy art book Soul Arts, we hired two different video teams – one Irish, one Italian – to capture behind-the-scenes footage of the manufacturing process.

Even though it’s easy to imagine a tidy division between categories like ‘hand-made’ and ‘machine-made’, the operation of modern Heidelberg printing presses and bindery equipment requires human skill and intervention every step of the way.

The printer in Florence, Italy, that helped us bring Soul Arts to life was just months away from upgrading its bindery line of tank-like cast iron to the latest grey and shiny state of the art.

Though efficiency gains more than justify the upgrade, I’m thankful that we were able to get such beautiful video footage of the vintage bindery chugging away on one of its final jobs before being decommissioned.

When you watch the casing section toward the end of the video below, you are literally watching history in motion:

Coming soon… Art of the Book.

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