• Reinventing The Look (And Smell) Of A Book - Part 2

Reinventing The Look (And Smell) Of A Book

By Alice Rawsthorn

When Irma Boom suggested designing a book in an unusually squat size and shape, it didn't go down well with the publisher. Nor did her insistence that it should have a white cover, raggedy page edges and an introductory essay printed in type that starts off big and becomes smaller on successive pages.

“It was a struggle,” Boom recalled. “I was suggesting something very different to all of the other books they'd published. But they were courageous and, finally, let me do it.” The result, “Sheila Hicks: Weaving as Metaphor,” was published last year by Yale University Press to accompany an exhibition of Hicks's textiles at the Bard Graduate Center in New York. It has since won a great number of design prizes, and on Mar. 23 was awarded the Gold Medal at the Leipzig Book Fair for “The Most Beautiful Book in the World.”

Winning prizes is nothing new for Boom. Working with a single assistant in her Amsterdam studio, she is also accustomed to struggling to make each of her books as inspiring and surprising as possible. Over the years, she has experimented with everything from elaborate color-codes and hidden motifs to scented bindings, printing on filter coffee paper, producing a 2,136-page book with no page numbers or index, and hacking page edges with a circular saw.

Unexpected though Boom's books look, feel and smell, there is always an underlying logic to their design. The rough-hewn edges of Hicks's book evoke the selvages of her textiles, and the white cover was chosen as a contrast to their rich colors. The shrinking type was conceived to coax people into reading the introductory essay by the philosopher Arthur Danto, by drawing them into the text with big lettering at the beginning.

“Irma is a genius at combining form and content,” said the graphic design historian Emily King. “She finds formats and materials that perfectly match her subjects. Her books are beautiful, satisfying objects that aren't simply exercises in formal skill. She uses design to deliver content in a brilliant fashion, interweaving stories, creating tension and surprise.”

Boom always loved books but discovered book design by accident. Born in the Dutch city of Lochem in 1960, she studied painting at art school in nearby Enschede, and wandered into a lecture on books one day.

“The teacher didn't say anything about design, just showed us books and read from them,” she recalled. “I joined the class and finally joined the graphic design department.”

After graduating, she was offered a job in the government printing office, in The Hague. “I thought, 'No way, it'll be too dull,' but everyone advised me to go there and learn how to design.” She planned to stay for a year but was there for five, experimenting from the start. An annual report for Raad vor der Kunst, the arts funding body, was printed solely in red, blue and yellow, with the size of type on each spread determined by how big - or small - it needed to be to fit a particular text on those two pages.

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c.2007 Alice Rawsthorn. Originally published in the International Herald Tribune. Distributed by The New York Times Syndicate