Visual Editions; 172 pages; $40 and £25.
Established in 2009 as an outlet for literary experimentation, Visual Editions is now four books old.
"What we're about is great-looking stories," explains Anna Gerber, who runs the irrepressibly ambitious London-based publishing house Visual Editions with her fellow book lover Britt Iversen.
Now Visual Editions has teamed up with Google Creative Lab in Sydney to create Editions at Play, a publishing project and online bookstore that sells books that "cannot be printed", with each one available through Google Play.
Kevin Harvey, Nottingham The only book I managed to finish this year, and I started several, was Geoff Dyer's Another Great Day at Sea: Life Aboard the USS George HW Bush (Visual Editions).
Gerber has been pushing at the boundaries of the printed page since she and Britt Iversen founded Visual Editions in 2010, a publisher of mould-breaking books including Jonathan Safran Foer's Tree of Codes and Marc Saporta's Composition No 1.
And Visual Editions, a young company set up to develop a new genre of visual books, is to publish its fourth title in May: "Kapow!", a book on the Arab Spring written by Adam Thirlwell and designed by Studio Frith.
Conceptually, it is akin to BS Johnson's The Unfortunates (1969), lovingly resurrected in 2008 by New Directions, or Marc Saporta's Composition No 1(1962), which received the app treatment from Visual Editions last year – but in those cases, the co-author, subordinate as they may be, is the reader, who ultimately shuffles the pages of the work themselves.
A boutique publisher called Visual Editions, working in tandem with die-cut specialists in the Netherlands and a "hand-finisher" in Belgium, has produced a £25 artefact that, if you share Foer's aesthetics, has "a sculptural quality" that's "just beautiful", or which, if you're an average reader, might make you think a wad of defenceless print has been fed through an office shredding machine.
You can find out more about Visual Editions here, and Google Creative Lab here.
You can find out more abotu Visual Editions here, and Google Creative Lab here.
