Penguin Random House New Zealand
Award for Best Illustrated Book 2021
Finalist
Designer: Katie Kerr
Title: Dwelling in the Margins: Art Publishing in Aotearoa
Publisher: GLORIA Books
Format: 180 x 114mm, 318pp, perfect bound. The book has uncoated and coated paper stocks, is perfect bound with a Colourplan Black cover and encased in a screen-printed vinyl dust jacket. The book was printed and bound in Aotearoa New Zealand.
Typography: Pitch and Söhne by New Zealand type foundry Klim, and Agipo by Radim Peško.
All of the books that Katie produces with GLORIA are the same size and format: an exploration into, and appreciation for, the paperback book as an accessible yet often overlooked medium. The layout and style recalls publications by mid-century book designers Quentin Fiore and Richard Hollis, who experimented with the paperback format in titles like The Medium is the Massage by Marshall McLuhan (1967), Ways of Seeing by John Berger (1972) and I Seem to Be a Verb by Buckminster Fuller (1970). GLORIA publications are non-monolithic art books that are designed to be read anywhere — popped in a handbag, exchanged over coffee, taken on a train. You can see all of the titles at gloria-books.com.
Judges’ comments A seemingly humble, small, yellow paperback with considerable heft once held in the hand, containing, as it does, the contemporary state of art publishing in Aotearoa. An engaging mix of black-and-white trade bookwove pages recounting admirably honest, exhaustive – and at times understandably exhausted – reflections on bookmaking, interleaved with full-colour gloss inserts displaying a variety of materials, contents and contexts in which the artists and publishers operate. Abstract marginalia illustrations of leaves, signatures, spines and punctuation circulate through the book, acting as a kind of running graphic commentary. The design encourages easy dipping in and out, jumping around the different spaces and studios featured, but in so doing, it also pulls you in – an alluring image or errant phrase grabbing your attention and convincing you to spend time in these margins.
