We don’t like to have favourites but… this project is up there with the best of ‘em. Mainly because we got to have so much fun with letterpress. We were asked to look at how we could incorporate traditional letterpress printing into the design of the book so we commissioned artisan printers, Aardvark-on-Sea, to design and hand print the chapter openers. We then scoured London print shops for old wood blocks to adorn the interior. Kristen did the creative direction, along with Simon Rhodes at Random House, and Rowan Powell did the gorgeous interior text design. The cover was designed by Julia Connolly at Random House. We also designed and produced the website londonforlovers.net.

About the Book: London for Lovers navigates the changing face of the Capital, with all of its secrets and surprises, mapping out dates full of originality, spontaneity, and adventure, allowing you to concentrate on the main event – each other. Whether your idea of romantic bliss is walking with dinosaurs in Crystal Palace or star-gazing in Greenwich Park, sniffing out the best street eats in Maltby Street or unearthing Gothic romance in Highgate Cemetery – there are ideas here to suit every mood, every season and every budget.

There are suggested routes for quiet days of romance in Leafy London – from Hampstead Heath and Kensington Gardens, to Isabella Plantation and St James Park, taking in some secret gardens on the way. Or for the night owls, Late Night London – from the Seven Noses of Soho to the streets of Shoreditch, from Dalston’s hippest bars to Exmouth Market’s Cafe Kick. And then there’s Lost London, Last Minute London, Lazy London and Learned London, as well as Live and Left-field London.

For first dates and soul mates, long term Londoners or just visiting, this book freewheels through London to find you a few hours that could change everything.

We had the pleasure of designing and producing, in collaboration with Riot Communications, this beautiful clothbound hardback for Waterstones. Editor Cathy Galvin commissioned eighteen writers to reflect the mood and changes of 2012. These included fiction writers, essayists, and poets such as Will Self, Victoria Hislop, Andrew Motion, Hanif Kureishi, Lionel Shriver and Jackie Kay. Our job was to ensure the books were produced to the highest standard to do justice to such an amazing array of talented writers. The book uses gold and burgundy foils on red Brillianta, with red/burgundy printed endpapers. Designer Emma King did a wonderful job of both the case and text design while Kristen Harrison managed the editorial and production processes.

About the Project

This is an extract from ‘Making Murakami’ by Kristen Harrison, which explains some of the thinking behind this complex project:

The limited edition of Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84 is inspired by the tradition of the artists’ book or livre d’artiste. Artists’ books can take many forms – an artist might create a book as an artwork in and of itself (like Louise Bourgeoise and her beautiful hand-sewn cloth books: http://bit.ly/csw2FY) or they may use the book as a canvas as Joan Miro so wonderfully did (http://bit.ly/tbEfnh) or, a more contemporary technique is to re-use books to create completely new artworks as seen in the papercut installations of Danish artist Peter Callesen (http://bit.ly/qtrAFT). But whatever the form, three things remain common to artists’ books: they are predominantly hand-produced, are limited to a set number of copies and they naturally blur the line between books and art. There was never any question that the artist in this project was Haruki Murakami so our challenge was simply to find a way to express the essence of his story visually. We started by imagining the three volumes as a blank canvas (left) and then looked to the text to draw out the key elements of the narrative and imagine… click here to download the full article

Edition Information

This signed and numbered edition of 1Q84 is limited to exactly 111 copies. The front and back covers are printed on Somerset, a 10 per cent cotton archival paper, using a Swiss-made 1963 Gietz Art Platen hand-fed letterpress. This limited edition is a collaboration between Simon Rhodes, Kristen Harrison at The Curved House and designer Stefanie Posavec. Text design by Jim Smith. Covers printed by Justin Knopp at Typoretum in Great Britain. Text pages printed and bound by Graphicom, Verona. Published by Harvill Secker in 2011. Random House Group Limited Reg. No. 954009. A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 9781846554902.

To view more images of this project see our Flickr stream: http://www.flickr.com/photos/thecurvedhouse/sets/72157627866450881/

Photos courtesy of Justin Knopp

Read more

Pricey Tomes, Straights Times, November 27, 2011 (PDF)

We are very excited to announce the launch of Curved House Editions, the limited edition publishing arm of The Curved House. Visit the website to get your hands on copies of our very first publications, namely: two gorgeous limited edition notebooks that we have published as part of the Little Book Project (see below). These notebooks feature illustrations by über talented Irish illustrator, Denise Nestor, whose delicate and beautiful pencil drawings have been published in the New York Times. All copies are signed and numbered by the artist.

The Little Book Project

The Little Book Project is our way of making beautiful art accessible and affordable in book form (in case it’s not obvious, we love books). We select artists to collaborate with and produce a set of two notebooks, one lined for writing and one blank for drawing, featuring their work on the cover. Each book comes with an edition certificate in the form of a miniature artwork, signed and numbered by the artist.

We will continue to publish a new set of notebooks – featuring different artists – every season (four per year) with continuous numbering so you can collect them all until infinity.

And though these are limited to just 500 copies we hope you will not be precious with them. They will only truly be a limited edition when they are filled by you.

>>> curvedhouseeditions.com

Waterstones Children’s Book Prize from The Curved House on Vimeo.

Now in its eighth year, the Waterstones Children’s Book Prize was created to champion new and emerging talent in children’s writing. For the first time this year the prize has been split into three categories – Picture books, Fiction 5 – 12 and Teen books. Working with Preena Gadher and Ceri Maxwell at Riot Communications, we needed to come up with an energetic and inventive way to introduce all 18 authors and their books. We decided to work with real kids, who really love books, and we think that vibe shines through.

>>> Read more about the Waterstones Children’s Book Prize

>>> Visit the website of Riot Communications

Waterstones 11 is a campaign designed to uncover and champion the very best in debut fiction for the year ahead. In this, the second initiative of its kind, Waterstones present 11 truly incredible new writers whose debut novels will be published in the UK in English in 2012.

Working with the amazingly talented publicists at Riot Communications (specifically Anwen Hooson and Maura Brickell) The Curved House produced a book and a video for the launch of the Waterstones 11, on 18 January, 2012. The 500 limited edition books were designed by Jim Smith and produced by Kristen Harrison. The covers were printed full colour on Colorplan with matt lamination and debossing. For those with an interest in design and production details, the effect of the matt lam over the Colorplan was surprisingly impressive, giving the books the softness of matt lamination but with a nice grainy texture. Our friend Coralie Bickford-Smith even gave it the thumbs up – we’re awfully proud of that!

The video was produced using the artwork for each book jacket. These were designed in-house by the various publishers so we just took their original artwork and animated different elements to bring them to life. The music is ‘So You’re a Writer’ by 6-Day Riot (6dayriot.co.uk).

And the best thing about this project? We got to read extracts from all of these talented debut authors:

The Waterstones 11 for 2012:

Jenni Fagan: The Panopticon
Patrick Flanery: Absolution
Frances Greenslade: Shelter
Chad Harbach: The Art of Fielding
Eowyn Ivey: The Snow Child
Rachel Joyce: The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry
Grace McCleen: The Land of Decoration
Anna Raverat: Signs of Life
Charlotte Rogan: The Lifeboat
Karen Thompson Walker: The Age of Miracles
Will Wiles: Care of Wooden Floors

>>> Read more about Waterstones 11

>>> Visit the website of Riot Communications

From the dimly lit alleyways of Whitechapel that played host to the Ripper’s darkest deeds to the well-to-do streets of Belgravia where Lord Lucan was last seen, Murders of London stalks the capital’s thoroughfares, uncovering the city’s violent past.

This is by far the creepiest book The Curved House has produced. It’s 224 full-colour pages of utterly murderous stories, some from London’s distant past and some from London’s all-too-recent history. Thank you to the book’s awesome editor Sophie Lazar for giving us this fun little project, and subsequently giving us nightmares every night for the entire production cycle.

The trailer above is part of a website we’re now producing to accompany the publication and early designs confirm that it will be just as creepy as the book.

Jasmine’s website needed to appeal to her target readership (kids aged 8-12 years) as well as parents, teachers, publishers and agents who might want more information about Jasmine and her books. We have used the imagery from The Book of Wonders cover to give the site a magical, fantasy-style mood and we’ve included a couple of animated icons to get the attention of young readers. We’ve also included a forum so Jasmine can chat to her fans and we’ve got news, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube all feeding through to the homepage.

Jasmine has produced the videos on the site herself which just goes to show what a super talent she is!

>>> Visit www.jasminerichards.com

Campaign Website

Spent a couple of days setting up a campaign website using the WordPress CMS. This included a simple form so that people could upload their profile and nominate an indie bookshop they want to support. We made the form semi-automated so that we only had to moderate the submissions once they came in and we made sure to add categories from the start so we had some flexibility in re-jigging the site later.

Spread the word

With our website ready, we spread the word via Facebook and Twitter. We created a Twitter hashtag #booksnotbeer so people could join the conversation and this was particularly successful. The word spread far and wide and we began to get submissions from all over the UK plus Germany, the USA, Australia, Spain and France.

Industry news

We also got a piece onto the Bookseller’s blog to announce the campaign to the booktrade. This, and the activity on Twitter, prompted a piece in Australia’s equivalent, The Bookseller and Publisher.

Twitter dialogue

Come 1st October the submissions to the website stopped and people started to use Twitter and our #booksnotbeer hashtag to give updates on their progress. This was the fun bit as participants became ever more imaginative with their Tweets. Some even posted photos of their non-alcoholic beverages and tweeted pictures of books they’d bought with their saved beer money.

Retox event

To end the campaign we’ve organised a drinks evening on 1st November at Treadwells bookshop in Bloomsbury. It hath been dubbed “Indiependence Day” to remind us why we did this in the first place. Stay tuned for pics and a further update. And if you’d like to attend, let us know!

This 2-minute animation was produced for Riot Communications. They needed a quick turnaround video that would have an impact in under two minutes so we came up with a few ideas, sketched out a storyboard and then commissioned the fantabulous illustrator, Gemma Correll. We then did the edit, applying a few stop motion techniques along the way, and voila! A lovely little story about how books change lives. And it’s true, they really do.

Directed and Produced by Kristen Harrison at The Curved House
Illustrated by Gemma Correll
Written and narrated by Riot Communications