Picture the Book

A catalogue of books or an art catalogue? It’s all the same when it comes to the one created by Seagull Books.

A catalogue of books or an art catalogue? It’s all the same when it comes to the one created by Seagull Books.

This was as unique as it could get—an exhibition of digital reproductions of pages from a publisher’s catalogue of books. The 245-page Seagull Books’ catalogue (for fall 2009 and spring 2010), which was released at the Frankfurt Book Fair last year, drew such an enthusiastic response from across the globe that the publisher decided to exhibit book covers and collages from it in Kolkata.

Expectedly, the exhibition, titled The Art of The Book, drew rave reviews and will now travel to other parts of the country. This is not the first time, though, that a Seagull catalogue has created a stir. The publication is quite looked forward to at Frankfurt and has, over the years, induced many famous foreign authors to approach Seagull to publish their books. Eclectic, colourful and artistic, these distinctive catalogues are, by themselves, a treat.

Being nonpareil has, incidentally, been the norm with Kolkata-based Seagull Books since it was founded 28 years ago. “Our catalogues have always been showstoppers. And at Seagull, design has been our pride. Not just the catalogue, but everything in every publication is meticulously designed, right from the typesetting, the font, the page-setting, layout to the binding,” says Seagull Editor Sunandini Banerjee, who has been designing the catalogues for the past few years.

Perhaps the most well-received display is a collage depicting German author and poet Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s A History of Clouds—it features the photo of a cobblestoned square in a typical European town, with people milling around, clouds in the sky and sketches of angels, birds and an airplane-shaped bejewelled pendant juxtaposed on the photo. The book of laconic conversational poems has clouds—‘aliens and yet symbols of human life…’—as its defining theme. “I was fiddling on the computer with this photo and I liked the appeal of the collage. That led to the idea that this year’s catalogue could be collages of photos and sketches that depict a book’s content and theme,” says Sunandini.

Then, there’s the cover of Jean-Paul Sartre’s Portraits, which features an assortment of carved picture frames. The section on French social philosopher Andre Gorz’s Ecologia has collages of vintage cars as they appeared in print advertisements, skeletons of mammals in motion, coins, an apartment block and flowers, all of which find mention in the book. Carnival and Cannibal—an analysis of the antagonism between globalised western modernity and traditional cultures—by French theorist Jean Baudrillard has a collage of a masked George Bush, American actresses, an African tribal in traditional attire, a kid with a burger and Osama bin Laden in a lady’s wig and hat.

One of the most striking displays was a corner on Conversations—a series of books on conversations with Jean-Paul Sartre, Edward Said, Mohsen Makhmalbef, Jaqueline Rose and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. The collages are made of images of telephone booths, old advertisements of the telephone by Bell Telephone Systems and photos of people speaking to each other on streets. “I’ve used a lot of photos taken by Naveen Kishore (Seagull Publisher), and sketches, images and some photos downloaded from the web,” says Sunandini.

The idea to showcase the catalogue was Naveen’s. “Everyone who saw it said it was art. Naveen said the catalogue ought to take a life of its own. This exhibition is as much a celebration of books as it is a celebration of Seagull (its 28th anniversary was on 20 July). This is our endeavour to make art everybody’s business, to make people read,” says Sunandini.

The Art of the Book can be viewed at seagullindia.com

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