Bonjour, Paris College of Art!

As part of the Blurb Road Show tour in Paris, the trio of Dan Milnor, Kent Hall, and I held a book-making workshop at the Paris College of Art for 40 students and faculty. They were an especially welcoming bunch—whip smart, creative, and multi-lingual—many from France, but others from the UK and as far away as South Africa and Texas. They study design, architecture, and fashion and their approach to book-making was anything but conventional.

They have the design chops to create beautiful books using Adobe InDesign and the Blurb plug-in, but what impressed us the most was their willingness to embrace the idea of not publishing one magnificent project, but multiple projects in a range of formats and mediums. Magazines and books, work projects, school projects, and personal projects—from one to dozens of copies.

They asked about paper choices and book trims, but also how they might add their own special bindings or the best way to showcase illustrations in a visual tribute to Samuel Beckett and Paris. They were clearly remaking the idea of a book and what that entails. How a book can be an object of worth and desire as well as an important communication tool and tinkering device for ideas as they embark on their own creative careers.

I’m certain that these students are going places. We will share some of their amazing projects as they are completed at our European presses in The Netherlands. À bientôt.

As for our Road Show, we are getting back on the road in the next few months. Stay tuned to see what cities, and countries we will be visiting in 2016!