Radiant Republic: Printing Complete!
After six months, I have cleaned the press for the last time. My final run on The Radiant Republic: the book cloth for the box lid. It is a relief to have the printing side done, not least because next week I have to ship the first copy to California. In February, the book will be on view in an exhibition titled The Book as Place: Visions of the Built Environment at the UC Berkeley Environmental Design Library. I didn’t design the project with this exhibition in mind, but this show suits it down to the ground. I can’t think of a better way to introduce the book to the wider world.
I’ve written extensively about this project already (it has been underway in some form or another for the last two years) and I won’t go into the details here. Today, I want to share some images of the proof copy. I will have this book at The Codex Book Fair and Symposium in February, where I will be standing behind the Shift-lab table.
As you can see above, printing is only a part of the checklist for this project. I am producing The Radiant Republic in an edition of fifty copies, each of which will be housed in an enclosure containing elements of wood, cement, and glass. The editioning process now shifts to my basement. Goodbye ink, impression, and the hum of the Vandercook. Hello scoring, casting, gluing, and the whine of the electric sander. The journey continues.
From the colophon: The Radiant Republic is built entirely out of language found in Plato’s Republic and Le Corbusier’s The Radiant City. In these texts, separated by more than two thousand years, Plato and Le Corbusier each describe a city plan designed to provide a framework for morality and ethics. The Radiant Republic was completed in 2019 in an edition of fifty copies. The text was digitally set in Baskerville and printed from polymer plates. Imagery was printed from polymer plates and linoleum in combination with pressure printing. Materials include handmade Belgian flax paper from the Morgan Conservatory, Rives Heavyweight Buff, Baltic birch plywood cut by Sarah Pike at Freefall Laser, cement, and glass. The epigraph for this book is an excerpt from Mostafavi and Leatherbarrow’s On Weathering: the Life of Buildings in Time.
Pricing information to come soon.
One comment on “Radiant Republic: Printing Complete!”
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Big Jump Press 
omfg this looks amazing