Making of
Before it becomes a book, each volume is a video call between two strangers, a word nobody expected, prints spread out on a table, then inks overlapping on the press. This is the workshop.
The call
Two strangers.One screen.One word.
The photo selection
The images come in, we print them, move them, take them out. The sequence is built by hand. Do as we do: grab a print and move it.
The texts
In each book, the entrepreneur explains why this word, and the photographer often answers. A few excerpts from the printed texts.
Art direction
Thibault Geffroy
Art directorThibault Geffroy gives The 11 its face. Eleven books, eleven encounters, eleven very different photographers: he makes them one collection.
He is the art director of the collection: the covers, the typography, the way each volume’s word takes over the page. The title becomes an image in its own right, set large, printed in an ink that changes from one book to the next.
Risograph printing sets its own rules: few colours, shifts, a surface that forgives nothing. The art direction works with these limits instead of hiding them.
The paper
Fedrigoni makes some of the finest papers in the world. For The 11 Collection, Éditions Bessard and Newfund worked directly with the group.
Cover colours, paper weight, feel, how the ink holds under the press: every decision was made together, proof after proof. A true collaboration.
The project brings people together right to the end, manufacturing included. Entrepreneurs, photographers, publisher, art director, papermaker: everyone had a hand in the book.
Fedrigoni × Éditions Bessard × Newfund
Printing
Pierre Bessard prints every page by risograph in Paris: one ink, one pass, then the next. The layers never land in exactly the same place. Set the registration yourself.
Vegetable inks, 250 copies per volume, never reprinted. Each copy comes out slightly different from the others.