Hardback
The case-bound space books — A Voyage Fantastic, Europa in its case-bound form, Camino de Santiago and Retail Centres. A hard case does two things for a screen printed book: it protects a folded interior that would otherwise be crushed, and it gives a small object enough presence to be handled like a book and not a card.
Pochoir
We Will Rule the World exists as a pochoir book. Pochoir is stencil printing applied by hand, colour by colour, and it predates screen printing as a method for flat colour in editions. It is slow, which is why the same work also exists as a cheaper centre stitched booklet.
Centre Stitched
Canal Boats, Frog Heart, Flat Holm and Modern Constructivist Booklet 2. Stitching through the centre of a folded sheet is the simplest binding that still produces a real book, and it suits work that runs to sixteen or twenty four pages in a fixed sequence.
Races
Still Running, Invasive Species, Cook Food Book and Cell Division are grouped as a set, not by their construction.
Folded
The largest group, and the one most particular to this practice: Dark Matter, Paradise, The Dark Tribe, Dance, Europa, Book Jacket, Schroedinger’s Card, Wooden Horse, Folding Bike, Paper Plane and Narrow Boat.
A folded book has no binding at all. One sheet is cut and folded so that turning it produces a sequence, and opening it out produces a single image. Nothing is stitched, glued or cased, which means the paper has to carry the structure by itself — and why the stock weight appears on every entry.
One hundred copies where the sheet binds itself, twenty-five where every page is painted.
Poster
The single sheet, unfolded and unbound, where the whole image is present at once.
Hardback and Stab Bound
The hardbound titles are the ones where the interior could not survive being handled loose. A Voyage Fantastic is a hardback cross-cut fold book, an edition of fifty made in 2018, where the case exists to protect a fold that opens into a form, not a flat spread. Space Books, an edition of sixty from 2019, is stab bound: the sheets are pierced and sewn through the outer margin, which produces a book that opens stiffly and stays exactly where it is put.
Stab binding does not lie flat, and choosing it means deciding that the individual page matters more than the spread across the gutter. For a set of screen printed images where each sheet is one complete impression, that is the right trade.
Folded and Stitched
The folded group covers the books built from a single sheet. Paradise is a square folded book in an edition of eighty. Dark Matter, an edition of one hundred, is the largest of the recent editions and the one where a folded structure came closest to a print run. Canal Boats, an edition of eighty, is folded and stitched together, using the thread to hold a structure that the folds alone would not keep closed.
We Will Rule the World appears in this group in its pochoir form, a stencil painted hardback in a signed edition of twenty-five, and it is the smallest edition on the list by a wide margin.
The pattern across the recent work is that edition size tracks labour almost exactly. One hundred copies where the sheet does the binding, eighty where it is folded and sewn, fifty to sixty where a case has to be made, twenty-five where every page is painted through a stencil by hand.
Europa and Camino de Santiago
Two titles appear in this group in more than one form. Europa exists as a case-bound book and as a folded one, and Camino de Santiago is a leporello held in a hard case. Both are examples of the same decision: the structure was chosen after the pictures existed, not before.