Content
The illustrations are mainly landscapes from the route, accompanied by text. The two sides of the folded sheet carry different material. One side holds short anecdotes taken from conversations with other pilgrims. The reverse holds practical suggestions about preparing for the journey and what to expect on it.
That division is the book’s argument in miniature. A pilgrimage is at once a logistical problem with a packing list and a social one made of people met briefly on a road, and each side of the paper takes one of those.
Form
A leporello in a hard case. One sheet of strong cartridge paper is folded and cut into 24 squares, which either unfold page by page in the ordinary way or open out as a full sheet revealing a large landscape across 16 of them.
Adapted from the first edition of 45 printed in 2015.
Twenty-four squares, read one at a time or opened into a single landscape.
Specifications
- 48 pages with text and image
- folded size 13 × 13.5 cm
- unfolded size 51 × 72 cm
- inside: 4 colours on 130gsm Lambeth Cartridge
- cover: 2 colours, hardback
- made in August 2017
- signed edition of 100
Reading the Numbers
Four colours inside means four separate passes through the press for every sheet in the edition, each one registered against the last, with drying time between them. On a hundred copies that is four hundred pulls for the interior alone, before the cover is printed and before any folding begins.
The 130gsm cartridge is heavy enough to take four ink layers without cockling and still flexible enough to fold into 24 squares that will open and close repeatedly. That balance is the whole reason the stock is named.
Two Texts, One Sheet
The book carries different writing on its two sides, and they were gathered differently. One side holds short anecdotes taken from conversations with other pilgrims on the route. The other side is practical: how to prepare for the walk and what to expect from it.
Putting the two on opposite faces of the same sheet means the reader chooses which book they are holding. Turned one way it is a record of other people’s remarks collected over several hundred kilometres. Turned the other it is advice, written by someone who had just found out what he wished he had known.
How the Sheet Works
A single sheet of strong cartridge paper is folded and cut into twenty-four squares. Folded, it reads square by square in sequence, the way an ordinary book reads page by page. Opened out completely it stops being a sequence: sixteen of the squares together carry one large landscape, so the images that were separate incidents on the walk become a single continuous view of it.
That is the argument for the leporello here in place of a bound book. A pilgrimage is both a series of days and one line across a map, and the structure lets the object be read either way without choosing.
Adapted From the First Edition
This is not the first version. A first edition of forty-five was made in 2015, the year of the walk itself, and the 2017 edition of one hundred was adapted from it, not reprinted: the later version is the one in the hard case, at four colours inside, on named stock.
Two years between a first edition made immediately and a considered second is a long time in a catalogue where most titles appear once. A poster drawn from the book was issued alongside it.
The Case
The hard case is doing more than protecting the book. A leporello of twenty-four squares has no spine to hold it closed and will open itself in a bag, so the case is what makes the object portable at all, and it is the reason a folded sheet of cartridge paper survives being carried.