Being in this enormous library surrounded by books from the very beginning until basically today made me realize books are made for the future. The unchangeable or frozen information is the key to understanding the past and the future.This is especially important now, because making books is no longer self-evident. One of the most important debates of our time concerns whether books can survive.

The answer lies in the hands of the new generation.It is precisely young students who are mainly active in the digital world who are discovering the book as a source of exclusive information today. The ‘no screen’ is a new dimension to them and reading is literally a rediscovery of the materiality, tactility, the smell of paper and ink. My main focus is the study of the earliest printed books in relation to the book now. If you look at the oldest manuscripts, from AD 500 and 850, and the earliest printed books, from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, these are of unprecedented modernity, you would now call it experimental. It is an exciting time, any thing was possible – you see text as wide as the page, there are no headings, no paragraphs, no page numbers. I find the innocence you see in that earliest book super fascinating and inspiring. Bookmaking was not yet hindered by conventions or marketing rules.

The printed book was a medium in development. When the demand for the printed book grew and it became widely distributed, there was a need to make rules for how a book should work. I follow the quest:

At a time when information is increasingly being distributed digitally, the book seems to be under threat, but nothing could be further from the truth. The immutability of the printed world in relation to the Aux of the Internet is only one of the values of the book: the printed word as a reference for the future. Therefore, I can – or must – articulate my work as a bookmaker and study the intrinsic characteristics of the printed book intensively and propagate them in my book designs and apply those characteristics.

Johannes Gutenberg‘s (c. 1397-1468) revolutionary printing method, first commercially exploited in the 1460s, had many political, economic and cultural implications. First of all, it helped to spread ideas and information faster and in greater quantity and, secondly, accelerated the production process, which in time made it more affordable to buy books. Prior to this invention, spreading information was limited to handwritten texts and oral messages. The tise of the printing press changed the same for literature, politics, religion, science and many more. Ideas became more easily accessible but at the same time more vulnerable to criticism. The art of printing en- abled people to choose their own right from wrong, or even to develop and spread their own ideas around the world.

The Romans invented the codex form of the book, folding the scroll into pages which made reading and handling the document much easier. Legend has it that Julius Caesar was the first to fold scrolls, concertina-fashion, for dispatches to his forces campaigning in Gaul. Scrolls were awkward to read if a reader wished to consult material at opposite ends of the document. Also, only one side of a scroll was written on, while both sides of the codex page were used. Eventually, the folds were cut into sheets, or leaves‘, and bound together along one edge. The bound pages were protected by stiff covers, usually of wood enclosed with leather. Codex is Latin for a ‚block of wood‘: the Latin liber, the root of library‘, and the German Buch, the source of ‚book‘, both refer to wood. The codex was not onlv easier to handle than the scroll, but it also fit conveniently on library shelves. The spine generally held the book‘s title, facing out, affording easier organization of the collection. The term codex technically refers only to manuscript books - those that, at one time, were handwritten. More specifically, a codex is the term used primarily for a bound manuscript from Roman times up through the Middle Ages. From the fourth century onwards, the codex became the standard format for books, and scrolls were no longer generally used. After the contents of a parchment scroll were copied in codex format, the scroll was seldom preserved. The majority of those that did survive were found by archaeologists in burial pits and in the buried trash of forgotten communities.

Jan Tschichold‘s Penguin paperbacks are design icons. In the late 1940s his strict composition rules set high standards for the book as a mass-produced product. Yet from printing‘s earliest beginnings books did more than bring uniformity to the machine à lire. Fortunately there have always been printers, binders and later also designers who strove for innovation in type and typo-graphy, in the relation between image (including photography) and text, in the use of paper and in finish The Allard Pierson in Amsterdam book and graphic design collections document that evolution from Nicolas Jenson, Albert Magnus, Giambattista Bodoni and William Morris to El Lissitzky and Jurriaan Schrofer.

IB studied at the architect in Enschede, in the eastern Netherlands. This Academy of Art & Design was founded in the late 1940s to provide design talent for the then flourishing local textile industry. It was a small, intimate school, with a progressive and autonomous character. IB originally wished to become a painter, but at the academy a love of book design quickly took root and grew. While attending the multi: day AKI FluxFest including performances and an exhibition, she came in direct contact with this move-ment, which continues to fascinate her. She graduated as a graphic designer, and on Jurriaan Schrofers advice she began work in 1985 at the Government Printing and Publishing Office (SDU) in The Hague.

The collaboration with him inspired her, and in the early years of her career, one can certainly see Nikkel‘s influence and that of other leading figures in graphic design. Soon, however, IB set off on her own tempestuous course. This is already clear in the annual reports she made for the Dutch Arts Council for the years 1987 and 1988. The Council gave her a free hand (who reads those brochures anyway?) and she made full use of that freedom. The reports show several design elements that were to appear repeatedly in her work. That of 1987, for example, in a Japanese binding - inspired by the art magazine Wendingen - shows a foredge in colour. Noteworthy in the report for 1988, in addition to is full-page colour compositions, is the wide range of sizes of type used fort continuous texts, set in extremely lot lines and printed in three colours.

In these catalogues for the then state-owned PTT (now PostnI), IB demanded, and was given, plenty of space to go deeper into her chosen theme of ‚inspiration‘. She worked intensively for three months on the research and design, much of it devoted to selecting and planning the illustrations. It became clear she would overrun her budget consider-ably, but the client agreed to go ahead with the project. All possibilities of Japanese binding were explored here; thus the inside of the transparent paper has also been printed. Incidentally, the volumes were not perfect bound – an option not available for larger runs at the time – but the two parts were stapled.

Anyone could see that these postage stamp books paid no heed to the generally proper and respectable design of the earlier volumes, which had also been produced in a some-what smaller format (IB still shows, preference for broader book forman in her work today). The personal fie dom of the designer, which up unt then had been limited to trendy magazines, posters and covers, now manifested itself in a serious catalogue for collectors. The rules of readability were provocatively violated: these post modern books tend towards autonomous design, while their function as a reference work becomes secondary. They reaped both praise and scorn. ‚A brilliant failure‘, reckoned the jury of the Best Dutch Book Designs. Only in the mid-1990s would ideas about the ‚designer as author‘ really pay of. The uproar didn‘t deter the CPNB (Collective Propaganda for the Dutch Book), who turned to IB to design the catalogue The Best Book Designs 1989. She presented a rock-solid plan. By using paper that was glossy on one side and by trimming the margin slightly closer on every second leaf, she allowed the reader to flip through the leaves from front to back for the jury reports or from back to front for the full-colour glossy images of the selected works. At her request, the often blandly interchangeable jury reports for the awards were replaced with excerpts from the jury‘s delib-erations, providing insights into the selection process. For IB this catalogue remains one of her personal favourites. After more than five years, she left her employer. Anthon Beeke had roused her to action and in 1991 she set up as an independent designer in Amsterdam‘s Jordan quarter and began working on an Apple Macintosh. She deliberately limits the staff at her office to a minimum, with generally no more than two permanent employees. In 2015, current and former interns and assistants described in an entertaining publication how challenging, demanding and educational they found working with her. The office has about fifteen book projects in various stages of completion going at any one time, along with many other commis-sions. From the outset most of the clients came from the cultural world, such as smaller art centres like De Appel (Amsterdam) and later the Amsterdam Rijksmuseum, and international institutions like the Fonda-zione Prada in Milan and the Bard Graduate Center and the MOMA, both in NYC. She designed numerous catalogues for De Appel from 1990 to 2005.

Since the late 1980s, making small scale models has been part of IB‘s design process. As she works from outside to inside, the models are also useful in that respect. Of course these minis often are, comparatively, extremely thick, but is loves voluminous books.

This huge commission came from entrepreneur Paul Fentener van Vlissingen (194I-2006). He was then CEO of the multinational company SHV, a trader and distributor in the fields of energy and consumer goods. She first designed a private publication on the occasion of Van Vlissingen‘s fiftieth birthday in 1991. Soon afterwards, he gave her and art historian Johan Pijnappel the commission to mark the 100th anniversary of the family firm in 1996 with an ‚unusual‘ production. Van Vlissingen offered them plenty of leeway as well as his full trust in their judgement. ‚For Irma and Johan,‘ he said in 2004, ‚it must have been an extraordinary commission, allowing them to devote not just a few weeks but a five years to a subject. What lies at the heart of the SHV? What happens there? How do people there interact? Where do they come from? Why are they active in the coal trade? Why are they active in the Makro wholesale stores? Where are decisions made? How does it relate to personal circum-stances? They spoke to many people in the firm and after a while everyone knew who Irma and Johan were.“* Three and a half years were spent on research before the actual design began. The format and extent of the book were already established at the beginning of the project. The monumental book appeared in May 1996: 2136 pages presenting a nonacademic history of the company in reverse chronological order by means of widely varying material, such as photos, reports, advertisements and other archival documents. IB and Pijnappel do not skirt around the painful departure of SHV Makro from South Africa in the mid-198os, forced by a Dutch action group‘s arson attacks, which brought SHV much negative publicity at the time. This is a book made for non-linear reading, for browsing, and page numbers are therefore deemed unnecessary. That ‚digital‘ characteristic is strengthened by the rendering of the wide variety of images as if they were stills from a video. Lots of more or less hidden graphic treasures await discovery here. The title on the white linen cover, for example, becomes visible only after intensive use. Truly spectacular are the printed hidden fore-edge images: fanned slightly in one direction the edge shows a field of tulips, in the other Gerrit Achter-berg‘s poem Bolero van Ravel. This exploration of the edge has become one of in‘s trademarks. In addition to the English edition, there is a Chinese edition bound in black linen.

The book never appeared on the market, but was distributed to a small circle of shareholders. (What would a fair trade price have been?) Although the private commission of art and design has a long tradition and by design, where IB is concerned. When Koolhaas signed copies of S, M, L, XL at an Amsterdam bookshop in December 1995, she stood among the many fans along the canal waiting for a signed copy. She also took one along for Van Vlissingen, and was somehow shocked that a book this size just got finished before theirs. A few years later, is and Koolhaas began collaborating on projects. S, M, L, XL and the SHV book incidentally seem to have initiated a trend in hefty design monographs.

Pentagram Book Five (1999) runs to almost 500 pages, Mau‘s Life Style (2000) is over 600 pages, and Alan Fletcher‘s The Art Of Looking Sideways (2001) is over 500 pages. For the production of her books, 1B prefers to work with a fixed group of innovative Dutch firms she can rely on. It allows her to guide and oversee the printing and binding at close range, which she considers essential. Unfor-tunately, the number of Dutch printing firms and book binderies has dramatically declined since the 2000s, a downhill spiral that continues to the present day. IB, however, doesn‘t allow a concept of hers to be constrained by any technical issues. Only by breaking through them, she believes, can the book medium retain its vitality. The only technical obstacle she has not yet managed to overcome is the thickness of a book. A mechanical book bindery can only manage up to eleven centimetres. She (almost never considers hand finishing as an option: industrial production is user as a matter of principle. In her own words: ‚I don‘t build villas, I build social housing.‘

Scale and Size, Frits Scholten According to Claude Lévi-Strauss the strength and the appeal of small things lie with the fact that they reverse the cognitive process. When we wish to become acquainted with an actual (and large) object in its entirety, we tend to start with the parts, with manageable segments. By breaking it into pieces, it becomes comprehensible. Once the scale of an object is reduced, however, precisely the opposite occurs: it is easier to deal with it all at one time, and that increases one’s power over the object. Lévi-Strauss described this process in the following way: «This quantitative conversion (the reduction] expands and multiplies our power over a depiction of the object; because of this, the object can be held in one’s hand and weighed, and seen at a single glance.’ Excerpt from: ‘Lilliputian Collecting’, inaugural lecture, prof. dr. Frits Scholten, Faculty of Arts, Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, 10 February 2011.