This new edition of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman is the first book published by Visual Editions: a new London-based book publisher of literary fiction and non-fiction who make use of what they call "visual writing." They believe books should be as visually compelling as the stories they tell, and their strapline is "great looking stories." Their aim to publish The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman as their first title is to show where the idea of "visual writing" originated, to show where it all began. The idea is to bring out the book’s brilliance and playfulness again, to dust it down from its shoddy Dover Classics image and make it accessible and relevant again to a more contemporary audience. Visual Editions asked the designers to breathe new life into the book and told the designers to add new visual elements in as well. As long as they stayed faithful to Sterne's spirit, then VE were happy to let the designers roam. And so they did: a shut door is a folded page, perspiration is pages of dotted spot varnish and the marbled page is a moiré of a black-and-white photograph (a nod to contemporary printing technologies, in the way that the marbled page was a result of technologies of the time). British author Will Self introduces the book, with the typically wonderful irreverence that Sterne himself would have loved.

The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman

Literature & Fiction

STERNE, Laurence

Classics

Visual Editions

Tree of Codes is a haunting new story by best-selling American writer, Jonathan Safran Foer. With a different die-cut on every page, Tree of Codes explores previously unchartered literary territory. Initially deemed impossible to make, the book is a first as much a sculptural object as it is a work of masterful storytelling. Tree of Codes is the story of an enormous last day of life as one character's life is chased to extinction, Foer multi-layers the story with immense, anxious, at times disorientating imagery, crossing both a sense of time and place, making the story of one person’s last day everyone’s story. Inspired to exhume a new story from an existing text, Jonathan Safran Foer has taken his "favorite" book, The Street of Crocodiles by Polish-Jewish writer Bruno Schulz, and used it as a canvas, cutting into and out of the pages, to arrive at an original new story told in Jonathan Safran Foer's own acclaimed voice.

Tree of Codes

FOER, JONATHAN SAFRAN

Literary

VE3 is a re-imagining of a book originally published in the 1960s. The book is the first ever book in a box”, called Composition No.1 by Marc Saporta. When we say book in a box we mean: quite literally a book that comes in a box with loose pages. The narrative is contained on each page, leaving it up to the reader to decide the order they read the book, and how much or how little of the book they want to read before they begin again. In so many ways, Composition No.1 was published ahead of its time: the book raises all the questions we ask ourselves today about user-centric, non-linear screen driven ways of reading. With this in mind, Visual Editions approached Tom Uglow of Creative Labs Google and Youtube to write an introduction for the book. This re-imagined edition also includes several of Salvador Plascencia’s (author of The People of Paper) drawings, looking at all the different components that make up a typical” book. The book is designed by Universal Everything, a London based design studio known for their interactive screen-based work (clients include MTV and AOL). The book, as Visual Editions have shown with their other two titles, will have a high attention to design and production values and in many ways is the best example of a book as an object, or better yet, the book as an experience. Along with their usual consideration to high quality craft and finish, the designers have also generated unique digitally-generated artwork for the backs of each page, making for a gorgeous, tactile design relevant to literary, art and design and digital audiences. Ultimately, Visual Editions’ re-imagined Composition No.1 asks readers to question: what is it that makes a book a book?

Composition No. 1

Saporta, Marc

Unfolding, turning and spinning, Kapow! is a new book by best-selling British writer Adam Thirlwell. Kapow! takes place in the thick of the Arab Spring, guided by the highspeed monologue of an unnamed narrator over-doped, over-caffeinated, over-weight trying to make sense of this history in real time: with 24 hour broadcasts, YouTube films, lesbian bars in London’s East End and far too many newspaper clippings. A clever, funny and bitingly critical cultural commentary, using spinning digressions to tell the stories of a group of interconnected characters in London and Egypt, each transformed by the idea of revolution. Beautifully and thoughtfully designed by Studio Frith, hailed by the New York Times as the go-to graphic designer”, Kapow! asks readers to open and unfold pages, to follow text leaking in and out of paragraphs, to discover more and more visual surprises, while progressively becoming part of and lost within the narrator’s giddy digressions. Kapow! is a beautifully crafted object told in Thirlwell’s uniquely acrobatic voice: a visually immersive storytelling experience like no other.

Kapow!

THIRLWELL, ADAM

Every day we map. We map how we get from a to b. We map when we’re somewhere new, and somewhere we’ve been many times before. We map ourselves, our days, our thoughts, memories, what we want to mark, save and share. Today it seems, that most of the time, despite all this mapping, we actually don't have a clear sense of where we are. Where You Are, a collection of new work, explores the shift from our classic understanding of map as geography to a more personal, human map. This collection of new writings, photographs, drawings, thinking looks to explode the map as we know it. A book of maps that puts people, not destinations at the centre, hoping to leave readers feeling completely lost. A collection of work, edited by Visual Editions, made with help by our friends at Google Creative Lab, published as a book and on the screen.

Where You Are: A Collection of Maps That Will Leave You Feeling Completely Lost

Arts & Photography

Decorative Arts & Design

A re-imagining of Don Quixote that champions another innovative classic for a new generation.This handsome edition of Don Quixote brings the wonderfully bonkers, truly innovative, and still very much culturally relevant Spanish classic to a modern, visually appreciative, literary and design audience, championing the book for its progressive meta-story narrative and celebrating it as a contemporary cultural object. Designed by the award-winning designer Fraser Muggeridge, this volume includes photographs by recent Royal College of Art graduate Jacob Robinson, specially commissioned to metaphorically trace and visually interpret the journey of Don Quixote in a fresh contemporary way through vibrant, expansive, and dynamic-in-scale landscapes. Bringing another entry point to the classic narrative, the photos also invite new interpretations, both romantic and realistic.

Don Quixote

Another Day at Sea is the first title in the Writers in Residence series  a collectible set of books that brings together some of the greatest writers and photographers on the planet to reveal the normally faceless organizations that shape the modern world. The arresting, full-color photography, depicting a subculture that is surprising, hilarious, beautiful and insane, is by Chris Steele-Perkins, an award-winning Magnum photographer. Every book in the set designed by Jeremy Leslie of magCulture. Meeting the Captain, the F-18 pilots and the dentists, experiencing everything from a man-overboard alert to the Steel Beach Party, Dyer guides us through the most AIE (acronym intensive environment) imaginable. Underlying Dyer’s efforts to overcome the disadvantages of being the oldest, tallest (actually, second tallest), and most self-conscious person on the boat is an intense fascination with the military world. In recording daily life on board the ship, Dyer illuminates a society where discipline and conformity, dedication and optimism, become a form of self-expression. Another Great Day at Sea is a dazzling social experiment, bringing readers behind the scenes of the world’s largest aircraft carrier in a way that has never been seen before.

Another Great Day at Sea: Life Aboard the USS George H.W. Bush

DYER, Geoff

Photography & Video

In Money and Tough Love Liaquat Ahamed offers brilliant insight into the heart of one the world’s most influential institutions. At turns factual and informative, and others emotive and anecdotal, Ahamed joins in on the IMF’s world missions to Washington, Tokyo, and Dublin in true James Bond meets The Financial Times style. Pulitzer prize-winning author and pre-eminent financial thinker, Ahamed reveals the human stories behind the headlines, ranging from chatting about the state of the economy to Irish cab drivers, to Dior with none other than the IMF's Christine Lagarde.

Money and Tough Love: On Tour with the IMF

Ahamed, Liaquat

The third book to be released as part of the Writers in Residence series is written by Canadian cultural literary giant Douglas Coupland. Coupland takes readers on a web surfing-inspired ride through Alcatel-Lucent: one of the largest global telecommunications companies in the world. Coupland, with Magnum photographer Olivia Arthur, reports from inside Alcatel’s faceless corporate offices and wire-laden science labs, writing in his inimitably playful and insightful way about the wider cultural implications of the Internet and the affect Alcatel’s information technology has on each of our lives and the way we live. A non-fiction spin of Microserfs meets J-Pod, here comes Coupland’s wildly funny meditation on the Internet, its future and our possible future within it, in ways we would only hope for and expect from Douglas Coupland.

Kitten Clone: Inside Alcatel-Lucent

Coupland, Douglas

Computers & Technology

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Books by Visual Editions