I am often asked to choose a beautiful book. When I hear such words, I reflexively reply that most books are beautiful, and immediately regret it. But honestly, most of the books in the bookstore are beautiful. to the point of jealousy.
Kim Hyeon-ho, photo critic and CEO of Vostok Press
Around the age of 30, I worked at an old university press. It was a job he moved to after feeling a bit sick after wandering around making things around photography and design. Rather than being chased by the obsession with something beautiful and new, he thought it would be okay to spend a while looking at the thick proof sheets in the corner of an old building that was quietly located.
There are many beautiful academic books these days, but at the time, the appearance of books from university presses was generally rough. Shortly after joining the company, a professor with a pleasant personality joked in front of several employees that the cover of our books looked like the ‘Socialist State Annual Report’. At that time, no one laughed except me. Later, while working as an editor, I realized that the cover and text, which were more crude than I thought, contained various design elements, concerns about limitations, and thoughts about beauty.
For example, among the authors at the time, there was a scholar who had been doing China-related research for a long time. The thought was deep and the research was solid. In each elaborate commentary, the effort he put into the book was imbued. All in all, such scholars wish rather little for cover design. It was here that I first learned that there can be authors who do not like their books to come out too pretty. There were some who thought the beauty itself was embarrassing, and there were rare people who felt uncomfortable with the luxurious properties of books as if they were trying to cover up their lack of study. When I offered to put gold leaf on the cover, they waved their hands.
This author’s request was very clear. To sum it up, ‘anything is fine as long as it doesn’t contain red, bamboo, pandas, roosters, maps of China, and the five-star red flag’. This was for functional rather than aesthetic reasons. Naturally, he had a lot of Chinese-related research books, but most of them had similar covers, so it was difficult to find. Indeed, the bookshelves in his lab were all glistening with red books.
But I felt as if I was having a design meeting with a literary figure from the Northern Song Dynasty, such as Gu Yang-su. One snowy day, Gu Yang-su asked his guests to compose a banquet poem of a few characters. For example, a poem that greets the eyes without letters such as jade, moon, pear, plum, cotton, white, crane, or silver can you build Later, Su Dong-po compared this to a hand-to-hand combat where weapons were thrown away and fought with bare hands. Fortunately, the designer of the book was good at it and seemed to think it was a challenging project. We made a book with a pretty nice cover.
But just because I was lucky. In general, it was difficult to invest enough time and money in the production environment of academic books at the time, even to the cover. When we tried to solve these requests for design with our insufficient skills, there were many cases where rather crude or crude results came out. But would it have been more ‘beautiful’ if I had made a book with a slightly more sophisticated cover instead of focusing on problem solving? At the time, we struggled with Chinese characters or multilingual fonts to make the text of complex academic books as clean as possible, but we failed more often. However, if I hadn’t tried, the book would have been much more uncomfortable to read.
The ecosystem of publishing in Korea is not very rich, but around this time of year, various award ceremonies for books are held and support systems start to run. Watching it, and sometimes participating in it, made me feel a bit complicated. It would be nice if we, the readers of the book, could imagine the efforts of those who are far from the award as much as the joy of those who receive the award. Even if the books we pick up are a bit clunky.