1Q84 Haruki Murakami Limited Edition

About the Project

This is an extract from ‘Making Murakami’ by Kristen Harrison, which explains some of the thinking behind this complex project:

The limited edition of Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84 is inspired by the tradition of the artists’ book or livre d’artiste. Artists’ books can take many forms – an artist might create a book as an artwork in and of itself (like Louise Bourgeoise and her beautiful hand-sewn cloth books: http://bit.ly/csw2FY) or they may use the book as a canvas as Joan Miro so wonderfully did (http://bit.ly/tbEfnh) or, a more contemporary technique is to re-use books to create completely new artworks as seen in the papercut installations of Danish artist Peter Callesen (http://bit.ly/qtrAFT). But whatever the form, three things remain common to artists’ books: they are predominantly hand-produced, are limited to a set number of copies and they naturally blur the line between books and art. There was never any question that the artist in this project was Haruki Murakami so our challenge was simply to find a way to express the essence of his story visually. We started by imagining the three volumes as a blank canvas (left) and then looked to the text to draw out the key elements of the narrative and imagine… click here to download the full article

Edition Information

This signed and numbered edition of 1Q84 is limited to exactly 111 copies. The front and back covers are printed on Somerset, a 10 per cent cotton archival paper, using a Swiss-made 1963 Gietz Art Platen hand-fed letterpress. This limited edition is a collaboration between Simon Rhodes, Kristen Harrison at The Curved House and designer Stefanie Posavec. Text design by Jim Smith. Covers printed by Justin Knopp at Typoretum in Great Britain. Text pages printed and bound by Graphicom, Verona. Published by Harvill Secker in 2011. Random House Group Limited Reg. No. 954009. A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 9781846554902.

Photos courtesy of Justin Knopp