Living Archive – Mathieu Lommen

Jan Tschichold’s Penguin Paperbacks are design icons. In the late nineteen-forties his strict guidelines 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 were always printers, binders and later also designers who strove for innovation in type and typography, in the use of paper, in finish and in the relation between image (including photography) and text. Amsterdam University’s Special Collections Department documents that graphic evolution from Nicolas Jenson, Aldus Manutius, Albert Magnus, John Baskerville, Giambattista Bodoni and William Morris tot El Lissitzky and Jurriaan Schrofer. That is what makes the 2003 acquisition of Irma Boom’s ‘living archive’ so important: she too explores new paths in the tradition. Boom’s design and editorial style emerge from her own individualistic ideas, which bind content and form inseparably. That makes her work unique.
​Irma Boom (b. Lochem, 1960) studied at the AKI academy of fine art in Enschede. She originally wished to become a painter, but at the academy a love of book design quickly took root and grew. She graduated as a graphic designer, and on Jurriaan Schrofer’s advice she began work in 1985 at the Government Printing and Publishing Office (SDU) in The Hague. Her first commissions, still as a trainee, were for the corporate identity of the Ministry of Welfare, Health and Cultural Affairs, whose logo was designed by Walter Nikkels. The collaboration with Nikkels inspired her. In her early years, one can certainly see his influence and that of other leading figures in graphic design, but Boom soon set off on her own tempestuous course. That is clear in the annual reports she made for the Dutch Arts Council for the years 1987 and 1988. These commissions which gave her a free hand, show several design elements that were to appear repeatedly in her work. Her report for 1987, for example – inspired by the art magazine Wendingen – shows foldouts, leaves with the fold toward the fore-edge (as in a Japanese binding) and the cut edges of the book block printed in a single colour. Noteworthy in the report for 1988, in addition to its full page colour compositions, is the wide range of sizes of type used for the continuous texts, set in extremely long lines and printed in three colours.

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