Bibliomania is a catalogue made by second year graphic design students: Beatrice Borgström, Jungyeon Sung, Risto Kujanpää, Rhodé Tavenier and Zuzanna Zgierska from the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague
This catalogue Is a typography coursework. At the beginning of the course, everyone had to choose ten different books that they liked typographically. When we chose the ten books, we got assigned into groups of five. We then showed all the books we had selected, so we now had 50 books to look at. We the had to narrow the selection down to ten books again. After a few hours we finally had only ten books that would be in our catalogue. We had a wide variety of books, from old storybooks to new contemporary books. They are all different from each other, but they still have similarities and different kinds of connections between them.
We created a hashtagging (#) system for all of the connections, for example #titlemoment, which is when the title of the book or the cover picture of the book is mentioned/showed inside of the book. This idea came up when someone jokingly said that the feeling is similar when you're watching a movie and your mind blows when a character in the movie mentions the title of the movie. The hashtagging system is also nice because we didn't want to have clear chapters, but instead you could read the book in any order you like.
We also added some fake ads, fake tweets and reference pages inside the catalogue. The reference pages contained screenshots of the google search results, when each of us were searching for information about the books. The fake tweets contained some general discussion about the book that was on the same page as the tweet.
The idea for the name Bibliomania, came when we realised that we had a lot of pictures of books in our catalogue and in almost every picture, someone was touching the book with their hands or their feet. This gave out kind of like this feeling of obsession with the books. That's how we came up with the name.
We took all of the pictures in our catalogue in Rhodé's garden in one afternoon.
This was a great assignment and we were really happy with our end result. The group work went really smoothly and we managed to control a lot of content and make it into a beautiful and compact publication.
The catalogue has 113 pages and it is printed on two different papers: 90g matte paper and 70g glossy paper.
The typeface is Traulha Jornau by Yoann Minet.
Bibliomania was also featured in Off Print Paris, 2016.
