Call it the next big thing. The book market, where success is usually measured by sales, is getting a new yardstick, literally: Today's big books are actually getting physically larger.
Last month, MIT professor Michael Hawley set a new Guinness World Record for largest book with the publication of Bhutan: A Visual Odyssey Across the Last Himalayan Kingdom, a 114-page photographic picture book recording four of his visits to the tiny country.
Opening to 1.5 by 2 metres and weighing more than 60 kilograms, the book is so big it needs its own Sherpa. The price? A cool $10,000 (U.S.), 17 times what the average Bhutanese earns in a year, although the books only cost $1,000 each to produce, with the remaining $9,000 benefiting the Bhutanese ministry of education as a charitable donation.
Hawley is not alone in recent attempts to reclaim the word bookish from meaning pedantic and dull and instead imbue it with a sense of bold and brash. Publisher Taschen's GOAT: A Tribute to Muhammad Ali (that's Greatest of All Time to the uninitiated) is a literary heavyweight, if only a bantam in the ring; the book has 792 pages, including 3,000 images, weighs in at 34 kg and measures 0.5 metres square. So much for floating like a butterfly.
Poised to be the champion of the coffee table, the first 1,000 copies are accompanied by a Jeff Koons sculpture and go for $7,500 (U.S.) each; the remaining 9,000 retail for a mere $3,000. (It's even bigger than Taschen's last Big Book, published in 1999: Helmut Newton's Sumo, a 464-page photographic extravaganza that weighed 30 kg and came with a stand designed by Philippe Starck.)
In Canada, photographers Pat and Rosemarie Keough have launched a whole series of Big Books. The first volume of a proposed eight-part series titled Explorers, Antarctica is relatively more modest: Its full leather-bound package of 330 full-colour prints and 15 duotones is merely the size of an extra-large pizza box and weighs as much as a pizza-laden two-year-old.
In a photo depicting the Keoughs presenting a copy of the book to Prince Charles, he looks as if he is buckling ever-so-slightly under the tome's weight. On the Big Book stage, Antarctica's price tag is a steal at $3,700 (Canadian).
Antarctica may not be as physically big, but so far the book has been a big deal, winning 19 international awards for excellence including the U.S. Benjamin Franklin Award, considered the Oscar of the printing and graphic-arts world.
"We were at a stage in our professional career when we wanted to create a book as an art object itself, that we no longer had to make those horrible compromises on quality to meet the demands of the commercial market," explains Rosemarie Keough, 44, on the phone from the Saltspring Island, B.C., home that doubles as their studio. "You can make a beautiful coffee-table book that to most people's eyes looks beautiful, but by golly, when you're involved in production, you know the sacrifices that had to be made in order to make it affordable to most people."
But their book isn't just Antarctica for Antarctica's sake: The Keoughs are also motivated by philanthropy. Despite its price tag, the couple won't make a cent off sales — after costs of about $1,800 (Canadian) a book are recovered, revenues go to the Save the Albatross Foundation. (The couple's appreciation for the bird started during their treks to Antarctica, where the albatross nests, and Rosemarie expresses horror that some 16 of the 18 species of the bird are facing extinction.) For the Keoughs, publishing has never been about making money, but about making statements and taking risks, much the way they've lived their own life.
Their own biography would read more like a romance. The couple first met 20 years ago on a canoe trip on the Nahanni River in the Northwest Territories — both had had alternate vacation plans fall through at the last minute. At the time, both of them were serious amateur photographers, but were still working in the corporate world — Pat at Consumers Gas, Rosemarie at Proctor & Gamble. A few years into their marriage, Rosemarie took a year off work to put together their first book, 1986's The Ottawa Valley Portfolio. After it received universally glowing praise — and sold 20,000 copies worldwide, Pat quit his job to work on their next project. Seven books later, they work full-time as the entire staff of their own publishing company, Nahanni Productions Inc.
Of course, you could argue they had to create their own company, since few publishers would dare think on the scale of the Keoughs. For as much as Antarctica defies the imagination, actually creating the book defied some of the physical laws of book production.
The Keoughs spent a decade not only assembling the images for this book and the next, but planning how to put the book together. This meant setting up test jobs with printers around the world to gauge picture quality before settling on Hemlock Printers in Burnaby, B.C., using a revolutionary process called 10 micron Stochastic, which creates a resolution three times greater than anything else available. This meant researching which grain of leather was the most suitable for the book's cover (equatorial goat, by the way, since goats in cooler climates have heavier coats and thus less suitable skins). Most important, this meant visiting archives and binderies in North America and Europe to delve into seemingly impossible task of binding a book this size without it falling apart. They eventually found Felton Bookbinding in Georgetown, Ont., which revived and refined a Renaissance technique of hand-sewing books.
"Rosemarie and I, and this is not bragging, this is just factual, are probably the most knowledgeable people about books in Canada," says Pat, 58. "This latest effort has been like a very intense university course in book manufacturing."
So who has a big enough bank account, let alone strong enough back muscles, to pick up a copy of a Big Book? One Antarctica owner is a fellow artist, naturalist painter Robert Bateman. He doesn't describe himself as a collector, at least not of books. "This is obviously a collectible, but we didn't buy it for that reason. We bought it because it is a masterpiece of its kind. It's magnificent," he says. He keeps his copy in fireproof storage, bringing it out for "special occasions."
The book's content also has some special meaning for Bateman, who has made the trek to the Antarctic four times, and his wife, Birgit Freybe Bateman, who shot the photographs for Peter Matthiessen's recent book End of the Earth: Voyages to Antarctica. "We see nature with the same eye, it makes a wonderful keepsake to look back on and reminisce about," says Bateman. "It's the most dramatic place on the planet. This is the epitome of all books of visual images on Antarctica."
Of course, as beautiful as Antarctica is, as much of a triumph of technology and innovation, it has one paradox: The very attributes that make it the ultimate book also make it so expensive that few people will ever be able to see a copy, let alone own one. If a book won't be read, is it even a book? Are the Keoughs concerned that their labour of love won't have an audience because of its price?
"That is true, and that's partly why we put some of the text on-line," says Rosemarie. "And we have been asked to consider mounting a public exhibition of the imagery and that way tens of thousands of people can see the images. It was a decision that we made, early on, to do it this way."
Making a cheaper version of GOAT, however, was really never seen as a goal, says that book's editor, Ovais Naqvi. There was simply no point in producing another book on Ali unless they could make it different, distinctive and truly definitive, he says, pointing out there are already 100 or so books on Ali available on Amazon.com. They didn't want GOAT to be simply No. 101. The sheer size of the book is meant to reflect Muhammad Ali's place in the world.
"Ali is such an enormous figure both in sport and humanity that it's very appropriate given the scale of his stature, for this book to also have an enormous scale," he says. "Conceptually, there's a very interesting fit between what he is and represents and the book."
More important, books such as Sumo and GOAT represent an understanding that books aren't simply just for reading any more. Naqvi acknowledges that GOAT isn't even aimed at average readers —who can easily afford 99 per cent of Taschen's catalogue, he adds — but higher-end collectors and those who dabble in the art market, visiting auctions to snap up their latest acquisition.
"These kinds of books are kind of a hybrid of art and literature," he says. "What they recognize is that there is an audience out there of people who are collectors of art if the content of a book has enough of an artistic element to it, who will take this book and embrace it the way they would a piece of art."
The book as an art form or collectible fetish object is not new There's even an exhibition currently running at New York's Public Library, Ninety from the Nineties, displaying books from the last decade whose subtext (circumtext?) of intricately crafted exteriors takes precedence to the text — when there is any. There's even a small commercial market for books as art, witness the Hallmarkesque elaborateness of the Griffin & Sabine epistolary books by Nick Bantock actually packaged in the form of letters, or Derek McCormack's Western Suit, which comes tucked inside a real pattern for a cowboy shirt.
As for GOAT, Naqvi reports that the pre-orders so far have been positive (the books ship in the spring). Antarctica's sales are also brisk: The Keoughs are about halfway through their production of 950 copies; although the binding is taking about twice as long as anticipated, they are keeping supply up with demand.
However, considering most coffee tables store a half dozen TV and stereo remotes, remnants of last night's takeout, magazines — anything but a coffee-table book — it seems unlikely that Big Books will penetrate the mainstream any time soon.
For their part, the Keoughs have never stopped working long enough to think about hesitating over what people might think of their work.
"We've had to have a lot of self-belief and self-confidence for a decade to make this book happen, and finally we're starting to be respected for what we've done," says Rosemarie. "A lot of people have dreams and they just never act on them, and then when they get to the end of life they have regrets. Well, Pat and I have had a full, interesting life already.
"The only regret we'll have," adds Pat, "is that there was not enough time to do a fraction of what we wanted to."
