‘Functionality, inspiration and creation represented in the three separate parts of this calendar’, announces the credits page. The theme is China and through the whole thing you can taste, feel and breathe China. The silk cover material in bright pink with gold stamping. Sixty pages of calendar (functionality) on super-thin paper, printed in black and red and here and there decorated with a kitschily drawn Chinese rose in PMS gold. Loads of Chinese symbolism on every page. Then, a sixty-page photo section (inspiration) with an impression of Shanghai: a great deal of ugliness, to our blasé Western eyes. In the third section (creation) we again have that very light 50gsm paper, now printed in PMS piglet pink bled off. Here Shanghai’s young creatives are interviewed about their dreams and ambitions.
Each section has been given its own sewing in bright yellow thread, necessitating large holes in the narrow spine. Not the summit of refinement, and anathema to bookbinders, but the panel were unconcerned. They observed that the decision to use vulnerable materials had called for more than one technical tour de force – and for Drukkerij ANDO that was precisely the point: why make things easy when you can make them complicated?