At his departure as director of The Hague’s city museums Wim van Krimpen was presented with a leaving present in the form of a book: a Pandora’s box designed not just heart and soul but head, heart and soul, by Irma Boom. The shadow panel fell for it en bloc.

A work by Daan van Golden, painted specially for the occasion, has been applied as a screenprint to the front
cover, the spine and the three edges. It is the close matching of the image on the edges with that on the cover that makes the book a box.

Inside, the period of van Krimpen’s reign is presented in a cool four thousand images, which the designer has
arranged in series according to their predominant colour: white, black, blue, red, green, purple, brown, and, for those images with no predominant colour, a catch-all ‘multi’ category. That’s eight sections, one for each year of van
Krimpen’s directorship.

Within each of these sections everything is jumbled up: exhibitions and accessions, in all the multitude of disciplines and techniques with which The Hague’s city museums concern themselves. Despite that, Boom’s method of sorting prevents it all becoming a mishmash.

To link everything together the designer uses page-filling fields of colour, each with the name of an artist beneath it. These are a spin-off of the investigation of colour that she presented some years ago in an issue of Grafisch Nederland. The first of all these pages is blank, with the caption ‘Van Krimpen’, followed by a white field and ‘Mondriaan’ and a black field and ‘Fieret’. The last one of all is back to black, with under it ‘Wim’. What from the outside is a beautiful object is on the inside a beautifully thought-out and personalized leaving gift.