At Éditions du livre, the form of a book is something to be cut, coloured and played with

Since 2013, Éditions du livre has been crafting children’s books with a distinctly geometric, minimal and colourful aesthetic. Large or small, whichever form they may come in, each of these printed objects is like a sculpture “exploring a material specificity of the book”, founder Alexandre Chaize tells us. “Following in the footsteps of Bruno Munari’s editorial experiments, Éditions du livre defends a clear principle: the form of the book is the content.”

Prior to establishing the independent publishing house, Alexandre initially had his start in the industry distributing fanzines with various artists in collaboration with his partner Frédérique Rusch. Somewhere along the way, in all of the printing and binding and distributing, Alexandre became much more interested in the way books were constructed and how these houses of paper could facilitate meaningful modes of communication, rather than rest as generalised vessels — leading him to produce the kind of books he makes today: “works by artists or graphic designers that find their final form as a book”.

Many of the publisher’s artist books for kids cover “very simple universal subjects’, like animals, fruits, vegetables and flowers, using depictions that sit on the border between “figurative and abstract”, Alexandre says. Being reintroduced to the world of children’s books through the birth of his daughter, Alexander discovered once again that “colours and shapes could be the subject of a book, even before the arrival of reading”, steering his focus to abstraction as a tool to spark the imagination, as demonstrated by the publishers book Birds by Damien Poulain where images teeter between buildings of geometric shapes, or birds – depending on which way you look at it.

While simple and accessible in subject, Éditions du livre’s artist books are certainly not constrained in form. In vivid Pantone colours, Zoo in my hand by Inkyeong and Sunkyung Kim, can be completely cut out to create 40 origami animals; in Aquarium, the fish colour when the sun shines through the paper; and Bloom by Julie Safirstein is a 360° pop-up that unfolds like a bouquet of flowers. Each book, Alexandre ends, “reveals its share of printed magic”.