Saluti & Baci - Graphic Days
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SHAKESPEARE & Co
A tunnel book by Daniele Catalli x Shakespeare and Company
6 pages + sleeve, 162 × 220 × 20 mm
Letterpress and offset, printed and cut on Fedrigoni paper
Turin 2024
This must be the place
"I created this bookstore like a man would write a novel, building each room like a chapter, and I like people to open the door the way they open a book, a book that leads into a magic world in their imaginations."
George Whitman
Shakespeare and Company is an English-language bookshop in the heart of Paris, on the banks of the Seine, opposite Notre-Dame. Since opening in 1951, it has been a meeting place for anglophone writers and readers, becoming a Left Bank literary institution.
It quickly became a centre of expat literary life in Paris. Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Anaïs Nin, Richard Wright, William Styron, Julio Cortázar, Henry Miller, William Saroyan, Lawrence Durrell, James Jones and James Baldwin were among the early visitors to the shop.
From the first day the shop opened, writers, artists and intellectuals were invited to sleep among the shelves and piles of books, on small beds that doubled as benches during the day. These guests are called Tumbleweeds, after the rolling thistles that "drift in and out with the winds of chance", as George described them. A sense of community was very important to him: he referred to his shop as a "socialist utopia masquerading as a bookstore".
Three things are asked of each Tumbleweed: read a book a day, help in the shop for a few hours a day, and write a one-page autobiography.
One fine morning I received a call from Shakespeare and Company. They wanted me to create a tunnel book dedicated to the bookshop: a miniature, a doll's house that could capture the atmosphere you feel when you walk in.
The first thing I did was go back and look, because the shop had been renovated in the meantime. It is larger now, and the rooms relate to each other differently from how I remembered. What to include, and what to leave out?
I divided the rooms into levels, like theatre backdrops. Each level of the ground floor, with the bookshop, corresponds to one on the upper floor, with the library and the piano room. In some cases I had to distort the proportions so that the perspectives would line up.
How do you represent a place so iconic and so layered?
Should the drawings be descriptive, capturing every detail, or evocative, conveying essence and atmosphere? How can they hold the stories of everyone who has passed through, myself included?
What does this book tell? A journey through time, a glimpse of the lives that crossed in these rooms, or a reflection of a place that keeps changing? The challenge was to balance precision with emotion, and to find a story that is both personal and universal.The structure
The structure is built in Fedrigoni Materica 360 gsm paper. The sequence of planes creates a distorted perspective of the rooms.
The interiors also had to be visible from both the front and the back, as in a doll's house. This is the main difference from the tunnel books I had made before.
The six levels are joined by a paper accordion, assembled without any glue thanks to an ingenious papercraft technique (thank you, Archivio Tipografico).
The printing took a great deal of work on colour and was done in two parts. The outer sleeve is printed in letterpress, in four bright colours, to convey the idea that the bookshop is a landmark for so many people. The inside pages are printed in offset, which gave more freedom with colour gradients.
For many years now, visitors have been able to leave a message on the noticeboard on the first floor. Instead of reproducing the board, I made a secret blank space in the book, where you can leave a message or a dedication.
A tunnel book by Daniele Catalli x Shakespeare and Company
Turin 2024
Drawings: Daniele Catalli
Paper engineering: Daniele Catalli and Archivio Tipografico
Printing: Archivio Tipografico
Agent: Daniela Bonerba
6 pages + sleeve, 162 × 220 × 20 mm
Letterpress and offset, printed and cut on Fedrigoni paper