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Visual Editions releases Composition No.1

We love Visual Editions – in our eyes they can do no wrong. With their beautifully designed edition of Tristram Shandy and their playful Tree of Codes (with Jonathan Safran Foer), they continue to fulfil their pledge to create ‘great looking stories.’  This time they’ve been busy preparing their third book VE3, Composition No.1 by Marc Saporta, a re-imagining of a book originally published in the 1960s.

The book is the first ever “book in a box”, explain Visual Editions. “When we say book in a box we mean: quite literally a book that comes in a box with loose pages. Each page has a self-contained narrative, leaving it to the reader to decide the order they read the book, and how much or how little of the book they want to read before they begin again. In so many ways, Composition No.1 was published ahead of its time: the book raises all the questions we ask ourselves today about user-centric, non-linear screen driven ways of reading.”

With this in mind, Visual Editions approached Tom Uglow of Creative Labs Google and Youtube to write an introduction for the book. This re-imagined edition also includes several of Salvador Plascencia’s (author of The People of Paper) drawings, looking at all the different components that make up a “typical” book. Visual Editions say, “Ultimately, Composition No.1 asks readers to consider: what makes a book a book?

The book is designed by Universal Everything, UK-based design studio known for their interactive screen-based work.

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