Recollected Work, Mevis and Van Deursen

Well, I must admit, this one doesn’t really fit the idea of an overlooked editorial piece (and I promise this will be an exception). Quite the opposite, actually. Few books have had as much weight and influence on the whole graphic design world of the 2000s as Recollected Work, the first monograph of Dutch graphic design duo Mevis & Van Deursen, released in 2005.

The entire book, from the front and back covers to the photographs inside, plays with the idea of overlapping, as if the reader were browsing through an archive in the making. All the studio’s projects are thus brought together and interwoven so as to offer a comprehensive, multifaceted view of a flourishing body of work, yet also a fragmented one, where nothing is truly present in its entirety, with no chapters or themes to guide you. As Etienne Hervy put it in the third issue of Revue Faire, released in 2017 and dedicated to Recollected Work: “on the space of the table or in that of the pages, the work appears in an entanglement that refutes any consecration, classification, hierarchization, or explanation”.

The indexing of projects, listed in a sprawling numbering system along the outer margin of each page, isn’t really meant to create multiple entry points but rather to enumerate over 200 works, all of them gathered at the end of the book in a very minimal index.

Even handling the book is a bit of an ordeal, as the individual signatures of the binding have been left untrimmed. Pages don’t turn smoothly; the process is punctuated by little jolts, making each reading session feel like an almost randomised journey through a unique and massive body of work.

A legendary editorial object, to say the least.