Verslag van de opening van de nieuwe vestiging van Veenman Drukkers in Ede op 20 maart 1998

This book is the quintessence of what Booook-Makers is about. Everyone loves Karel Martens and his work, myself included. His legacy on graphic design as a discipline is beyond measure, and books like Printed Matter / Drukwerk are milestones in the history of Dutch book design. But with Booook-Makers, what gets me going is digging up gems that almost nobody has ever heard of. And this publication is undeniably one of those gems.

Published in 1998 and produced together with graphic design students from the art and design schools of Arnhem, Breda, The Hague and ’s-Hertogenbosch (the very same year Martens founded the Werkplaats Typografie in Arnhem with Wigger Bierma), this publication documents the opening of the new Veenman Drukkers print house building on 20 March 1998. For the opening, students from those same schools put together a comprehensive programme of dance, fashion, films, drawings, digital art, theatre and ceramics, and this report offers an overview of it all in an utterly experimental way.

Playing with paper formats and qualities, experimenting with the contrast between digital and analogue images, this rare and little-known publication is a perfect artefact of Dutch book design in the late 1990s, with all its characteristic typesetting and its freedom in composition and structure.