The Improbable City
Published by Edinburgh Art Festival, 2015
Edited by Sorcha Carey and Emily Gray
Designed by James Brook
ISBN 978 0 9929909 1 6
48 pages with soft cover with pockets front and back containing a set of 8 postcards
Book size 210 x 165 mm; postcard size 105 x 148 mm
Printed by Allander, Edinburgh, on Cocoon Preprint 100% recycled paper with Colorplan smoke grey cover; postcards printed on Cocoon Offset 350gsm
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The Improbable City is the second book that I designed for the Edinburgh Art Festival. The book accompanied a programme of commissions that ‘celebrate the work of visual artists who vividly conjure alternative imaginary worlds through their work, and considers how it is often the improbable which illuminates the real’. The programme included work by leading and emerging Scottish practitioners and includes new work by three international artists showing in the UK for the first time.
Above are a series of iterations exploring ideas for the cover of the book which layer various glyphs with settings of the word ‘Improbable’ against backgrounds of different textured papers. The final design for the cover of the book was printed on Colorplan Smoke Grey with a map of the old town of Edinburgh by Hanna Tuulikki. The printed version of the book includes a glyph of a pointing hand on the title page to create the feeling of a guide book or travel guide; I later learned that this symbol is known as a ‘manicule’ (from the Latin root manus for ‘hand’ and manicula for ‘little hand’) or fist.
The set of postcards was an attempt to include last-minute images of the installations that were being created specially for the Art Festival and that were still being made when the book had to go to print to meet the deadline of the opening of 29 July; as the postcards had a shorter production time we hoped to include images of the finished installations that were not ready in time for the book. The postcards slot in to pockets on the front and back cover.
There are eight postcards in the set with work by the seven artists featured in the exhibition – Charles Avery, Marvin Gaye Chetwynd, Julie Favreau, Emma Finn, Ariel Guzik, Kemang Wa Lehulere, and Hanna Tuulikki – as well as an eighth postcard by Neil Mulholland, which features a text written in response to Marvin Gaye Chetwynd's work. The reverse of the postcards featured another manicule and the legend ‘Postcard from the Improbable City’, further strengthening the idea of a book as a guide for visitors to ‘The Improbable City’.
