James Jennifer Georgina

James Jennifer Georgina is a big book: 1,200 pages. Irma Boom’s revolutionary spine design allows the book to lie flat on any page. The entire cover and page edges are silkscreened in a brilliant soft neon-yellow glow; the colour lives big but does not dominate. Within this balance, Boom has reworked the limits of the page with a radical invention in storytelling and has reached a new level of equilibrium between design and narrative.

The book is a memoir divided into three sections: postcards, conversations and a photo album.

The 210 postcards are culled from 1,000 written to Georgina between 1989 and 1999 – the first ten years of her life – during a 282,162-mile odyssey undertaken by Jennifer and James, to keep James’s hands on the steering wheel rather than the bottle. Reprinted and transcribed, they to form the bulk of the book’s pages and bookend the stages of James’s alcoholism, starting with the spiral into his problem and ending with his final decision to stop drinking.

In a largely digital world, Jennifer chose to handwrite the postcards to her daughter every day they were apart. Some are even handmade from photos and collages. They contain stray thoughts – strawberries are in season a month early this year – grievances – the hotel is on a pond, which is full of ducks and mosquitoes. I wish one would eat the other – and aphorisms – the simpler the explanation, the closer the truth.

The postcards are joined by 21 conversations that, ten years later, the family made themselves sit down to have, addressing specific topics in the hope of achieving some sort of closure on issues that still dogged them in the aftermath of the disease. These unedited dialogues are unflinchingly open, but also honest in their willingness to spin off at whatever tangent the family’s collective spirit dictates. Laying open the forces that both bind a family together and push it apart, they have been described as a cross between Woody Allen cinema and Harold Pinter theatre – but will also ring true for anyone who has ever been in a family.

The book took nearly two years to produce and cost over 250,000 Euros. It is a treasure house of ephemera, the things that most of us discard and forget, yet which here provide the physical evidence of a family’s journey. It makes the case for three-dimensional books in an Internet age – an age of formless emails that are unlikely to be treasured and reread as these postcards were. It demonstrates the vitality of print and proves that the book object can never be replaced.

JAMES, JENNIFER, GEORGINA
Jennifer Butler (text)
Irma Boom (concept and design)
Erwin Olaf (portrait photos)
London/Amsterdam 2010
Yellow cloth sewn/in cassette 1,200 pages
Unique binding method with coloured edges
Full colour illustrations
Text in English
Edition limited to 999 copies
Price: €435.00

Feature in the New York Times on Irma Boom