Client: LL'Editions
Type: Merchandise Design
Year: 2022-23

LL’Editions is a Sweden based publishing imprint, collaborating with artists around the world.

Initially founded in 2014, as an offshoot of the design studio Lundgren+Lindqvist, LL’Editions (an acronym for Lundgren+Lindqvist Editions) has since grown into an active publishing venture, releasing a number of editions and titles each year. The publisher’s editions range from artist’s books and multiples in small numbers to project oriented books and monographs. . LL’Editions’ books are often released in both trade editions and in signed and numbered special editions, featuring artist’s treatments, special materials and prints. To date, LL’Editions have published books and editions with artists like Fiona Banner aka The Vanity Press, Heimo Zobernig, Ryan Gander, Jonathan Monk, Brad Downey, Maurizio Nannucci and EKTA.

Apart from having founded the imprint, Lundgren+Lindqvist designs most of the editions released by LL’Editions and also run and maintain the webshop and the extensive Cinema section, featuring hundreds of art related films available for free streaming.

As part of our ongoing work for LL’Editions – which has included designing the visual identity, designing and developing the imprint’s webshop and designing a range of publications – Lundgren+Lindqvist has designed a comprehensive range of merchandise; including everything from branded garments to specific themed series of caps and totebags.

For the Book Guardians caps, Lundgren+Lindqvist has designed a series of caps paying homage to the animals who have dedicated their lives, knowingly or not, to protecting books and manuscripts.

The first cap in the series is the Book Scorpion cap. For centuries, book scorpions have been the unsung heroes protecting books and manuscripts from aggressors, such as book lice and silverfish. Minuscule in size, the book scorpion is often found in libraries and antiquarian bookshops. The limited edition LL’Editions Book Scorpion Cap celebrates this savior of books, who has for far too long been idly at work outside the limelight.

The second cap in the Book Guardian series is the Bat Cap.For the past two centuries, two colonies of bats have protected the books at the Joanina Library in Coimbra, Portugal. Taking up residence behind the bookshelves, the bats emerge at nightfall to consume flies, gnats and other pests that would otherwise feed on manuscript pages.

“Since the end of the 18th century, two small colonies of bats have lived behind the shelves of the Joanina Library. We consider them ‘honorary librarians’ because they eat insects that infest books. They always arouse the curiosity of visitors to the old building (1728), but they do not exempt us from using modern conservation routines, such as a nitrogen anoxia chamber and cleaning, cleaning, cleaning.”

– António Eugénio Maia do Amaral, Joanina Library’s Associate Director, in conversation with Lundgren+Lindqvist