Project: Svensk Bokkonst Catalogue 2024 Author: Johanna Lewengard, Ylva Sommerland Client: Svensk Bokkonst, Kungliga biblioteket Type: Publication Design Year: 2025
The Swedish Book Art Association, or Svensk bokkonst, is a non-profit association founded in 1933 to celebrate high-quality book publications. Each year, a jury of five to seven people chooses 25 books, covering different genres, whose designs are cleverly adapted to their content in terms of typography, printing and binding. With the competition celebrating its 90th year in 2023, it is one of the world’s oldest competitions for book design.
Each year, a winner from the previous year is selected by the jury to design the catalogue for the coming year’s competition. The statues say that you are only allowed to design the catalogue once in your career. Consequently, it is a very prestigious assignment. Lundgren+Lindqvist was selected by a unanimous jury to design the 2024 Svensk Bokkonst catalogue.
Historically, reproducing books in digital or printed form has been both problematic and reductive. Each stage of the process strips away layers of meaning, with much of the materiality lost—from the initial act of photographing to the printing of that image. To challenge this convention, we bypassed reproduction altogether and worked instead with the books in their raw, authentic form.
Rather than relying on photographs, we chose to use actual pages from the winning books: the real materials, real dimensions, and real scale of text and images, exactly as they are experienced in their physical state, making the 2024 Svensk Bokkonst catalogue an ephemeral portfolio; compiling physical samples from each of the 25 awarded books. Thanks to the generosity of the winners, and the joint efforts of Svensk Bokkonst, Taberg Media Group and Norrmalms Kartongfabrik, this very complex and highly work intensive quest became possible.
The result is a collection of fragments, with each catalogue containing a leaf from every awarded book. With this approach, each catalogue becomes unique, as no two catalogues contain the same combination of pages. The format was determined by the width of the widest book and height of the tallest, accommodating all pages without trimming. To contextualise the fragments, we included an index with cover images of all 25 titles, presented in a museum-like manner, accompanied by a colour card for size and tone references. Everything to stay as close to reality as possible.
The prong fastener binding lends the catalogue a scrapbook quality, while the design itself was kept unobtrusive not to overshadow the featured works. Each copy includes a folded poster bound on top of the inlay, serving as the catalogue’s cover. On the visible side, the poster presents the cover of one of the awarded books; on the inside, a photograph of Kungliga biblioteket staff (and for the represented children’s book: the child of one of the employees) reading the same book in the library’s reading room. For the contextual images, Kungliga Biblioteket’s photographer was instructed to only photograph the readers from the balconies surrounding the room lending the photographs a candid, real life quality. With a total of 25 posters in the series, the catalogue has 25 different covers. Together, these posters juxtapose the book as object with the book as lived experience—its material presence set against its encounter with the reader.
The catalogue was typeset in Tid, designed by Göran Söderström and Stefania Malmsten for Letters From Sweden in 2024. Selecting a Swedish typeface for the catalogue was a natural way of further manifesting the quality of Swedish design.
The project also included the design of the diplomas handed out to the 25 winners. For these, we repurposed the covers of the disassembled books, making sure that nothing went to waste and–in the process–turning the diplomas into a multiple of sorts. Uniform stickers containing information about the winning book and the signature of Nina Ulmaja, chair of Svensk Bokkonst, were placed on the covers.
Additionally, Lundgren+Lindqvist also designed the invitations for the award gala, including a short film. In this film, the information about the gala was printed in fragments throughout a blank book. Upon leafing through the book, the message is completed. The film was used both across social media and displayed on screens in the Royal Library of Stockholm.
The 2024 Svensk Bokkonst catalogue was released and presented at the award gala at the Royal Library in Stockholm in the Autumn of 2025. It can be ordered from Svensk Bokkonst.
Each cover has a double sided poster attached to it, on which each winning book is represented by a studio image (recto) and an image of the book being read in the Royal Library in Stockholm (verso).
At the print house, all the contributed books were disassembled and prepared to be bound into the catalogues, page by page.
At the print house, all the contributed books were disassembled and prepared to be bound into the catalogues, page by page.
The covers of the books disassembled for the catalogues were repurposed as diplomas for the winners.
The covers of the books disassembled for the catalogues were repurposed as diplomas for the winners.
01. Andreas Eriksson: huset luter, men gardinene henger rett / The House Leans but the Curtains Hang Straight (Blå himmel förlag), 02. Audiovisuella arkiv: en svensk mediehistoria 1930–1990 (Föreningen Mediehistoriskt arkiv), 03. Birger E. Nilsson: krukmakare, konstnär och poet (Theo Ågren Publishing), 04. Costa Bravo Holiday Paradise (Journal), 05. Design and Grace: an Ahuman Odyssey (Konstfack), 06. DESIGN = MEMORY: Akira Minagawa & minä perhonen (Nationalmuseum), 07. Fittjakökets kokbok (Labyrint Press), 08. Forty Viewpoints in Seven Instances on the Reconstruction of Two Environments by Björn Lövin (Null & Void Books), 09. Gertrud (Void Books), 10. Gunilla Bergström & Alfons Åberg: donation till akvarellmuseet (Nordiska akvarellmuseet), 11. Göra, gömma och förstöra: en handbok om böcker (Rojal Press), 12. Ingen utom jag (Natur & Kultur), 13. Iscensatta samtal: arbetsböcker till Flotten och Det osynliga äventyret (POV Books), 14. Kid Life (2066 Publishing), 15. Laguner blomma (Albert Bonniers förlag), 16. Leif Engström: natten vilar mot balkongdörren (Otsium Books), 17. The Midwife’s Archive (Shoof / Samira Bouabana), 18. Mussels (Null & Void Books), 19. Skogen: i folktro, sägner och sagor (Stolpe förlag), 20. Skuggan (Lilla Piratförlaget), 21. Svenska ABC-böcker och deras djurvärld (Orbis Pictus), 22. En textil historia: Handarbetets Vänner (Arvinius + Orfeus), 23. Topografier: landskapets texter (Carlsson bokförlag), 24. En värld av luktärter / A World of Sweet Peas (Flower Power), 25. Växter & texter (UKW förlag).
