The Best Dutch Book Designs 2016

The Best Dutch Book Designs 2016 consists of 33 books combining the highest quality in design, lithography, printing and binding, and publishing.
 
The annual judging of the Best Dutch Book Designs is the oldest of its kind in Europe. The first was held in 1926. The competition is a phenomenon within the Dutch publishing industry, casting the spotlight on the versatility of its graphic design professionals. After all, a book comes about only by combining the expertise, creativity, courage and perseverance of publishers, writers, designers, printers and binders. Budgetary and technical constraints are often the only restricting factors. And in some cases, all that hard work culminates in the Best Book Design award.

But how do you achieve this? Is there one universal benchmark for all these works? Absolutely not! Each year a fresh, independent panel of judges looks at all the new nominees from the past twelve months and comes up with its own answer. An answer you may heartily agree or disagree with. The last decades The Best Book Designs has become an institution cherished by the Dutch graphic design community.
This year 298 books were submitted. A judging panel consisting of two designers, a publisher, a creative director with a printing house, and a curator of graphic design, spent two days in amicable but sometimes fierce debate about what motivated them to nominate a book or rule it out. In the end 33 books were selected to be part of The Best Dutch Book Designs of 2016.

The Dutch selection is also entered each year for the international competition for Best Book Designs from all over the World (Die Schönste Bücher aus aller Welt), often winning prizes there. And this year was no exception. The top prize, the Golden Letter, went to the book Ornithology. The pleasure photographers Anne Geene and Arjan de Nooy take in photographing birds and then collecting and arranging the images has translated itself into visual jokes and other ideas that work so beautifully thanks to the dry presentation. The silver medal went to (un)expected, an intimate publication by photographer Peter Dekens about people who are left behind by their loved ones who committed suicide. The bronze medal was given to Dwars Vers , a beautiful designed diptych with poems by Emily Dickinson, Edna St. Vincent Millay.
          
Besides a professional panel of judges there exists a student panel consisting exclusively of design students at Dutch art academies and colleges. Every year five students, usually from all over the world, follow the same procedures and come to their own final selection. This is presented at www.bestverzorgdeboeken-studentenselectie.nl

We would like to wish all visitors and book-lovers lots of fun and we hope they enjoy the exhibition.
 
The exhibition will be opened on 6 December 2017 at 7:00 PM by Annemieke Ruigrok, Consul General of the Kingdom of the Netherlands.