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November 13, 2018

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Everyone loves a beautiful book, including blind readers

THE annual national Beauty of Books awards were presented to 25 books from 20 publishers yesterday.

The winners will take part in an annual international book design competition next year in Leipzig, Germany.

This year’s competition started accepting applications in June and received 541 entries from 101 publishers, covering fields including art, education and history. The results came after two rounds of voting.

The competition organizer, Shanghai Press and Publication Bureau, said its standards were in line with both those of the Leipzig award and Chinese culture.

“We organize this event to encourage matching of design and content, and help to raise the standard of domestic book design by building bridges for Chinese books to be seen by the world.”

Among the 25 winners, “LOCUS” published by CABP shows the simple beauty of structures. Containing the work of Chinese, Japanese and South Korean architects, the book has an elegant layout with text — Chinese, English, Japanese and Korean — running lengthways, crosswise and in italics. Some fonts are very large and some quite small.

The Commercial Press brought Japanese artists to the competition.

Three books — “Yu-ichi Inoue,” “Shiko Munakata” and “Kazuo Yagi” — are biographies of masters of Japanese calligraphy, painting and ceramics. With a magnet in its slipcase, the whole set is black with the pictures inside all black and white. The page edges are variously cut in crude deckle, smooth or irregular.

This year, a book for the blind won an award for the first time. “Touching the Sun and Grass,” a two volume set published by Shandong Friendship Publishing House, has a hand on their covers, a reference to how blind people read.

The set allows blind readers to touch and experience the changing nature of Chinese characters alongside changes to the Braille alphabet.

To give general readers access to the world of the blind, the books use both text and Braille.

An unusual winner from Shanghai Literature and Art Publishing House was “Boogers Talking,” a funny book with a booger who works as a science teacher as the main protagonist. It has QR codes so readers can watch some short animations and pick up extra information about the scientific content.




 

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