Czech book culture has its own tradition and heroes, and has always been as diverse as the society at large. As a city at the crossroads of Europe, Prague has for centuries been a place where various cultural influences – Austro-Hungarian, German, Italian, Jewish and Slavic – have come together. The tradition of Modernism, with icons of book design such as Ladislav Sutnar and Karel Teige, was continued after the Second World War by a typographic school which despite political turbulence managed to maintain a high level of book quality.
Czech society is more of a society of words than images and the book has always been seen as an important symbol of the social level and education that maintains the Gesamtkunstwerk as an inseparable whole of content and form. The book is usually given its comprehensive form by a single designer, who handles the cover design as well as the layout of the interior pages.
This tradition is also continued by the duo of Matej Vojtuš and Josefina Karlíková, recent graduates of the Type Design and Typography Studio at Prague’s Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design. The pair also work on film posters and visual identities for cultural institutions, but above all, they design books.
In 2023, the duo – as the winners of the previous year’s Most Beautiful Czech Book competition – were given the task of designing this year’s catalogue. They named the catalogue Judge a book by its cover, but despite the hyperbole with which they conceived the entire concept, both designers take book design very seriously.
‘For us, the book is a crucial topic,’ Vojtuš says. ‘The name of the competition itself refers to the beauty of the book, which is a highly subjectively measurable quantity. But because the beauty of a book has been judged in a competition for almost 60 years and no one has questioned it, we decided to see what other variables associated with a book could be measured: not only size and weight, but also its flammability and gunshot resistance, or the speed at which it falls to the ground.’
The designers commissioned fake scientists (theatre actors) to conduct the research; in doing so, they subconsciously referred to the tradition of the Theatre of the Absurd personified by the Czech playwright and later president Václav Havel, and also to the experimentation, playfulness and Dada we have come to associate with Czech graphic design. The Judge a book by its cover catalogue became a holistic work, where not only the authors of the text and the designers took part, but also theatre artists, photographers, and illustrators played a role. In this way the graphic designer becomes a connecting point for all the professions involved in the book, and an invisible mediator between the author of the text and the reader.