Books I made at Steidl

3 entries in my diary:

It has been an extraordinary day. Yesterday I finished laying out the book for the Centre Pompidou and Gerhard announced that I would accompany him to Paris today; that while he had his meeting at Chanel, I would present my design to the curators at the Centre Pompidou. I was thrilled and terrified at the same time. I actually tried to get out of it saying I did not have a multiple entry Visa yet, which was true. Gerhard brushed that aside saying we’d fly in a private aircraft.

So in the morning today I found myself in Gerhard’s Phaeton with him, Monte and Frank who was driving us at 220 kmph down the autobahn. We flew to Paris in a Dornier which flew low enough for me to gaze at the patchwork countryside below. Not used to left-hand driving ways, I jumped into the driver’s seat in the taxi as soon as we landed in Paris and caused Gerd to laugh. My meeting with many grave-looking curators was easy enough – they liked the design very much and felt reassured by me that the book would be ready in time for the exhibition. Annie, the Director of Publications and Marina, the Editor took me out for lunch, bought me a map of Paris and dragged me to see the collection at the CP. I spent a few hours there feeling utterly happy as I gazed at works by Arbus, Friedlander, Gursky, Callahan, deKooning, Starck…. I decided to walk along the Seine to the Notre Dame and then head towards Chanel to meet the rest. From Chanel we drove to yet another airport where we had a meeting with Karl Lagerfeld whom we found shooting Chanel accessories in a Chanel aircraft! In the evening, the Eiffel was lit up as we flew low past it. Now I can’t go to sleep.

September 20, 2007

It is odd that memories from my childhood are coming back so frequently here. I don’t know what triggered it but I am thinking of one of my earliest memories of glasses of an orange drink with bits of coloured ice floating in them and jars of pink and white mints shaped in hearts, clubs and spades. The drink was served on a day when someone important was visiting. Ray perhaps but it's not a lucid memory of that day.

The other day, during Rudi’s excellent lunch a clearer memory of a day came back to me. I was talking about Lead Belly with John who is writing the book on him that Steidl is making. Lead Belly, Robert Johnson, Odetta and many others when Seeger came up – true blue lefty, banjo-picking Seeger and I told John how I had briefly met him. He had come home with his grandson Tao Rodriguez and they had sung and twanged away on a mandolin. I remember sitting in the cramped room on the mezzanine floor and knowing vaguely that it was an important moment. It was the same room where I spent a week with my parents when rainwater flooded the ground floor of our house in the 80s. These memories come and vanish every once in a while. There are things here too that I must document. Specially to share with Nityan – the old, orange Vespa and the red Mini Cooper I saw while walking around the town today.

Yesterday I asked Elisa what polenta was made of and she said “mice”! She meant “meis” which is German for maize but I get the giggles all the time with my European friends. Claas saw me looking at leo.org to see what “fahrt” meant. we snorted and laughed while he tried to explain the various uses of the word which in one sense means “drive”. Then at Ines’s house, we were to pick walnuts from her garden. After coffee and cakes, she said, “Now we get sex”. Even the other Germans in the room snorted coffee through their noses. She meant “sacks” for the walnuts of course.

October 7, 2007

Time is flying – first the Frankfurt Book Fair, then the pressure to finish the Centre Pompidou book, then the grand event at Goettingen: Gunter Grass’s 80^th and now Amsterdam. Today was an easy day at work – I had finished my book and Gerhard was away in Paris and all was calm. I took the opportunity to dash down to the press and see the printing of my book. From the mammoth Man Roland I wandered into the plate-making room where I met Rolf, the man who makes the plates. The last time I saw film being exposed on plates was in Calcutta in 1998. The press in India uses CTP technology now but Gerhard insists that negatives give him better results. Rolf was delightful. He taught me how to feel for a speck of dust on the positive with my fingertips. He pulled out wasted plates and made me search for the dust spots. “Come on, it’s the size of a door!” he said while I looked for a miniscule fleck. He washed and fixed the plate I had exposed, held it up and said, “this is a masterplate!”

After that I sat with Mika who cleared my doubts about forms and signatures. He folded an A3 sheet thrice and marked odd and even numbers on either sides and voila – there was the mystery of the form decoded after all those years I had thought it was a deep mathematical secret that my little brain would never comprehend. The people behind the printing are as fascinating as the ones who design the books. I can tell how much Claas enjoys typography – he always sits back to admire his own covers and they are truly beautiful. For one he had blown up letterforms; from the way he uses them I know he's friends with the letterforms.

October 23, 2007