ADDING A BOOK. BREAKING THE RULES.

BOOK

We have added a book to the Simple Shape collection. Perhaps this doesn’t seem like a very big deal, but it definitely seems like a good moment to explain a little about how we choose our stock and make decisions about what we’re going to include in the Simple Shape collection.

Every single thing that we stock in the Simple Shape shop is chosen very carefully. We think about the reason for adding new things, we don’t just add things for the sake of newness. It would be retail suicide never to add fresh products and after all we are retailers, let’s be honest, but we don’t compromise. If we don’t find the right thing, we don’t buy the next-best on a that-will-do basis. We don’t include things purely for seasonal benefit either, although of course stock might be more relevant at particular times of the year. Everything we have on our shelves, the real ones in our Studio-Shop and the virtual ones online needs to be an interesting design, well made and able last year round too.

Also, we only ever stock form British and Irish designers and makers. Absolutely everything in the collection is designed and made here in the UK and Ireland. This is important as a celebration of British and Irish design talent and in the making and manufacturing skills that are inherent in the work. We are supporting British businesses and in addition our products have a low-milage.

The reason the book is significant is because it breaks our self-imposed rules.

An Atlas Of Rare and Familiar Colour is not designed or made in the UK. It is however such a strikingly wonderful book designed with such exceptional visual production values, filled with anecdotes and stories and quotes and references that make characters of the colours themselves. The archive collection that the book uses is not in the UK, it is held at The Harvard Art Museum, Cambridge, Massachusetts. For these reasons we decided it was acceptable to include it in the Simple Shape collection. We hope you’ll agree, and we hope you’ll throughly enjoy it too.

To tantalise you, this is the glorious opening paragraph to the chapter dedicated to Green:

“Verdant vegetation and healthful vitality, contrary illness and consuming envy, environmentalism, Quranic exaltation and wholesale liberty, the colour green intoxicates with yellow incandescence, then allays with blue’s equilibrium.”

An Atlas Of Rare and Familiar Colour is published by a small independent publishing house, Atelier Éditions, based in Los Angeles and is printed in Spain. Atelier Éditions publish a sustainability statement on their website that notes their continued effort to work with printers using low-impact printing methods and FSC materials.