Brief: Each year’s selection of The Best Dutch Book Designs is accompanied by a catalogue that conforms to an established schedule of requirements. The catalogues to date (thirty since 1987) represent a broad spectrum of what the makers of carefully designed and created books are capable of producing. The visibility of the structure of this year’s catalogue is a tribute to the skills and expertise of all who create, produce, cherish, challenge, reinvigorate and above all love books.

Solution: The catalogue of The Best Dutch Book Designs 2016 represents this year’s 33 winners. There is no ranking—each one has been selected by the judges on its own merits. All of them deserve a place on the cover. It is this principle of equality that has guided the design process. That is why this catalogue—devoid as it is of any hierarchy—appears in thirty-three versions. Each winner has its own section, with its photo on the front page. The sequence of the sections varies, so that at any given moment one particular section is the first, thus effectively becoming the catalogue’s front cover and hence its visiting card. For the bookstore they are sorted randomly.

Insights: The varying sequence makes heavy demands on the expertise of a bookbinder. To guarantee the right order they must take careful note of the collating marks on the back of the folded sheets of each section. Usually these are black step-marks forming a diagonal line across the spine of the book. Here the diagonal is interrupted, so that the collating marks move about, revealing the hand of the binder in the varying patterns on the catalogues’ spines. One side effect of the egalitarian approach of this concept is the absence of page numbers. However, that loss is more than offset by the final consequence of the equality principle: the placing of the title on the fore-edge—surely the natural product of viewing the 33 books as equals—and a stylish tribute to this year’s winners.