Print is a tenacious beast, indeed. As the pendulum of popular opinion swings in earnest back toward analogue, last decade’s rallying cry of “print is dead!” is now ultra passé—quelled by a seemingly continuous influx of new and supremely good art and lifestyle publications. But despite this rising new wave of design-conscious lit, the overall market is still dominated by battling big-box e-commerce companies and traditional publishers who control pricing and distribution throughout the industry.
Opting to remain outside of the fray are Unit Editions, the highly regarded, innovative book imprint founded just five years ago by the esteemed Tony Brook and Adrian Shaugnessy. The self-financed house creates and distributes their limited-edition works independently, adhering to their own meticulous production, design, content and shipping standards. Unit Editions refers to each of their releases as numbered units, of which 17 have been published since 2009.
Their latest—Unit 17—is Type Plus, a followup to last year’s Type Only . Where Type Only explores the elasticity of typography on its own to deliver clear messages in ways that transcend written language, Type Plus examines the other end of this spectrum. It presents an array of design works in which type operates in symbiosis with image to deliver messages that are always more than the sum of their parts.
