This is a remarkable but quite unusual catalog of a no less remarkable and unusual exhibition organized by the Casa do Design of Matosinhos, a well-known research institution near Porto that aims to contribute to the production and dissemination of knowledge developed within the disciplinary scope of Design, Art and Architecture. Curated and edited by José Bártolo e Jorge Silva, the project “To be Eternal It suffices to Be a Book: 20th Century Publishing and Book Design in Portugal” is a diptych bringing together an ambitious show in the Center and a book that is more than a catalog in the traditional meaning of the word.

Book exhibitions and the catalogs that accompany them tend indeed to focus on a special type of publications and other printed material: the exceptional, the rare, the precious, the unique, often also the expensive, in short what is called in bibliophilic terms the “treasures” of a collection. In the Matosinhos show (4 May- 27 October 2024), the concept is totally different. The curators have tried –very successfully by the way– to give an overview of the global production of the twentieth century, an era strongly marked by the long period of corporatist dictatorship (Estado Novo, the “New State”) which started with a coup d’état in 1926 and ended with the democratic revolution in 1974. The Portuguese language has been vital to the development of certain forms of avant-garde and modernism, although much less in Portugal itself than in Brazil and the diaspora. The relative absence of Portugal from the international forum during several decades does however not mean that modern book production and design had come to a standstill. The exhibition displays the dynamics of the graphic and visual culture in the country through a certain number of curatorial choices that highlight the specific features of book art in Portugal (yet always with a sharp eye on Brazil) by replacing the conventional norm of selection (“the best of”) by the challenging decision to show the broader spectrum, not simply by including perhaps less “attractive” material but more generally by also taking into account neglected and forgotten books. Thus, rather than foregrounding artist books or avant-garde, often clandestine works, the exhibition covers the totality of Portuguese book culture during the twentieth century. It does so by showing an incredible amount of works, both artistic works such as literary collections and non-artistic ones like school books, and by stressing the similar design procedures and efforts made in either domain. The curators thus redefine the traditional relationship of quantity and quality, which cease to be mutually exclusive but appear instead to be dramatically intermingled. The beauty of the books and the admirable efforts to enhance the quality of the production in difficult circumstances become visible through the global overview with thousands and thousands of items on display, not all of them being “masterpieces”, while the visual confrontation with the global mass of what has been produced in the last century becomes an object of beauty and admiration in itself.

The aims of the project can be summarized by five threads. First of all, the curators stress the close relationship between book design and book production. Graphic design is not an artistic practice that develops in a material void, a zone of exclusive aesthetic choices and experiments. It is deeply marked and determined by an economic and political context, that triggers as much as it blocks new and interesting productions. To make books is something that may seem natural and easy to do, but this was not always the case in Portugal, where paper shortage or insufficient quality of ink and print technology were a sad historical given. Moreover, the difficulties of book production also maintained a strong divide between the cover of the books and the interior pages (the latter being more difficult to master and control for graphic designers). To bridge the gap between these two faces of the book (the one that one sees without reading, the one that one reads despite the often frustrating visual aspects of the text) was one of the key assignments of modern designers.

Second, the project also emphasizes the extreme fragility and vulnerability of the books. We often forget that books may come to existence, but they do not always last. Books come and go, and they more often go than stay. In the case of the Portuguese production, this question was a fundamental issue, not only because of the poor material quality of some publications, which made them subject to neglect and organic disintegration, but also because of censorship problems, which produced the same destructive results. The struggle to keep books alive is very well highlighted in the catalog as well, which pays much time and effort to contextualize and historicize what is on display.

Third, the curators make clear that books are always part of larger wholes, for instance series, and the exhibition rightly stresses the creative importance of this context for book design in Portugal. It is the existence of collections (and much of the exhibition is structured by this criterion) that helps designers to develop new ideas and styles, while at the same time allowing the public to become more sensitive to what is going on in this of that specific element of the series. It is also, and this does not come as a surprise, a vital economic factor, since the publication of books in a series format helps to retain a certain readership but also to provide the designers themselves with some minimal stability and security.

Fourth, books are not just objects, reading material if one wants. They are tools to interact with a social and political context and in many cases even to create a social and democratic debate that other media do not allow as easily as the comparatively cheap print material. Hence the importance of the “thematic” horizon in the organization of the show, which demonstrates the capacity of books to spread otherwise censored of mutilated content. In the Portuguese context, the theme of the colonial wars in Africa is obviously a major aspect of book work, but it is far from being the only one (feminism is far from being absent, for instance). It also makes clear how many different groups played a role in the creation of this dialogue: authors, illustrators, typographers and designers, but also critics, booksellers, librarians and readers.

Fifth, the catalog aims to become a work of art itself, not by trying to present the elements of the show in a posh or fashionable way, but by applying to its own design principles what it brings to the fore in the exhibition. The catalog experiments with illustrations, typefaces and layouts, stressing questions of readability (a lot of attention given to framing details of what is also shown in totality). It contains a wealth of background information, always carefully linked with the books themselves. It also manages to achieve a convincing analogy between the design of the exhibition, with its overwhelming amount of horizontally and vertically organized walls of fame, and the design of the catalog, where each page looks a little bit like one of the spaces of the Matosinhos center (page and poster tend to become exchangeable). One has the impression to “walk” to this book and to “look” at the vitrines of the exhibition while reading the text and watching the illustrations. An inspiring confrontation, which turns upside down the traditional relationship of the interior and the exterior: the catalog is no longer just what comes after the show, it can also be seen as the starting point of a reflection on the book that is eventually clarified by the exhibition itself.