Certain libraries are formed around literature alone. Others emerge from an entire way of
inhabiting the world. Books & Gardens belongs to the latter tradition.
Conceived as a personal album of Kurtiak & Ley Publishing House, the volume unites
bibliophile culture, landscape, architecture, restoration, and artistic imagination within a
single reflective structure. What appears at first to be a book about gardens gradually reveals
itself as a meditation on cultivation itself: the slow shaping of space, memory, atmosphere,
and daily surroundings across time.
Set within a historic residence surrounded by mature greenery, the work documents more than twenty-five years of transformation.
Comparative photographs reveal the same places before restoration and after years of careful planting, growth, and seasonal change.
Yet the edition avoids the character of documentary record alone. The garden appears here as a cultural form — disciplined, living, and continuously composed.
The volume also reveals the deeper relationship between nature and artistic bookbinding. Floral structures, vegetal rhythms, textures,
and ornamental systems long present within our bindings reappear here in explicit dialogue with the landscape itself.
The book therefore becomes both archive and source: a reflection on how cultivated surroundings shape artistic language.
For the first time within one of our editions, augmented reality was incorporated directly into the binding structure.
Through the Books & Gardens AR application, the cover acquires spatial animation, allowing the object to move beyond static
surface into a layered visual experience. The technology remains discreetly integrated, serving atmosphere rather than spectacle.
Bound by hand and issued in limited form, the edition was conceived for collectors interested not only in books,
but in cultivated interior life, architecture, gardens, and the continuity of aesthetic environments.
Selected copies remain in private collections. Additional photographic documentation and binding variations may be presented through private enquiry.
Reviews
There are no reviews yet.