FALL PROGRAM 2023

THE ANALOGUE IN THE DIGITAL WORLD – OR THE DIGITAL IN THE ANALOGUE WORLD?

Much, if not all, of our Fall 2023 list revolves around the so-called “art audience.” Our work is primarily aimed at those who look at images, who find themselves through images—be they painted in oil or watercolor, printed or danced, created with a brush or with the voice—who find their own sensations or thoughts, who may be led to completely new insights and paths thanks to the impulses they receive from books, images or the “in-between.”

This printed catalogue is a curated sequence of books and images to hold in your hands, but since hardly anything analogue can be tracked down today without digital channels, we will simultaneously carry these books out into the world through all digital channels at our disposal.

What has always amused me about the word “digital” is that in the medical sense it means “done with a finger.” However, the word not only refers to the physical finger on our keyboards or touchscreens, but also to the binary system that can be expressed with a finger: 1 or 0, on or off. So the so-called “digital world” also has a very physical point of attachment. Perhaps the only way to “grasp” it is to become involved in the constant interplay between the respective references of the physical (analogue) and virtual (digital) worlds.

In publishing, this affects our everyday work on many levels: we sit in front of computers all day long to produce printed books. We feed more and more databases, manage more and more sophisticated metadata, so that our marvelously designed, beautifully printed and bound books can be picked up in various parts of the world. All this in order to then also publish e-books or consider other digital outlets? Then post about them on social media? Or finally launch our new website, with which we will now also arrive in the present with a responsive interface?

Yes, that is exactly how it is, and yet here we are discussing from morning to night what is actually going on in the world, in culture, in art. How else can we develop and distribute sustainable—in every sense of the word—books that fascinate all of you, our “art audience,” our “cultural society,” our readers and viewers, that make you happy, or are simply necessary in times like these, and that can best be understood by holding them in your hands. Your interest is our greatest motivation.

With gratefulness for this and confident greetings to the book trade, the art public and all other book people,

Nicola von Velsen and the Hatje Cantz team

April 19, 2023