Modern artists Gilbert & George have been creating art together since meeting at St Martin’s School of Art in 1967, so it’s no surprise that the book published to document their work to date is rather weighty. A twin-volume work housed in a buckram slipcase, Complete Pictures weighs in at a literally staggering 9.7kg.

Beacon Press, part of the Pureprint Group, printed 12,500 copies of Complete Pictures, comprising two volumes, each of 620 pages and, with more than 1,500 illustrations, reproduces every picture the artists have made from 1976 to 2006.

Francis Atterbury, Beacon Press’ fine art consultant, has worked with Gilbert & George for four years and been involved with four other Gilbert & George books, but Atterbury says these were “a mere bagatelle, coming in at between 200 and 300 pages each,” compared to this colossus.

Quality was vitally important in a project of this stature. “It had to be the best it possibly could be. With all decisions, it has not just been a question of cost but also a question of quality. In a few years everybody will have forgotten the cost and just have the book in front of them to look at,” says Atterbury.

The books’ slipcase fulfils two roles: an aid for transportation and a housing for the two volumes. “With such a weight, I was wondering how people were going to carry this book, and came up the idea of a milk-bottle holder, like people used to leave outside their door,” says Atterbury. “Gilbert & George liked the idea and took it further. They wanted the handles to fold down so that the books could be put on bookshelves and still stay in the slipcase. For Gilbert & George, the case became part of the work itself and they designed it as they would a piece of their art.”

The slipcase was produced by Challenge Packaging in Uckfield with its Dutch partner Vinke; Atterbury tested it himself, carrying the books on trips around London to ensure it had the strength to do the job.
Gilbert & George’s London studio houses four Epson 9600 inkjet printers which the artists use to produce their work. Once the artists were happy with the pictures they handed them to Atterbury, who then worked to match them on Beacon’s presses.

“Gilbert & George work in a colour palette that is well outside the gamut of standard four-colour, so first we had to build a colourspace that would accommodate their colours,” says Atterbury. He wanted to stick with a standard four-colour ink set “as it ensures, amongst other things, that the colours remain stable. Plus, it gives a relative accuracy of proofing. Extended-gamut systems like Hexachrome have no place in fine art reproduction because the colours are so unstable – in six months, you could have very different colours to the ones you printed.”

Once in production, the artists’ work was refined using Beacon’s specially created print condition – a combination of colourspace and on-press conditions to stabilise variables from consumables and dot gain – and a new proof was made that maintained colour “within a 5% shift of the original.” Gilbert & George’s work has changed several times over the past 40 years, making for distinct periods in their oeuvre, each with its own colour palette. For each period, the artists visited Beacon to pass pages on-press.

The press crews worked in 12-hour continental shifts to print the books’ pages, and the same crews stayed on the press throughout. Gilbert & George say that the success of the job was due in part to the care and attention shown by the press crews. “Never before have we worked with such an extraordinary printer, and the success of this two-volume publication is beyond our wildest dreams,” says George.

A bindery in the Netherlands was used as Atterbury struggled to find UK binders with the skills and equipment needed. “The single most important part of the book binding is to ensure that the grain direction runs parallel against the spine and, if case-bound, that cold glue is used rather than hotmelt,” he says. “It’s a shame, but the combination of book size, format and glue meant we had to look abroad.”

Complete Pictures has been the biggest challenge so far in the G&G/Atterbury relationship. Atterbury describes the project as “a journey – a total collaborative effort of the people who worked on it.”