Big red book for year of the dragon

A far cry from China’s revolutionary ‘little red book,’ the Chinese government’s 2012 Year of the Dragon celebrations now include the addition of a commemorative big red book, which was designed and made right here in Australia.

Conceived by local design agency, Toko, and manufactured by Sydney’s Digitalpress, the 4,716-page Long Story Made in China book was created for the ‘Chinese Dragon Exhibition,’ which opens in late February at the Capital Museum of China in Beijing.

With each page representing a year since the widely accepted origins of the Year of the Dragon in 2697 BCE, the book is over 28 centimetres thick and is, in fact, so big that the pad-style method used to bind it prevents the volume from being easily flicked through – or even opened. Fortunately, as the book's pages are blank apart from the page numbers, which are printed in red, this does not thwart the potential reader.

“It wasn’t a matter of binding a normal book,” says Digitalpress’s account manager, Stacy Masiruw, who oversaw the production of the weighty volume. “They had to simplify it. Ordinarily you’d glue it or staple it. What they had to do was pad the pages like a notepad. It couldn’t go under a guillotine, so they had to take the individual sheets and pad them.”

Considering the tome will be kept as a museum piece under glass in the Capital Museum of China, there is really no requirement for it to be able to be opened and read as a regular book. “It’s just for display purposes really,” says Masiruw.

Digitalpress chose to use K.W. Doggett Envirocare recycled paper stock for the book, which were printed with CMYK plus an added layer of red. Digitalpress not only digitally foiled the book’s end papers, but also gold foiled and embossed the red linen cover.

This is not the first of Digitalpress’s specially made volumes to become part of a permanent display. In 2009 the company produced, what was at the time, Australia’s largest book.

The volume, Footpath Philosophers, measuring a whopping 2.6 metres-wide when open, has its home at the NSW State Library. The Long Story Made in China, however, will be the first of the company’s specialty books to be showcased overseas.