The Fall Program 2022 is now online!
To all book lovers with open eyes and minds,
“The world now ticks differently,”* I read on the round entrance façade of the Schaubühne on Berlin’s Kurfürstendamm. Indeed, the challenges don‘t get smaller: the war on Ukraine, an endless pandemic, growing inflation rates, supply chain issues and many people in great need. At the same time, hope is growing that we will gradually regain our individual freedoms. A Spring and Summer with great art events lies ahead: the Venice Biennale, documenta fifteen in Kassel, the photo festival Les Rencontres d’Arles, Art Basel and Paris Photo—we look forward to these occasions and to accompanying them with marvelous books. Among colleagues, we are happily looking forward to seeing each other again in the office as well as at the London or Frankfurt book fairs.
“The world now ticks differently,” jumps right back into my mind. This part of the building—Erich Mendelsohn’s WOGA Complex, built first as a cinema in 1927–28 but home to a theater since 1975—was known as “Universum.” We think of the hardships of cinemas, theaters, all art and culture in „real life“. Where has real life gone? In retrospect, the past two years seem like a strangely enclosed space. But in it, a new broad space fanned out between digital projection and physical presence—for all people living in a privileged, secure situation.
As a team, we’ve gotten better and better at communicating digitally. Books, however, continue to be our special “real life” friends. Over the past 24 months, we have experienced what it feels like to create and discuss books digitally: online, and worldwide. Up to the very moment when the printing plates inscribe their contents on the paper in the offset process, when suddenly everything becomes very physical: from the printing press to the bookbindery, to packaging and from there to major distribution centers and post offices around the world.
This catalogue arrives in your hands by a similar route. We are thankful to be able to give you such a colorful, visually rich and promising preview of the Fall 2022 program. A delightful reliability in these unsettling times.
“The world now ticks differently,” but these books remain a magical and quite tangible testimony to the freedom of the eye and the mind in real—at least in physical— life. The culture of the book actually also entails believing in communication and sharing. It means believing inthe possibility that conflicts can be resolved by talking to one another, developing a mutual understanding of our images and worlds and values—and believing that peaceful coexistence is possible.
Nicola von Velsen, Hans-Gerd Conrad,
and the whole Hatje Cantz team
*quote from the play Ödipus by Maja Zade
April 26, 2022
