Michael Maharam; Irma Boom - Maharam Stories - 2015

Michael Maharam - Maharam Stories
Publisher Skira Rizzoli New York 2015
Designer Irma Boom!!
Softcover with flaps and 284 fold-out pages
in mint condition

For his new website, Michael Maharam began collecting stories about designs, about fabrics, about all sorts of things. He wrote himself about things that inspired him, but he also invited all kinds of people, and thus a very varied blog emerged that often had only tangential or no relevance to Maharam’s company that designs fabrics.

At a certain moment it seemed to Michael like a good idea to publish some of the stories in a book, and then Irma Boom came into the picture, because Boom doesn’t make ordinary books. The book is dead, long live the book, that’s basically Boom’s slogan, and with her you can expect something special.

And, in particular, that’s what it has become. The book is printed on fairly thin paper, full color, in long sheets that are folded twice in an unusual way and that come in a cardboard sleeve. That may sound a bit crude, but the result is downright stunning.

You fold the book open and you see Stories, with a wide dark blue margin on the left formed by the edges of the pages. You fold it a little further and then you start flipping through, always on the right you find an intriguing illustration. The nice thing now is that you have to pull the left page all the way to the left to see the three pages that belong to the illustration. It’s always surprising.

What's even nicer is that the packaging, that magnificent design, does exactly what good design should do—it invites you to start browsing and reading, and the stories turn out to be particularly interesting and inspiring as well. Form and content fit perfectly together in this case. A sublime book, one that makes you as a reader excited and happy.

Maharam Stories – edited by Michael Maharam with Bailey Salisbury – Skira Rizzoli – ISBN 9780847845170