Irma Boom - Career

Career

Boom has worked on her 2136 page SHV Think Book as editor and designer for five years. Research for this book took place in cities like Amsterdam, Paris, London, and Vienna. This anniversary book was one of her biggest works and showed a specific view on the history of her company. It was designed to be distributed around the world. However, it's pace of distribution is very slow. Boom has calculated that it will take five hundred years to spread to all the places in the world. Four thousand copies were printed in English and five hundred in Chinese. Her think book has become an international icon of Dutch design. Her design for ‘Weaving as Metaphor’ by the American artist Sheila Hicks was awarded 'The Most Beautiful Book in the World’ at the Leipzig Book Fair. Her books have been shown at numerous international exhibitions and are also represented in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Boom introduced the idea of a "fat book", and when asked what would make her create a book that was two inches tall and half as thick, she replied: “The book is small because whenever I make a book, I start by making a tiny one. Usually I make five, six or seven for each book, as filters for my ideas and to help me to see the structure clearly. I have hundreds of those small books and am so fond of them. I’ve always wanted to make one for publication, but no one has ever wanted to do it. And I thought, well, this time, I can.” The book contains 704 pages and 450 images. She titled the book "Irma Boom: Biography in Books." The New York Times wrote an article called "A Small Book in a Big Career," published on August 8, 2010, based on Irma Boom. This book only ran for about two months at the University of Amsterdam Library.