The Alcuin Award-winning books travelling the world

The books that were chosen as the best designed and published in Canada in 2012 are travelling not only across our provinces and territories, but reaching distant lands such as Germany and Japan.

One of the big supporters of the Alcuin Society and its Awards is the Embassy of Canada in Tokyo. Under the care of Misako Terauchi, Assistant Library and Academic Relations Officer, our books were loved, treasured and exhibited inside the embassy library from July 15 to October 18. More than 3,300 visitors had a chance to admire these books, some of them being introduced to the collection while doing the tour of the Embassy. A representative of one of the Japanese major publishing house, who took a long time to examine all the details of each book, such as binding and paper, fell in love with Out of the Wood and purchased it online shortly after.

The collection is continuing its journey as it is loaned to the Printing Museum in Tokyo as part of the exhibition "World Book Design 2012-2013", which ends on March 2, 2014. There, our books are in select company there, next to award-winning books from Japan, Germany, Holland, Switzerland, Australia, China, Belgium, and books accepted for the World's Most Beautiful Book competition.

Many thanks to Shelley Gruendler, who designed this year's very visually-appealing and well-organized display cards, that accommodated the information in English, French, and Japanese. In the past years the cards in English and French were accompanied by separate Japanese translations.