What are the most beautiful books made over the past year? According to the 2016 Best Book Design From All Over The World, an annual book design competition that has been held in Leipzig, Germany since 1963, two Chinese books, among 13 winners out of 600 entries from 32 countries and regions, are worth the reputation.



Designer Li Jin's Orders won the gold medal. It has been 12 years since a Chinese book, a collection of the Peking Opera master Mei Lanfang's archives, received the title.



No Satiety in Study co-designed by Qu Minmin and Jiang Qian, won the bronze medal.

(From top left) Copies of the award-winning books Orders and No Satiety in Study Photos: Courtesy of Qu Minmin and Wu Linhua

Bookstore story



Orders tells the story of Fangyuan, a family-run fine arts bookstore in Xi'an. The book tells the story of the store through a selection of the orders it placed with publishing houses.



The owner of the store, Lü Zhonghua, would mark these by drawing his self-portrait on them, rather than by using an official stamp.



Li Jin, who graduated from Xi'an Academy of Fine Arts with Lü in 1996, personally purchased books from Lü's mother, as a pop-up vendor, before she opened the actual bookstore.



She said she and generations of arts students in the city share strong emotional connections to the place, and her familiarity with the venue and the characters certainly helped.



"The decline of traditional bookstores is undeniable, and I wish to encourage more people to understand how difficult it is to maintain a bookstore today through my design," Li told the Global Times.



It took Li a year to select about 1,000 orders from the 10,000 orders Lü preserved. "Overall they were highly monotonous and repetitive, so I tried to choose the distinctive ones," Li said.



Each page of four separate, horizontally arranged pamphlets featured one of the self-portraits that Li scanned and attached, showing Lü's varied emotions over the years.



Li said it is inspired by children's picture book - when you flick through the pamphlets, it feels like these caricatures are in motion.



The pamphlets appear on the left side of the binding line, whilst the two-thirds of the books, on the right, contain the writings.



The entire binding process, which is all handmade, contains more than 20 steps. It took nearly three months to complete the first 2,500 copies.



Numerous changes have been made over time, but what stayed unchanged right from the start was the material for the paper.



Li picked a kind of rough and tough dampness-proof package paper that the bookstore used to wrap books in. Meanwhile, the most common drawing paper was used for the inner pages.



She pointed out that when she began to "do minuses," she knew the design was about to be completed.



"The elements I cut eventually must be those that disturb the delivery of the text - once they are gone, it feels more comfortable."



To Li, "beautiful" is a very inclusive word. "It does not have to be elegant and exquisite - it can be coarse, simple, violent, twisted. The core is whether it delivers the emotion of the text. I personally like effortless beauty, but I accept eccentric beauty and I am curious to learn about that," Li said.



Li highly admires famed Shanghai-born book designer and illustrator Lü Jingren among many others, who encouraged her to "produce more beautiful books for yourself and for the readers."



Search for satisfaction



No Satiety in Study, in which a famed TV host from Nanjing contemplates the theme of learning, is printed on mock xuan paper, the traditional material used for calligraphy and water ink painting, with the characters printed vertically, and the length of each line irregular.



It starts and ends with a blank page, with black-and-white calligraphy dotting the pages in between, which Qu believes stresses the writer's idea that learning is repetition and persistence, and there is no end to it.



Qu and Jiang, who worked together right from the start, continuously made revisions during the brainstorming process - once the structure was there, few changes were made afterwards.



To Qu, the key to book designing is bringing out the "aura" of the writer and the text. To do so, he went to meet the writer in person many times, and discovered someone "not on TV, but in real life."



The fact that he took part in the editing of the text before the designing stage also helped him have a clearer view and more profound understanding of the overall work. He hopes his designs are the texts in visual forms.



Qu believes that the "beautiful" books are the ones that really touch readers.



"I once bought an Indian comic book in Korea - it is in Indian handmade paper, all screen-printing, and entirely about cats. It was breathtaking, I felt like I was looking at the originals," he said.



Qu has been designing books for more than two years, simply due to his love of paper books, and has finished five projects so far, including Dances of Dunhuang, which won Best Designed Books from China in 2014.