Book By Its Cover

This week Anna Gleeson reports from the Tokyo Art Book Fair:

This beautiful little zine is by Jun Omori. He was one of my stall neighbours at the fair and I enjoyed watching people react to his work. It’s a stack of 50 loose sheets with illustrations and short comics. He had it printed by JAM printing in Osaka – these guys offer really cheap printing with a limited colour pallet and imperfect registration. They’ve become really popular with designers/artists who make books and paper products in Japan; so much so that you can often recognize JAM colours straight away. Somehow though, Jun’s used really complex and interesting paper and colour choices in this zine and I didn’t even pick up that it was JAM until I asked.
There’s a lot more of Jun’s amazing illustration work to look at on his website (click on the links to the left under Art). His style reminds me a little of Himaa (who was also at the fair this year) or Yokoyama Yuichi but is definitely it’s own thing; really light and uplifting but complex. Jun’s work is not available for purchase online at the moment but I expect he’ll be wildly famous in about five minutes and his work will hopefully be more widely distributed. You might try convincing your local bookstore to stock this book.