HANDMADE ARTIST BOOKS WEEK: VERONIKA SCHÅPERS

HANDMADE ARTIST BOOKS WEEK: VERONIKA SCHÅPERS by Laila NaharMay 29, 2026

The final artist of Handmade Artist Books week is Veronika Schapers. It was to see her work that I went to the Book Becoming Art exhibition at the SVMA last year. My heart leapt. Experiencing her work firsthand expanded my understanding of the artist’s book and the breadth of its possibilities.

Veronika redefines what a book can be through works that merge exceptional craftsmanship with contemporary design, conceptual interpretation of literary texts, innovative explorations of paper and materiality, and sculptural form – works meant to be experienced tactilely as much as read.

I am honored to have the opportunity to speak with Veronika at CODEX this year about her new work.

An interview with the artist follows.

Tell us about your growing up and early influences. What first drew you to making handmade books, and what led you to the artist book as your form of expression?

I grew up in a small town in northwestern Germany, in a house full of books, and I’ve always loved reading a lot. From a young age, I was also always doing something with my hands—painting, pottery, knitting, and crocheting; it was always clear to me that I wanted to pursue a career in the arts and crafts. My first career aspiration was to become a paper conservator; the combination of precise craftsmanship and art history seemed perfect. To do so, I needed to complete an apprenticeship as a bookbinder, so I began an apprenticeship at a small bookbinding shop, where I quickly realized that it was not so much paper conservation as the work on book covers and design that fascinated me. After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and during the final year of my apprenticeship, I learned about the Burg Giebichenstein University of Art and Design in Halle, where I applied in 1990 and began studying in the bookbinding program in 1991. Shortly after reunification, the university and the program were in a state of constant flux and thus very open-ended; what began as a focus on bookbinding gradually evolved for me into a broader field of “books,” incorporating typography, letterpress printing, and graphic techniques. I took advantage of this great freedom and gradually began producing complete books, mostly one-of-a-kind pieces. Prize money enabled me to take a trip to Japan during my final year of college, and I was so impressed by the experience that I did everything I could to spend an extended period there after graduation to learn more about traditional papermaking and typography.

With a scholarship, I arrived in Tokyo in 1997, where I lived for 15 years, and began producing small editions of artist’s books there alongside my work at Paper Nao. At first with very simple tools, later with a printing press, but always in very limited space—which, however, often led me to new ideas and solutions. It wasn’t until I returned to Germany that I was able to rent my own studio and set up a few devices and machines, which makes working on print runs much easier!

The foundation of each of your books appears to lie in the text you choose, supported through your extended reading and reflections. Could you elaborate on this process?

Almost every project begins with a literary text—sometimes one that already exists, but often texts written specifically for my book projects. In such cases, inspired by a book I’ve read or a current event, I come up with an idea that I then begin to research. The research can be extensive, involving visits to relevant locations or exhibitions, reading non-fiction books, and finally, conversations with writer friends. This gives rise to a dialogue and, in the best case, a text for a new book. In this case, it’s important to emphasize that I have no influence whatsoever on the text; I accept what the author writes and then use that text as the starting point for my book. Only now does the actual process begin; I research more deeply and in greater detail, searching for a suitable implementation in terms of materials and techniques. Each new book thus starts from scratch and is intended to truly build upon the underlying text. This results in great diversity in my work; while there are some materials and book printing techniques that recur, one can still say that no two works are alike. As far as possible, I produce my editions myself; this allows me to continually incorporate new ideas and changes, and my solid training as a bookbinder gives me the opportunity to work with a wide variety of book forms.

It might also be worth mentioning that the book’s packaging or cover plays a major role for me. It’s not just a protective cover, but often an object in its own right that holds the book, and it’s usually based on an idea that comes to me during my research.

I would like to know about one of your latest works The Island of Eternal Life. Tell us how you interpreted Yōko Tawada’s short story of dystopian time and abstraction of immortality into a tactile and nonlinear reading object experience. It would be interesting to know your thought process to select the structure, printing, experimental typography and delicate material of the book.

In her dystopian short story «不死のしま/ The Island of Eternal Life» (2012), Yoko Tawada describes a country beset by disasters and cut off from the outside world, one that is easily identified as Japan. The story takes place in 2023; the unnamed narrator, of Japanese origin, has been living in Berlin for a long time and is unsuccessfully trying to travel to his homeland. Following the triple disaster in 2011, the country in Tawada’s story met with further disasters and was consequently isolated from the outside world. Bereft of energy sources and any form of industry, the inhabitants live as they did in the Edo period; their lives are made even more difficult by a younger generation that is very weak, almost incapable of living. The elders, on the other hand, do not die but keep growing older, and they are forced to care for the sick children.

Since the Fukushima nuclear disaster, Yoko Tawada has been an outspoken opponent of nuclear power. In addition to «不死のしま/ The Island of Eternal Life, » she has published many works about the consequences of atomic pollution. She has also demonstrated remarkable foresight in predicting political events.

March 11, 2011, is the date when I began engaging with the text. I was living in Tokyo at the time, and I still remember what I did that day; the morning before the quake I had bought a few pocket calendars in Shibuya that appealed to me because of their odd covers (because the fiscal year, school year, university year, and often even new jobs start on April 1 in Japan, most pocket calendars start on that date).

In the days that followed, there was a great deal of speculation and hardly any reliable news. Special newspaper editions handed out on the streets offered new information about the disaster, but their accuracy was often difficult to prove. Three photos from the special editions I collected during that time form the creative starting point for my book: an image of the Fukushima

Dai-ichi nuclear power plant taken from a very great distance, a large column of smoke in Tokyo Bay, and a picture of an emergency shelter with people evacuated from a nursing home. The highly enlarged photos are offset-printed on thin paper: then I cut them up and overprinted the entire photo, making it almost unrecognizable. These prints are the basis for the book. The unprinted reverse of the emergency shelter page features Tawada’s text, in the Japanese original as well as the English translation. Both texts are printed in a bold silver font, shot through with small holes that increase page by page and eat up the letters, nearly dissolving them by the end. In addition, the overleaf photo of the emergency shelter is fully overprinted with a light-green, fluorescent safety ink, which glows mysteriously in UV light.

Each page of text alternates with a cut-out section of the other two photos, overprinted in gray, that also has the name of one of the twenty Japanese nuclear power plants printed on it in black. The opposite text page features the corresponding geodata, which becomes visible under the light of the UV lamp included with the book. The text page also glows slightly, playing with the association of radioactivity. The Japanese-folded book is held together by an acrylic spine; the semi-transparent cover is also printed in silver and the fluorescent safety color.

The book is wrapped in an aluminum-coated, fireproof «bousaizukin,» a pillow-like hood for children that is designed to protect them from injury in the event of an earthquake. These padded hoods are a standard disaster preparedness item, hanging from every elementary-school child’s chair. Eight of the books in the edition will also contain one of the abovementioned calendars, which have been revised, reprinted, and re-bound so that the days after March 11, 2011, are no longer visible. That is the date when Tawada’s dystopia begins and the normal chronology ends.

In this year’s CODEX I had the opportunity to experience your book Passion & Vision, or A Mysterious Collection of the Unknown. As a reader, this book feels an invitation into the unseen to interpret and to make the invisible connections. It holds your amazing mastery of book arts, from concept to design, printing, and binding, where each decision feels deliberate. Can you tell us about this work, what inspired you to explore this and underlying the process?

Thirteen etchings based on a collection of mysterious objects are counterposed with fifteen quotations about various Hollow Earth theories by writers, scientists, and researchers.

The etchings can be seen as illustrations of the text fragments that overlay them, but upon closer inspection the viewer sees a fine grid. Because of this, and due to their blurriness in places, they look like telescope images from an unknown world. Their origin remains unclear; the deep-black background is reminiscent of images from the deep sea, outer space, or uncharted caves. The objects sometimes seem organic, sometimes technical—they could be plants, minerals, or life forms; it is hard to determine which. All thirteen etchings came from photograms of objects belonging to a passionate collector, as yet uncatalogued and of unknown value. It is left to the viewer’s imagination to categorize and evaluate them. Each of the thirteen etchings is paired with a text fragment about the various constructs of the Hollow Earth theory, written between 1741 and 2007. While authors like Athanasius Kircher (Mundus Subterraneus, 1665) and Jules Verne (Voyage au Centre de la terre,1864) envision the hollow world as a system of subterranean caves and passageways, Edmond Halley puts forth a scientific theory that the Earth consists of concentric globes with atmospheres and sun-like illumination between them, making the inner spheres habitable as well (1691). In addition to the theory of a hollow Earth that can be accessed via openings at the polar cap, there is another version—the topologically inverse idea of a cosmos within the world, as imagined by Cyrus Reed Teed aka Koresh (1870). According to this theory, humanity is actually living on the concave side of a hollow Earth and the sun, planets, and stars are inside this sphere. While Edmond Halley’s scientific theory was still being discussed at length by scientists, the work of Cyrus Reed Teed was no longer considered credible by scientists at the end of the 19thcentury; however, he attracted a significant following and founded a commune in Estero, Florida, known as the Koreshan Unity.

The quotations I chose cover all of these facets; they describe visions of idyllic conditions and unimaginable riches, which often made their authors the subject of contemporary ridicule but also frequently found followers and supporters. At the same time, the authors’ bizarre testimonials about their supposed travels to the center of the globe, or their detailed financing requests for planned expeditions to explore the hollow Earth, inspired countless writers. The best-known example in literature is certainly Jules Verne’s “Journey to the Center of the Earth.” Following the exploration of the polar caps in the early 20th century, the Hollow Earth theory was relegated to a historical sidenote, circulating mainly among conspiracy theorists.

The text and image layers are separated by printing them on different papers; only at first glance do the quotations seem like titles for the deep-black etchings, stirring up various associations. However, they were chosen completely at random. The rich imagery of the language stands in stark contrast to the vague, blurry pictures.

Based on the ideas in these Hollow Earth theories, according to which the interior of the Earth can be reached through the polar caps or the concave side of the globe is inhabited, the book’s cover is designed as an object that is wrapped around it, “inside out.” No matter how you look at it—with the slatted cover on the outside and the binding on the inside, or the other way around—both ways work, but neither feels quite right. The slats correspond to the fall of the pages, alternating between deep-black and aluminum-coated stripes that are highly reflective, a reference to the unimaginable wealth and Edenic conditions in the Earth’s interior. The contrast makes the black stripes look even darker, and they manage to convey no information at all—like a black hole.

In the middle of the book—or at the start, or the end, depending on your perspective—is Walter Benjamin’s essay “Zum Planetarium,” both in the German original and the English translation (“To the Planetarium”). In the essay, Walter Benjamin describes a world in which people connect with the cosmos in an entirely new way. He describes the new worldview as largely shaped by technology; here, technology is not just an instrument that humans use to conquer nature, but also one that facilitates collective, intoxicating experiences—placing people and their environments into different relationships with one another. In Benjamin’s reading, technology is the source of collective experiences of transgression that fundamentally change people’s worldview, and to which Benjamin ascribes therapeutic effects. The planetarium served as the inspiration for his ideas.

The book can also be viewed as an object. It is stored in a tricolor linen-covered box with an acrylic pane and title label evocative of a display case from a natural history museum or a cabinet of curiosities. Because of the slatted cover, the book can be placed in the box in such a way that the observer has a partial view of the book’s mysterious interior.

What’s next in your journey? What are you reading lately?

I’m still in the middle of producing “Passion & Vision”, which will certainly take a few more months, but there are two other projects I’m thinking and reseaching on. One of them is a very strange biography of a chef, which I am currently trying to reconstruct together with a German writer; the second is rather unusual for me and uncharted territory: a collaboration with a major German publisher on a short Chinese text, which is also biographical.

Veronika Schäpers, (b. 1969 in Coesfeld, GER) lives in Karlsruhe (GER), where she works as a book artist.

After a three-year apprenticeship as a bookbinder she studied at the college of art and design «Hochschule für Kunst und Design Burg Giebichenstein», Halle (D), specialized in painting and books. After her Diploma in 1996 she received a three month scholarship with the Centro del bel Libro, Ascona (CH), followed by a nine months scholarship with Naoaki Sakamoto in Tokyo in 1997. From 1998 to 2012 she worked as a free-lance book-artist in Tokyo (J), from 2012 to 2014 in Berlin and present in Karlsruhe (GER).

Her work often addresses current social phenomena; in creating her books, she always ensures the highest quality craftsmanship and works with carefully selected materials. Again and again, the works connect to Japan, where she lived for 15 years. Veronika’s works can be found in many important collections worldwide, including the Library of Congress, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, (USA), the Urawa Art Museum (JP), the Berlin State Library and the Klingspor Museum Offenbach (GER), as well as in many private collections.

Her books have been awarded numerous prizes, such as the State Prize of North Rhine-Westphalia and the MCBA Book Art Prize. Veronika regularly teaches classes at the Centro del bel libro in Ascona (CH), the University of Applied Sciences Karlsruhe, holds workshops and gives presentations.

Website https://www.veronikaschaepers.net

Instagram https://www.instagram.com/veronikaschaepers/

Contact: books (at) veronikaschaepers.net

Tags: Artist Book, Handmade Artist Book, Laila Nahar, VERONIKA SCHÅPERS