This book is printed without a 3 mm bleed. It is the first book for which we have decided not to follow this convention. We have positioned the images, which were to be printed flush with the edge, right up against the edge of the paper. As the machine cannot cut reliably to the nearest millimetre, we have risked so-called ‘blitzers’. These are hair-thin white lines at the edge of the paper that occur when the image does not extend exactly to the edge of the paper. Overlapping the image by 3 mm beyond the edge of the paper prevents this from happening. Image information is sacrificed in advance to ensure the book looks neat.

We questioned this practice for the first time here and, with the support of Eberhard Havekost, we successfully seduced printer and publisher to work without bleed. Further books followed in which we worked in this way.