A pliego was the earliest known European printed book format. The first pliego created was the Sibyllenbuch, and is believed to have been printed by Gutenberg in 1452 before the Gutenberg Bible. The project idea has to do with the uncovering of an old suitcase that had been abandoned in a family garage. Inside was a collection of nearly 200 Catalan pliegos dating between 1910 and 1915 that were produced by a publishing company, Patufet, led by Josep M Folch i Torres. We are currently developing the PliegO-Maker. Once a user has submitted a short text or a pre-formatted PDF, it can be automatically paged and outlined as a ready-to-print micro-book on two sides of the same paper to be folded, cut, and read. Several sources feed our PliegO-Maker tool development, such as The New Art of Making Books manifesto, which is a new algorithm provider. Hacking a book is about prose and poetry, the space, language, and structures. Examples are the historical canons of page construction, like Van De Graaf, Villard de Honnecourt, and other golden ratio page layout; the typographic modulus playing as a classical lead composer, or with dynamical variable fonts; the ISO pdfX-5 specific page imposing strategy via Reference XObject; the source text & image connections via MediaWiki, and the web page capture, via experimental Firefox Addon. Here is the web demo module that we hope will grow.
Pliegos Chapbooks
David Gómez-Fontanills
