Some books are made to be carried; this one is made to be laid open on a table and leaned over. Art + Science vol II: Tropic of Capricorn / Trópico de Capricornio is the second volume in Hampstead School of Art's Art + Science series, brought to us by Malcolm Willett under the HSoA Publishing imprint. It gathers photographs, artworks and bilingual texts from a journey along the Tropic of Capricorn: salt flats, red canyons, the Hill of Seven Colours at Purmamarca, fabric works unfurled in the wind. We printed it in early 2026 as an A4 landscape case-bound book, 90 pages on 170gsm silk, with printed endpapers, a 12mm spine and a matt-laminated cover carrying a red sculpture streaming across a mountain sky.
The first Art + Science book came to us in 2023 for an exhibition at the school in Hampstead, a 58-page A4 landscape hardback with a spot gloss UV cover, reprinted within months for a delivery to Stockholm. Volume II is bigger in every direction: 90 pages rather than 58, a 12mm spine rather than 10mm, and a run of 252 that was always going to travel. The introduction runs in English and Spanish in facing columns, the captions are bilingual throughout, and between the photographs sit sketchbook pages, among them a hand-drawn chakana, the Andean cross, annotated with solstices and equinoxes in two languages. It is a heavyweight vehicle for showing off artwork.
Open an A4 landscape hardback and you get a spread 594mm wide by 210mm tall, and Volume II uses every millimetre. A cracked salt flat fills the left-hand page edge to edge while the Hill of Seven Colours takes the right; a black mesh sculpture held up to the wind runs full bleed; the red chakana-patterned fabric appears again and again, dragged across grassland, caught mid-flight against cloud. These super-wide spreads are what give the images their power, and case binding is the only method that lets a 90-page block open this far. Lay it open and a little pressure at the gutter brings the whole 594mm into view, and on 170gsm silk the pages turn with a satisfying weight. Silk is the usual sheet for photography on this scale: smooth, with none of the mirror glare a gloss sheet throws back under gallery lighting.
The endpapers are printed in full colour on 170gsm uncoated, front and back, and they are a photograph in their own right: a lattice of bleached, skeletal dried wood, honeycombed with dark hollows, running across the full 594mm as if the desert had been pressed inside the boards. On uncoated paper the image takes on a soft, matt surface, a change of texture before the silk pages begin. The cover is printed on 170gsm silk, matt laminated and wrapped over greyboard; the first volume carried a spot gloss UV over the matt film, and for Volume II the varnish was dropped at order stage and the photograph left to do the work. When the final files arrived, Mike called the cover spread outrageously good. The 12mm spine takes the full bilingual title in two lines, and 90 pages of silk between two boards give the whole thing the heft of a substantial exhibition catalogue. It is a stunner of a book.
Two hundred and fifty-two copies, packed fifteen to a box, were ready in early March 2026. Sixty went straight to the school in Hampstead; the remaining 190 left in April by tracked international courier, with customs paperwork and a label for every destination: 105 copies to Chile, 45 to Sweden, and smaller parcels to the United States, Canada and the Netherlands. A book about a line of latitude ended up crossing several. We handle export shipping like this regularly, and what makes it painless is knowing the split before the books are boxed, so each destination's cartons can be labelled at the bindery and collected in one pick-up.
If you are planning an exhibition book or an artist's monograph, our art book printing page covers formats, papers and case binding, and for another Hampstead School of Art hardback, see Landscape in Weaving by Rachel Scott. Get an instant price at exwhyzed.com, or send Harriet and Mike a page count and a sense of where the books need to go.
