Dierenboeken voor / Animal books for Jaap Zeno Anna Julian Luca

Animal Books for Jaap Zeno Anna Julian Luca gathers the animal picture books that Lous Martens made for her grandchildren into one 416-page volume.

She started the first book when her grandson Jaap was born, using a dummy for the architecture journal OASE and pasting in pictures of animals clipped from newspapers and magazines about art, literature and science, along with stamps and photographs from advertising brochures. Each later birth, Zeno, Anna, Julian and Luca, started another book, until five were in progress at once. In her account none of them is finished, and they were “never intended to be published.” She says others persuaded her to combine them into one big book. The design credit goes to the Martens Family.

Roma Publications, an Amsterdam art book publisher and design studio founded in 1998, made the book in collaboration with the family. Roma lists three editions of it.