16 millions de signes / From and About Books

To mark the twentieth anniversary of the contemporary French art museum MAC VAL, the institution invited the design duo Syndicat (the force behind Revue Faire) to showcase the 104 publications it produced over the past two decades. These publications, designed in collaboration with various designers, reflect the museum's commitment to contemporary graphic design. The books were presented in a display that brings together all of the published texts—a total of 16,465,721 typographic characters. Alongside a selection of works from the museum’s collection, enlarged pages from the catalogs are exhibited so that the formats of the reproductions and the originals can be seen next to each other. This catalog, which accompanied and documented the exhibition, collects reflections by curator Alexandra Midal, write and designer Thierry Chancogne, and Syndicat themselves, on books and printed surfaces, offering historical, semantic, technical, and sociological perspectives. Edited by Julie David, François Havegeer, and Sacha Léopold Art direction and design by Syndicat with Arthur Chaput Published by MAC VAL and Editions Empire, 2025 Bilingual, in French and English Softcover, 240 pages, color and b&w offset, 4 × 6 inches ISBN: 979-1-09-599184-7