For the 2018 edition of the Most Beautiful Swiss Book catalog, which presents the results of the annual competition that highlights the most beautiful Swiss books, the results were published as nineteen separate issues. Each issue was printed in a limited edition of 160 copies at Neidhart + Schön. 

The conceptual approach of this year's catalog explores the relationship of an original with its reproduction. Each volume reproduces the entire content of one of the awarded books. Across the nineteen editions, the books have been standardized in print, format, and paper, and each contains a second section that reports on the competition and winners.

The result is that each volume is also a facsimile – a model of the original.

Volume 16 replicates The University is now on air, designed by Jonathan Hares and published by Jap Sam Books and CCA/Canadian Centre for Architecture

“This publication accompanying an exhibition at the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) in Montreal employs a small number of simple yet very appropriate and functional design ideas. Its subject is the university course in the history of architecture and design 1890–1939 that was broadcast on the BBC between 1975 and 1982 by the Open University, which had been founded in 1969. While the exhibition presented historical teaching materials and reconstructed settings of the university and broadcasts, the book contains lavishly illustrated commentaries on the course, four accompanying essays on historical contexts, and five conversations with people involved. The commentaries are subdivided into eight episodes, and the layout with single columns, offset quotations and numerous directly integrated reference images recalls John Berger’s book on art history Ways of Seeing (1972). The Berger book was adapted from a television series of the same name, and the cross-media approach is revisited here from a historiographic perspective. The result, for today’s readers, is a dynamic, expansive and highly engaging image-and-text narrative. The comma in the title is an unusual typographical detail..”

With text contributions by Tan Wälchli and Joost Grootens.

Series designed by Teo Schifferli

Published by Bundesamt Fur Kultur Bern, 2019

Softcover, pages variable, color and b&w, 8.25 × 11.75 inches

ISBN: 978-9-49-285201-4