About books with Set Margins’

Who can afford to be critical? Who does design serve? And how can we preserve our own way of seeing in a world that constantly competes for our attention?

We invite you to Laichter House for an evening with Freek Lomme, founder of the independent publishing house Set Margins’. His books open up uncomfortable questions about work, culture, technology, and power. They connect personal experience with political thought, experiment with the form of the book, and seek ways to bring voices from the margins into public debate. Lomme also publishes for audiences that have yet to form around new ideas.

Even the titles of his books suggest the kinds of conversations they enter into. Who Can Afford to Be Critical? examines the cost of independence and who can afford it at all. Design Against Design opens up tensions between creative work, political conviction, and the need to make a living. Lomme’s own book Care Where No-One Does explores how to build independent culture from the ground up and keep it alive.

Joining Lomme will be James Dyer, one of the publisher’s authors. His and Nick Deakin’s Ninety-Nine Graphic Design Workshops invites playful experiments in attention and everyday perception that anyone can try.

In the former publishing house of Jan Laichter, we will open a conversation about the place of such books in contemporary society: how they come into being, whom they can reach, and what they can change in our thinking and actions. Come ask questions, share your reading experiences, and meet someone who connects publishing with the everyday practice of cultural independence.

Freek Lomme is a Dutch publisher, curator, editor, and author. In 2006 he co-founded the art and publishing platform Onomatopee, which he led until 2022. In the same year he founded Set Margins’. He has also worked as a curator at the Van Abbemuseum and taught at the Design Academy Eindhoven.

James Dyer is a writer and editor focusing on design, visual culture, and education. Together with Nick Deakin, he co-edited the book Ninety-Nine Graphic Design Workshops, published by Set Margins’.

· PARTNERS ·

This event takes place with the financial support of the City of Prague, the Prague 2 Municipal District, and the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic as part of the Laichter House literary club.