Conville & Walsh

Jake and our foreign rights team have been working on a special project recently: the What on Earth? Wallbook, which we are delighted to say has just been shortlisted for a British Book Design and Production Award.

It reads like a book or hangs on a wall! All 13.7 billion years of existence beautifully illustrated on a unique 2.3 metre-long timeline. The What on Earth? Wallbook features more than a thousand illustrations depicting millions of years of evolution, the rise and fall of civilisations, one hundred of the top battles and, on the reverse, the story of planet, life and people from the Big Bang to the present day.

‘I came up with the idea for a wallbook high up in the mountains of the winter Bernese Oberland on a chair lift,’ says author Christopher Lloyd. ‘Why on Earth do we spend so much time (and money) producing beautiful books and then for most of their lives we clam them shut and stuff them on a bookshelf with nothing more to show than a spindly spine....? Then I thought.... walls. That’s it! How about a traditional paper-based publication that can be read like a book but also unfolded and stuck on a wall?

‘The idea of a “wallbook” was born. I saw it as a timeline - a visual way of taking in the enormous, but utterly compelling story of planet, life and people over the last 13.7 billion years. I envisaged hundreds - no, thousands - of pictures and captions - a compelling, visual rendition of the past - from the dinosaurs to Genghis Khan, from the Big Bang to 9/11...’

Writing in the Telegraph, Christopher Middleton called the book ‘truly impressive...an epic undertaking in terms of layout, typography, design and sheer scale of ambition.’ It has been a runaway success in the UK, selling more than 25,000 copies to date, and we’ve now sold foreign rights to Italy (Mondadori), Netherlands (Moon) and Denmark (CPH). We are currently concluding sales in Japan, Korea and Germany, too.