rojal

Rojal is a publishing project started in the spring of 2014 by the book binder and artist Olle Essvik, and the translator and artist Joel Nordqvist ­– for experiments, collaborations, discoveries and distribution of narratives, ideas, objects and images, that have been lost and forgotten, or deemed unfit for larger editions or conventional formats.

Based in a workshop in Gothenburg, Sweden, we produce and publish everything from artists books, to photo books, multiples, theory and fiction, in small, carefully designed and handcrafted editions.

Order by e-mail: post@rojal.se (free shipping on orders over 1000 sek/100 euro). We use Paypal, Credit Card, Swish or IBAN.

Det blottade ögat #2 (The Exposed Eye #2)

Anna Strand och Helga Härenstam

Pris: 350 sek

Dead&Alive

Lars Kristensen & Olle Essvik

Pris: 450 sek

Hidden Books/Unerasable Characters I
Winnie Soon

Price: 22 euro

Göra, Gömma och Förstöra

Joel Nordqvist & Olle Essvik

Pris: 250 sek

Price: 45 euro/450 sek

(edt. 150 numbered copies)

Pyssel

Anna Nygren

Pris: 250 sek

(edt. 100)

Three Years of...

Helga Härenstam

Pris: 250 sek

(edt. 70 )

You Are Here

Jonas Örtemark & Hanna Östergren

Pris: 250 sek

(edt. 120 )

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Nils Olsson

Pris: 220 sek (inklusive frakt)

Capablanca - Alekhine, 1927

Fredrik von Zweigbergk

Price: 150 sek

(edt. 64 SWE/64 ENG)

Eaten Books

Olle Essvik

Price: 450 sek

(each title edt. 4)

Svalget

Leif Holmstrand och Jonas Örtemark

Pris: 1400 sek (inklusive porto)

The Goldberg variation (Bach clock)

Jesper Norda

Price: 1000 sek

(edt. 20)

FLUX UNTIL SUNRISE

Geraldine Juárez

Price: Sold Out

(edt. 100 numbered copies)

Untitled

Sven Drobnitza

(edt. 120 numbered copies)

Dödens Engel

Johan Olof Wallin

Pris: Sold Out

The Chance Execution

Olle Essvik

Price:

300 sek

(edt. 150 numbered and signed copies)

År med tretton månar, Kennet Klemets

Pris: Sold Out

(edt. 67 numbered and signed copies)

Olle Essvik och Joel Nordqvist

Pris: 150 sek

Den här datorn

Olle Essvik och Joel Nordqvist (red.)

Mareld

Elin Liljeblad

Pris: 150 sek

Alla hjärtans dag och andra scener

Helga Härenstam
Pris: Sold Out

(edt. 80 numbered and signed)

The Enemies of Books

William Blades/Olle Essvik

Price: Sold Out

(edt. 120)

Välkomna Finska barn!

Pris: 150 sek

Winds

Jeff Olsson

Pris: 300 sek (

(edt. 120)

Flip books from the hidden corners of the Internet

Olle Essvik

Price: 150 sek (1 book) 200 sek (2 books), 250 sek (3 books)

(edt 1/1 - each book different )

Mörker med glödande kanter

Kennet Klemets och Ola Åstrand

Pris: Sold Out

Decay

Sara Wallgren

Price: 200 sek

Bruksanvisning för symaskinen Singer Victoria. / Mönster till Singer hålsöm

Price: 250 kr

Bomber, virus, kuriosakabinett

Jonas Ingvarsson

Price: Sold Out

(edt. 120 )

Återkomsten - Bilden, Skolan och Samhället 1968 – 2018

Arne Kockum, Bitte Alling Ode och Ulla Lind (red.)

Pris: 300 sek

SOIL

Simon Berg

Pris : 200 sek
(edt. 120, <5 copies left)

En bok om en bild

Olle Essvik, Helga Härenstam (red.)

Pris: 200 sek

(edt. 150)

Vindstädningen/The Attic

Olle Essvik

Price: 330/450 sek (two sizes)

(Total edt. 110)

Art & Game Obstruction

Various

Price: 140 sek 

Det blottade ögat #2 (The Exposed Eye #2)
Price 350 skr

216 pages
offset print, colour, black and white
swiss binding, open spine
240 x 170 mm
edition 550
text: swedish and english (a mix)

En uppföljare till Det blottade ögat #1, i vilken Anna Strand och Helga Härenstam gav varandra uppdrag (Gör någonting om … ) som besvarades i ord och bild. Ett sista uppdrag gick till läsarna: Gör någonting om The End. I Det blottade ögat #2 har 48 svar valts ut och stoppats om med förord och efterord. De medverkande är:

Alice Hedström, Andy Allen-Olivar, Anna Nordström, Anna Nygren, Barthélémy Garcia, Bengt-Göran Nilsson, Björn Larsson, Carla Lomakka, Christian Kajanus, Christine Andreasson, Christofer Bocker, Elias Björn, Erika Larsson, Eva-Teréz Gölin, Freja Andersson, Freja Arvidsson, Fungi Phuong Tran Minh, Futuro Berg Fredes, Göran Kolbäck, Hendrik Zeitler, Jenny Lindhe, Jenny Rova, Johanna Wallin, Johannes Samuelsson, Josef Kovac, Karin Strand, Kristoffer Granath, Lena Nilsson, Lojs Qvarfordt, Louise Wolthers & MC Coble, Lotta Törnroth, Maie Wisur, Marit Kapla, Martin Jurander, Martin Magntorn, Mathilda Frykberg, Mette Hartung Kirkegaard, Mirjam Lamut, Pelle Kronestedt, Peter Frodin, Pia-Paulina Guilmoth, Rikke Mádi, Sara Lubich, Simon Blanck, Sixten Främberg, Tina Umer, Viveka Enander, Zooey Jolivet.
/
A sequel to The Exposed Eye #1, in which Anna Strand and Helga Härenstam gave each other assignments (Do something about …) that were answered in words and images. The final assignment went to the readers: Do something about The End. For The Exposed Eye #2, 48 responses has been selected and tucked in with a foreword and an afterword. See the list of contributors above.

Dead & Alive (2024)
Price: 450 sek

As Olle Essvik and Lars Kristensen suggest, their book Dead & Alive: Reflections on Media / Art is a result of trying to capture the disparate nature of dead media and to present it in yet another edited collection, but within a different casting form. To pursue their book project, they invited a range of international authors including Joanna Zylinska, Sarah Cook, Jesper Olsson among others, who bring different perspectives and approaches to artistic practices, media sociology and technological speculation. At first glance, these disparate contributions to the book might seem out of step, or sometimes even in collision, with each other. In the authors’ words: “Readers of the book will no doubt find this disparity frustrating, or even irritating, but hopefully also exciting and dynamic. Art and technology can intertwine in many different ways, and we wanted to highlight this nature.“

Writers: Annika Gunnarsson, Esther Leslie, Linda Hilfling Ritasdatter, Joanna Zylinska, Rosemary Lee, Cecilia Grönberg & Jonas (J) Magnusson, Jesper Olsson, Sarah Cook, Kristoffer Gansing Jacek Smolicki, Rebecca Rouse, Louise Wolthers

Göra, Gömma och Förstöra (2024)
Joel Norqvist & Olle Essvik & Winnie Soon
Price: 350 sek

Göra, gömma, förstöra (”Make, hide, destroy”) is a three part book about books – books as material, physical objects in an increasingly digital world: a hands-on practical manual on how to make them, using simple, accessible and unexpensive tools, materials, and techniques; an historical survey and equally hands-on account on tried and tested, practical methods for how to destroy them or render them inaccessible or otherwise illegible for potential readers: through art, censorship, iconoclasm, technological progress, negligence, natural disasters, etc.
The book is founded on our decade-long experience of running the experimental artist’s book publishing project ROJAL and written in collaboration with the Hong Kong-born artist and researcher WINNIE SOON, who contributes a section on how to hide sensitive text-based materials online.

THREE YEARS OF CHILDHOOD DURING THE ERA OF EXTINCTION (2024)
Price: 250 sek (70 edt.)

I found myself in an attic. In front of me was a bed with a smile made up of many small deaths. A smiley of flies. I photographed it. Imagined that I was someone or something looking back at an era when there were still people and childhoods. This someone/something was just drifting around looking for dandelions, photographs and other things. Not to investigate whether a civilization could be recreated, but more because there was nothing else to do. The fires had burned, the ice had melted, small and large species had died out. Then I left the wind and the smiley for the next visitor to discover.

A handmade book in an edition of 70 copies. The book consists of 34 color photographs, including: an arm/swan swimming in the dark, a girl behind a gate, a wall with the name HELEN written on it, a shadow with two heads, a cemetery with a lost mitten, and a boy resting in tall grass.

Olle Essvik

Vindstädningen/The Attic
Price: 350 sek (small size, edt. 90: 53 swe/37 eng), 450 sek (big size, edt 20: 10 swe/10 eng)

Memories from an attic cleaning - created from materials and equipment found in the attic.

“The storage space in the attic carries traces and marks of previous tenants – a cross hanging from a beam in the ceiling, paint stains on the floor and a pair of old skis, at some point left behind – the door adorned with numbers and a padlock, protecting against intrusion and baring witness of an owner.”

“There is no more space and a cleaning is necessary to make room for new things. Most of it has been packed in brown boxes and bags, of which I no longer remember the contents. Squeezed in between the boxes and the bags are items still waiting to be organised. Ending up here are the things that were rejected or that belong to another time, hidden away but none the less a part of my story and my life, a collection – a spare saucepan, a tennis racket for future matches, chairs awaiting guests. A remarkable number of the objects have never been used, and will eventually be replaced or thrown away.”

This DIY book is a part of the artwork Unerasable Characters I, by the Hong Kong-born artist coder and
researcher Winnie Soon, containing predictive/output data from machine learning processes, based on 54064
sample censored posts, collected from Weibo and Weiboscope during a one year period, from June 2021 until
June 2022.

By using free and open source software and libraries, DIY book binding tools and computational publishing
(html to print), Unerasable Characters explores the commons: infrastructure of (generative) erasure, creating its
own form of Do It Yourself approach as a way to rethink erasure beyond deletion, especially through building
solidary and generating alliances.

When text is no longer fixed and restricted but generative and malleable like water, what forms of meanings,
relations, marks and traces have been altered, and what have emerged?

Inspired by community movements like “white paper protest” and “blank paper revolution” , the book is meant
to be generative yet unreadable to circumvent censorship.

The project asks: is this a forbidden book? 

Winnies art project recevied 2023 the well known digital art prize, Prix Ars Electronica!

More about the artwork Unerasable Characters I: https://siusoon.net/projects/unerasablecharacters-i
Link to the source: https://gitlab.com/siusoon/unerasable-characters-i

Hidden Books is a reusable tool developed by Olle Essvik/rojal for gathering and binding disparate, found,
collected, computer generated, digital, transient, potentially censored or private, material into a semi-
permanent, adaptable book form. Pages can be added or removed, or the entire contents be exchanged at any
time. The tool can also be used as a simple instrument for making more permanent, glue bound editions of
collected materials.

A remake and a new version of Åke Hodells famous artists book Bruksanvisning för symaskinen Singer Victoria.
A second book is made a remake of the book Mönster till Singer Hålsöm

Svartvita fotocollage varvas med korta meningar och längre textsjok i ett mörkt, uppsplittrat och rytmiskt flöde. Ett trevande, maniskt försök att få fotfäste, att fånga och väga en omvärld som hela tiden är för nära, för avlägsen, skymd, överbelamrad eller uttömd – för att nå fram till något, en fast punkt, en insikt, en flyktig känsla av lugn och klarhet, oregelbundna andningspauser.

Flux until Sunrise is a book documenting a material exploration of our Liquid Crystal Epoque through the production of screenware and screen-glazes for ceramics. Screen-glazes use LCD screen waste from computers and smartphones as glass former component instead of silica and frits. The book includes an interview with Esther Leslie about Materialismo Mágico and screen-glaze recipes for ceramics. 

I'm looking for movies on Youtube with few or no visitors, webcams at eventless times. In most cases, I am the only visitor. Sometimes the filmmaker does not even know that the movie was uploaded, an incorrect button press. Movies that sometimes are there for a short while, disappear. Webcams from tourist resorts off season, construction sites, municipal webcams that monitor traffic or someone trying their new mobile phone.

A flashing traffic light from a webcam somewhere in Colorado, recorded 03.45.15-03.45.35
A birthday party in Sarajevo, 2 visitors 23.16.15-23.16.35
A surveillance camera outside a strip club in Thailand, 1 visitor 13.16.15-13.16.35
A gull flying past a camera in Denmark 0 visitors 13.16.15-13.16.35
A flagpole on a parking lot in Hamburg, 0 visitors 17.15.25-17.15.55

I wrote a program that recorded the movies and transferred them into pictures, and later made into thousands of hand-bound unique flip books

I boken BOMBER, VIRUS, KURIOSAKABINETT. TEXTER OM DIGITAL EPISTEMOLOGI samlas texter som har gemensamt avsikten att belysa konceptet »digital epistemologi». Utgångspunkten här är att »det digitala» inte ska förstås enbart som något som är knutet till särskilda verktyg och objekt. »Det digitala» inom till exempel humaniora är inte bara databaser och big data, topic modelling och spekulativa visualiseringar; ej heller är objekten begränsade till dataspel, andra elektroniska verk eller till litteratur och konst som explicit relaterar till datorisering eller andra digitala aspekter.

Detta perspektiv har kommit att väcka ett antal frågor. Hur kan litterära former i tryckt text spegla eller relateras till en digital närmiljö? På vilket sätt skiljer sig de digitala verktygen och uttrycken under 1960-talet till vår tids ubika system – och vad kan det få för konstnärliga effekter? Är vår tids uppenbara fascination för konstens och textens materialitet en effekt av eller reaktion mot en tilltagande digitalisering? Vad har kuriosakabinett, emblem och pertinensprinciper att göra i analysen av samtida digitala uttrycksformer?

I samarbete med Rojal förlag – och konstnären och bokbindaren Olle Essvik – har själva boken utformats som ett hundratal handgjorda mediearkeologiska objekt, bland annat med bokpärmar som hämtats från kasserade böcker. Varje volym är unik.

Boken kan ses som en samling prövande och öppna essäer, målet är inte att spika upp några teser, utan snarare erbjuda ingångar till mer eller mindre spekulativa samtal om humanioras framtid.

The Goldberg variation (Bach clock) is based on Johann Sebastian Bach’s Goldberg variations. But whereas Bach’s version takes around 30 minutes to play from beginning to end, this version is stretched to 12 hours and 25 minutes. Each note in the original score is struck at even intervals, every two seconds. The rythm is evened out, the dynamics are flattened: every sense of musical direction is gone. What remains is a solemn enumeration of all the tones that make up the original piece – a kind of clockwork.

A white book filled with pages that would be completely empty if it wasn’t for the round black ink stain on one of its shorter edges. The stain bleeds into the paper, leaving a unique mark on each page. When the book is read like a flip book the three dimensional stain turns into an animation, a growing and fading image. With the title printed on both sides of the cover the book can be read in both directions: There is no beginning and no end. The process can be repeated until the book falls apart.

On the 19th of September 2012 I travelled to Alexandria, Egypt. 
In my luggage I had a camera and in my pocket a phone.

50 images collected in a book with a form that reminisce old time photography albums, 
family albums - and travelogues. With the book is a text written that tries to connect the images 
with a longer history of travel photography. The text is translated from Swedish to
Arabic by Sausan Rook & Tezt Rooke, and to English by Ulrich Hansen.
The book is donated to the Artists Book collection at the Library of Alexandria, Egypt.
www.bibalex.org

The poem Dödens Engel (”The Angel of Death”) was written in 1834, during the first Swedish cholera epidemic, but wasn’t publish until five years later, the same year as the author himself passed away. The poem has since been published in a number of different illustrated editions, the latest in 1917. This edition is a scaled down remake of a publication from 1880, illustrated by Carl Larsson.

I download the book from the Internet, https://books.google.com, Enemies of books, written by William Blades, published in 1881. A book on the decay of books. The enemies of the physical book – fire, water, gas, the bookworm, dirt, bigotry etc. A digitized book with no identity. Black letters on a white background. I buy a copy of the book from 1881. A yellowed, and stained copy. The book bears traces of a former owner, one Dr. Sarolea. Newspaper cuttings on his death and his extensive book collection. I compare the two texts, the original and the digitized copy. Using my computer I create a tool for binding books. I combine and modify traditional tools that have been used for hundreds of years and print out the components on a 3D-printer. The next day I print out another copy of the digitized book, and using the 3D-printed tool I make an exact replica of the book from 1881, in its original design. I construct a manual describing the process and upload the files to the Internet.

This is a description of a project which I begun in 2014 as an artistic development project financed by the University of Gothenburg. A project exploring digitization, human traces and the unique copy, and at the same time an act of resistance against digitization and technology. The outcome of the project was a book, presented together with the tool used to produce it.

Välkomna finska barn! (”Welcome Finnish Children!”) is a remake of a leaflet distributed to the Swedish foster parents of Finnish children who were evacuated to Sweden during the Second World War, containing translations of useful everyday words and phrases.

Carefully revised limited edition reissue of the rare 1997 debut
collection of poems by the poet Kennet Klemets.

A group of people walking through the pitch black August night, heading for the sea, hoping to experience the elusive ”mareel”, guided by the sole light of the photographer’s camera flash.