In the summer of 2008, 4th Estate asked my company, Apt Studio, to create ’something stunning’ that would help them celebrate this anniversary, as well as celebrating books and their own ground-breaking, international, literary agenda.

Apt has worked with 4th Estate, and parent company HarperCollins, since 2002. Over the years, we’ve made a few films for them and also built the Fifth Estate blog that you’re reading this article on, as well as some other webby and creative projects – such as the recent Golden Notebook project for Doris Lessing.

Given this history we had a pretty open brief – just that whatever we did would touch on 4th Estate’s own history, as well as the sheer joy of books and the world they create.

We pitched a crazy, beautiful, and ambitious 3-minute animation to 4th Estate’s managing director, John Bond, and marketing director Ben Hurd. The animation would take place in a city made – literally – out of books, and we would pass through the city like a bird flying down the streets, witnessing scenes from these books taking place in lots of different districts over the course of an afternoon, evening and early morning.

Each district would loosely represent part of their publishing programme – from ‘Museum District’ made up of non-fiction, to the ‘edgy fiction’ part of town (Soho and the red light district) to the European cafe district in the early morning referencing work in translation.

All of the buildings and people would be made out of books, and the pages of those books, influenced in part by artists Thomas Allen and Su Blackwell.

For an added twist, the animation would feature only 4th Estate titles, and be shot ‘stop motion‘ – like Morph – at 15 frames per second. At three minutes long, that means we would have to set up and shoot 180 x 15 = 2700 separate photographs…

Luckily, 4th Estate loved the pitch and we teamed up with our mates at Asylum Films to put the film together. Over two weeks, more than twenty animators and model-makers worked with over 1,000 books to build a world, and an everycity made from the world’s literature. (You can see more production stills over at our blog, Times Emit.)

The film (’25th Estate’) incorporates works from many of 4th Estate’s acclaimed authors: Jonathan Franzen, Jean-Dominique Bauby, Fay Weldon, Simon Singh, Dava Sobel, Nigel Slater, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Alaa Al Aswany, Giorgio Locatelli, Robert Fisk, Spike Milligan, Eric Sykes, Francis Wheen, Alexander Masters, Joan Didion, Michael Chabon and many others.

My personal favourite moments are those of almost hidden detail: zebra crossings made from the paperback jacket of The Corrections; the Imperial War Museum modelled from Robert Fisk; the Greenwich Observatory made out of Longitude; the cinema made out of all the film tie-in editions, and the homage to The Corrections when the father falls out of the boat. The film is stuffed full of these references, and whilst they were a labour of love, they are (to me) what makes the film sing.

If you visit the site we’ve set up for the film you can also see a load of production stills, and time-lapse films of the animations being shot. And furthermore, it’s all been shot in glorious high definition.

Let us know what you think.

‘25th Estate – This is Where We Live’ – 4th Estate’s 25th Anniversary

But let me try. I was given Karoo by a friend who had worked on the book’s publication at Chatto in the UK in 1999. We worked together at the time and she impressed it upon me, emphatically, like a secret.

At the time I was working for Canongate / Rebel Inc who did a line (so to speak) in underground classics, many of which were written by drink- or drug-soaked failures of men who only found a voice in death. From what she told me, Karoo’s author Steve Tesich was a drink-soaked emotional failure of a man who seemed to have found his voice in death. I began reading it immediately.

The book opens at a cultured (i.e. full of successful film and book types) Boxing Day party in New York, where the guests – primed by pronunciation guides in the New York Times – are discussing the recent fall of Nicolae Ceausescu. They are clearly reveling in their erudition and grasp of Romanian, spouting “eh-LEH-nah chow SHESS- koo”s and “is YAHN ill-ee-YES-koo”s among the “nee-koh-LAY-yeh chow- SHESS-koo”s. Saul enjoys their enjoyment and mocks his own, “There was a quality to these names that made them delicious, almost irresistible to pronounce, and made speaking as pleasant as eating canapes.”

Reading just that line again now, I am sorely tempted to begin the book again. I may well. But even this scene – which included on the first page an extract from the NYT with the very pronunciation guide the guests are reciting – grabbed me immediately. It turns out that it’s grabbiness got me hooked on a book for which this brilliant scene would be uncharacteristic of where the book ultimately heads – even if it is characteristically funny, ascerbic, deprecating and brilliant. It’s just that the book is so much more than that.

Saul Karoo, our hero of sorts, is a Hollywood script doctor. He heals sick movie scripts. He has attained a reputation, standard of living, divorce and drink problem concomitant with his position. At this party, and any other occasion, he is expected (by his ex-wife in particular) to play the role of the drunk, and the absent father to his brilliant and gorgeous son. The problem is that however much he drinks, he can’t get drunk. Yet the weight of expectation upon him to make a fool of himself is so heavy, and to disappoint would be so churlish, that he feigns drunkenness. This is the paradox of Saul: tied up in his outer asshole appearance is an inner angel that can’t break out in case it shatters anyone else’s illusions. See – the asshole is actually a decent, caring, compassionate and sensitive soul. This is a paradox many of us can associate with, or aspire to at least, particularly boys working in the rocknroll wolrd of counter cultural publishing.

So far, you may think, so what? It is the same line – albeit wittier – that one could cruelly accuse of any Rebel Inc type novel of the time.

But Karoo is so far beyond this. I have given this book to many friends. I gave it to my wife – before we even began a relationship – as my favourite book (which it remains). As she worked in publishing too – and I was desperate to impress beyond my ‘Rebel Inc’ credentials – the stakes were high. It won hands down and it may still be her favourite book.

As the book has slipped into obscurity and out of stock, and maybe out of print – a crime that would be the first remedy should I become a dictator or (close second) CEO of Waterstones – I have urged publishing friends to acquire and republish this book with the attention and care it merits. When, finally, after perhaps five years of monthly hectoring, one of these publishers read it on his honeymoon – he and his new wife perhaps came close to agreeing with me that it is at least “up there” with the best. Of course, he then tried to acquire it only to discover that it has been slated for reissue, apparently by Vintage.

I could rant on for ages. Talk about the people I thought should join EL Doctorow and introduce this book. Talk about the tragedy of Steve Tesich, the author, dying a rumoured two weeks after delivering the manuscript. I would love to, but I think I need to read it again.

Look, Karoo is the most moving, sensitive, funny, biting, cruel, uplifting, and god knows how many other words, book I have ever read.

I’ve read it four (soon to be five) times. It’s beyond a secret weapon – it’s… Just trust me. Read it.