This year's Gutenberg Prize of the City of Leipzig goes to the internationally renowned Leipzig publishing company Spector Books. The German Museum of Books and Writing is marking the occasion by dedicating a showcase exhibition to the prize winner; titled "Handapparat ", this exhibition is curated by the Spector Books publishing team.

Jean-Luc Godard once said, "If you want to make a film, there has to be two of you". The same applies to books. Throughout more than twenty years in business, Spector Books has tested this principle of more-than-one at all levels of its work. For this company, publishing books means bringing together everyone involved in book production for a lively exchange of ideas while coordinating the interaction between authors, artists, designers, printers and bookbinders.

The various perspectives and conflicts that open up as a result are passed on in the books themselves: the graphic decisions and the materiality of the book block, the structure of the double page and the different constellations in which the images and texts are assembled all show that a dialogical work process of this kind gives rise to dialogical forms, also in the medium of the book. Yet the ongoing questioning of the medium, the dialogue with what has already been produced, is just as important as the exchange of views that arises when working on new books. The place for this is the library, the society of books.

As part of the exhibition being held to mark the award of the 2023 Gutenberg Prize of the City of Leipzig, Spector Books provides a platform for this dialogue between books and shows the many ways in which their own productions touch other books and book makers. The exhibition also refers to former Gutenberg Prize winners such as Elisabeth Shaw (1984), Lothar Reher (1988), Hans Peter Willberg (1992) and Solomon B. Telingater (1963). For Spector Books, publishing is a paradoxical movement in time: each new book is created against the backdrop of the books that have already been produced; it is a work on the present and a message sent into an unknown future.

Since 1959, the City of Leipzig’s Gutenberg Prize, bestowed in memory of Johannes Gutenberg, has been used to honour people and institutions that – according to the Prize’s statutes – “have shown merit through their outstanding, exemplary efforts to promote book art”. It has been awarded every other year since 1993, alternating annually with the City of Mainz’s prize of the same name. The German Museum of Books and Writing is a member of the jury. The Prize is awarded for special artistic, technical or academic achievements in the areas of typography, book illustration, book art publishing, book creation and services to the dissemination of the free word.