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Printing: Marta Conti, Lucia Conti, Roberto Conti at Conti Tipocolor

Lead Designer

Design Company

Profile Website

Joseph S. Steinberg, Chairman Jefferies Financial Group

Client

Design Team

"Leucadia National Corporation, Annual Reports from the Years, 1978-2012" was published by Joseph S. Steinberg. The 412-pg book was made to honor the late Ian Cumming, commemorating a decades-long business partnership and deep friendship. Joe and Ian purchased Talcott in 1978 which later became known as the Leucadia National Corporation.

The initial design brief was to reproduce the annual "Letters to Shareholders" to capture the breadth of their 35-year partnership and how the company grew from an initial $54,000 purchase price into a $1.317 billion dollar publicly-traded company. As the work began, the design quickly centered around featuring the "Letters," but commentaries, amendments, notes and personal memories soon started to propagate in the margins. Our design meetings became a true collaborative storytelling effort. We began the concept design in 2018, and continued through the Pandemic. The book was printed in late summer of 2022 and shipped to the U.S. for private distribution in 2023.

The ephemera and photographs were collected and sequenced chronologically within the decades to visually amplify the story. Personal anecdotes were collected from current and former employees, lawyers, bankers and friends in the form of "contributor letters." These shared experiences interweaving through the decades became the heart of the book. These additions are what drove the format: impacting the project's page count, scale and actual printable surface area by including gatefolds. Additionally, we printed the entire year of 2008 in a special PMS red to signal the financial collapse, with no addendums or comments "it's all in the letters" Mr. Steinberg said.

The book is a monumental 412 pages, measures 12-1/2" square and has twenty-eight gate folds. This was achieved by using an ingenious system of signatures made up of different pagination configurations. For example, a 12-pg signature would sit next to an 8-pg signature, followed by two 6-pg gatefolds wrapped to an 8-pg gatefold, followed by a 4-pg signature wrapped to another 6-pg gatefold, and so on. 

This allowed us incredible flexibility for where the gate folds could ideally be placed in order to connect artwork and other stories to the right time period chronologically. The ability to have so many different signatures created a very complex binding process and the design and production needed to happen in close collaboration with our printers at Conti Tipocolor in Florence Italy. 

The book uses Hoefler Text for typography, and was printed in 7-color on Fredrigoni X-Per White 100gsm in an edition of 750 copies. The binding is smyth-sewn and its spine is silkscreened in a custom PMS color. The book is slipcased in linen cloth and contains a custom inset tip-on of the Leucadia logo. Each book was packaged in a custom box covered in a pattern of tiny Leucadia logos.

Silver Winner in Book Design for Graphic Design