- Gerhard Steidl: This is a lost knowledge that books should smell good. In the printing industry of today they print all four color process and on top of it they run a dispersion varnish. And the dispersion which is covering all the paper and the ink kills smell, yes what I don't do. I'm still working with oil based varnish and so every paper and the ink on top of it has a certain smell. And the weight of the book, the feeling of the paper, to look at it with the eyes, to hear the sound of a page falling down on the other one, and the smell is the composition of a book which makes book unique in a digital world.
- Gerhard Steidl: When you have been pushed, all your lifetime, with this drug of ink smell and paper, you can't miss it.
- Gerhard Steidl: Does it look good?
- Joel Sternfeld: It looks better to me, but do you think we can go more and take more red, more yellow out?
- Gerhard Steidl: I would do it very radical.
- Joel Sternfeld: Oh? On the red...
- Gerhard Steidl: Not five percent, twenty percent.
- Joel Sternfeld: On the red and the yellow?
- Gerhard Steidl: Yeah.
- Joel Sternfeld: Across the border?
- Gerhard Steidl: Yeah.
- Joel Sternfeld: And what about the midtones?
- Gerhard Steidl: Fuck the midtones!