Todd: This is the most amazing book I have ever seen. It’s called ANTARCTICA and it features 330 photographs of this fascinating and beautiful land. Each page is its own artistic statement, the paper is weighty, the book is hand-bound, the cost is $2,900. The book’s authors are Pat and Rosemarie Keough. We’ve reached the Keoughs at their home in western Canada. The book is a work of art in itself, but why is it so expensive?

Rosemarie: The very reason is that it is a work of art. For example Todd, it’s taking six artisans two years to hand bind the edition of 1000 books.

Pat: Each book, just the work to produce it costs almost $2000.

Todd: My goodness. I hear that a portion of the proceeds is going to charity.

Rosemarie: Exactly. We’re connected with BirdLife International and their specific program The Save the Albatross Campaign. Albatrosses are those gorgeous and majestic birds with 11-foot wingspans that fly around Antarctica over the Southern Ocean.

Todd: How much of the sale of the book will go towards the campaign.

Rosemarie: The entire net profits that we’ll be fortunate enough to accrue. We hope that will be around $500 per book.

Todd: How many copies have you sold so far?

Rosemarie: We’re now over the 100 mark so we’re over 10% of the way there.

Pat: And its going to be another year just to finish binding the rest of the books.

Todd: How long does it take to bind one of these books.

Pat: Well, it’s done in stages. What they’ll do for instance is fashion a hundred covers. It’s a very slow process.

Rosemarie: Even starting with sewing the books. There are women who are sitting there with needle and thread and they are sewing 288 stitches and numerous knots for every book.

Todd: It’s 27 pounds we should mention too. This is an incredible book.

Pat: It’s a weighty tome, as they call it and much of the technology that went into binding it dates back 100’s of years to Venice in the 15 and 16th centuries.

Rosemarie: Perhaps the closest way of imagining this book for listeners is to think of illustrated manuscripts of the Renaissance.

Todd: Yes, the paper has such tremendous weight to it, and the photographs... I have seen a lot of wonderful coffee table books, but its been a long time since I’ve seen photographs with such clarity. It must be the quality of the paper it’s printed on.

Pat: ANTARCTICA is the first photographic book in the world to be printed using a revolutionary new printing technology called 10-micron stochastic printing.

Rosemarie: You have to use a 50-power magnification to start seeing the ink dots. Each dot is approximately 1/100 of a millimeter in size. This is approximately 3 times higher resolution than the usual high-end printing done in art books.

Todd: Who took the photographs in ANTARCTICA?

Pat: Both of us did. In fact many of the images in the book we don’t even know who took them, and that’s the truth.

Rosemarie: Often Todd, we’ll have our camera set up on our tripod and I’ll take a few images. I’ll call my husband and he’ll look through the viewfinder and say, “you’re balance is a little off, let’s just move it a little.” He’ll take a few images and I’ll then look through and readjust the camera. In the end we’ve mutually composed the photograph.

Pat: And yet there are other images that we know for sure Rosemarie took them. My favourite pair of pictures is a group of emperor penguins on a bleak snowscape and facing this is a detail of just the breast feathers of the emperor penguin.

Rosemarie: It’s this beautiful gold and orange in graduated tones. It looks like a burnished shield of a warrior from years ago and yet it’s the breast of a penguin. This is a two-second exposure that I took – and this is Pat’s favourite.

Pat: I know how she took it. You see, in order to get the picture from down low she had to dig a hole in the ice and stick her chin in it so the camera could rest on the ice and point upwards.

Rosemarie: I should tell you that it was awfully cold to get that close to the emperors. I was lying on the frozen sea ice of the Weddell Sea for five hours, not moving as the colony slowly approached me – because they’re curious. They’ve hardly ever seen people. In fact the young ones have never seen humans before. And as I’m lying there, your body’s getting into rigo mortis.

Todd: Over how many trips did you assemble these photographs?

Pat: It was two austral summers Todd. We were down there basically from November through the end of March, two consecutive years. While the light was shining in Antarctica you might say.

Todd: Pat and Rosemarie Keough joining us from Canada. The Keoughs have put together the book ANTARCTICA featuring 330 photographs. Sale price $2,900. If you like to have a look at some of the photos, it might be a bit much to buy. You can check out this website: keough-art.com.