Every Christmas the royal Dutch printers association, the KVGO, publishes a special, book-sized issue of its biweekly newsletter made by a selected group of its members. The theme of last year’s book, designed by Gerard Hadders, was specified by the KVGO, but the treatment is entirely his own, its ambivalence reflected in the title: Oil is innocent, oil is a blessing, oil is a plague. Hadders begins by positing the alternatives – wind, heat exchange, water, coal – before moving on to mount a lucid appraisal of the uses and abuses to which the fuel is put. Each image is given a single page, sometimes a spread, with periodic fold-outs, allowing the possibly unresolvable complexities of the issue to emerge through a series of provocative juxtapositions: leisure technology against medical lifesaver; macro astronaut opposite micro pill. The highly abbreviated text, set in Joanna and Formata, follows the visual argument rather than determining its course.