Fresh off the Press: Fruit Salad from Tara Books
01 October 2025
In July 2025, Tara Books published Fruit Salad, a new children’s picture book created by Paris-based Italian illustrator Chiara Armellini during her Villa Swagatam residency with the publishing house in Auroville. Produced on hand-operated letterpress presses, the book reflects Tara Books’ artisanal approach to publishing.
Fruit Salad invites children to explore language and imagination through playful word games and fantastical inventions of new fruits. The interactive, letterpressed pages feature Indian fruits with flaps that can be mixed and matched to form humorous and surprising combinations.
On the process of the production, Gita Wolf, founder of Tara Books expresses herself: “We printed 2000 copies on a letter press. It took nearly three months to complete. A block needs to be made for each colour, and almost every page had three colours. The hardest thing is the alignment, to get the colours to 'register' with each other to make an image. The first letter press printing with movable type goes back to Johannes Gutenberg, around 1440. At that time, it was considered efficient, a kind of 'mass' or 'automatic' printing. However, it still required enormous manual skill in composing and aligning the printing blocks, a skill that has almost disappeared. So we have had to relearn the manual skills needed to operate the machine. It requires constant technical adjustment with each page. The printing itself was a complicated process, followed by die-cutting the sheets to align perfectly. Perfection was needed in the binding as well, so that the book opened properly.”
The book extends the work Chiara developed during her residency, which also included workshops at the Ceylon Literature Festival in Sri Lanka and at the Alliances Françaises of Pondicherry and Chennai.
Reflecting on the collaboration, Chiara shares: “The experience with Tara has been very positive: the publisher understood the essence of the project, and thanks to this collaboration, this interactive, colorful, and fun book has come to life. I only followed the printing process from a distance, as I am currently in Europe. But the illustrations are beautiful, printed with the letterpress, which gave a unique touch of originality and beauty to this project.”
Chiara is now developing a new children’s book on geometric forms, while preparing for a residency in the south of France, where she will also lead creative workshops for children.
To purchase a copy of Fruit Salad, visit here.