11 Stations(2025) Diego Brambilla Portfolio wrapper enclosing a paper-covered book, pamphlet-stitched with black thread. Portfolio: H308 x W225 mm.Book: H238 x W197 mm. 55 pages. Edition of 55, of which this is #53. Acquired from the artist, 16 June 2026. Photos: Books On Books Collection.
Diego Brambilla‘s 11 Stations pays homage to Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities with a beautiful construction that visually and materially reflects the novel’s intricate structure. Where Calvino has Marco Polo describe 55 cities to Kublai Khan across a complex cascading cycle of 11 themes, Brambilla’s artist’s book has 55 pages and 11 images from handmade gelatin-silver prints each recurring 5 times. The descending staircase pattern of numbers starting from 1 and ending at 11 on the back cover shows Brambilla’s cascading cycle of images. It is in fact a structural Table of Contents for 11 Stations.
Brambilla’s 11 images are of abstract, enigmatic forms that blur the line between photography and sculpture. He has constructed the objects to be photographed, then rendered as silver-gelatin prints, and reproduced for this book.
Brambilla’s eleven images, which align with Calvino’s eleven themes.
Excluding its paper cover, the book would need 110 pages to accommodate its 55 images and 55 blanks. In fact, with 2 pages of text at the center of the book, it needs 112 pages, or 28 folios (sheets) folded in half and pamphlet stitched.
Brambilla neatly takes advantage of the arithmetic here to introduce 7 variations of paper, each used 4 times corresponding to the required 28 folios. The 7 different papers are
Below is the 6th image across its 5 iterations. Because the 6th falls midway among the 11 images, its position in the cascade puts its third iteration at the center folio in the book. The centered pages of text can be seen bleeding through that third iteration below. The 6th image’s position in the pamphlet stitched structure also causes its 1st and 5th iterations to share the same sheet of paper; likewise, the 2nd and 4th iterations share a folio. At first, this seems the only point on which Brambilla’s structure does not have a precise correspondent in Calvino’s structure.
But consider this: The city of Baucis is the 28th city/chapter, the midpoint, among Calvino’s 55 cities. It is the midpoint among the 5 cities in Calvino’s 6th theme: “Cities & Eyes”. As Marco Polo describes it,
After a seven days’ march through woodland, the traveler directed toward Baucis cannot see the city and yet he has arrived. The slender stilts that rise from the ground at a great distance from one another and are lost above the clouds support the city….There are three hypotheses about the inhabitants of Baucis: that they hate the earth; that they respect it so much they avoid all contact; that they love it as it was before they existed ….
If Brambilla’s choice to place this image of a three-legged stool at the center of his 11 images was coincidental, chance is a genius — with which Calvino would have likely agreed.
Reading 11 Stations exercises the visual and haptic mind. The use of translucent pages is a frequent technique to have the reader/viewer see more than the image that lies on the surface or behind the image.
But what to make of the 4 instances in which the folio is not trimmed at the top edge? And what to make of the sketches printed inside the folded sheet? Here is another technique that makes the reader go beneath the physical surface. Is the book artist using features of bookmaking to prod the reader/viewer to think then of what lies beneath the creative surface?
Brambilla’s attention to detail is meticulous — even in the selection of Calvino Grande by Zetafont for the title and text pages — and that is what serves him so well in paying homage to Invisible Cities. Like Calvino’s book, 11 Stations is one to read and re-read.
Further Reading & Viewing
“Ken Botnick (II). 17 September 2026. Books On Books Collection.
I see that one way or another I keep circling around the idea of an interdependence between the unwritten world and the book I should write. This is why writing presents itself to me as an operation of such weight that I remain crushed by it. I put my eye to the spyglass and train it on the reader. Between her eyes and the page a white butterfly flutters. Whatever she may have been reading, now it is certainly the butterfly that has captured her attention. The unwritten world has its climax in that butterfly. The result at which I must aim is something specific, intimate, light. — Italo Calvino. If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller (Vintage Classics) (p. 172).
As homage and work of art, Ken Botnick’s Six Memos Project is that “something specific, intimate, light” to which Calvino’s narrator refers. It hovers between us and Calvino’s Six Memos for the Next Millennium (1985), his Charles Eliot Norton Lectures prepared for Harvard. All but the sixth lecture was written when Calvino died in the fall of 1985.
Six Memos Project (2020) Ken Botnick Board slipcase with inked embossed title. Open spine hardcover. H290 x W188 mm. [116] pages. Edition of 20, of which this is #12. Acquired from the artist, 14 July 2026. Photos: Books On Books Collection.
The Six Memos Project makes us want to read or re-read those lectures and make us long for that missing sixth. With its papers, ink, incisions, typographic layout, page structure, binding, and textures, this artist’s book captures our attention and wonder long enough to realize that it is acting as a lens on the lectures and, paradoxically, on itself and the act of reading. This self-reflexive artist’s book is the ideal medium for paying homage to Calvino’s writing about his writing.
Lightness was the first of the six literary themes that Calvino commended to the next millennium. Botnick arranges its title in Italian and English on translucent paper so that it pivots on its initial letter, ascending and descending the margin. As the page turns to the left, the opening statement that Botnick has selected from the lecture emerges crisply in English on the left and Italian on the right, alternating like wings down the center of the page.
Matching Calvino’s description of his writing method, Botnick centrifugally subtracts segments from the image in the upper left corner of the same page. The expressive abstract image seems to float behind the statement’s tinted panel, and the enlarging subtracted segments surface through and over the panel as they move downwards from left to right.
In the next spread, the enlarging segments continue to follow the gist of Calvino’s theme until they seem to float off the page.
The following sequence switches techniques from inking to stenciling for the response to Calvino’s method and theme of lightness. Leaf by leaf it metaphorically enacts the removal of weight from the incised letters of the word “lightness”.
It is telling that the heavily ink-saturated opaque paper that gives the final absences their weight is used only in this section of the book. Its second and last use in the section is just as metaphorical and functional as its first. In response to the excerpt “the search for lightness as reaction to the weight of living”, it contrasts with bare remnants of the subtracted segments on the left and punctuates with its weight the end of “Lightness”.
In each of the next four sections, the artist exercises different functional metaphors corresponding to the themes and excerpts of the lectures that Calvino completed: Quickness, Exactitude, Visibility, and Multiplicity. As with the symbiosis of lightness and weight, Calvino proceeds by contrasts: quickness vs delay, exactitude vs insubstantiality, visibility of the imagination through words vs their failure under the weight of the “image civilization”, and multiplicity of language, viewpoints, and things vs a single language, an insular perspective, and a null undifferentiated whole.
Where Calvino adopts Manutius’ motto festina lente [“make haste slowly”], Botnick gives us
Where Calvino worries about straight lines of exactitude vs oblique curves by which to approach the unsayable, Botnick gives us
Where, in contemplating visibility, Calvino posits “the imagination is a place where it rains”, Botnick give us an image printed on a sheet held within the fold of another sheet on which Calvino’s text appears in blocks that seem to float on the watery image underneath.
Below are internal shots of the French fold sheet that envelopes the single sheet bearing the watery image that appears through the sides of the French fold. The angle is from the spread bottom edge of the French fold with the first shot showing single sheet image bowed to the right, the second showing the single sheet curving between the sides of the French fold, and the third showing the single sheet image bowed to the left.
Where Calvino notes the argument of some “that the more a work tends toward the multiplication of possibilities, the further it drifts from the unicum that is the writer’s self, from sincerity, from the discovery of personal truth”, Botnick gives us the text of Calvino’s contrary reply below on the left, but note that it is the same text with which Botnick prefaced his artist’s book on the right:
That preface is the first of an enveloping move that Botnick completes at the end of Multiplicity and the end of the artist’s book. Calvino has the last word of the section in text that hovers over a large solid spot-varnished half circle. When this sheet and the next two are turned, …
we are left with this last abstract image capturing the combinatorics of our experiences, the rain descending in the imagination, and the multitude of the voices of things that cannot speak … including this object the book.
The unwritten sixth memo would have addressed the theme of Consistency. What did Calvino mean by that word? Would he have spoken of the regularity of results such as the consistent taste of the morning espresso at his local bistro? Or the mechanical consistency that worried Walter Benjamin in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1935)? (Calvino might have had a conflict of interest given the lucrative reproduction of his fiction.) Or did he mean the essence of which a person, place, or thing consists? In Invisible Cities, the word refers to the celestial and infernal characters of the two versions of the city Beersheba, the one in the sky and the one on earth. Barring a manuscript find yet to be made, we won’t know. In the meantime, Botnick’s affinity with Calvino welcomes the speculation that his artist’s books offer the kind of consistency Calvino would have appreciated.
Further Reading
“Ken Botnick (I)“. 16 June 2022. Books On Books Collection. See for the Diderot Project (2015) and Table of Contents (2020).
“Angela Cavalieri”. In progress. Books On Books Collection.
“Karen Kunc“. 11 June 2026. Books On Books Collection.
“Pauline Lamont-Fisher“. In progress. Books On Books Collection.
Benjamin, Walter. 1968. Illuminations. Edited by Hannah Arendt. Translated by Harry Zorn. London: The Bodley Head Ltd.
Calvino, Italo. 2016. Six Memos for the Next Millennium. Translated by Geoffrey Brock. First Mariner books edition. Boston: Mariner Books/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Morning Prayer II (2000-04) Robbin Ami Silverberg Tefillah-shaped box: H70 x W65 x D65 mm. Meander-fold booklet: 52 x 52 mm (closed); H250 x W150 mm (open). Mica inlay on bookle’t front cover. Edition of 20, of which this is #7. Acquired from the artist, 20 April 2026. Photos: Books On Books Collection.
In the granite quarry at Mauthausen in Austria, there are 186 uneven steps made of stone leading out of it. These are the “Stairs of Death”, so named for the countless who died in the forced labor of carrying blocks hacked from the quarry up the nearly vertical climb. Morning Prayer II is a heart-breaking memorial to these victims.
A tefillah-shaped box holds a double-sided meander-fold booklet illustrated with archival photographs from the concentration camp. Tefillin (one worn on the arm, one on the head) honor the biblical commandment to remember the Exodus from Egypt and observe Passover. Associated with morning weekday prayers, they hold parchment scrolls with four verses from the Torah: (Exodus 13:1–10, Exodus 13:11–16; Deuteronomy 6:4–9, and Deuteronomy 11:13–21). They are usually made of leather.
In contrast, the container of Morning Prayer II appears as stone — mica embedded in its base and granite simulated on its paper covering. Instead of a morning prayer in remembrance of the trek to freedom and passing over of the angel of death, we have a mourning prayer counting each of the 186 stone steps of the staircase.
Instead of scrolls extolling the laws of the deity, we have a single sheet, cut and folded to open in a zigzag meander recalling and showing photos of the uneven granite steps.
Instead of the calligraphy of verses from the Torah scrolls, we have the typeset counting of steps confined and justified left and right within four of the fourteen segments of the artist’s book.
Instead of morning sunlight, we have gray ink on the reverse, mimicking marble or ashes.
Instead of the rhythm of scripture, we have the gaps between stones mimicked by the gaps between run-together words enumerating the 186 steps.
Each stone in each step represents where prejudice, racism, and xenophobia lead. Each stone in each step recalls yesterday’s and today’s iniquity and inequity of persecuting those with the “wrong” color of skin, different beliefs, ethnicity, or geographic background. Each stone is the one cast against someone who is not you — until it is you.
La durée réelle: Make this cut first (2024-25)
La durée réelle: Make this cut first (2024-25) Robbin Ami Silverberg Box: H388 c W229 x D58 mm. Book: H352 x W204 xD28 mm. Edition of 12, of which this is #10. Acquired from the artist, 20 April 2026. Photos: Books On Books Collection.
Our experience of time is no small topic in philosophy, literature, and art. The title of Robbin Ami Silverberg’s artist’s book comes from Henri Bergson’s 1889 dissertation on the subject and his later collection of essays translated as Creative Evolution (1911). With his term la durée réelle (“real duration” or “lived time”) and metaphor-driven exposition, his books aim to describe time as a continuous, flowing, yet nonlinear stream of consciousness rather than surrender it to the mechanistic, linear, and causal descriptions of science. Silverberg’s artist’s book is her meditation on time and life expressed with handmade paper, watermarks, pulp painting, dry point, typography, quotations as if from a commonplace book, and the form of the book.
So much is going on in this artist’s book. Motives interact with technique, material, allusion, text, image, and structure. Motives interact with motives, techniques with techniques, material with material, allusion with allusion, and text with image. All of it like the crisscrossing strokes left on the cutting board and transferred to paper by drypoint.
Embedded in the custom box, a cutting board used as a printing plate.
Consider the following sequence. On the verso page of chartreuse green paper, inside the impress of the printing plate, the small image of the fish in the lower left hand corner indicates the seasonal food being prepared in the Spring. On the recto page, the as-yet-illegible text showing through translucent paper mimicks the marks on the cutting board print. When the recto page turns to the left, the now legible text explaining techniques of cutting fish appears in different weights, different cases, and different orientations, mimicking the different blades and direction of cuts. The translucent paper on which the instructions are typeset bears a watermark grid in the shape of the cutting board. When the fold-over sheet of chartreuse green paper turns to the right, it shows another cutting board print. In the center of the triptych is a quotation drawn from Marcel Proust’s appreciation of Jean Siméon Chardin’s La Raie (“The Ray” or “The Skate” ).
By way of the season for fresh fish and the etched evidence of cutting, we have come to instructions for making the cuts. By way of the instructions, we have come to a description of Chardin’s still life of a gutted ray, the text of which is typeset on the cutting-board-watermarked translucent paper. By way of a still life freezing a moment in time, we have come to Marcel Proust, author of the septology In Search of Lost Time and its fictional exploration of the experience of memory. By way of Proust’s essay the “Essence of Things”, we have come to his good friend Henri Bergson and la durée.
As the translucent page with Proust’s text and the cutting-board watermark is turned to the left, we now have a diptych of two cutting board prints on the chartreuse green paper. We may think of the translucent pages and the accumulated cuts as evidence of times past, but the flow of the sequence, the feel of the different papers as they turn, and the interaction of associations offer a layer of experience approaching the essence of the thing Bergson calls la durée réelle. More than a static artifact, Silverberg’s artist’s book functions to evoke temporal experiences.
But can visual and physical art really represent or conjure up Bergson’s concept of the lived experience of time? Juxtaposition of images, techniques, texts as well as text and image, material, page with page, etc., is almost unavoidable — indeed is often sought — in an artist’s book. For Bergson, juxtaposition is static and does not fit with the concept of duration. Explaining that concept is not the point of Silverberg’s artist’s book, but if it sends you on a hunt for an explanation and you wind up at The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, you will find the following passage that chimes extraordinarily with La durée réelle: Make this cut first:
… Bergson calls intuition a method. … The method resembles that of the good butcher who knows how to cut at the articulations or the good tailor who knows how to sew pieces of cloth together into clothes that fit. On the basis of the division into extremes or into a duality, one can then confront our everyday “mixtures” of the two extremes. Within the mixture, one makes a division or “cut” into differences in kind: into matter and spirit, for instance. Then one shows how the duality is actually a monism, how the two extremes are “sewn” together, through memory, in the continuous heterogeneity of duration. — Lawlor, 2025.
Much has been made of Bergson’s influence on William Faulkner, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and others. Their technique of stream of consciousness in internal monologues captures the fluidity of time as experienced by single characters such as Benjy in The Sound and Fury, Molly Bloom in Ulysses, or Mrs. Ramsay in To the Lighthouse. There is no single character in Silverberg’s artist’s book unless we count the artist or the artwork itself as that character. The quotations from such a wide range of sources — Hans Christian Andersen, Matsui Basho, Jorge Luis Borges, Lewis Carroll, Charles Dickens, Janet Flanner, Franz Kafka, Etgar Keret, Alan Lightman, George R. R. Martin, István Őrkény, Plutarch, Marcel Proust, Bruno Schulz, and Wallace Stevens — appear in free association across the seasons of food preparation. They punctuate the images made with the cutting boards and the “images” made with phrases of instructive texts angled across the pages like so many cuts on the cutting board. The text jumps and glides like a knife from Plutarch’s anthropological/moral query about eating meat to István Orkény’s sly query of euthanasia for animals but not for humans. And then to the political violence in the excerpts from Etgar Keret and Wallace Stevens. And from culinary advice to self-harm cutting and statements about seppuku. From lines about skating to definitions for various types of knives.
As an aside: the repeated use of Bruno Schulz’s works, especially Street of Crocodiles (1934), conjures up Jonathan Safran Foer’s dissection of Street of Crocodiles to create Tree of Codes (2010). It is certainly apposite, but is it also a challenge to assumptions of male hegemony in the world of book art? With the use of cutting boards as printing plates, is there a sharp cut at the denigrators of women’s book art as kitchen table craftwork?
If you are still visiting The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy trying to make sense of Bergson’s concept of duration, consider how this passage below echoes with what La durée réelle: Make this cut first is doing with its multiplicity of quotations and cuts:
For Bergson, we must understand the duration as a qualitative multiplicity – as opposed to a quantitative multiplicity. As the name suggests, a quantitative multiplicity enumerates things or states of consciousness by means of externalizing one from another in a homogeneous space. In contrast, a qualitative multiplicity consists in a temporal heterogeneity, in which “several conscious states are organized into a whole, permeate one another, [and] gradually gain a richer content” (Time and Free Will, p. 122).
Silverberg’s cutting boards and their multiplicity of cuts do capture something of Bergson’s ideas of la durée réelle [“duration”]. The boards display linear traces of individual acts over time, and their accumulated presence represents the nonlinearity of the “duration”. Likewise, the unfolding diptychs and triptychs disrupt the usual expectation of linear paging through a book. Like Bergson’s concept, Silverberg’s artist’s book is complex. Much is going on in both. To grasp them, it is best to let them wash over you — like time.
Details from “behind the scenes”: the text-bearing translucent sheet is fixed to the chartreuse green folio and is watermarked with a grid; the impress of the cutting board plate appears in the lower right corner, and the different widths of cuts show up in the drypoint etching; the deckled edges of the differently colored handmade papers appear like torn food-stained wrappers.
Text close-up
Proust on Chardin’s La Raie.
Further Reading
Bergson, Henri. 1911. Creative Evolution. Translated by Arthur Mitchell. New York: H. Holt and Company.
Bernadac, Christian. 1978. The 186 Steps. Geneva: Ferni Pub. House.
From a body of work that goes back to 1982 and covers subjects as wide ranging as Soviet Russia’s White Sea-Baltic Canal, New Orleans’ 19th century cotton industry, the Dutch Golden Age’s roots in slavery, life in Tibet’s remote Ganze Autonomous Prefecture, the west coast of Newfoundland, and an Appalachian farm-turned-museum, the four works below are by no means sufficient to represent the geographical breadth of Clifton Meador’s art. They do present his particular combination of social conscience and experimental printing. It would seem axiomatic that visual narrative (or argument) proceeds by sequential illustration or tableaux. These four works illustrate how Meador moves his narrative and argument by manipulating the printing process and the structure and material of the book.
Acheiropoieta or Not Made by Hands and Concerning Archeiropoieta (2020)
Acheiropoieta or Not Made by Handsand Concerning Acheiropoieta (2020) A Book in Two Volumes Clifton Meador First volume: Softcover, hand sewn binding, black dust jacket with title die-cut, held in a portfolio made of cloth over boards with the title in black on front cover. Book: H482 x W319 x D10 mm. [36] pages. Portfolio: H486 x W322 x D16mm. Second volume: Softcover, hand sewn binding, in stiff black dust jacket with title die-cut. H203 x W128 mm. [36] pages. Edition of 115, of which this is #42. Acquired from the artist, 21 June 2024. Photos: Books On Books Collection.
The Greek word acheiropoieta means “not made by hands” and names a class of religious icons purportedly created by miracle. The Shroud of Turin, Veil of Veronica, and Mandylion (or “Image of Edessa”) are the most famous Western examples. At times, believers have accepted them as unmediated objects of divine truth.
Other than the cover, title page, and colophon, there is no text in Clifton Meador’s Acheiropoieta. It has to be read by its images. The idea of the divine and unmediated image gives Meador a springboard for exploring whether, in light of photography’s fall from unmediated truth, authority, and trust — and, with digital photography, even from physicality — “images might be made to seem unmediated, [and] … made to revert to a kind of solidity”. There begins his search for a metaphor, and he turns to the substrate of those religious icons for it.
As Meador explains:
Woven cloth forms a raster, a grid of threads that forms a fabric. When seen by transmitted light, the warp and weft of the cloth forms a variable density grid-which calls to mind a halftone contact screen, a predigital piece of technology that translated continuous tone images into fields of halftone dots in order to simulate tonality. In this project, I created color separations of images, print them through dye sublimation technology onto cotton cloth, and use those pieces of cloth to directly expose offset lithographic printing plates, which would then be used to print three-color images. The weave of the cloth itself would break down the continuous tone image into dots of varying size. In a very literal way, I wanted to create a material metaphor to elaborate the idea of an acheiropoieton- where the lithographic shadows of the cloth images were multiplied into a book.
Left: woven-cloth raster. Right: Veronica’s Veil, an image of an image of an image of an image of an unseen acheiropoieton.
It is a mind-twisting metaphor. Is god the digital image that is about to be color-separated? Is god the piece of cloth from which the image will transfer to the offset lithographic plates? Is god the plate from which the image will transfer to the book? In the end, we are holding and looking at something solid that, by a process effected and affected by something solid, has sprung from something not solid.
Along with the metaphorical and metaphysical challenge, Meador weaves another challenge: one to our social consciences.
But there is a problem inherent in cotton cloth: Cotton production has a long and horrible history. Sven Beckert’s great book, Empire of Cotton, details not only the development of chattel slavery in the New World in response to the growing demand of the textile mills in England, but also the troubling history of cotton in the Old World. Cotton cloth-comfortable, easily dyed, beautiful-comes with a long, miserable history of human suffering and exploitation.
After the images of the stripped field and waiting bales of cotton, the artist asserts page layout to develop the overlapping themes. In the first double-page spread below, when turned 90º, the steamboat in portrait issues bales of cotton as steam. That which drives the boat and economy clouds the air. In the second spread, the bale of cotton as acheiropoieton proliferates and equates with the acheiropoieton of Veronica’s Veil. With the repeating bales and veils interspersed across the wallpaper-patterned cloth, the third spread below drives home the metaphor of the icon borne on its own substrate to the extent that it extrudes only the cotton icons emblems on the recto page.
In the center of the book, the mechanics of the acheiropoietic process takes center stage. The metaphors of predigital photography, digital color separation, the printing process, and the acheiropoietic result roll across the spread.
From here on — until the final image — the historical social implications of the new technology dominate. The portraits come from the Library of Congress’ collection of daguerrotypes. They are the privileged and celebrities who could afford an appointment with the new technology and have their likenesses captured without human hands. As Meador puts it in the companion volume Concerning Acheiropoieta, “”we have evolved from seeking the divine to staring at ourselves”.
As the portrait sequence comes to an end, the overlaid images and separations obscure the faces. The pattern of colors and the floral figures take over the steamboat and its spouts of smoke. The book’s final image is the tool that brought us here — a daguerreotype camera box. It is so overlaid with a blue and red cotton print that it is almost unrecognizable. The image pushes the mind-twisting metaphor even further. The tool that creates “unmediated” images has its own likeness obscured by a pattern emblematic of the original substrate for acheiropoieta.
The camera overlaid with cotton fabric.
The die-cut cover of Concerning Acheiropoieta, the smaller volume, announces its companion relationship to the larger volume. Unlike its partner, though, it is printed on chartreuse paper and contains text. Text and image in the companion also begin with the grid of cotton cloth and icons not made by human hands and proceed to the fallow December cotton field, over which the text spells out the links with England’s industrial revolution, empire, and slave trade.
The text then knots those threads to the explosion of demand for cotton cloth (in particular, printed cotton cloth), the spread of cheap mirrors, and invention of photography.
The text also unpicks the structure of the daguerreotype camera. In doing so, it adds another layer to the theme of self-regard. Fitted with an achromatic lens, the wooden box held at its rear a copper sheet plated with mirror-polished silver and sensitized to light. Removing the lens cap projected the image of whatever was in front of the camera to the plate inside.
Although the text expands on the human cost of the demand, its primary focus and the entire focus of the images remain on the portrait sitters — despite their receding into “the soup of history”. The images are versions and details of those appearing in the larger volume most of whom are difficult to identify. It is at this point in the companion volume that the text’s typographical presentation begins to enact itself and gloss the images alongside which it appears. Notice how Meador jumbles the descriptions of the sitters on the verso page below.
Notice also how, with the label “Unidentified woman” and names of the portrait sitters typeset perpendicularly to the image below, the typography enacts the metaphor of “the warp and weft of the cloth”. Meador is comparing the cloth and “technology” of the acheiropoieton with the page and technology we hold in our hands.
Text, image, and their interaction become the message in the smaller volume and also facilitate closer reading and appreciation of the larger volume. In fact, just the abundant presence of text in the smaller volume sends us back to the larger volume to check the impression that it has no text. In fact, there is one spread in the larger volume that does contain text. Faintly, behind the calico-like pattern composed of color-separated bales of cotton, the reverse image of the word COTTON appears.
The image above from Acheiropoieta echoes the following text in its companion volume:
What if an entire book could be printed from cotton cloth exposed onto printing plates?
Would that be a miraculous indictment or a demonstration of the ineffable?
Acheiropoieta is that entire book printed from cotton cloth, and with the companion’s text on the human cost, they lead to the next work in the collection.
CottonCurtain (2018)
CottonCurtain(2018) Clifton Meador Archival box: H300 x W270 x D40 mm. In slipcase: H295 x W260 x D27 mm. Out of slipcase: H295 x W255 x D27 mm. [96] pages. Edition of 10, of which this is #10. Acquired from artist, 21 June 2024. Photos: Books On Books Collection.
A version of Cotton Curtain and related installation first appeared in the exhibition “Four Proposals for Reading” at Seagar Gray Gallery in February 2015, which was well reviewed by David M. Roth (see below). Cotton Curtain (2018), a version with significant changes, performs its task through a remarkable integration of structure, material, sequence, pattern, text, typography, and image. On opening the archival box, we see a portfolio-style cover whose stunning printed muslin aligns perfectly with the same pattern over the book’s bolted wrapped-back binding, which places the folds at the fore edge.
Lifted by its spine, the book’s pages flow downwards like the samples in a cloth or carpet sampler because they are cotton cloth. Loose threads trail from their edges. Together the wrapped-back binding and cotton cloth cause the half-title to billow as it turns to reveal a steamboat, streams of smoke, and river surface bearing the same print pattern.
Left: the “drape” of the book. Right: half-title folio “gapping” as it turns.
Title-page spread.
The double-page spread is the functional unit of the book, and the title-page spread is but the first that stops readers/viewers in their tracks. Drawing on the Detroit Publishing Collection archives in the Library of Congress, Frederick Law Olmstead’s The Cotton Kingdom, and other 19th and 18th century sources, the 44 spreads that follow display black and white etchings, tinted photographs, traditional Toile de Jouy with its muted single color patterns, toile with bright multicolors, typographic toile patterns, typographic mimicry of stitches and quilt patches, typographic mimicry of weave and weft, and slave inventories in script arranged to mimick decorative patterns.
The sequencing of the spreads builds toward a run of the photographic images depicting cotton bales on loading docks, in warehouses, and riverboats with the black labor and white management engaged. Other than the opening pair of etchings showing similar earlier scenes, the photos are the only type of image that appears in back-to-back groups. There are 21 of them, 9 in the first half and 12 in the second.
Paired etchings introducing the book.
In the first half of the book, the images of the docks are mostly separated by toile images.
From first half of the book: typographic toile followed by photo, followed by Toile de Jouy, followed by photo.
In the second half, the dock and work images come in groups of 2, 3, and 4 (as in the following sequence).
From the second half of the book: grouping of photos of cotton bales, riverboats and work scenes.
All of the brightly colored toile spreads occur before the mid point of the book. There are 4 of them (or 5 if you count the title-page spread). They deceptively lighten the impact of the tinted photographs.
Multicolored toile.
The first of 8 traditional Toile de Jouy in the book comes just before the mid point. It shows the expected bucolic scene — again, deceptively lightening. The second Toile de Jouy is a different matter. It gives us plantation scenes, dancing natives, and slave capture. A third depicts slave trading in Africa. A fourth displays a patriotic scene complete with a ribbon ironically proclaiming “Where Liberty Dwells, There Is My Country”. The fifth reverts to a bucolic theme, only to be followed by a slave raid in the sixth. The seventh and eighth come back to more traditional scenery, but the eighth and last Toile du Jouy is reproduced as a torn fragment.
Toile de Jouy.
The text in the 4 typographic toiles comes from a variety of 19th and 18th century sources. The first 3 appear before the mid point of the book. Their multicolors contribute to the brightening effect of the multicolored toiles in the first half of the book, but their text does not. Almost illegible from the overlapping, some phrases can still be picked out from the fabric: notably those from Senator James Henry Hammond’s infamous “Cotton is King” sppech such as “No! you dare not make war upon cotton”, “the system of slavery is a necessary evil”, “The spinning machinery of England gave birth to the cotton cultivation in America”, which are ironically offset with Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s words “the Fruits of the Earth belong equally to us all, and the Earth to nobody!”
Typographic toiles.
The 4 spreads that mimick stitches, quilting patches, threads, and the weave and weft of fabric include the book’s mid point spread. Like the typographic toiles, they provide color that offsets the photographs, but their text darkens the tone. The first 3 list the names and capacities of the human beings from slave inventories: “Lucy”, “Polly”, “Simon”, “Henry”, “Cook and Washer”, “Field hand and jobbing carpenter”, “Infant”. The last repeats text from Hammond’s “Cotton is King” speech.
Spreads mimicking stitchery, quilting, and sewing with type and script.
It is telling that the most intricate of these spreads typographically mimicking cross stitch and the weave and weft of cloth occupies the mid point of the book. The type bleeds red and blue ink as it threads down and across the white muslin. The names, roles, and numbers of slaves are its text — including a nameless infant. The evil of King Cotton is stitched and woven into the heart of this book.
Mid point spread of the book.
The book’s last 3 work scene photos are preceded by the Toile de Jouy depicting a slave raid, then separated by a bucolic Toile de Jouy, and paused for the run of the Rousseauvian typographic toile, the torn Toile de Jouy, and the stitchery-mimicking spread with phrases from Hammond’s “Cotton is King” speech. Hammond gets the last typeset word, and the image of the baling warehouse — a photograph taken between 1890 and 1910 — gets the last visual word.
Detail from image on the left in the row above.
VOC (2022)
VOC (2022) Clifton Meador Hardcover, casebound. H371 x W155 mm. [96] pages. Edition of 100. Acquired from the artist, 4 February 2024. Photos: Books On Books Collection.
The Vereenigde Oost Indische Compagnie (Dutch East India Company), referred to as the VOC, was the first publicly-traded corporation in the world. Chartered in 1602, the VOC could “independently wage war, coin money, negotiate treaties, establish colonies, enslave people, massacre indigenous populations, and create spice monopolies by burning entire islands they did not control clear of spice plants”. (VOC, colophon) The resulting “embarassment of riches”, as Simon Schama entitled his history of the Dutch Golden Age, led to much of the art and objects now housed at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. Clifton Meador’s social conscience and imagination saw the Rijksmuseum’s ongoing project to digitize and post its holdings as a creative opportunity too great to pass up.
On his site, Meador offers this project statement about VOC:
I imagined this project as a museum catalog gone completely wrong: reproductions mangled, images misregistered, odd fragments recombined from wildly different sources, cropped badly, with colors transformed into something from a hallucination. I imagined that in this catalog all text—including the vitally important informative, contextualizing captions for the images—would be removed. Gone would be the gallant, abridged histories provided by any museum, normally present in the image descriptions, but now entirely absent. The reader would be left to construct their own narrative from this unreal evidence.
And my hope is that the evidence of this museum catalog is so unreliable, so tainted by its own distorted agenda, that the reader is left with nothing other than a vague impression of a horrific cataclysm swimming around illusory objects of great beauty, virtue, and price.
Marlene MacCallum and Ruth Rogers have both registered insights into Meador’s blend of experimental printing, metaphor, and art that confirm his hope.
Central to Cliff Meador’s process in making VOC is a willfully disruptive strategy. … In text and music, we are accustomed to the suspension of comprehension, but in visual forms, we expect the coalesced image, and when this is withheld, we are challenged. We experience incomprehension. We lose our place. And in a piece where the artist wonders “about the real cost of wealth”, this is fitting. VOC is a work of dreadful beauty. The images are alluring, shimmering, and horrible. This parallel the difficult-to-reconcile reality that, quoting from the colofon, “At the same time the VOC was becoming a force for terror …, the Dutch Republic was a haven for liberal thinking”. (MacCallum, 2024)
The first page spread of the book is the title page of Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations printed opposite the official manuscript charter of the VOC, with lead seals attached. But the words are sliding off the page, the colors are wrong, and everything is out of focus. Could this distorted mise-en-page be a reference to the corruption of wealth and power? … In this unreliable museum catalogue, richly made objects that represent the vast wealth of the Dutch golden age are combined and deformed. … There are no captions, and the reader must find the narrative within seemingly disparate images. Enlarged engravings from early printed books that chronicle colonial domination are layered over photos of domestic objects and people with kaleidoscopic effect. … In his book, the luxury goods, paintings, exotic spices, and weapons are the spoils of an extractive colonialism. But there is no text. Instead, Meador uses dissonant color and layered, dislocated imagery to provoke the reader’s complacency with the historical narrative. — (Rogers, 2025)
The book’s front and back covers certainly promise disruption, dislocation, and dissonance. The artist has achieved this by color-separating the high-resolution files from the Rijks, recombining the images of documents, fine possessions, portraits, paintings of battles, and engravings with each other, and skewing the registration of the separations when printing.
The book has three unnamed sections: objects, portraits, and scenes of travel and battle.
As MacCallum points out, the book’s tall narrow shape and tight binding also make it an awkward customer. Overly tight bindings are not usually intentional, but given the strange combinations in the centers of the double-page spread, there is not much doubt here. Not only do images disappear into the gutter because of the binding, they slip over the fore edges and onto the next page.
But not always. The artist frequently misfoots that expectation and many others as with forks having tines on both ends, chairs suspended from the top of a page, and folio stuck in the middle of a chandelier.
For the curious, the project statement shows the process as applied to the portraits section of the book, which follows the objects section.
Project statement: “Unseparated images from pages 76-77. This spread was printed in Pantone 801, Pantone 806, Pantone 810, and two different black inks.”
In the portraits section, we can detect scenes from images of travel and battle faintly layered over some of the faces. In the last section of the book, however, focused entirely on travel and battle scenes, the technical fireworks build at a furious pace, ending with a depiction of an Anglo-Dutch sea battle.
Just within these four works, Meador’s art evolves. How it has developed across his incredibly broad historical and geographical interests since the 1980s awaits a catalogue raisonnée of his prolific output. In the meantime, exploration of VOC, Cotton, Acheiropoieta and its companion volume yields an embarrassment of riches to enjoy, however uneasily.
Further Reading
Chen, Julie. 2013. 500 Handmade Books. Volume 2. New York: Lark. See pp. 166 and 170 for A Repeated Misunderstanding of Nature (2012) and Grove (2011).
Rogers, Ruth R. 2025. “Mutable Form and Engimatic Meaning“. New York: Center for Book Arts. Expanded version of a talk delivered at the “Luminous Books Symposium”, Boston Athenaeum, 10–11 March 2023.
A Maiden’s Voyage(2015) Anne Lydiat Paperback. H145 x W180 mm. 36 pages. Edition of 50, of which this #31. Acquired from the artist, 28 August 2026. Photos: Books On Books Collection.
Anne Lydiat’s A Maiden’s Voyage (2015) pays homage to the Belgian conceptual artist Marcel Broodthaer’s “book-film’” A Voyage on the North Sea (1973).
The reader/viewer of Broodthaers’ book faced three challenges, the first two of which are outlined in its preface. The first, whether to cut or not cut its uncut pages and reveal or leave hidden its page numbers. The second, to make sense of its juxtaposition and manipulation of images of a 19th century sailing ship painting and a photographed 20th century yacht. The third challenge was access to its associated film (which only came with the deluxe edition) and make sense of its relation to the book.
The reader/viewer of Lydiat’s homage does not face that first challenge. She is explicit in her preface —”there are no cutting remarks” — and the book is fully trimmed top, bottom, and fore edge. Her disavowal’s phrasing, however, slyly envelopes the reader/viewer in a different challenge. Does this homage really have no “cutting remarks”, no rebukes? Noting the rarity of depictions of women in maritime history, the second paragraph concludes otherwise: “this artist’s book is a space that marks this gendered absence”. A Maiden’s Voyage pays a passive/aggressive homage to a male artist and his work that unconsciously participates in that gendered absence.
We still have the second challenge with A Maiden’s Voyage: to make sense of its juxtaposition and manipulation of images.
Lydiat is an accomplished artist working in photography, sculpture, and installations as well as books. She could have chosen to work her found painting and subject of gendered absence into another medium, another frame. But she chose the medium of the book and the frame of Broodthaers’ A Voyage and his projected Analyse d’une Peinture. While A Voyage juxtaposes present and past images, A Maiden’s Voyage contains no such juxtapositions. Paradoxically it makes itself the juxtaposition of present and past. Lydiat has juxtaposed her “space” with Broodthaers’ artist’s book and intent. Her space is the present; his space is the past.
The title of Broodthaers’ projected project implies that the subject of A Voyage concerns the analysis of a painting, an expensive one at that. In parallel and contrast, Lydiat takes a cheap found painting of the past and “analyzes” it, breaking it down into clipped details, stripping it of color, and framing the results as Broodthaers did in A Voyage. In doing so, she underscores that her present space is shaped by the past, implicitly arguing that “gendered absence” in the past shapes the present. It is not a situation that Lydiat lets lie. By contrasting the costs of the found paintings, she neatly slips in one of those disavowed “cutting remarks”.
As for the third challenge, the Fondation Marcel Broodthaers provided a solution for access. Likewise, Anne Lydiat provides a link to her film that accompanied the maiden launch of A Maiden Voyage at Chelsea Cafe Project (Chelsea College of Arts).
Like Broodthaers’ “book-film” (his term), Lydiat’s book-film presents image frames as numbered pages. At least since Dick Higgins’ introduction of the term “intermedia” in the mid ’60s, interest in the hybrid work that crosses media and occupies the space between painting, film, music, performance, installation, sculpture, the book, computers, and now the Web has grown — especially among book artists. In 2013, the topic held center stage at the MCBA Book Art Biennial in an exhibition entitled “Directed: The Intersection of Book, Film and Visual Narrative”. Works recently added to the Books On Books Collection occupy this intermedial space (see examples below). Anne Lydiat’s book-film A Maiden Voyage brings the added edge of appropriating form, technique, and content from an arch-appropriator and focusing them on a persistent social blindspot.
I first came across Anne Lydiat’s work at the Wittockiana in Brussels. There in the a minima exhibition was Lost for Words … (1999). Displayed as below, no one could tell that it is a blank book. Not even the subtlety of the blind embossed ISBN on the back could be seen, nor could the quotation from Maurice Blanchot on the inside flap (“About this book I had promised myself to say nothing …”). The context of the exhibition was a hint about the book’s theme — or an aspect of it — “absence, loss and nothingness” — as Lydiat’s website notes.
Lost for Words… (1999) by Anne Lydiat also appeared in the exhibition Blank. Raw. Illegible…Artists Books as Statements, 1960-2022 (2023) organized by Moritz Küng.
Although not a part of the Books On Books Collection (at least not yet), it is mentioned here as an additional gloss on her intermedial style of conceptual art. Lost for Words … first appeared in an exhibition at the Freud Museum entitled “Permission to Speak”, after which it was deposited in Sigmund Freud’s library. So where is the intermediality? It lies in her performance of secretly depositing Lost for Words … in libraries that she has visited around the world. The only means of knowing where they are is the follow-up volume — … of the book — which lists the libraries.
Further Reading
“Amaranth Borsuk“. 19 February 2017. Books On Books Collection. See Between Page and Screen (2012) and ABRA (2014) for examples of intermedia.
Flickbuch, Geschichten um das Flickbuch, and Fresh Breath on the Blow Book (2000, 2001, and 2003)
Flickbuch, Geschichten um das Flickbuch, andFresh Breath on the Blow Book [trans] (2000, 2001, and 2003) Horst Antes and Volker Huber [Translators: Ariel Frailich, Richard Hatch, and Sharon and Arno Ziesnitz] Slipcase containing two volumes in German. Single volume in English. Slipcase: H276 x W212 mm. Books: H269 x W209 mm. [164] and 32 pages. Translation volume: H268 x W209 mm. 40 pages. Slipcased edition of 1000, unnumbered copy. Acquired from Ricky Jay Estate, 17 August 2024. Photos: Books On Books Collection.
I had been looking for Ricky Jay’s The Magic Magic Book (1994) and hoped that the 2024 estate auction would yield a result. It did but an unexpected one. Like Jay, the namesake founder of Volker Huber Edition und Galerie in Offenbach was a collector of magic artifacts. He was also an honorary member of Germany’s Magic Circle, so his acquaintance with the celebrated magician and actor was no surprise. What was a surprise was that he had combined his art interests with those in magic to create a “blow book” with Horst Antes, one of the several well-known German artists he published.
The blow book is best known in its familiar incarnation as the “magic coloring book”. The performer flicks through the book of blank figures to be colored in, calls on an observer to blow on the closed book, and then reopens it to show all of the pictures colored in. Hard-to-see tabs or alternating page widths enable the performer to produce the effect. Jay’s work remains the definitive history of the blow book. It consists of two volumes, one of which is a working blow book with contemporary art by Vija Celmins, Jane Hammond, Glenn Ligon, Philip Taaffe, and William Wegman, the other being the history of the apparatus.
Huber leads the list of acknowledgments in Jay’s book. From that and this piece of ephemera, there is no doubt of their close acquaintance. If, however, you have read the New Yorker profile on Ricky Jay, Huber’s reference to Jay’s “ambiguous post card” will raise an eyebrow. Both Jay’s and Huber’s productions are slipcased, both are in two volumes, both have a working blow book, and both have an accompanying history. Given the New Yorker anecdote about Jay’s harsh reaction to a magician who mentioned he had incorporated Jay’s famous “The Four Queens” routine in his act, might Jay’s “ambiguous post card” have implied that Huber had reperformed Jay’s book trick?
Huber’s Geschichten um das Flickbuch [“History of the Blow Book”*] naturally cites Jay’s book. But it has many of the same illustrations. Unsurprisingly it equally highlight the same source for the first detailed description of the blow book. The main difference is that Huber argues for the existence of a missing blow book that would have accompanied the source, whereas Jay considers it unlikely. As for the working volumes, both have dos-à-dos structures. Admittedly there are differences. Jay uses tabs to facilitate the performer’s switch from sequence to sequence; Huber uses a sloping trim of width. Jay’s has twelve sequences, six to each side of the dos-à-dos; Huber and Antes have only four, two to each side. Might Jay have been a little jealous that those differences are what give Huber and Antes the room to elevate the blow book from a worked example to an artist’s book?
Holding the spine of Flickbuch with the left hand and placing the right thumb against the lower corner of the fore edge, the reader/performer riffles through the book. Twenty pages flip along, displaying the text of three selections from the mid-17th-century picaresque novel by Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen entitled “SimplicissimiGaukeltasch und erhaltene treffliche Losung” [“Simplicissimus’ Magic Book and its Excellent Profits”]. At the bottom of the text block on each page, a large display letter appears: first H, then O, gradually spelling out HORSTANTES-FLICKBUCH. It is a clever way of appropriating the Simplicissimus tale for Antes.
The next flick-through sequence is accessed by closing the book, shifting the right thumb to the upper corner of the fore edge, and again riffling through the book. “Magically” the text has disappeared, replaced by blank pages that change colors, gradually darkening from a light pink to coral to orange then lightening to yellow. This is another appropriation of the Simplicissimus tale. In the just-vanished text, Simplicissimus, the con artist, has arrayed six glasses of wine before the crowd of dupes gathered by his blow book patter. By adding one drop of magic elixir to the first glass, he changes the wine’s color and quality. The second glass receives two drops, the third three drops, and so on until Simplicissimus and his sidekick Hopalong are relieving their audience of their money in exchange for tins of the elixir that they believe will turn casks of plonk into the finest vintage.
The opening pages of the three Simplicissimus excerpts. Note the display characters H, -, and U, three of the twenty that spell out HORSTANTES-FLICKBUCH.
The first, ninth, eleventh, and last spreads of colored blank pages.
On the other side of the dos-à-dos structure, the first flick-through’s sequence of twenty images has Antes’ face morphing into Marilyn Monroe’s. It’s a curious transformation. Perhaps it’s in keeping with the carnivalesque barker Simplicissimus, and after all, the color of the paper does change from cream to white as the artist turns into the bearded lady and the latter turns into Marilyn. The sequence’s twenty-page length facilitates the gradation of the change.
The first portrait image, the mid-point image, and the final image.
The second flick-through presents an ink drawing of one of Horst Antes’ clear acrylic sculptures called Die Figur (1995-97). A version of the sculpture rests in the rooftop foyer of Vienna’s Hofburg. Inscribed in a large plane of acrylic intersecting another plane of acrylic acting as its footing, Antes’ signature figure the Kopffüßler [“Head-Footer”] appears. In Flickbuch, the figure is drawn in red, and the plexiglas in grey ink. Across this flick-through’s twenty spreads, the drawing is animated, turning from the left, gradually showing an edge-on view, and ending up facing right. It captures Ante’s blend of the figurative and abstract for which he is known.
For some reason, Antes’ graphics often appear in German galleries alongside Andy Warhol’s images of Monroe, but here, perhaps it is a dig at Clement Greenberg. In the accompanying volume Geschichten um das Flickbuch, Huber explains how Antes’ work has been a counter-response to Greenberg’s avant gardist art theory that figurative, illusionistic painting belongs to a bygone era that has been superseded by high Abstract art that accepts and self-reflexively explores the nature of its two-dimensionality. In Huber’s view, Antes’ emphasis on two dimensions in his sculptures and paintings nevertheless restores the figurative and three-dimensionality to art, superseding Greenberg’s dicta.
Greenberg also placed photography as second fiddle to the self-reflexive and opaque surface of pure abstract painting.
The art in photography is literary art before it is anything else: its triumphs and monuments are historical, anecdotal, reportorial, observational before they are purely pictorial. Because of the transparency of the medium, the difference between the extra-artistic, real-life meaning of things and their artistic meaning is even narrower in photography than it is in prose. And as in prose, “form” in photography is reluctant to become “content,” and works best when it just barely succeeds in converting its subject into art—that is, when it calls the least attention to itself and lets the almost “practical” meaning of the subject come through. — Greenberg, 1964.
The photography in Flickbuch certainly calls attention to itself. Maybe using the flick book form to play with photos and allude to a literary text actually supports Greenberg’s formalism. Then again, the photography sequence seems to throw shade on another Greenberg polemic: his 1939 salvo for the avant-garde and against kitsch.
Kitsch, using for raw material the debased and academicized simulacra of genuine culture, welcomes and cultivates this insensibility. It is the source of its profits. Kitsch is mechanical and operates by formulas. Kitsch is vicarious experience and faked sensations. Kitsch changes according to style, but remains always the same. Kitsch is the epitome of all that is spurious in the life of our times. Kitsch pretends to demand nothing of its customers except their money—not even their time. — Greenberg, 1939.
There is something a bit tongue-in-cheek about this artist’s book and its creators. The idea of a blow book likely came from Huber to Antes. Together they must have enjoyed that spread placing the artist at one end of the spectrum and the image of Marilyn Monroe, goddess of high Pop and kitsch, at the other. Antes in particular must have enjoyed bringing the three-dimensional Kopffüßler into the two-dimensional confines of pages and, seizing on the blow book’s mechanics, creating a representational illusion of its original three-dimensional self, which of course emphasized an inherent two-dimensionality.
* The German term flichbuch translates as “flick book”. For most book historians and artists, that term and its alternates “flip book” and “flicker book” refer to the structure that creates an animation effect by gradually changing an image from one page to the next.
“HAP Grieshaber“. 27 August 2023. Books On Books Collection.
“Ricky Jay“. 2 September 2026. Books On Books Collection.
“Nicholas Phillips“. 11 August 2020. Books On Books Collection. Phillips’ Egyptian Cards demonstrate a multiple image changes in a deck of cards.
Aling, Michael. n.d. “Publishing as Architectural Practice“. University of Greenwich. Architectural book designer Michael Aling put the “blow book” principle to work in Negative Equity: House Projects by Neil Spiller & Nic Clear. By adjusting the trim, Aling makes the book display only spreads with Spiller’s work if the codex is flicked through with the right thumb and only Clear’s spreads if flicked through with the left thumb. P. 6, Fig. 2.
Ricky Jay’s The Magic Magic Book explains and presents a structure well suited to the artist’s book but one rarely used. The structure is called the “blow book”. Most of us know the apparatus from childhood birthday parties as the “magic coloring book” in which the clown or magician flips through a book of blank figures to be colored, calls on the birthday boy or girl to blow on the closed book, and then reopens it to show all of the pictures colored in. Hard-to-see tabs or alternating page widths enable the performer to produce the effect. Until Jay’s production with the Whitney Museum Library, there had never been an extended serious study of the blow book by scholars of magic, iconography, children’s literature, or the history of the book.
The Magic Magic Book ‘s two softcover volumes are housed in a blue silk clamshell box whose front cover displays the optical illusion of a house of cards. The card motif reflects both the blow book structure’s use in trick decks of cards and Jay’s reputation in the 90s as “perhaps the most gifted sleight of hand artist alive” (Singer, 1993). The first volume gives an illustrated essay on the history of the blow book. The second volume (a blow book itself and in a dos-à-dos structure) features illustrations by contemporary American artists Vija Celmins, Jane Hammond, Glenn Ligon, Philip Taaffe, and William Wegman as well as painted devils and harlequins, letterpress alphabets, figures in silhouette, and instructions (in four languages) for operating the blow book. After one flick through the book showing blank spreads, the next flick yields a dance of eight harlequins.
The next flick turns the harlequins into alphabets.
The next flick transforms the alphabets into fire-breathing, fire-farting devils (the images courtesy of Thomas Stauss to Jay).
With the next flick, we get the English, then French, then German, and finally Spanish instructions for operating the book.
And with the last flick, Philip Taaffe’s fern-like, starburst abstractions appear, gradually shrinking and ordering themselves into columns of four and rows of five. When the dos-à-dos is turned, Taaffe’s series returns (again last in the sequence of flicks) but in reversed order, the columns and rows dispersing into other patterns and increasing in size.
The blow book offers artists a tool that can shape meaning, metaphor, and perspective. It can elicit performance by the reader to enact ideas, narrative, and structural effects. Its close association with the rise of the printing press, affordable paper, and binding capabilities recommend the blow book to book artists intent on demonstrably tying their works to the history of the book. The hard-to-see tabs or alternating page widths that enable the performer to produce the blow book’s effects offer a means of enhancing the materiality of the artist’s book. Its mechanics offer the chance to use flip (or flick) book’s animating effects, which have appealed to numerous book artists. Its twist on those effects lends it to juggling the layout of text and image in a non-traditional manner. Its mechanics can also enhance binding structures like the dos-à-dos, a structure also borrowed for magic tricks. Its reliance on manipulating a book’s fore edge offers the chance to emphasize both form and tactility, a characteristic theme of artists’ books. The two volumes of The Magic Magic Book itself incorporate “watercolors, woodcuts, etchings, hand-colored engravings, lithography (black-and-white and colored), mimeograph, drawings, decals, stencils, photo-offset — even leaves from other books” (“Prologue”, p.2) — surely another enticement to book artists to explore the form.
In the Books On Books Collection, Julie Chen and Keri Miki-Lani Schroeder’s Book of Hours (2021) and Horst Antes’ Flickbuch (2000) are the only two artists’ books that exploit the blow book structure. As examples, they show the form’s scope for artists to work their individual magic and demonstrate the blow book’s magical transformations that make us query the nature of “the book”.
Further Reading
“Horst Antes“. 2 September 2026. Books On Books Collection.
“Nicholas Phillips“. 11 August 2020. Books On Books Collection. Phillips’ Egyptian Cards demonstrate multiple image changes in a deck of cards.
Aling, Michael. n.d. “Publishing as Architectural Practice“. University of Greenwich. Architectural book designer Michael Aling put the “blow book” principle to work in Negative Equity: House Projects by Neil Spiller & Nic Clear. By adjusting the trim, Aling makes the book display only spreads with Spiller’s work if the codex is flicked through with the right thumb and only Clear’s spreads if flicked through with the left thumb. P. 6, Fig. 2.
Singer, Mark. 29 March 1993. “Secrets of the Magus“. New Yorker. “I’m really intrigued with the concept of the book as both a subject and an object of mystery,” says Jay towards the end of the article.
There is more to Timothy Mosely’s art than meets the eye or touch. It rises equally on an intellectual plane and a physical plane. It is the art of visual touch or haptic seeing.
ep’s (2018)
ep’s (2018) the first book from the series of artists books ”representation by touch” Timothy Mosely Casebound in felt with plywood backing, pulp printing and silkscreen on recycled cotton paper. H52o x W345 x D58 mm (closed), W693 (open). 7 interleaved folios: 4 folios of H438 x W608 mm, 2 folios of H220 x W310 mm, and 1 folio of H307 x W210 mm. Unique. Acquired from the artist, 31 October 2024. Photos: Books On Books Collection.
ep’s (2018) is the first of four works in the series “representation by touch” that offers the results of Tim Mosely’s ongoing studio research into the relationship between touch and sight / the haptic and the optic. His drive to draw us into involving touch in our reception and evaluation of art has its roots in a long tradition of concern that Western society has become too ocularcentric for a whole-bodied appreciation of art. If the artist’s aim is to express how the world touches us (as Cézanne put it), a full appreciation of art requires all the senses.
4 p. and 33mm (2013) Sarah Colman Card folder with title, author, publisher. Perfect binding of 4.33 folios. H66 x W148 mm [10] pages. Acquired from the artist, 1 August 2026. Photos: Books On Books Collection.
Colman’s 4 p. and 33 mm. was on display in the exhibition a minima at the Wittockiana in Brussels. If the work ‘s title directs us to consider first the four full folios and then the folio trimmed to half their size, then the item is displayed upside down in the image below. Observant visitors may have noticed it. Western books read from left to right.
Left: 4 p. and 33 mm. (2013). Sarah Colman. Geneva: Boabooks. Right: 4’33” (1993).John Cage. New York: Peters No. 6777a.
Being able to manipulate this work drives home the right orientation. First come the 4 pages that measure 66 mm and then the page that measures 33 mm. Of course, it ends hanging in air — just as Cage’s composition leaves the audience hanging as it ends after 4 minutes and 33 seconds.
In other words, Colman has turned Cage’s temporal art into spatial art. Given the performance origin of the next work, though, it’s not hard to imagine an invitation from Colman to watch her open 4 p. and 33 mm., place it atop a piano, and then close it at the conclusion of 4 minutes and 33 seconds.
Semiotics of the Studio (2015)
Semiotics of the Studio (2015) Sarah Colman Leporello H300 x W85 mm (closed), up to W425 mm (open). Five panels. Edition of 10, of which this is #10. Acquired from the artist, 1 August 2026. Photos: Books On Books Collection.
Like 4p. and 33mm, the Semiotics of the Studio translates a different medium into that of an artist’s book and very much insists on being experienced on its own terms.
Laid flat or standing, Semiotics of the Studio presents itself as an accordion book, but the order of reading its text is not as straightforward (or downward) as the first panel’s alphabetical order suggests. The alphabetical order in panel 1 becomes a red herring in panel 2. With “Cube”, “Drill”, “Easel”, and “Finger”, Panel 2 resumes an alphabetical order only to abandon it, and in panel 3, there are no alphabetical pairs or triples at all.
Perhaps we should read from left to right across the three panels instead of down. Is the blank space at the top of the third panel showing us the product of “Absence” in the first panel and “Paint” in the second panel? But wait, maybe we should read backwards from “Paint” in the second panel to “Brush” in the first; after all, further down, we have “”Juxtaposition” in panel 1, then “Two” in panel 2, and “Put” in panel 3, suggesting that we put two in juxtaposition.
Just below that, if we put “Kitsch” and “Balloon” together with “Pop”, do we have a dig at Jeff Koons? And much further down, is the juxtaposition of “Urinal”, “Urinal”, and “Drop” taking the piss with Duchamp?
What about “Object”, “Hammer”, and “Bang”? If we are trying to figure out sentences from this, Subject, Verb, and Object seem to jump about. We need to put “Chin” (panel 3) on “Hand” (panel 2), and “Question” (panel 1) what is going on.
Another puzzle is that some words are repeated across from each other in panels 1 and 2. “Drill”, “Easel”, “Plinth”, “Rubber”, “Spirit Level”, and “Urinal”, as we have seen. Sometimes, panel 2 gives an example for the word in panel 1 (e.g., “Computer” for “Technology”). Sometimes, the words are descriptive or synonyms of one another (e.g., “Neon” and “Light” and “Void” and “Empty”, respectively).
Closer inspection reveals that the three columns of words do not precisely align horizontally. They cascade. “Absence” is slightly higher than “Paint”, “Paint” is slightly higher than “X”, and so on. Moreover, panel 1 has 26 words, panel 2 has 22, and panel 3 has 23. So perhaps we should be looking for sense in multiple directions, which is pretty much where semiotics as a discipline has landed.
Context, too, matters. Colman reaps the benefit of Martha Rosler’s kitchen setting for her subversive purposes. While Colman is in the studio, which suggests that her exploration of semiotics is one of creative process, she also slips in terms that challenge the clichés and politics of art, terms like “Beret”, “Kitsch”, and “Viagra”. It’s the artist’s book equivalent of donning the aprons and maintaining a deadpan delivery in the video.
By putting art words to work in a work of art — especially in the form of an artist’s book — Semiotics of the Studio “interrogates” itself and its subject.
Paul Johnson’s book art has a childlike openness to delight, wonder, and joy. Those characteristics are signaled in his works’ titles — titles such as Suddenly from the centre of the universe came a symphony of light and The rivers of time carry the music of life down to the sea…. Below, the titles of two of his works in this collection also capture that exuberant spirit — The Sun Showers Symbols on the Earth and Morning Light Showing the World the Way. Some titles such as The Book Chair, Goldilocks & The Three Little Pigs, and The Pop-Up Unabridged History of the World, all also below, signal a quirkiness to be found in the works. And another vein of titles such as Ed Hutchins Studio, New York and Arthur Jaffe’s house, Florida reflects his works’ celebration of friendships, as demonstrated in the first work of Johnson’s to join this collection:
Paul Johnson’s Salem Village Panorama (2014)
Paul Johnson’s Salem Village Panorama(small version) (2014) Paul Johnson Pop-up double-sided leporello. H140 x W140 mm (closed), W974 mm (open). 8 panels. Limited edition (unknown quantity). Acquired from Ed Hutchins, 26 January 2022. Photos: Books On Books Collection.
Johnson’s good friend Ed Hutchins organized the show at North Main Gallery in Salem, NY. The town historian chipped in with historical sources, and local artist Paula Beardell Krieg announced it here with excited anticipation.
The next three works in the collection display Johnson’s penchant for unexpected and quirky explorations and that tell-tale characteristic of artists’ books: self-reflexivity.
The Pop-Up Unabridged History of the World (2008)
The Pop-Up Unabridged History of the World (2008) Paul Johnson Purple slipcase. Pop-up book. Slipcase: H86 x W65 mm. Book: H85 x W55 mm. [6] pages. Edition of 50, of which this is #12. Acquired from Collinge & Clark, 7 November 2024. Photos: Books On Books Collection.
Again, title matters in Paul Johnson’s work. How can something so small, crafted from Hahnemuhle Aquarell, Johnson’s preferred paper, contain the unabridged history of the world?
On the very first page, we find we are in a world of fiction, not non-fiction, but is the book the main character is reading fiction or non-fiction? Either could be deepening her mind.
With the turn to the next page, the world’s leaves and the act of folding become as inclusive as the book’s leaves and the act of reading.
And with the turn to the last pages, we have the book she has made: a book within a book within a book.
Goldilocks & the Three Little Pigs (2008)
Goldilocks & the Three Little Pigs (2008) Paul Johnson Purple slipcase. Vertical, laddered pop-up. 75 x 75 mm [4] pages. Edition of 100, of which this is #22. Acquired from Collinge & Clark, 7 November 2024. Photos: Books On Books Collection.
Hijacking Goldilocks from her traditional story and the Three Little Pigs from theirs leads Johnson’s imagination in a more acerbic direction than in his other limited editions. His softer whimsy still comes through in his changing the usual time frame of “Once upon a time” to “Quite recently, in fact twenty minutes ago”, appropriate enough for the pace of modern life as is his giving the pop-up the shape of a make-up compact.
The Book Chair (2008)
The Book Chair (2008) Paul Johnson Blue fold-around slip with illustrated label. A pop-up chair with an origami book on the seat. H136 x W62 x D47 mm. Edition of 50 copies , of which this is #8. Acquired from Collinge & Clark, 17 July 2025. Photos: Books On Books Collection.
The Book Chair repeats the book-within-a-book gambit from The Pop-up Unabridged History of the World. This time the miniature within the miniature, however, treats us to full text that delivers reflection on reflection on reflection. Is the chair the book’s chair, or is the book the chair’s book?
Steps to the Sea (2008)
Steps to the Sea (2008) Paul Johnson Purple slipcase. A pop-out staircase attached to covering card. Slipcase: H76 x W57 x D18 mm. Card and pop-out: H75 x W59 x D12 mm (closed), H variable to 550 mm. Open edition. Acquired from Collinge & Clark 17 July 2025. Photos: Books On Books Collection.
Steps to the Sea may be based on a garden in Seattle, but if you have ever visited San Francisco and descended Lombard Street or the Filbert Steps, Johnson’s vertical pop-up will recall your vertigo for you.
Wrapped in multicolored ribbon, the next two works in the collection — The Sun ShowersSymbols on the Earth and Morning LightShowing the World the Way — arrive like gifts.
The Sun Showers Symbols on the Earth (1988)
The Sun Showers Symbols on the Earth(1988) Paul Johnson Notched slipcase with multicolor inked ribbons. Single sculpture pop-up book. Slipcase: H330 x W256 x D28 mm. Book: H319 x W249 x D25 mm (closed); W515 x D340 mm (open). Unique. Acquired from Potter & Potter Auctions, 9 Jul 2026. Photos: Books On Books Collection.
Compared with the later works above, The Sun Showers Symbols on the Earth is brighter and more abstract. Still later works, though, such as Serenade to Chaucer (2018), an abridgement of “The Miller’s Tale”, and Dies Natalis (2023), inspired by a cantata for voice and strings composed by Gerald Finzi (1901-56), inspired in turn by several poems by Thomas Traherne (1636-74), deploy colors just as bright. Both of those later works are considerably larger than the two shown here. The use of industrial fabric dyes seems to correlate with the size of the unique works, whereas watercolor correlates with the smaller limited edition works.
View from left side. View from right side.
View of lower edge.
View of left and right sides from above and behind.
Detail at left edge.
Front and back covers.
Morning Light Showing the World the Way (1988)
Morning Light Showing the World the Way(1988) Paul Johnson Notched slipcase with multicolor inked ribbons. Single sculpture pop-up book. Slipcase: H330 x W256 x D28 mm. Book: H319 x W250 x D25 mm (closed); W515 x D340 mm (open). Unique. Acquired from Potter & Potter Auctions, 9 Jul 2026. Photos: Books On Books Collection.
Johnson’s website refers to the stained glass windows of Norwich, where he grew up, as an influence on his work. In their titles, colors, and construction, The Sun Showers Symbols on the Earth and Morning Light Showing the World the Way fully bear this out. Their cascading tiers also bear out another influence: Hokusai (think of The Great Wave of Kanagawa).
View from above and behind.
Left side. Right side.
Detail of lower right.
Front cover.
The slipcasing of The Sun Showers Symbols on the Earth and Morning Light Showing the World the Way capture another characteristic of Paul Johnson’s work and the man himself — a giving nature — which foreshadows the monumental Dies Natalis, his gift to the Bodleian Libraries in 2023.
Dies Natalis (2023)
Dies Natalis(2023) Paul Johnson A gift from the artist, Dies Natalis resides at the Bodleian Libraries. Photos: Books On Books at the Bodleian exhibition Gifts and Books, curated by Dr. Nicholas Perkins, 19 June 2023 – 29 October 2023.
A birthday gift from the deity becomes a gift from the artist.
Further Reading
“Movables Now and Then“. 31 August 2024. Bookmarking Book Art. For background reading on movables.
“Květa Pacovská“. 19 July 2023. Books On Books Collection. For comparably colorful pop-ups.
Chen, Julie. 2013. 500 Handmade Books. Volume 2. New York: Lark. P. 26, for Johnson’s We Waited with Eyes Lifted (2012).
Serpents (2025) Phil Zimmermann Blind embossed white slipcase holding two volumes. Slipcase: H265 x W217 X D17 mm. Deep-flap cover: H263 x W216 mm. Vol. I: H262 x W210 mm. Vol. II: H262 x W215 mm. Vol. I: [40] pages. Vol. II: [60] pages. Edition of 65, of which this is #22. Acquired from the artist, 9 February 2026. Photos: Books On Books Collection.
Serpents is a welcome chance to add an alphabetical offering by Philip Zimmermann to his works already in the collection. Two volumes, one of which is an addendum, make up Serpents.
The main volume combines Zimmermann’s own photographs of swampland in Costa Rica and Louisiana with details from The Garden of Earthly Delights (1490-1510) by Hieronymus Bosch and embedded an alphabetical poem The Last Acts of Saint Fuck You (1975) by Bern Porter against a background of rattlesnake skin. Its politically conscious content echoes Sanctus Sonorensis (2009), but with sharper vi(per)tuperation against what the artist describes as “the increasingly corrupt and fascistic direction of our national and global civilizations”.
Zimmermann wields the book as a catalytic medium in just the right way to bring theme and technique together in striking and satisfying artworks. Two points of comparison with his earlier work High Tension illustrate this. Serpent‘s diagonally cut pages recall those of High Tension (1993), but notice how the diagonality works differently to suit each book’s typography and theme. Like its theme of personal anxiety, High Tension’s diagonality is spiky. Like its theme of reptilian tyrants, Serpents‘ diagonality emphasizes the diamond-back rattlesnake pattern that runs through the collage, and in turn, the diagonally set text emphasizes the rattlesnake pattern.
While High Tension includes Masaccio’s 1425 fresco depicting the expulsion from the Garden of Eden and Serpents includes Bosch, Adam and Eve’s grief and shame play their brief role among multiple personal anxieties, whereas Bosch’s creatures continuously slip and slide into the swamp and rattlesnake background of the world state.
In Serpents, snippets of text from other sources (1984 by George Orwell, “Sympathy for the Devil” by the Rolling Stones/Mick Jagger, “This is America” by Childish Gambino/Donald Glover, “The Star-Spangled Banner” by Francis Scott Key, Hannah Arendt, John McCain, Thomas Hobbes, Marcus Junius Brutus, and Elisabeth Kübler-Ross) appear in small fonts in the corners, diagonally, and at the fore edges (Kübler-Ross). Their size and positioning require close attention and draw the eye into the details of the imagery.
In parallel with the poem’s alphabetical arrangement, the addendum presents cropped individual portraits of Donald Trump, his enablers, and fellow tyrants from around the world in alphabetical order with amber-tinted irises and green-hued faces. It implicitly flips the script on Donald Trump’s use of Oscar Brown’s song “The Snake” (1963) to justify his concentration camps targeting the immigrant population (“You knew damn well I was a snake before you brought me in”).
The next two volumes carry forward a series of works with a different socially conscious burden — the anthropo(bs)cene period of terrestrial evolution. They began with Landscapes of the Late Anthropocene (2017) and Melt (2023) but also echo images in the earlier works Sanctus Sonorensis (2009) and Incident in Deseret (2014).
Accelerated Entropy (2024)
Accelerated Entropy (2024) Phil Zimmermann Casebound, cloth spine, photoprinted paper over boards and paste-down end sheets, pamphlet stitch book with translucent paper cover. H285 x W225 mm. [40] pages. Edition of 50, of which this is #4. Acquired from the artist, 31 August 2024. Photos: Books On Books Collection.
As Marlene MacCallum (2024) points out, “Phil Zimmerman has consistently woven imagery and text in response to issues related to perilous conditions of our world and social structures.” What is particularly interesting in Serpents, Accelerated Entropy, and In the Desert is how that weaving differs effectively from book to book. In Serpents, the Porter text and rattlesnake skin are tightly woven together, acting as the main tapestry weave while the snippets of text and the images of the swamp and Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights act as a discontinuous weft creating a changing collage around the main weave.
In Accelerated Entropy, the text (a poem by Zimmermann) is held to the very end. In fact, it appears on the translucent pamphlet-stitched back cover inside the casing. So how does the poem weave with the imagery? The images are not without narrative. Progressive computer-derived halftone patterns and various types of rasters of photographs of lush vegetation constitute the visual tool with which the artist writes that narrative. Like Melt and Landscapes of the Late Anthropocene, the narrative concerns climate change. The final image has reduced the foliage to abstract tracery over a whitened background, which is repeated in end pastedown. By placing the text on the verso side of the translucent paper at the end of the book, the artist makes the poem hover over and between the final image.
Zimmermann’s poem uses prepress process and photomechanical terms to create an extended metaphor for describing the decay of climate change. The terms relate not only to the visual tools used to effect the book’s images of decay but also to the disappearing tools and techniques of printing technology. Perhaps we will recognize our effect on the world around us when it is expressed in printing metaphors, and perhaps we will recognize the world’s accelerating entropy in the pace of our own disappearing technology.
Accelerated Entropy (2024)
In the half-tone dawn, inky shadows stretch across the land, like faded offset prints or a poorly exposed digital-proof, where once vibrant greens have dulled to sepia.
The trees, deep-etched in the landscape, stand ghostly, their sharpened branches skeletal, a grayscale photogravure of decay captured in the blue-green emulsion of time.
Fields, once a vibrant chromolithograph, now monochrome under the bleaching sun, their chlorophyll pigments drained, a spectral rasterized image of non-repro loss.
Rivers meander in slow exposure, their currents a blurred stochastic motion, silt layering like goldenrod paper dust on forgotten lithographic negatives.
Flowers, their gradient petals curled as if caught in an overexposed platemaker, try to hold their process colors close, a palette fading under the harsh UV light.
In the off-register garden, soil hardens like the cracked surface of an old plate, roots digging deeper, vectored, searching for the latent image of life beneath.
We walk through this moiréd landscape, each step like a rejected blueline proof, a dithered trace of our presence on the fragile surface of the mottled earth.
The sky, a vast non-silver cyanotype, watches over the degradation of midtones, its rubylith hues shifting, fugitive, uncertain, in the developing tray of our making.
Here, in this moment of accelerated entropy, we find ourselves stripped and exposed, our actions angled and imprinted, each breath a part of the final composition, hoping for a renewal of resolution before the last shadow falls.
Clifton Meador’s observation in correspondence with Zimmermann nails how this text is woven into the images:
“The poem at the end of Accelerated Entropy is a great addition to the piece, and how could I not love an extended metaphor about climate change that uses print technology as the vehicle? It significantly changes the reading of the piece after the first encounter—I had to go back through the book again, with a vastly changed framework for reading. In the place of a reading of visual richness and formal invention, I looked for evidence of a history of print production. That’s a pretty cool trick—a textual moment that causes me to re-read with an entirely different framework in mind.” — Meador to Zimmermann, 31 August 2024.
In the Desert (2024)
In the Desert (2024) Phil Zimmermann Casebound, cloth spine, photoprinted paper over boards and paste-down end sheets, pamphlet stitch book. H285 x W225 mm. [40] pages. Edition of 50, of which this is #4. Acquired from the artist, 31 August 2024. Photos: Books On Books Collection.
Stephen Crane’s poem In the Desert sits at the heart of Zimmermann’s artist’s book by the same name. In red ink, it sits there like the creature in Crane’s otherwise featureless poem.
In the Desert (1895)
In the desert I saw a creature, naked, bestial, Who, squatting upon the ground, Held his heart in his hands, And ate of it. I said, “Is it good, friend?” “It is bitter—bitter,” he answered;
“But I like it “Because it is bitter, “And because it is my heart.”
The artist’s book is far from featureless. The images in the book come from Zimmermann’s photographs taken at Lake Lucero, a dry gypsum lake located in the White Sands Missile Range near Las Cruces, New Mexico. His artist’s statement describes it as
… a restricted part of the missile range and open to the public only a few times a year when National Park Service rangers take visitors holding US Passports on closed busses in to visit the dry lake. The dry gypsum crystals from the lake blow to the northeast and are the source of the famous white dunes in White Sands National Park. The park is located, as is the entire Missile Range, in the great Tularosa Basin.
Seven double-page spreads of barren desert scenery lead up to the poem’s first line, which squats in red in the dark foreground of a recto page. In the far foreground, a blurry human figure appears.
Over the next ten spreads, the poem’s two human figures (narrator and creature) gradually inhabit the pages alongside that solitary human figure, who is joined by an increasing then dwindling number of other silhouetted human figures in the far foreground. The last double-page spread is textless. A foregrounded leafless bush looms on the verso page standing in contrast to three human figures walking away in the far foreground on the recto page.
From spread to spread prior to the poem, the only action was the movement of dust from the salt flats in the air. With the poem’s appearance, we have two other sets of action. Like small signposts, the individual lines from Crane’s poem drive the reader’s page-turning as do the gathering and dispersing human figures.
On the book’s last page, the only text is the copyright line. There is no other text. There are no human figures. The foreground is punctuated by a red boundary marker. In the middle ground, dust from the salt flats hovers against the low hills and cloud. Sky and cloud occupy the upper reaches of the background. In its size, that red boundary marker is shriveled in comparison with the heart on the front cover.
“But I like it “Because it is bitter, “And because it is my heart.”
The most beautiful and perfect book in the world is a book with only blank pages, in the same way that the most complete language is that which lies beyond all that the words of a man can say. Every book of the new art is searching after that book of absolute whiteness, in the same way that every poem searches for silence. — Ulises Carrión: “The New Art of Making Books” Kontexts no. 6-7, 1975.
At the entrance to The Wittockiana. Back and front cover of the a minima catalogue.
If, as I did, you missed Moritz Küng‘s exhibition Blank. Raw. Illegible… Artists’ Books as Statements, 1960-2022 at the Leopold-Hoesch-Museum in Düren, Germany, in 2023, Didier Decoux‘s a minima presents an equally well-thought-out gathering of artists’ books that stretches out over 150 years (1876 – 2026). With 4 spacious rooms, 25 vitrines, 2 videos, and over 180 works, a minima requires several hours at a minimum to peruse and enjoy. Information on getting there is available here.
The comments and links below are in no way a substitute for visiting this exhibition, and keep in mind that Wittockiana also has permanent displays of presses, rare fonts, and books that should not be missed.
Reading Dick and Jane with Me (1989) Clarissa Sligh Saddle-stitched booklet, staples. H212 x W177 mm. [24] pages. Acquired from Marta Zlotnick, 6 October 2025. Photos: Books On Books Collection.
This is a painful artist’s book. In the repetitive style of the 1950s “Dick and Jane” beginning readers’ book, the child in the artist carries on a one-way conversation with children from those books. Dick, Jane, and Sally are white and upper middle class. They live in a suburban setting with their dog Spot and cat Puff, and the text of their lives is interpersed with “Fun”, “Fun”, “Fun”. They run and play, and tell the reader to “Look Look See us play”. Dick demands, “See me jump” and asks, “Who can jump Who can do what I do”. Sally insists on how pretty and white Puff is.
Alongside her redrawn versions of Dick, Jane, Sally, and their pets, the artist sketches in a cartoon self portrait and pastes in old photos of herself, siblings, and friends. For the first few pages, these images respond mutely to the “Dick and Jane” repetitions.
Facing the page below where a white picket fence separates the artist from Dick, she and her friends respond in a scrawled script (in contrast to Dick’s typeset exhortations to “Go up up up”). They invite Dick and the reader to “come to our school” where they “go up too”.
In the next spread, surrounded by imperatives to “See it go” and “See it go up”, Sally frowns and appears troubled by the encroachment of scrawls over the gutter and into her typeset page. On the facing recto page, the artist and friends stutter as they read the typeset lines: “We read See. it. go. see. it. go. up.” Maybe Sally is troubled by the words between the lines:
Between the lines: “We don’t talk like that but we try to read it anyhow”.
At this point, when the artist and her friends read “Run Dick Run”, the book takes a darker turn for us the readers — if we are reading with the child artist. Dick and Sally run across the double-page spread. Even though they are more roughly sketched than before and even though Dick wears a Ku Klux Klan hood, we know it is them. As the scrawled imperative RUN RUN RUN grows across the spread to its largest size, Dick’s mask slips aside. If you the reader are white, and if you understand that the scrawled (not typeset) command is in the artist’s voice, and if you are reading with the child who stands self-portrayed in the lower left hand corner and with the children in the photographs, maybe now you see what they see between the lines in Dick and Jane’s world.
From here on, the child artist addresses Dick and Jane (white society) more directly. She signals her “encroachment” by taking over the verso page with all of her scrawl and places Dick, Jane, and Sally within the drawn pages of their book in the foreground of the recto page. For the first time, her self-portrait is shaded as she stands in the background of the shaded Dick and Jane book.
As she explains how she and her friends differ from Dick and Jane (not likely to be listening, embedded as they are in their book), the child artist’s voice is soft but insistent in its “Dick and Jane” style repetition. For the first time, her self-portrait appears larger than the white child, and she is on the same side of the picket fence.
In the next spread, the impact of these “Dick and Jane” stories on her and her friends is spelled out and drawn to heartbreaking effect. Sally and “Pretty white Puff” stand in sharply drawn and typeset contrast to the erasure, the slipping away, of the self-portrait and the photograph. Even the book you hold in your hands and its hand scrawled text are smearing away in the lower left corner.
The artist’s voice is soft but, like the “Dick and Jane” style, insistent. In text and image, the message is heartfelt.
Reading Dick and Jane with Me also had an exhibition life, which Sligh describes on her website:
These cyanotype prints, 40 x 30 inches, 1990-2013, originated from artwork made for my artist’s book Reading Dick and Jane With Me while in residency at Visual Studies Workshop in 1989. The size of the original collage and the book page was about 8 ½ x 7 inches. During that residency at VSW, before the days of Photoshop, I learned to shoot the artwork onto film, strip and spot the films and make metal plates for the offset press printing of the book.
With the encouragement of Joan Lyons, the VSW Press director, I also used the large process camera to shoot and develop large negatives from the artwork. After returning home, I built a large light table, contact printed the negatives and processed them in my bathtub. The prints are sent to various exhibition sites. Viewers draw and mark on the prints in response to my image and text narratives. This process is done repeatedly until the prints are fully covered with marks and sketches left by the public.
The process continues. — Sligh website, accessed 17 July 2026.
As of this writing — in the time of Jim Crow 2.0, brutalization of children of color, and vicious beliefs in replacement theory and empathy as sin — Reading Dick and Jane With Me continues to insist — Read Dick. Read Jane. Read Sally. Read.
Further Reading
“Tia Blassingame”. 17 August 2020. Books On Books Collection.
Gabor, Nora. 18 February 2021. “Black History and Experiences through Book Arts“. The Full Text: News about library resources and services. Chicago, IL: DePaul University. Accessed 22 January 2024.
Gleek, Charlie. 2019. “Centuries of Black Artists’ Books“. Presented at “Black Bibliographia: Print/Culture/Art” conference at the Center for Material Culture Studies, University of Delaware, 27 April 2019, pp. 7-8. Accessed 20 July 2020.
Sligh, Clarissa. 1 July 2006. Interview with Steve Miller, Book Arts Podcasts, School of Library Information and Sciences, University of Alabama. Accessed 20 July 2020.
Deconstruction and Reconstruction of the Book (1990)
Deconstruction and Reconstruction of the Book (1990) Norman Clayton Softcover, exposed spine, hand sewn. H250 x W205 mm. [50] pages, including 4-page foldout. Edition of 200, of which this is #90. Acquired from the artist, 23 June 2026. Photos: Books On Books Collection.
As a student at the Rhode Island School of Design, Norman Clayton journeyed back to the beginning of printed books in the western world with a Nikon FE2 and 55mm macro lens. He captured those elements that, during the age of incunabula (printed books before 1500), typesetters and printers-cum-editors were reshaping from manuscripts into what would become the received structure of the book. More satisfying, he poured those photos and the craft he was learning at RISD into an artist’s book. It is hand sewn over linen reinforcing tapes so that the booklet lies flat to offer up the images celebrating the title page, table of contents, illustrated capitals, illustrations and text, and printers’ marks — all drawn from thirty-six works in the Annmary Brown Memorial Library at Brown University in Providence, RI.
There are plenty of full color illustrated histories of the history of the book available, but Clayton’s black and white photographs, choice of font (Stempel Garamond Roman) and paper (Warren Lustro Cream), and neatly executed exposed-spine binding deliver a satisfying artist’s book with a sense of the texture and material of history.
Clayton’s introduction to his fold-out index elicits a smile and a wish that he had also captured a colophon or two. Perhaps there’s a revised edition project looking for an intern or future book artist.
a METRICA n’aboolira JCT 1 (1968) Mario Diacono Booklet, saddle-stitched, staples. H259 x W190 mm. [32] pages. Edition of 199, of which this is #172. Acquired from Ars Libri Ltd, 18 February 2026. Photos: Arengario and Books On Books Collection. Displayed with permission of the artist.
From Ars Libri Ltd. description:
Mario Diacono relates that the manuscript of a METRICA n’aboolira was made in 1968 as a unique work, with no plans for its future publication. His idea to issue it as a limited edition artist’s book (and equally, as the first number of his review “JCT”) arose in the late summer of 1969, following a stay in New York, where he was in contact with Vito Acconci, Joseph Kosuth, and members of Art & Language. On his return to California in September, Diacono delivered the manuscript to the San Francisco printer, Futura Press, including with it a colophon which was dated November 1969, based on the expectation that the edition would take two months to complete.
With the colophon offering 1968 or 1969, the title page picks 1968 and presents that as the date of publication. The date only matters in determining who came first with the idea of replacing Mallarmé’s text with solid blocks: Diacono or Marcel Broodthaers, whose three versions of Un Coup de Dés Jamais N’Abolira le Hasard: Image (on translucent paper, solid paper, and anodized aluminum) were published by Wide White Space in 1969.
Besides being first out of the gate with an “homage by redaction” of Un Coup de Dés, Mario Diacono is perhaps the first hommageur to give a sociopolitical cast to the effort. In an interview in Ursula, Diacono comments
1968 was a year in which many things were abolished, or felt tempted to be abolished. Language was one of them, at least the traditional language of poetry, but also the language of ‘bourgeois/capitalist’ society. Berkeley is also present in the book through the reproduction of three frames from a cartoon in a local magazine, which functions as a kind of preface. The title alternates not only colors, black and orange, but also uppercase and lowercase letters. The wordplay in essence says: the absence of metrics, of language, will not abolish poetry. Neither will the American taboos.(Nickas, 2019).
Those comments align with the element of “pop” art and the underground comic in this homage.
Later in the 1970s, Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub would pick up the thread of social critique by staging and filming a choral reading of the poem on the lawn of the Père Lachaise cemetery,
where there are the great memorials of the concentration camps: Ravensbrück, Auschwitz… it is in the corner of the cemetery where you can guess something about the city. Under this hill are buried the last members of the Paris Commune, who were shot in that same place. – Jean-Marie Straub
These three connected volumes explore graphic transpositioning from oral speeches to a visual representation. Though a new way to read/experience the speeches–to visualize their patterns–you can [still] not tell the truth from fiction. You can not tell what you are reading. “In the 3-part, 4 Speeches/Coup de Des, the images of audio waves are the same—but one purports to be a group of speeches by Bush 43 ; another, a group by Tony Blair; and the last—the real thing—is an unidentified man reading Mallarme’s “Un Coup de Dés Jamais N’Abolira Le Hasard”, that modern masterwork that launched a thousand artists’ books. The concept is trenchantly funny; the books are beautifully executed. [from the preface to Didier’s Manifesto by Tim Young]
Like Huillet, Straub and Mutel, Diacono is trying to balance his socio-political drive with the visual and historical homage to Un Coup de Dés. Huillet/Straub’s performative vocalization delivers its message only through the visual of its location. Mutel delivers his message by muting the poem with its sonographic visualization and sleight-of-hand substitution for political speeches. a METRICA n’aboolira delivers its message by balancing the textual and the visual, reminding us that Mallarmé wanted Un Coup de Dés to be looked at as well as read.
a visual pollution (1970) JCT 2 Mario Diacono & the Navajo Indian Tribe with photos by Barry Spinello Broadside, illustrated with 32 photographs in six strips. H157 x W254 mm (closed), H472 x W503 mm (open). #270. Acquired from Ars Libri Ltd, 18 February 2026. Photos: Books On Books Collection.
A broadside of books, or a photographic record of a display of three works of book art and some print works? On its surface, a visual pollution is a single sheet of paper displaying strips of Kodak film with frame numbers (2A to 34) appearing along the foot of the roll of film. The first four frames show photos of clear acetate blocks forming the Navajo ancestral emblem called the “Whirling Log” (tsil no’oli). On each block, double-page spreads have been printed containing phrases as text and images. In the fifteen frames that follow the first four, Diacono and Spinello give us close-ups of the acetate panels/pages. Page numbers can be seen in each spread’s upper left and right corners. The next eleven frames, starting with 21A/22, show two leporellos (one has eight panels, the other seven) with close-ups of the panels. The last two frames show two printed cards (or one double-sided one) in portrait and landscape orientations.
The first four frames, the arrangement of acetate blocks in the shape of the Navajo emblem “Whirling Log” (tsil no’oli). The Navajo Nation disavowed the totem in 1940 after its appropriation as the Nazi swastika.
In JCT 1, Diacono designated the work as “co-opywritings” of himself and Mallarmé. In JCT 2, the Navajo Indian tribes “join” Diacono. “Co-opywriting” is the perfect neologism to describe Diacono’s self-aware act of appropriation. There is no collaboration here; he has co-opted the French poet and the indigenous Americans. As an Italian and recent immigrant to the US, did his self-awareness extend to knowing that he was appropriating a disavowed emblem? “After the symbol was co-opted by the Nazi Party in Germany in 1920, the Navajo, Hopi, Apache, and Tohono O’odham tribes prohibited their communities’ use of the whirling logs motif by way of a 1940 intertribal proclamation. In the past few decades, Navajo people have begun to feature the motif in their weavings once again.” (Millicent Rogers Museum)
While it is nonsensical and inappropriate to assign authorship in this case to a tribe, the work’s title, the use of the tribal emblem, and the nature of the word mash-ups like (“U.S.A.lly dressed in a baby dollar“, “PRAyerb“, or “r’Apachem’EscalactionAGAIN,STviet Pueblos) suggest that something other than appropriation is at play. It is far from the offensive “playing Indian” in which the Italian artist Eliseo Mattiacci engaged (Salza). Diacono’s art seems to spring from an anti-establishment and counter-culture base. His assault on words as “visual pollution” and the need to mash them up into “object-oriented writing” (Martini) may or may not have appealed to the Diné-speaking people and the Red Power Movement of the 60s and 70s. But there is no denying Diacono’s critical enthusiasm and energetic claims of solidarity.
The story goes that in 1945 or 1946 René Magritte gave Marcel Broodthaers a copy of Mallarmé’s poem Un Coup de Dés Jamais N’Abolira le Hasard: Poème (1914). Twenty-three or twenty-four years later, Broodthaers organized an exhibition in homage to the poem. Entitled Exposition littéraire autour de Mallarmé: Marcel Broodthaers à la Deblioudebliou/S (“Literary exhibition around Mallarmé at the Deblioudebliou/S”), it presented three versions of an appropriation of the poem. The three versions consist of ten copies numbered I-X on anodized aluminum, ninety copies numbered 1-90 on transparent mechanographic paper (the original edition), and three hundred copies on opaque paper (the catalogue edition).
On Broodthaers’ cover, the word Image occupies the same space as Poème on the cover of the 1914 edition arranged by Mallarmé’s son-in-law. On the title page, however, Image comes first and in type larger than the poem’s title beneath it. The poem’s title is even smaller that Broodthaers’ name. Already this promises to be a bold appropriation of Mallarmé’s poem.
When the poem first appeared in the May 1897 issue of Cosmopolis, Mallarmé reluctantly provided a preface at the editors’ request. So reluctant was he that the preface urges readers not to read it. Broodthaers obliges. He displaces all of Mallarmé’s dismissive text with the poem’s entirety in a justified block of type with the line breaks indicated by slashes. Until the colophon, that will be the only legible text to appear in this homage.
“Le modèle de cette image approximative est l’édition originale du poème ‘Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard’ de Stéphane Mallarmé, publié en 1914 par la librairie Gallimard.” Books On Books Collection.
Between these two islands of text, Broodthaers offers his “image” of the poem: printer’s leading of the same dimensions as the types in the original edition of the poem. The image is the homage. In light of Magritte’s poster-essay “Les mots et les images” (1929) and its translation and appearance as an accordion-formatted catalogue for the Sidney Janis Gallery’s Magritte show in 1954, Broodthaers could equally have been paying homage to Magritte.
Top: Printer’s leading redacts “UN COUP DE DÉS”. Bottom: The leading redacts “JAMAIS” and the next three lines, which were set in smaller type. Books On Books Collection.
The other two versions were materially even more striking, and with the rest of the elements in play in the Wide White Space Gallery, Broodthaers made an innovative advance for post-Surrealism.
Top: the anodized aluminum edition; image courtesy of Charles Bernstein. Bottom: the translucent edition; image courtesy of MACBA.
As visitors to Broodthaers’ 1969 show perused the three editions, a tape recording of Broodthaers’ reading the poem played in the background. Broodthaers’ Image was not the only homage for Un Coup de Dés on display. Three hanging black shirts, allegedly taken from the Dallas Police Department, bore the full text of the poem transcribed in thin white chalk. With its floor painted black (the poem’s abyss?) and the works on display, the installation at the Wide White Space was also not Broodthaers’ first curation as art.
In 1968, Broodthaers established Le Musée d’art moderne, Département des aigles [The Museum of Modern Art, Department of Eagles]. Through 1972, museum shows occurred in various locations: his Brussels studio, the Städtischer Kunsthalle and a basement room at Burgplatz 12 both in Düsseldorf, at documenta 5 in Kassel, the A379089 alternative art center in Antwerp, and Galerie Michael Werner in Cologne. A 1968 manuscript in the Musées royaux des beaux-arts de Belgique in Brussels shows sketches of works of homage to Mallarmé that Broodthaers assigned to his museum’s “Literary Section”.
Broodthaers’ multimedia homage would provoke dozens of artists to create works of double-, triple- even quintuple-homage over the following decades into the new century. Among the most prolific of hommageurs, Michalis Pichler mounted Pichler: Exposition Littéraire autour de Mallarmé” in Milan in 2016. There he displayed many of those works of homage alongside his own. Later in 2024 at the Center for Book Art in New York, Pichler formalized Broodthaers’ concept of curation as art form in a show and book entitled Coup de dés (Collection) Books and Ideas after Mallarmé. Two years before, Galerie Michael Werner hosted an exhibition entitled “Footprints of a collector: Reiner Speck. Mallarmé, Broodthaers et les autres” (2 May – 23 July 2022). In addition to outstanding copies of the Image works, the curator Sabine Schiffer and Reiner Speck included Garniture Symbolique (1975), a blue-tinted glossy photo strip with nine photos on glossy paper, showing excerpts and phrases from the poem. Also included was a painting entitled Un coup de dés jamais quand bien même… (oil, gold paint, felt pen on canvas) from 1969, which is owned by Speck and, according to his afterword in the catalogue, has appeared in every exhibition of Broodthaers’ work since. For anyone looking for a description of Broodthaers’ 1969 exhibition, Sam Sackeroff ‘s “Literary Exhibitions” in the Speck catalogue is the gold standard.
The following collections offer more images of Image:
A Voyage on the North Sea (1974) Marcel Broodthaers Paperback (English version), Chinese wrapped-back binding. H148 x W178 mm. 38 pages. Edition of 1000. Acquired from Marcus Campbell Art Books, 9 October 2024. Photos: Books On Books Collection.
That over-elaborate and arch admonition to the reader on the inside cover doubles its mystery when it reappears on the last page of the book. If the warning has been ignored the first time, the reader knows that cutting the fore edge folds reveals the page numbers inside, but does its reappearance at the end prompt some doubt and regret? There’s no going back.
Last page and inside back cover.
Alongside a 16mm film with the same title, the book premiered at the headquarters of the Petersburg Press, Portobello Road, London on 28 January 1974. In addition to the 1000 copies, Petersburg Press produced a numbered edition of 100 copies, signed by the artist, and distributed in a box with a copy of the film. Although developed together, the film preceded the book in 1973 and was originally entitled Analyse d’une Peinture. The painting in question is one found by Broodthaers at a Parisian flea market. To produce the film, Broodthaers added his own photographs of yachts at sea in the port of Ostend to stills of the painting and its details. With simple cuts and juxtapositions divided into “Page 1”, “Page 2”, etc., the film proceeds more like a book than a cinematic narrative, but there is no “booby-trap” in the film comparable to the prefatory warning once the book was prepared. The flea-market painting was also placed on display at the premiere.
To celebrate the peculiarity of the anniversaries of the artist’s birth (28 January 1924), the artist’s death (28 January 1976), and the book-film’s debut screening (28 January 1974), David Platzker organized his Specific Object exhibition Marcel Broodthaers : A Voyage on the North Sea on 28 January 2009. Platzker’s description provides just the right preface to the film and conclusion to this Books On Books Collection entry:
The subject of the exhibition focuses on Marcel Broodthaers’ film and book, both titled A Voyage on the North Sea which were distributed together as part and parcel of the same publishing plot. The ostensibly related subject of both book and film consists mutually of 19th and 20th century nautical images including: 1. photographic reproductions and details of an amateur’s 19th century painting of a fleet of fishing ships and 2. photographs of a contemporary sailboat. Bringing together film, books, ephemera, drawing, and the artist’s original maquette for the book, this specific exhibition sets out to map the local coordinates of A Voyage on the North Sea’s maiden launch on January 28, 1974 at the London offices of Petersburg Press. …
Referring a contemporary audience to the original screening context of Broodthaers’ book-film—itself very much like a reading lesson–this exhibition asks how a contemporary audience might begin to unpack the particular dialectics, obtuse poetics, and critical cargo of Broodthaers’ confounding enterprise. “It is up to the attentive reader,” Broodthaers writes in the preface of the book, “to find out what devilish motive inspired this book’s publication.”
Ceci est une Pipe / This is a Pipe / Dies ist eine Pfeife (2001 )
In 1972, Broodthaers renounced this project, initiated in 1969-1970. He did not want to associate his name or that of his Musée d’Art Moderne, Département des Aigles with it. Almost thirty years later, leaving aside the renunciation, Maria Gilissen Broodthaers and Reiner Borgemeister issued this volume that documents what can be gleaned from the archives. Honoring Broodthaers’ original aim to issue a work in French, English, and German, the volume is presented that way — except for an appendix that does not appear in English or German.
Here is an English version:
1968-1969: Broodthaers made the 50 mm black-and-white film n/b La pipe (René Magritte), from which he subsequently created three variations:
1. La pipe (white) 2. La pipe (black) 3. This Would Not Be a Pipe, a film from the Musée d’Art Moderne From these four films, he created yet another version in 16 mm color. He also made a 35 mm black-and-white film n/b titled La pipe satire.
1972: Broodthaers registered This Is a Pipe—This Is Not a Pipe at the Musée d’Art Moderne, Département des Aigles, in Düsseldorf, in the form of an interview with a cat:
“(…)—Then close the museums!
Meow
This is a pipe.
Meow
This is not a pipe.
Meow”
Finally, Magritte’s painting (taken from a catalog) is included in the Advertising Section of the Department of Eagles in Kassel. Under “This Is Not a Pipe,” we read: “The Betrayal of Images.” Broodthaers added “Abb. I” by hand in red, the abbreviation for Abbildung.
1974: Broodthaers wrote: “… It was with this pipe that I embarked on the adventure …”
Not only by Magritte’s exploration of image and text in his art but by giving Broodthaers a copy of Mallarmé’s Un Coup de Dés, Magritte exerted a great influence. Broodthaers’ realized works responding to that poem would suffice alone as evidence. Michel Foucault’s essay Ceci n’est pas une pipe (1968) expounding on his interpretation of Magritte’s Trahison des images as an unraveled calligramme apparently irked Broodthaers and became the likely seed for his idea to enroll Magritte’s pipe in the Musée d’Art Moderne, Département des Aigles along with asides on Foucault’s comments. If realized, the idea would have been a tribute that Magritte, who died in 1967, would likely have enjoyed.
In the end, though, Broodthaers was bothered over “useless text and reflections” from [André] Blavier (a fellow Belgian avant gardiste) and his own “ridiculous” interventions as well as dissatisfied with the prospective layout, so he abandoned the project. So what to make of Ceci est une pipe?
As an artist’s “unrealized” and abandoned conceptualization resurrected in an explanation of what the realized work might have been, it offers interesting insight into the concept of a concept. But it is not a pipe.
Foucault, Michel, and J. A. Harkness (trans.). 1983. This Is Not a Pipe. 25th anniversary ed. Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press. The essay “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” appeared in Les Cahiers du chemin (no. 2), 1968.
Book art always pushes at the edges. Whatever meets at the edges is book art’s business. Negative space and positive space. Letter stroke and counter. Margins and the gutter. Justified and unjustified. Legible and illegible. Bound and unbound. Art and craft. Unique and multiple. Self and other. Destruction and creation. Life and death.
Inscription 6 is about cuts and tears, mostly tears — creating edges. “Tears” is also a heteronym, a word whose meaning changes with the change of the sound of the vowel but whose spelling remains the same. We can have tears [/tɛ(ə)rz/ tairz] as in “torn parts or places, or rips asunder”. Or we can have tears [/tɪ(ə)rz/] as in “teardrops, or weeps”. Or, with art, we might paradoxically have both simultaneously as we shall see in this issue’s first contributed essay. Also, with art, we might find that tearing — creating edges — paradoxically binds what it divides.
But first, as subscribers have come to expect, Inscription 6 opens with a surprise. Buzz Spector invites us to join in his artistic practice of tearing things up.
The artist says that he is asked all the time how he stands the tedium, to which he replies it is a meditative state he is sorry to see end. He is right. Once the initial unease over tearing pages from the issue subsides, a certain satisfaction ensues.
The “second” tear. (See further above for the first.)
The result is the wake’s image restored in a composition of torn strips still bound to the book.
Rather than surrendering themselves to the bin, the removed strips beg to be reassembled for a wake on the other side of the gutter in keeping with the creative productivity of turning the singular into the plural.
Left: the Spector-esque result. Right: the removed strips rearranged.
Buzz Spector is the star of this issue. Images from fourteen of his works divide the main sections and each contribution from one another. Works of torn edges create edges or boundaries between the issue’s contents. A stroke of genius from the issue’s editorial and design team. The range of Spector’s sources also draws attention to other boundaries inherent in the body of his work and the issue’s theme: the border between high and low in art, East and West, and Art and Nature. After the 12-page exercise, we have the altered Chinese translation of the self-help book Ego is the Enemy by Ryan Holiday; before the colophon, we have an array of shells and stones on an unidentified altered book, a sculpture held in the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. In between, there are alterations of catalogues of Ansel Adams’ photos and the Polaroid Collection, an academic study of Antonioni’s films, a foundational Italian volume on ancient and Renaissance glassmaking, a gardening book, and sailing photobooks.
The altered sailing photobooks recall Spector’s North Sea (for M.B.) (1990), his homage to Marcel Broodthaers’ A Voyage on the North Sea (1974) in which Broodthaers juxtaposes a 19th century amateur painting of a tall-masted ship with his own photographs of a sailing ship. Tellingly for this issue of Inscription as well as the thrust of Spector’s homage, Broodthaers opens A Voyage with an elaborate warning not to cut the uncut pages of the book.
From A Voyage on the North Sea (1974) by Marcel Broodthaers. Photos: Books On Books Collection.
Spector’s homage is a work 10 feet long and presented on a table appropriately jutting out from the wall like a pier. The eleven “waves” of torn pages placed in a row on top of the steel shelf come from eleven copies of the Walker Art Center’s 1987 catalogue for Broodthaers’s first U.S. retrospective. Spector had all the pages in each copy painted with white gesso before tearing the pages. He saved the excised “wedges” and bound them at the fore edges. Because the gesso does not completely obscure the text and images from the catalogues, viewers who come close to the work can see slivers of some of Broodthaers’ works along with the word fragments typical of Spector’s altered books.
North Sea (for M.B.) (1990) by Buzz Spector
The echoes of Spector’s appropriation from the great appropriator (recall Broodthaers’ 1969 appropriation of Mallarmé’s poem in Image: Un Coup de Dés Jamais N’Abolira le Hasard) bring another set of boundaries into view: the space between originality and appropriation and the space between the auratic artwork and its mechanical reproduction raised in Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1936).
Across its 10 sections and 11 loose inserts, the sixth issue of Inscription takes the lead from Spector’s works and explores all these binaries and the cut or torn edges between them. As usual with Inscription, it isn’t all book art. There are prints, a vinyl record, bookmarks, postcards, installations, libraries, typography, a syllabary, and even moth-repellent cedarwood blocks, and its sources range from the London Missionary Society hospitals in early 20th century China, to an installation of Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s library shelves (at Washingon State University of all places), and to J.L. Carr’s home in Kettering. The eclecticism is a challenge to coherence as much as the number of contributors is a challenge to adherence to the theme. Complete success would be an issue that is an artwork of collage in itself.
Collage is naturally where the first contributor’s article begins. “What does it mean to make art out of torn-up paper?” Eric Robertson uses Hans (Jean) Arp’s déchirés (torn pages), Raymon Hains’ and Jacques Villeglé’s torn posters, and Sol Lewitt’s “rip drawings” to take us beyond categorizing such works as vandalism, desecration, or iconoclasm.
By discussing Arp’s posthumous collaborations with friend Kurt Schwitters and partner Sophie Taeuber under the heading “Tears of Mourning”, Robertson bridges the dual meanings of the heteronym and well prepares the ground for his moving quotation of Arp in conclusion: “By tearing up a piece of paper or a drawing, we bring into it the very essence of life and death”.
YuHao Chen‘s “Table of Phonetic Wounds” aims to make metaphorical connections among a host of pairings: surgical incision/skin, site of operation/cause for operation, the initial/final phoneme structure from the Wang-Peill Mandarin Syllabary, Western colonial intervention/China-the-sick-man-0f Asia, literacy/illiteracy, non-Christian/Christian, etc. Successful surgery equals achievement of literacy, healing equals conversion, etc., by which we should be convinced of causality (or not).
The justification running through the center of the article’s paragraphs offers a visual metaphor for all these binaries. Even the gap between the initial and final phonemes in the Mandarin Syllabary recalls the gap between the consonants of “tears”. It is a space in which something meaningful happens.
Reanna Brooks‘ “Cut and Paste: Virginia Woolf’s Bookcraft” provides a good case for looking carefully at the border between craft and art. Brooks finds a depth in Woolf’s bookbinding that should prompt us to ask more often, When do the book arts and book art overlap to create a new work of art?
Sally O’Reilly‘s “Birth, Accident and Death: A Narratological Probing of Die-Cut Holes” would not have been out of place in Inscription No. 2 on “holes”. Its presence here demonstrates the extension of the theme of tearing to include cutting and holes. Removal by tearing or cutting may overlap, but the techniques are sharply different in their results as we saw with Arp’s “Doll carrying Schwitters” and “Le Petit Prince”. The differences here point to the messiness of giving birth contrasted with the tidiness of the neatly designed and pocketable guide for midwives that shows the growing diameter of the cervix stage by stage through a die-cut hole.
The following juxtaposition of Lucio Fontana‘s Spatial Concept “Waiting” and Bas Jan Ader‘s I’m too sad to tell you draws attention to the heteronym “tears”. It is set off in its own section, knowingly bracketed by Spector’s Displacement after Lawrence Weiner (2024) — conceptual artist — and After Ansel Adams (2024) — photographer. It is a meaningful curatorial gesture meant to be on a par with, say, Robertson’s effective bridging of the heteronymic meanings under the heading “Tears of Mourning”.
Tear: N1 A torn part or place; V1 To pull or split apart. Tear: N2 A secretion of the lachrymal gland; V2 To weep.
Eleanor Baker‘s “Cut, Paste, and Pocketed” explores J.L. Carr’s 1066 and All That treatment of Chaucer’s “The Reeve’s Tale”. While Carr would surely have been familiar with Sellar and Yeatman’s 1930 comic book history, Baker pegs Carr’s approach as a form of collage rather than comic strip. As we’ll see later with Angela Szczepaniak’s contribution, the two can be combined to drive a narrative forward. In Carr’s case, as Baker points out, the pocketbook approach and cheeky fragments of collage combine to deliver a comically modern sense of Chaucer’s world and an inventive match to the fragmentary nature of “The Reeve’s Tale”.
Using knives and punches, A T Kabe Wilson removes every tenth word in Graham Greene’s The Tenth Man and replaces it with a synonym or as near a proxy as he can manage to challenge the notion of copyright. The resulting pages are arranged to make up an installation where visitors can read the entire set of altered pages. There is no edition of Copywrong. It turns Walter Benjamin on his head: “The Unique Work of Art Produced from Two Copies of a Mechanical Reproduction”.
To bring this relevant work within the bounds of Inscription, the editors provide images of Wilson at work and rely on Dennis Duncan (University College of London) to elicit from Wilson where the work’s strange status places it in relationship to artists’ books and other visual art.
Kabe Wilson’s choice of every tenth word takes its impetus from the book’s story of collective punishment in wartime (“choose ten from among your number to be executed”). But it also turns on its head the common fallacy that ten percent of a work can be reproduced without violating copyright: hence the title Copywrong. In Greene’s novel, when the rich tenth man contracts with a poor man to trade places and switch identities in exchange for the rich man’s inheritance, a whole vein of copywrongs reveals itself for mining. Wilson sees his creative destruction of the novel as a form of translation and betrayal of the original. While challenging us to think where the line between book and not-book lies, and even to think of its sheets of paper as 3D objects, Copywrong becomes a way of asking where the line between original and copy, legal and illegal, and life and death lies.
The next contribution is Fraser Muggeridge‘s “Cuts and Tears as Justified and Unjustified Typesetting”. While the article gives an informative sketch of the history and development of the straight and ragged edges of print, its argument that unjustified typesetting is “torn typography” does not convince. An unjustified line does not begin with a justified line from which spacing is torn or cut. A justified setting may give a page the visual effect of having been evenly cut down the right, and a ragged right setting may give the visual effect of a tear down the right side, but whether they contribute to a work’s artistic meaning — not just an aesthetic effect on readability — needs convincing examples. With Apollinaire and his calligrammes, Stefan Themerson and his “internal vertical justification”, and Christian Bök’s Diamonds, Muggeridge make a good start. Most of the other variations on justified, unjustified, and mixed, however, are far cries from, say, Mallarmé’s breaks of the line and play with page layout in Un Coup de Dés Jamais N’Abolira le Hasard or from the meaningful typographical tearing and cutting that the avant-gardistes of the early 20th century perpetrated.
It’s odd, especially as the Fraser Muggeridge Studio designs Inscription, that the article does not mention the center justification used in several of the issue’s other articles. Their paragraphs decline to show off those even edges of justified-left and justified-right typesetting. Instead, they go for a ragged left and ragged right with a book-mimicking gutter of justified left and right in their center. When proofreaders were more a feature in typesetting houses, they not only had to catch “typos” but also to watch for “rivers in the type”, those breaks between words in one line that aligned with breaks in the next several lines to create a white rivulet of space trickling down the page and distracting the reader from the sense of the sentences. In Chen’s article, the “river” is a medial surgical cut. In Duncan’s interview with Wilson, the clear gutter in the middle of the paragraphs offers a sharp contrast with the uncomfortable binaries that Copywrong bids us to engage. Kudos to Fraser Muggeridge and studio.
Left: from Chen’s article. Right: from Wilson-Duncan interview.
The next contribution — from the Leuven-based artists collective Rosetta, formed by Eva Moulaert, Anneleen Masschelein, and Willem Styfhals — continues with the topic of typesetting. Their starting point is those awkward phenomena of typesetting — widows and orphans. They are not deliberate renderings or loppings of words from a following or preceding sentence to be left stranded at the bottom or top of a page, respectively. But there they are. Are they tears or cuts, these weepy, abandoned strings of anthropomorphized type that are cause for tears among proofreaders, typesetters, and designers? No, they are cause for the fevered ponderings of the narrator in a book whose photographed pages make up this contribution.
No widows or orphans here.
This set of photographed double-page spreads (excised?) has plenty of widows and orphans. Even though they are likely deliberate, what is the point of them? And whose disembodied hand is that that keeps appearing, disappearing, and reappearing to hold the book facing out?
Orphan and widow.
The narrator winds “their” way through references to Gutenberg, Donald Knuth, Herman Zapf, Jean-François Lyotard, Martin Heidegger, Roland Barthes, Robert Bringhurst, Ellen Lupton, Frank Kermode, Amitav Ghosh, and half a dozen others to come to “a” point — an obsession with hyphenation. And the point of that? Why naturally for the narrator’s compound, hyphenated selves — Ro-set-ta — to hand over the pen to Rosetta, the widow at the end of “page 139”.
“The Extinctions Bureau” is a brilliant article with which to end this issue of Inscription. It offers readers a chance to wield scissors or papercutters if they are ready not to heed Broodthaers’ admonition above. It is also a clever conceptual extension of Will Eisner’s 1985 concept of “sequential art” that aimed to establish comics as a legitimate literary genre. Angela Szczepaniak first teases us with the narrative premise of a clothing moth-turned-detective on the trail of the Nylon Killer. If that is not hilarious enough, she posits conversion of the 2D linear narrative into a 3D existence around moth-repellent cedarwood. (She has created the blocks for exhibition display, but that’s not the point of the contribution.) Whether the blocks are more cruel to the detective or readers who now have to get their heads and hands around the idea of a “polysequential” story is a fine point. Readers who take up the challenge of cutting out the templates and folding them into cubes will have their own view.
By cutting and tearing the images for her collages from pulp comics, Szczepaniak rings all the bells of Inscription 6’s theme and reminds us of its subtitle: The Journal of Material Text.
Aside: below are images of the completed cedar block cubes on display in Nottingham. Photos courtesy of the artist.
Reminiscent of Aspen, Fluxus, The Journal of Artists’ Books, and the deluxe editions of Parenthesis, Inscription‘s artwork inserts contribute to the sense of the issue as an exhibition, a wunderkammer, a performance. No 33 LP this time; instead there is appropriately a cutdown 45-rpm record, albeit no instructions on “ripping” tracks from it to make up our own playlists. Putting together a thematically coherent journal is tricky. The artworks underscore and strengthen the issue’s theme of tearing and cutting. Two examples: Nick Thurston’s print Rips and Floods (2026) and Carolyn Thompson’s Tearjerker (2026) cover all the thematic notes of tearing, cutting, and weeping.
Thurston’s title for his print ensures that we don’t miss the heteronymic “tear”, which the visually torn phrase “A tear is an intellectual thing” might cause us to do. For those not well-versed in William Blake, a helpful note on page 160 identifies the phrase’s source as “The Grey Monk“. The editors mention Thurston’s truncation of Blake’s line, but leave it to us to supply the pun that it has been ripped from the poem. Blake’s preceding lines rule out the heteronymic meaning; for him, it’s the “Widow’s tear” that is ” an intellectual thing”. What makes Thurston’s print a strong work of art is how the tearing from the poem brings with it other key elements of the poem. For Blake, the Widow’s tears have more power than war to free the world from fear of the “Purple Tyrant”. In 2026, Thurston’s print reminds us that intellectual things — [/tɪ(ə)rz/] and [/tɛ(ə)rz/] — may have more power than Tangerine or Religious Tyrants.
Rips and Floods (2026), Nick Thurston
For her print, Carolyn Thompson excises words “from 30 works of literary fiction she has read since” 2016 to compose a sob story that well sums up the effects of Brexit (and the US election).
Tearjerker (2026) Carolyn Thompson
Pages 154-61 list the twenty-one artists/performers alphabetically with descriptions of their editions. Self-reflexively and in keeping with the issue’s theme, page 161 shows a blanked version of the torn segments from page 31 on which Partington and Smyth provide their introduction to the authors’ and artists’ contributions. (This blanked version is curious. If page 161 were showing the blank sides of the slips of paper, the four slips on the left would be flipped and on the right. Since one of the editors has let slip in correspondence that the theme of Issue 7 will be “blanks”, might this be an Easter egg?)
In homage to the journal and its edition contributors, below is a collage of the eleven loose inserts.
The wunderkammer nature of Inscription will send insatiable readers in search of more examples of creative destruction. To that end, here are a handful from the Books On Books Collection. If you can only find time for two, make it Eleonora Cumer’s Circoscrivere lo spazio No. 3 [Circumscribing space] (2021) and Cercare nella memoria [Searching Memory] (2021). They are her most sophisticated metaphoric works in the collection. They offer a circumvention of circumscription, which is another way of thinking about tears and the material text.
“Islam Aly“. 13 January 2020. Books On Books Collection. See 28 Letters (2013).
“Doug Beube“. 21 April 2020. Books On Books Collection. See Empty Talk (2016), Red Infinity #4 (2017), and Breaking the Codex (2011).
“Lizzie Brewer“. 4 July 2023. Books On Books Collection. See Babel(2019).
“Eleonora Cumer“. 6 September 2019. Books On Books Collection. See l’attesa/ l’attente (2010), visioni urbane/ visions urbane (2015), contaminazione (2015), Circoscrivere lo spazio No. 3 (2021), Cercare nella memoria (2021)
In Visible Cities (2012) Jean-Pierre Hébert, Harry and Sandra Liddell Reese Custom-made box enclosing sewn board binding with cloth spine, treated abaca/cotton paper with painted inlays, pastedowns with drawings, valley-fold folios of Niyodo Natural paper printed on Epson Stylus Pro 4800. Box: H442 x W290 mm. Book: H424 x W276 mm. [46] pages. Edition of 73, of which this is #48. Acquired from the Reeses, 9 February 2026. Photos: Books On Books Collection. Displayed with permission of Claire Hébert and the Reeses.
More than a few artists have been drawn to Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities (1972/74). Its attraction is not hard to understand. Calvino supposes a series of conversations between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan about cities across the Khan’s empire that he has not visited but Marco Polo has and which he describes for the Khan. The premise, however, is paradoxical: the fifty-five cities Marco Polo describes do not exist. Calvino’s sensuous and surrealistic prose and combinatorial arrangement of the conversations and descriptions create a book that is simultaneously inwardly and outwardly reflective. Simple but complex. Realistic but fantastical. Concrete but conceptual. A work ripe for homage and inspiration.
The Lively Dance (1983) Anne-Catherine Fallen Handbound book, sewn; endflaps secured at fore edge with bamboo twig to create wedge-shaped book. Laid flat, H223 x W157 mm; wedge fore edge, W75 mm. [18] pages. Edition of 200. Acquired from Stand 132, Zurich. 18 January 2026. Photos: Books On Books Collection. Displayed with the artists permission.
The Lively Dance is an elaborate and simple artist’s book. It consists of an eleven-line poem arranged across ten of eighteen pages displaying a stand of bamboo. Four pleated sheets of translucent paper, also displaying the stand of bamboo, overlap and bind those ten pages at the fore edge. Here is the book’s opening double-page spread with the translucent overlay first in place and then pulled back to reveal the poem’s invitation: “Come join the solemn dance”.
The [artists’ book] movement had its beginnings with a few individuals (conceptual artists Dieter Roth, Hansjörg Mayer, and Ed Ruscha immediately come to mind), but in the area of structural experiment and invention only one person seems to have been markedly influential (albeit seriously ignored): Hedi Kyle.
Alastair Johnston, “Visible Shivers Running Down My Spine”, Parenthesis, Fall 2013, Number 25.
While Alastair Johnston’s 2013 interview with Hedi Kyle is a rich one and welcome, it is inaccurate to say Hedi Kyle has been seriously ignored. After all, in 2005, the Guild of Book Workers awarded her an honorary membership, and Syracuse University’s Library invited her to deliver that year’s Brodsky Series lecture. In 2008, the Philadelphia Senior Artists Initiative recorded her oral history and posted her artist’s statement along with an extensive list of prior exhibitions, honors, professional roles and board memberships stretching back to 1965.
If, however, Johnston’s assessment is accurate, subsequent events have rectified the situation. In 2015, Kyle delivered the keynote address “Four Decades under the Spell of the Book” for the Focus on Book Arts annual conference. In the same year, the 23 Sandy Gallery held a successful international juried exhibition entitled “Hello Hedi“, an echo of the 1993 exhibition organized by the New York Center for Book Arts entitled Hedi Kyle and Her Influence, 1973-1993. In 2016, the San Francisco Center for the Book held a solo exhibition for Kyle: “The World of Hedi Kyle: Codex Curios and Bibli’objets“.
And now, in 2018, Laurence King Publishers has brought out the eagerly awaited The Art of the Fold by Kyle and daughter Ulla Warchol, which is the immediate impetus for this essay. The authors aim their book at artists and craftworkers, but there is a secondary audience: anyone interested in book art or artists’ books or origami — and learning how better to appreciate them.
On picking up the book, the first thing its primary and secondary audiences should notice is the folded “dust jacket”. Why the quotation marks? Just look:
“Dust jacket” unfolded, side 1
“Dust jacket” unfolded, side 2
This innovative, subject-appropriate cut, fold and print can set the reader on a hunt for precursors such as Peter and Pat Gentenaar-Torley’s Paper Takes Flight/Papier op de Vlucht, designed by Loes Schepens, where the multilayered dust jacket has small envelopes attached to hold paper samples from the contributing artists, or Doug Beube’s Breaking the Codex, designed by Linda Florio, where the dust jacket includes a perforated bookmark, whose removal implicates the reader in a bit of biblioclasm and challenges Western parochialism.
Paper Takes Flight/Papier op de Vlucht (2006) Peter and Pat Gentenaar-Torley Note how the book’s title is revealed on the second dust jacket from the bottom.
The five opened dust jackets displayed beneath the title page
Bottom-most dust jacket folded from the backboard to the right revealing the airmail envelope, which contains a blank sheet of airmail stationery
The Art of the Fold‘s clean, balanced design (Alexandre Coco) and excellent diagrams (authors) mesh well with the text. While this integrated clarity in the introductory section on Tools, Materials, Terminology, Symbols and Techniques will be appreciated most by artists and paper engineers, the secondary audience of library/gallery curators, aficionados and collectors will benefit from the description and comments in particular on materials, terminology and techniques. Knowing these points about an object of book art enhances appreciation of it and improves its handling, presentation and preservation.
Following this introduction, Kyle and Warchol provide 36 sets of detailed instructions across 5 sections:
The Accordion
Blizzards
One-Sheet Books
Albums
Enclosures
This double-page spread introducing the accordion structure shows off the the diagrams’ clarity, a feature throughout the book. Also in this spread are two important statements in the verso page’s final paragraph:
The accordion fold as an independent component is our focus point in this book…. Let us start with a brief visual display of a variety of folding styles. Hopefully they will inspire you to grab some paper and start folding. (p .28)
The focus on structure “as an independent component” is a strength and weakness. The strength is self-evident in the thoroughness and attention to detail. The weakness? More than occasionally, the authors make asides about the meaningful interaction of structure with content and, occasionally, with other components (type, color, printing technique, etc.). Some exemplars selected by the authors would have been welcome. The artist’s and reader’s challenge is to provide their own examples of how the structural component might work with different types of content, mixed media and other components that combine to deliver the artistic object.
The second statement — the exhortation “to grab some paper and start folding” — illustrates an unalloyed strength of this book. As towering an authority and figure in the book arts and book art as Hedi Kyle is, she and her co-author go out of their way again and again to keep readers open to playing with the techniques and structures and finding their own inventiveness and creativity. For those content to collect or curate, both statements push them to look for or revisit outstanding examples and inventive variants of the structures elucidated. After this section, a browse of Stephen Perkins’ accordion publications, a site running since 2010, would be a good start.
This double-page spread introducing the section on Blizzard structures delivers that blend of the anecdotal with essential engineering-like detail that is characteristic of the authors’ style throughout. Having explained how this family of folded structures that bind themselves got its name (a fold discovered in a daylong fold-a-thon due to a blizzard’s shutting everything down), the authors dive into the proportionality so key to getting them right. Perhaps because of its non-adhesive, origami-centric nature, the blizzard book structure generates more than its fair share of kitsch exemplars. When blizzard books do come along that rise to the level of art — integrating structure, content, printing, typography, color and other components of bookmaking in an artistically meaningful way — they stand out all the more. One such work took first place in the 23 Sandy Gallery’s juried exhibition in 2015, “Hello Hedi”:
Next to The Accordion section, the One-Sheet Books section has the most models. It is also the section that most addresses that challenge mentioned above:
A book folded from a single sheet of paper, including covers, offers a unique opportunity to consider the content and cover as one comprehensive design exercise. We explore the coming together of printing, layout and folding. (P. 94)
Given this opportunity, some treatment of imposition would have been useful, especially for the Franklin Fold and the Booklet Fold Variations. For the Booklet Fold Variations, one could lightly pencil into the book’s clear diagrams the usual markings and enumerations as below.
Again, a few selected photographs of examples of One-Sheet Books that achieve the coming together of content, design, printing, layout and folding would have been welcome.
The double-page spread above with which the Albums section begins exemplifies the book’s quality of photography (by Paul Warchol, Ulla’s husband). Like the “dust jacket”, the crisply photographed Panorama Book structure (upper right) and the pages that explain it will send readers on a quest to make their own or hunt for outstanding examples such as these by Cathryn Miller and Cor Aerssens, a long-time friend and correspondent with Kyle.
Westron Wynde (2016) Cathryn Miller Author’s statement: “This book presents the poem ‘Westron Wynde’ in a purely visual form. Letters become colours, and are used as graphic elements. The book manifests the essence, if not the sense, of the poem.” Westron wynde when wyll thou blow, The smalle rayne down can rayne – Cryst, yf my love wer in my armys And I yn my bed agayne!
Memories (2012) Cor Aerssens
Memories (2012) Cor Aerssens
Memories (2012) Cor Aerssens
A cautionary, or perhaps encouraging, note though: the fact that some structures can enfold others will frustrate readers with strict classificatory minds and exhilarate the more freewheeling. The Phelps’ Blizzard Book highlighted above includes in its sections items exemplifying the Flag Book and Fishbone structures. Aerssens’ Memories is even more so an integrated variant of the Panorama Book structure, featuring as it does panels within panels, two 8-leaf booklets bound into front and back with paper hinges, and mylar folders holding pressed flora from Aerssen’s northern Dutch environs.
The Enclosures section presents fascinating structures, not all of which are suited “to fit many of the projects in the previous chapters”. For example, the second-most fascinating form — the Telescoping Ziggurat, shown in the lower left corner of the recto page above — looks incapable of enclosing any of the other 35 structures. The authors acknowledge it is “less of a book and more of a toy — a stimulating and curious object whose inherent mathematical quality mesmerizes as it spirals inward and outward”. The most fascinating form, however, is as much a book as stimulating and curious object: the Sling Fold structure.
This structure looks suited to enclosing scrolls or narrow, collapsed accordion books of diminishing height, and its mechanics invite playful integration with content and variations of color, typography or calligraphy, printing method and materials.
It would not do to conclude a review of this book without touching on the Flag Book structure, for which Kyle is so well-known. It is found in The Accordion section. The outstanding works implementing this structure are legion. Here it is below in all its glory, which is exceeded only by the Two-Sided Flag book in the pages following it.
The Art of the Fold should become an instant classic. If readers are tempted to “grangerize” their copies with photos and clippings of favorite examples and variants, they would do well instead to create one of the authors’ album structures in which to keep them. There could be many editions of this classic to come.
Update: for more on Kyle and Warchol, see their interview with Helen Hiebert in her series Paper Talk.
It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us…. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.
– On the Origin of Species, 1869, the final paragraph.
In disparate “entangled banks” and micro-climates around the world, book artists and Charles Darwin have evolved a symbiotic relationship. By date and place, here are some bookmarks on that evolution.
1995, Washington, D.C., USA
Carol Barton and Diane Shaw organized the exhibition “Science and the Artist’s Book” for the Smithsonian Institution Libraries and the Washington Project for the Arts. Barton and Shaw invited book artists to respond to works in the Heralds of Science collection in the Smithsonian’s Dibner Library. Among twenty-one other pairings, George Gessert was invited to respond to Charles Robert Darwin’s On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, London, 1859.
Gessert’s response wasNatural Selection(1994), an artist’s book consisting of computer-printed handwriting and Cibachrome prints of the results of Gessert’s own experiments in hybridizing irises. Citing Darwin’s description of the breeding of pigeons for their ornamental characteristics, Gessert contends “that Darwin also recognized aesthetics as an evolutionary factor”. Since the 1980s, Gessert’s work and writings have focused on the way human aesthetics can affect evolution and the aesthetic, ethical and social implications. His work and that of artists/theorists such as Suzanne Anker, Eduardo Kac, Marta De Menezes, the Harrisons and Sonya Rapoport have constituted the bio art and eco art movements. A collection of his essays appeared as Green Light: Toward an Art of Evolution in the Leonardo Book Series, published by The MIT Press in 2010.
Emma Lloyd Evolution Triptych (2004) Part 1 – 10 x 7.5 x 1, Part 2 – 12 x 9 x 2, Part 3 – 8.5 x 6.5 x 1
Inspired by Darwin’s The Descent of Man, Part I, and cell structures in biology texts, Emma Lloyd‘s Evolution Triptych sparks thoughts of fossils, woodcarved altarpieces or the tooled cover of the St Cuthbert Gospel, the code of life embedded in DNA structure and the code of information embedded in the codex.
The artistic technique here – carving the book as artifact – is prevalent in book art; see the work of Doug Beube, Brian Dettmer and Guy Laramée, for example. Lloyd’s treatment of the Darwin volume is the only one of its type in this collection of bookmarks. Given the influence of On the Origin of Species, though, it would be unusual if other “book surgeons” have not been similarly inspired by it.
2009, London, UK
Storyteller and book artist Sam Winston set about categorizing the words in On the Origin of Species and poet Ruth Padel’s Darwin, A Life in Poems (Chatto & Windus, 2009). He sorted them by nouns, verbs, adjectives and “other”. As Winston puts it, he “wanted to present a visual map of how a scientist and a poet use language – a look at how much each author used real world names (Nouns) and more abstract terminology (Verb, Adjective and Other) in their writings.”
To do that, he categorized the 153,535 words in On the Origin – a dot with a 4H pencil for the 50,567 words categorized as “Other”, a 2H pencil for the 38,266 categorized as “Noun”, an HB pencil for the 26,435 categorized as “Verb” and a 4B pencil for the 38,266 categorized as “Adjective”. The result – Darwin, a series of visual “frequency poems” on display at Le Gun Studio in London – is a book altered through the DNA-like pattern of its own words into a completely “other” scroll and into a topographical map of itself – guided by the artist’s hand and mind.
Sam Winston Darwin (2009)
Right view. Sam Winston, Darwin (2009) Le Gun Studio, 19 Warburton Road, London, E8 3RT, UK
In the same sesquicentennial year, in the same city, Stefanie Posavec collaborated with Greg McInerny to issue (En)tangled Word Bank, a series of diagrams, each representing an edition of On the Origin of Species, and the work’s title alluding to Darwin’s “entangled bank” passage presented above.The pressed-dandelion-shaped chapters and subchapters are divided into paragraph ‘leaves’ with wedge-shaped ‘leaflets’ representing their sentences.
The sentences forming the ‘leaflets’ of the organism are of orange, senescent tones when they will be deleted in following editions. The green, growth tones are applied to those sentences that have life in the following edition. The tone of each colour is determined by its age, in editions, to that point. Through these differences in colouration the simplicity in structure in the early stages of the organism’s life develops into a complex form, showing when the structures developed to its changing environment. Around the organisms the textual code is provided, showing the changes in the size of the organism, and where the senescence and growth is derived in that code. A series of re-arrangements of the organism focus on changes at each level of organisation.
This is “structural infographic” as art.
Stefanie Posavec and Greg McInerny for Microsoft Research, Cambridge (En)tangled Word Bank (2009)
2009, Boston, MA, USA
Across the Atlantic, Ben Fry, author of Visualizing Data (O’Reilly, 2007), created a similar work of art called The Preservation of Favoured Traces. Fry color-coded each word of Darwin’s final text by the edition in which it first appeared and used the data to build an interactive display at fathom.com demonstrating the changes at the macro level and word-by-word. Fry went on to produce a poster version and print-on-demand book version.
Ben Fry The Preservation of Favoured Traces (2009)
2009, Vancouver, Canada
Three thousand miles away that summer, Canadian poets Stephen Collis and Jordan Scott placed multiple copies of On the Origin of Species in various outdoor locations “not … to put the natural into the text, [but] … to put the text out into the natural world and see what happens to it” (p. 2). After a year, Collis and Scott photographed the results in situ and collected and used the some of the still decipherable words as found text for their volume Decomp (Coach House Press, 2013).
Former science teacher and now botanical artist and bookmaker, Kelly Houle embarked on a 10-year plan to create an illuminated and scribed copy of the first edition of On the Origin. Where medieval scribes and rubricators had abbots to preside over them and their book art, Houle has University of Chicago Professor Emeritus Jerry A. Coyne and several other academics. As she notes about her process, the past techniques have also yielded to present concerns:
Kelly M. Houle The Illuminated Origin (2009 – ) Watercolor, gouache, interference watercolor, gold foil, shell gold on Fabriano Artistico, 22 x 30 inches
Today many artists still practice the tradition of illumination using medieval and renaissance-era materials and techniques. While many of these have stood the test of time, there are more earth-friendly materials than those used in the past….
Detail of frontispiece Courtesy of the artist
The Illuminated Origin of Species will be written on hot-pressed Fabriano Artistico paper made in Italy. It is the best paper in the world for both calligraphy and botanical art. These are extremely smooth, beautiful, and durable papers. They are chlorine-free, acid-free, and 100% cotton. No animal by-products are used in the sizing. Combined with Winsor and Newton watercolors and gouache, this paper will be perfect for the demands of The Illuminated Origin.
Detail of frontispiece Courtesy of the artist
To mimic the play of light on various shiny and iridescent surfaces in nature, I am using 23k gold foil, shell gold, and interference watercolors, which contain small flecks of mica to produce an iridescent effect. These metals will distinguish The Illuminated Origin as a truly “illuminated” manuscript. — Kelly M. Houle, “The Making of a Modern Illuminated Manuscript“
Houle aims to complete her work in 2019,On the Origin‘s 160th anniversary.
2009, Farnham, Surrey, UK
Between its hardback covers lined in marbled papers, Angela Thames’ Darwin’s Poetic Words has distilled the often liturgical, poetic passages of On the Origin of Species.
Angela Thames Darwin’s Poetic Words (2009) Hardbound, 12 pages, 12 x 8 cm, 8 linocuts, Somerset paper
Between 2009 and 2013, Thames created four more artist’s books besides Darwin’s Poetic Words, based on excerpts from On the Origin of Species. In this focus and technique, Thames takes and interprets portions rather than the whole of the source as do Houle, Collis and Scott, Fry, McInerny and Posavec, Winston, and Lloyd in their differing ways.
Angela Thames Evident Evolution (2009-13) Collagraph images of bone structures and text, 8 pages, Silkscreen covers, Spiral bound edition
Angela Thames A Grain in the Balance (2009-13) Collagraph images with rubber-stamped text, 8x10cm, 15 pages, Somerset beige paper
Angela Thames Poor Man (2009-13) Folded card with pop up flower, Words spoken by his gardener, Silkscreen, wood-stamped text, Open edition
Poor Man (2009-13) is the only exhibit in this survey that demonstrates the pop-up technique in book artistry, but as evolutionary biology and fossil-hunting have shown, who knows what undiscovered forms are out there.
2012, New York, NY, USA
Following in their tradition since 1984, Tim Rollins and K.O.S. (“Kids of Survival”) seized on Darwin’s “Tree of Life” diagram
Darwin’s notebook sketch of an evolutionary tree. Charles Robert Darwin, Transmutation of Species, 1837
and “jammed” to produce a series of paintings and preliminary works in ink and watercolor on pages of the book to create ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES (after Darwin). Eighteen students, aged 13 to 16, worked with Rollins on the preliminary studies, one of which appears below, that preceded the 2013 exhibition of paintings at the Lehmann Maupin Gallery.
Tim Rollins and K.O.S. Studies for ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES (after Darwin) (2014) Ink and watercolor on book page, 22.9 x 15.2 cm Photo credit: Lehmann Maupin Gallery
The large-scale paintings consist of almost all of the 360 pages of On the Origin fixed to canvas and ink-stamped over and over with the “Tree of Life” image, which had been cut into 60 handstamps. Rollins described the concept of the works in an interview for Brooklyn Rail:
The whole book is 360 pages but we don’t ever want to be literal so it’s not all of the pages. They’re there to inspire. It’s like an opera. The libretto inspires the music. You can watch an opera in a language you don’t know, without reading. It’s the same with our work. It’s about a visual correspondence with the text. The work is not about something. That’s why you can’t get hung up on interpretation. That’s a big issue, especially with so much politically engaged art. We want to create a situation, learning machines, so everyone is learning in the process of making and then hopefully the audience will be inspired too. Maybe they will pick up Darwin or continue with the idea. These are catalysts for action.
In a video interview with ArtNet, Rollins also refers to the K.O.S. jamming process -reading aloud from the book in a studio setting, discussing it with students and seeking inspiration from the text – not as a school lesson or classroom exercise but as a kind of séance, an assertion that touches the essence of “reverse ekphrasis” in book art. Rather than the literary work or book capturing the spirit of a work of art, the work of art captures the spirit of the book.
2013/14, Oxford, OH, USA
At the University of Puget Sound (2013) and Center for Book Art in New York (2014), Diane Stemper exhibited her Darwin-inspired book art that explores “the intersection between the natural world, daily living, science and the collective and individual experience of landscape”.
Diane Stemper Universal Sample (2014) Edition of 4, Intaglio and letterpress on Arches
Diane Stemper Universal Sample (2014) Edition of 4, Intaglio and letterpress on Arches
Diane Stemper Universal Sample (2014) Edition of 4, Intaglio and letterpress on Arches
Hand bound, printed and produced in her Plat 21 Studio, in Oxford, her Galapagos Map (2013), Darwin’s Atlantic Sea (2014) and Universal Sample (2014), these works have an eerie physical presence. At the Center for Book Art, I have seen and, with the kind permission of Alex Campos, the curator there, touched the works. The intaglio printing and richly textured creamy paper still communicate themselves even across the digital divide.
2014, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, and London, UK
Simon Phillipson completed a variorum edition of On the Origin of Species, in which every verso page is the evolved or amended text and the recto page is the final text from the the Sixth edition.
Charles Robert Darwin, On the Origin of Species, variorum edition designed by Simon Phillipson, 2014. Printed in the Netherlands on special 60gsm bible paper and finished with a special metallic bronze ink
The verso pages are completely printed in a special metallic bronze ink. The recto is printed in a combination of black and bronze ink. The bronze highlighted words in the recto correspond to the evolving or amending text in the verso. Very reminiscent of, but distinct from, Ben Fry’s The Preservation of Favoured Traces (see above).
2014, Minneapolis, MN
Vesna Kittelson, Mrs. Darwin’s Garden, Book Two (2014) Accordion book, 9 x 7 in
Vesna Kittelson is an American-Croatian artist based in Minneapolis. Her résumé cites public collections ranging from Tate Britain and Minnesota Museum of American Art to Cafesjian Center for the Arts in Armenia and the Modern Museum of Art in Croatia. In 2009, she spent time at Churchill College, Cambridge University, where she learned about the life and marriage of Charles Darwin and Emma Wedgwood. Subsequently she created four artist books titled Mrs. Darwin’s Garden depicting primitive-seeming plants imagined as flora that Darwin might have seen from the deck of the Beagle. The names of the plants are made-up Latin names or variations on those of contemporary plants.
Vesna Kittelson, Mrs. Darwin’s Garden, Book Two, 2014 Accordion book, 9 x 7 in
These abstract images are imagined plants for Mrs. Darwin’s garden. They are illustrations of named floral specimens that never existed in reality. In Mrs. Darwin’s Garden they are presented as if they correspond to data derived from Darwin’s experimentation in his greenhouse. In this book I replaced the 19th C methods of botanical drawing with pouring paints to incorporate the contemporary notion of valuing an accident, followed by drawing with brushes and pencils to gain control and give the images a place and time in the 21st C.
2014, Grasswood, Saskatchewan, Canada
Jonathan Skinner (Warwick University) wrote in his preface to Decomp (see above):
Writing rots, meaning flees. … Yet the book is written to locate (some) meaning here. Would it make any difference to leave Decomp itself in the wilderness? Probably not.
Book artist, papermaker and co-founder with her husband David Miller of Byopia Press, Cathryn Miller reviewed Decomp in 2013. If not prompted by Skinner’s preface, Miller must have felt how appropriately evolutionary it would be to attempt to replicate the Decomp experiment by substituting the result of that experiment for the subject of the replicating experiment. Thus, in January 2014, Miller nailed to a tree “a book based on letting brand new copies of On the Origin of Species rot in various locations”.
Cathryn Miller Recomp (2014) Copy of Decomp, Collis and Scott (2013) nailed to a tree Photo credit: David G. Miller
For over twenty months, Miller monitored and husband David photographed the book’s weathering. That, however, was not the transformation that would result in an altered book and possibly a work of book art. Nature had some ironic appropriateness in store for Miller, Skinner, Collis, Scott and all of us. The blown pages were visited by Bald-faced Hornets, who digested them á la John Latham and his students but regurgitated them as cellulose with which to build a large nest.
Cathryn Miller Recomp (2015) Photo credit: David G. Miller
Cathryn Miller and Bald-faced Hornets Recomp (2015) Nest composed of pages from Decomp, Collis and Scott (2013) Photo credit: David G. Miller
In the context of book art, the nest offers a curiously serendipitous digression. In 1719, the French naturalist René Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur published an essay to the Royal Academy of Sciences on the natural history of wasps. In the passage below, he hypothesizes how their natural papermaking industry could be adopted by man.
In 2015, Miller presented the results as Recomp in her blog at Byopia Press. In September that year, however, critics (raccoons, the artist thinks) visited the work and deconstructed it.
Recomp vandalized, 2015 Photo credit: David G. Miller
Might this prove that, to paraphrase the last paragraph of On the Origin, “by laws acting around us…. from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals [and their art], directly follows”? If so, that makes raccoons and critics equal laws of nature.
2015, Umeå, Sweden
Johannes Heldén’s work Field is book, visual art and installation all in one. Heldén’s is perhaps the darkest variant on Darwin’s theme here.
It consists of interactive landscape animations on a floor touchscreen of 20 sqm,
Johannes Heldén Field (2015) Produced, and premiered, at HUMlab, Umeå University
a series of sculptural mutations of the Eurasian Jackdaw*,
Johannes Heldén Field (2015) Produced, and premiered, at HUMlab, Umeå University
an ever-changing soundscape and an interactive screen wall with a text responding to the changing DNA of the bird
Johannes Heldén Field (2015) Produced, and premiered, at HUMlab, Umeå University
– as the ”code” of todays species is slowly lost, so is the code and context of language. The gaps in the text correspond to the shift in the DNA sequence, prose turns into dark poetry, connections and meaning changing for each iteration.
Johannes Heldén Field (2015) Produced, and premiered, at HUMlab, Umeå University
Johannes Heldén Field (2015) Produced, and premiered, at HUMlab, Umeå University
All these pieces are connected: as you explore the landscape and trigger the glowing touch points with your body, time is rapidly speeding up (clouds move over the scene, trees wither away, a flood is coming), one by one the four bird sculptures in the installation will be ”activated” with light and sound, spiraling the species further down into mutations. At the end of the piece, no lights remain in the landscape, the sound is immense, all mutations have occurred, the last poetry dissolves into entropy. Then all fades to black.
Since Darwin’s theory encompassed extinction, perhaps Heldén’s vision is not so much a variant on Darwin as it is a pessimistic appreciation and warning about the impact of our interaction with the entangled bank.
2016, Guildford, Surrey, UK
Cathryn Miller’s “bio-book-art” and that of Collis and Scott stand at the collaboration end of the bio art spectrum, where the artist yields considerable control to nature in the creative process. At the coordination end of the spectrum – closer to domestication of species – stands Dr. Simon F. Park’s bio-book-art – The Origin of Species – perhaps “the first book to be grown and produced using just bacteria”. Presented at the Edinburgh International Science Festival, the small book has pages made of bacterial cellulose, produced by the bacterium Gluconoacetobacter xylinus (GXCELL). Its cover is even printed with naturally pigmented bacteria.
Dr. Simon F Park The Origin of Species “The small book shown here was grown from and made entirely from bacteria. Not only is the fabric of its pages (GXCELL) produced by bacteria, but the book is also printed and illustrated with naturally pigmented bacteria. ” Posted 27 March 2016 Photo credit: Dr. Simon F. Park
Although Park’s science-driven process for paper manufacturing and printing echoes the speculations of French naturalist René Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur (see above), it seems to have much in common with the painstaking craft of handmade paper and hand letterpress printing. The first sheet of Park’s micro-organically grown paper took a little under two weeks to be generated and stencilled with his bacterial ink.
2016, Colchester, Essex, UK
It seems chronologically backwards to move from bio-book-art’s live media to Chris Ruston’s ammonites of The Great Gathering. As should be evident by now, however, the evolution of the symbiotic relationship between book artists and Darwin has been anything but a straight line. It has curved, circled and recursed.
Tim Rollins + K.O.S may have had their séance 30-50 feet away from Darwin’s lodgings in Edinburgh, but Chris Ruston brought her Darwin-inspired book art to an even more fitting venue: a church converted into Colchester’s Natural History Museum.
Natural History Museum Colchester, Essex, England Photo credit: Chris Ruston
As the artist comments at her site:
The Great Gathering refers to our continued exploration of where we have come from, and where we are going. Combined the seven volumes tell an amazing story spanning 650 million years. Sculptural in form, each book reflects a moment of this journey. From black holes and dark beginnings, through ocean and sediment layers, Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, and recycled National Geographic magazines the work charts the inevitability of change.
View of exhibition of The Great Gathering Natural History Museum, Colchester Photo credit: Chris Ruston
They are a response to visiting Museum collections, in particular the Natural History Museum, Colchester and the Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences Cambridge. Fossils have enabled us to unlock the story of our Origins – from the largest creatures to the smallest organisms. The 19th century saw an explosion of knowledge and understanding, culminating in Darwin’s publication of On the Origin of Species. By piecing together the riddle of the fossil record, Darwin and his contemporaries began asking revolutionary and challenging questions, the results of which are still felt today.
View of exhibition of The Great Gathering Natural History Museum Photo credit: Chris Ruston
Science and art are the presiding geniuses over The Great Gathering. In The sciences of the artificial (1969), Herbert Simon emphasized: “The natural sciences are concerned with the way things are” and engineering, with the way things ought to be to attain goals. Like the scientist, the artist, too, is concerned with the way things are. They are the raw material with which the artist works or to which he or she responds. But like the engineer or the designer, the artist is concerned with the way things ought to be:
Chris Ruston The Great Gathering, 2016 Photo credit: Chris Matthews
how a solander box ought to be constructed to operate with the work and, in enclosing it, be “the work”;
Chris Ruston The Great Gathering (2016) Photo credit: Chris Matthews
what materials (photos from the Hubble telescope) ought to be used to reflect a moment in time;
Chris Ruston The Great Gathering (2016) Photo credit: Chris Matthews
how thread, tape and stitch ought to be to hold together a spine that will flex and spiral into the shape of a fossil;
Chris Ruston The Great Gathering (2016) Photo credit: Chris Matthews
how the color of the material ought to be juxtaposed with the material’s altered shape to carry meaning;
Chris Ruston The Great Gathering (2016) Photo credit: Chris Matthews
how the shift from content to blankness ought to be juxtaposed with the material’s altered shape to carry meaning;
Chris Ruston The Great Gathering (2016) Photo credit: Chris Matthews
how the selection and alteration of text ought to be made to show the fixity and flux of knowledge and ourselves;
Chris Ruston The Great Gathering (2016) Photo credit: Chris Matthews
and how our reflection in the mirror in Volume VII under the maker’s tools and the made thing ought to implicate us — the viewer here and now – in an ongoing process of making and remaking.
On display at “Turn the Page”, Norwich, England (2016) Photo credit: Chris Ruston
If you have come this far with these bookmarks on the evolution of book artists’ symbiosis with Darwin, note that today and every 12th of February is Darwin Day, marking international celebrations of the birth of Charles Darwin and his contributions to science. From today’s engagements and all those to come with the concepts of On the Origin of Species and (I hope) with these bookmarks, perhaps new discoveries and new creations of book art will emerge.
Update
Sam Winston Modern Gods (2013) Photo: Books On Books Collection
Modern Gods follows on from Winston’s Darwin (2009) and consists of three “sacred” scrolls, each bearing a mandala formed by the names and symbols in type of the chemical elements that compose the modern god the scroll represents: the Rolex President watch, the pay-as-you-go SIM card, and Darwin’s On the Origin of Species.
Modern Gods is partially an example of inverse ekphrasis — where a visual artwork aims to re-present something already presented by a written text. Not the same thing as an illustrated book or livre d’artiste.
Rolex, SIM, On the Origin of Species
Like the works displayed above, Winston’s third scroll offers an example of visual and textual representation of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, which adds to the unusually lengthy list of works inspired by Darwin’s book. (Perhaps no surprise, but the Memory Palace project also commissioned Stephanie Posavec, whose earlier work also appears above).
Modern Gods was commissioned by Victoria & Albert Publishing as a response to a new piece of fiction it had commissioned from novelist Hari Kunzru along with 19 other visual works in response. As the V&A curators put it, Kunzru’s Memory Palace (2013) and the original commissions from the 20 graphic designers and illustrators would form the basis of an “exhibition that can be read. … [to explore] what happens when a story leaves the pages of a book and enters the gallery space.” Modern Gods stands on its own as an extraordinary fusion of type, word, image, material, and structure.
AMBruno’s last project Finale proved to be a fertile prompt for 19 artists and their 18 works. I thank Sophie Loss and John MacDowall for the fun and honor of reviewing the entries.
When I consider an artist’s book for acquisition or inclusion in an exhibit, I want it to make me read with my eyes, hands, and mind. Following the text is not enough. It should demand that I see the shapes of letters, words, images, pages, and the entire work itself. Turning a page is not enough. It should demand that I handle, unfold, rotate, manipulate – feel it. Mentally deciphering the work’s signs is not enough. I want it to make me think – about how the shape, material, and making work together – about how artists’ books before this one may be present – about how other literary, visual, sculptural, architectural, performative, or even digital art may be present.
So, you can appreciate what a challenge it was to select works on the basis of a few sentences or paragraphs describing what the artists planned to submit.
Now add that the proposals’ ranged from simple pamphlet fold to intricate concertina pop-up and to piano-hinged sculpture, from relief prints to photographic prints, from a Renaissance nude to a carnivalesque Full Monte, from entirely text to entirely blank, and from celebration to lamentation and back.
Now add their settings from fireworks displays, theatrical productions, the Book of Common Prayer’s Order for the Burial of the Dead, book burnings, a mythic road trip, and a televised lunar crash.
And then add the range of literary and other media influences – from the Greek myths, Bronzino, John Donne, James Joyce, Heinrich Heine, Georges Perec, J.B. Priestley, to the evening television news.
As I mentioned, it was an honor to be tortured with the challenge of imagining what the artists intended. On seeing the final results with Sophie and John via Zoom, my imagination was much relieved and delighted.
As I watched the artists present their works and the audience inspect the Finale selections, look hard and long, touch them, and think slowly, I was convinced of their delight as well.
As a group, the entries represented almost every variety of artist’s book I have encountered. One form missing though was the un-openable book. I feared that someone might propose a tombstone carved in the shape of a book which would weigh like a lump on the proceedings. There was, however, a book that took on the shape of a tombstone but seemed to take flight when opened. And although among the entries there were mourners for the final AMBruno project, there were celebratory memorializers as well. In fact, as Sophie and John reviewed the arrivals alphabetically for me by Zoom, I laughed that chance ended our session with Roy Willingham’s Touch Paper, a wonderfully structured diamond-shaped concertina whose folios each burst open to name a traditional English firework and combine to make a larger diamond.
How fitting that the finale of AMBruno’s Finale turns out to be a firework display that should prompt not only oohs and aahs but also a round of applause for Sophie Loss and friends for the 16 AMBruno projects over the past 14 years.
The nineteen Finale artists were: Karen Blake, Laure Catugier, Claudia de la Torre, Judy Goldhill, Susan Johanknecht & Katharine Meynell, Rafael Klein, Pauline Lamont-Fisher, Philip Lee, Sophie Loss, John McDowall, Alastair Noble, Linda Parr, Ximena Pérez Grobet, Peter Rapp, Mireille Ribière, Cally Trench, Maria White, and Roy Willingham. Visit the AMBruno siteand shop for additional views of the works.
Photography: Books On Books Collection, Sophie Loss, Judy Goldhill, Philip Lee, DDK, Julie Jones, Julia Davy-Brown, and Steve Davy-Brown.
