Books On Books Collection – Michelle Stuart

The Fall (1976)

The Fall (1976)
Michelle Stuart
Saddlestitched with staples in landscape format, glossy paper. H x W mm. 28 pages. Acquired from Specific Object, 15 March 2024.
Photos of the work: Books On Books Collection.

The Fall is one of the earliest publications of Printed Matter, founded in 1976 by a group of individuals working in the arts (among them artist Sol LeWitt and critic Lucy Lippard).

The Fall juxtaposes pages of handwritten text with reproduced photographic views of California, Oregon, and the Pacific Coast. It begins, however, with a one-page fable without any image. The tale describes a fevered recordkeeping in an unnamed state and country (presumably the US) and how their respective written histories came to occupy an entire city, then the entire state and finally the entire country. According to the story, succeeding generations lost interest in history, deeming it to be useless and consigning it to “its seasonal destiny”. Now, only fragments of it are to be found in the Western deserts. The fable’s conclusion: “Depending on ones [sic] view [,] fragments of time have dimension.” With this introduction, each page of text and its facing image become one of these fragments, and the images’ paired photos for antique stereoscopic viewers add a wryness to the fable’s qualification “depending on one’s view”. The ending, however, signals deeper points to come, as does the absence of an image with the fable.

Place and date introduce almost all of the entries — Monterey 1602, Salinas 1842, Tuolumne 1857, Santa Catalina 1758, Pala 1964, Cuyamaca 1847, Calabasas 1890, El Tejon Pass 1851, Soledad 1906, Yang-Na 1769 — but sometimes there is just a place, sometime just a date. Most of the entries come from the unidentified companion of a female character named Red Poppy, who sometimes makes entries in her own voice, and they end with the undated burial of Red Poppy at Yosemite, Mariposa County, her grave marked “with a pile of white quartz”. The entries come in varied tones — fabulistic, folkloric, vatic, mythic, cosmological, philosophical, reportorial and personal. As the list of places and dates above shows, the entries are not chronological, reflecting how time and space fold separately and together in The Fall. How else to explain the writer’s span of experience from the sixteenth to twentieth century, or to make sense of “vast maps that charted the passage of time and captured the essence of place” carried on the journey recorded. The Borgesian idea of a 1:1 map expands to envelop time as well as space.

Many of the images that follow the fable depict views of waterfalls, yet the title of the work is The Fall. Why the missing “s”?

Another artist’s book in the Books On Books Collection that uses the technique of juxtaposing indirectly related text and photos to capture a mythic sense of time and space is Charles Agel’s Monuments to the Industrial Revolution (1998), but in Agel’s volume, human depredation of the environment goes far beyond the European invasion of North America and the Gold Rush mining in Stuart’s. Outside the collection perhaps among the works associated with Dick Higgins’ Something Else Press, there is book art that offers additional points of comparison and contrast. Alongside The Fall, the ideal point of comparison and contrast would capture its pre-haptic, pre-material lead-up to Stuart’s techniques of rubbing earth into paper or pounding it with rocks or scrolling it 460 feet down a cliff into the Niagara River where the Falls were located in the last Ice Age.

Niagara Gorge Path Relocated (1975)
Rocks, earth (red Iron Oxide) on muslin-backed rag paper (Artpark, Lewiston, NY) 140 x 1.5m (460 feet x 5 feet 2 in)
Courtesy: © Michelle Stuart

Which brings us back to the missing “s” in The Fall. Critics point out Stuart’s constant theme of the interaction of time, place and change, but there is also a layered ache in that theme that emerges from the text and its juxtaposition with those antique stereoscopic images. At one layer, it is the ache for the places and time before those flat images of the North American West. At another, it is for a pre-colonial North America. At another, it is for pre-historic, pre-human North America. In all, it is before the Fall.

Courtesy of the artist, the Alison Jacques Gallery and ADA X Gallery, below are images of Stuart’s more haptic and sculptural artist’s books created in the same period as The Fall.

San Juan Ermita de Chiquimula (1978)
Cloth, string, muslin-mounted rag paper (earth and rock marks from site in San Juan Ermita de Chiquimula, Guatemala). 22.9 x 17.8 x 7.6 cm.
Courtesy: © Michelle Stuart.

Wind Book: Tikal (1978)
Earth and feather from site in Tikal Guatemala, muslin-mounted rag paper. 3.8 x 33 x 25.4 cm.
Courtesy: © Michelle Stuart.

Every Wave Book (for Melville) (1979)
Earth, sand, sea pebbles, linen, muslin-mounted rag paper. Dimensions variable: 35.6 x 20.3 x 8.9 cm.
Courtesy: © Michelle Stuart.

Another of Stuart’s more sculptural artist’s books is Language of Marks (Maroc) (1983), which is displayed in the ADA X exhibition in Zurich (Obere Zäune 8), 23 March – 16 June 2024. Note how the cover alone embodies the themes of The Fall.

Language of Marks (Maroc) (1983)
Mixed media. 30.5 x 25.4 x 7.0 cm.
Courtesy: © Michelle Stuart.

Review of “COUP DE DÉS (COLLECTION)”

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Why should an obscure poem like Stéphane Mallarmé’s groundbreaking Un Coup de Dés Jamais N’Abolira le Hasard: Poème (1897) have become the cornerstone of an art-industrial complex of literary, critical and artistic responses ranging from essays, books, edited collections, countless editions, and appropriations in the form of fine press livres d’artiste, book art and sculptures, films and theater, ballets and fado, musical compositions, digital programs and installations, and even pavement art? It was never even produced under Mallarmé’s hand in the form he intended. We have the poet’s manuscripts and proofs. We have his son-in-law’s efforts with the publisher Éditions de la Nouvelle Révue Française (NRF) in 1914 to present Un Coup de Dés in accordance with Mallarmé’s plans. In many ways, their liberty of including the preface from the 1897 Cosmopolis version so unsatisfactory to the poet paved the way for artistic/editorial interventions and art-industrial complex to come.

With this exhibition and edited catalogue COUP DE DÉS (COLLECTION) at the New York Center for Book Arts, Michalis Pichler does not so much ignore the question as answer it by extending the art-industrial complex. The exhibition and catalogue are more than a mere display and list of over 150 works. Taken together and with his own artistic practices, they represent a multi-faceted artwork in its own right. The core constituent of this artwork is Pichler’s extensive collection of editions of Un Coup de Dés, critical works and the numerous instances of the century-plus of appropriations, including his own, of the poem. In effect, Pichler has developed the activity of collecting, appropriating and publishing into an artistic practice.

(COLLECTION) is the second and further developed instance of Pichler’s practice. The first occurred in Milan in 2016 with an invitation card appropriating the format and title of Marcel Broodthaers’ Exposition littéraire autour de Mallarmé at the Wide White Space in Antwerp in 1969. Pichler appropriated not only the title and card of Broodthaers’ exhibition, he appropriated its content, redisplaying Broodthaers’ landmark UN COUP DE DÉS JAMAIS N’ABOLIRA LE HASARD (IMAGE) and many of the editions of the poem that Broodthaers had included.

Top: Invitation to Marcel Broodthaers’ Exposition Littéraire autour de Mallarmé at the Wide White Space Gallery, Antwerp, December 1969; image courtesy of MACBA. Bottom: Invitation to Michalis Pichler’s Exposition littéraire autour de Mallarmé, Kunstverein Milano and Il Lazzaretto, 14 December 2016 – 28 January 2017.; with permission of Michalis Pichler.

With its introduction of his landmark (IMAGE), Broodthaers’ exhibition marked a transformative moment for the Mallarméan art-industrial complex. By blotting out the lines of Mallarmé’s poem with strips of black ink, Broodthaers elevated image over text. In its wake, we have had

Jérémie Bennequin’s (OMAGE DÉ-COMPOSITION), (OMAGE) and (FILM)
Raffaella della Olga’s (CONSTELLATION), (PERMUTATION) and (TRAME)
Sammy Engramer’s (ONDE) or (WAVE)
Benjamin Lord’s (SEQUENCE)
Michael Maranda’s (LIVRE)
Richard Nash’s (ESPACE)
Aurélie Noury’s (RUBIK’S CUBE) and (POSTER)
Michalis Pichler’s (SCULPTURE) and (MUSIQUE)
Sam Sampson’s (((SUN-O)))
Klara Vith’s (DISCOURS I-III)
Eric Zboya’s 2018 (VECTEUR) and (TRANSLATIONS)

Like Broodthaers’ (IMAGE), each of these appropriations remakes the poem (and sometimes a previous artist’s remaking) through its parenthetically indicated tag. For instance, Pichler’s (SCULPTURE) replaces Mallarmé’s pages with plexiglas sheets and Broodthaer’s blottings with abrasions. But Pichler’s parenthetical tag (COLLECTION) is omnivorous. It consumes again Broodthaers’ Exposition, eating Mallarmé’s poem in its several incarnations; devours all the parenthetical appropriators, including (SCULPTURE); swallows the many other appropriators lacking a parenthetical tag; and picks its teeth with works that merely allude to the poem’s title.

The reverse of Pichler’s displayed print Bibliophagia (2024) reveals this cannibalistic metaphor as central to the artistic practice that yields (COLLECTION) as an artwork in its own right. Visitors may miss the import of the print’s reverse side until leaving the exhibition because that side is not displayed, although it can be found on the free copy offered onsite.

Pichler’s 2016 and 2024 exhibitions add another constituent practice to this project: that of performance art, but with the visitor as performer. Like a work of performance art, an exhibition has a venue and displays that serve as the stage setting. Performance art and exhibitions are both time-delimited, fixed within the period and hours of the venue’s availability. Where the length of a performance is constrained by the artist/performer’s stamina, this exhibition’s is constrained by the visitor’s stamina. Fortunately with Pichler’s performances, a less-than-indefatigable visitor has something other than a leaflet of performance notes as guide and souvenir: the volume COUP DE DÉS (COLLECTION): Books and Ideas after Mallarmé. This volume’s three essays and two book excerpts work together with the snapshots of the exhibition to put forward this premise that (COLLECTION) is intended as an artistic work in its own right.

COUP DE DÉS (COLLECTION): Books and Ideas after Mallarmé (2024)
Michalis Pichler (ed.)
Perfect bound paperback. H240 x W170 mm. 280 pages. Acquired from AHA-Buch, 22 January 2024. Photos: Books On Books Collection.

In addition to recapitulating the Bibliophagia manifesto, Pichler’s introductory essay provides the background to the appearance and editioning of Un Coup de Dés and also explains the relevance of the two book-excerpts. Pichler’s translation with Misaki Kawabe from Ryōko Sekiguchi’s book”Nagori” is welcome apart from any role it plays in (COLLECTION). As a concept, nagori has popped up in book art with Victor Burgin’s 2020 essay “Nagori: Writing with Barthes” and with Nagori (2023), a sculptural artist’s book by Ximena Pérez Grobet and and Kati Riquelme. Depending on context, nagori can mean the ephemeral imprint of withdrawing waves, a late-season wistfulness for the taste of early-season fruit or tea, what remains after the passing of a person, an object, an event, or the atmosphere of something missing. Pichler ties this to the absence of an authoritative edition of the poem.

The sense of something missing also comes up in the second book excerpt: Luc Boltanski and Arnaud Esquerre’s Enrichment: A Critique of Commodities (Polity, 2020). Pichler enlists them to establish what distinguishes a collection from a heap on the one hand and a stockpile on the other (pp.73-90), not merely accumulating items in a collection but curating according to governing principles, similarities, differences, and the feel for what is missing. (Recall the “missing” bird on both sides of Bibliophagia above?) In a sense, the act of collection or curation is a form of appropriation, and in that sense, Pichler’s governing principle of collection has been the appropriation of appropriations but always with a hungry eye for the next. To paraphrase Bibliophagia, Pichler has made many acquaintances and chosen but a few as his favorite meal.

Here, Annette Gilbert’s essay chimes in to assert that “curating has now ascended to a full-fledged artistic practice in its own right” where “literary curators are also increasingly succeeding in creating ‘a new artist-like identity’ for themselves and inscribing their ‘collections’ as autonomous works of their own right in their own oeuvre, of which Michalis Pichler’s COUP DE DÉS (COLLECTION) … is a striking example.” (p.52)

Tellingly, Gilbert’s assertion comes in the context of mapping the field of “appropriation literature” as a manifestation of the pressures of an affluent society giving rise to “new strategies of artistic production and the creation of meaning” (p.29), echoing Felix Stalder’s observation: “in the digital condition, one of the methods (if not the most fundamental method) enabling humans to participate […] in the collective negotiation of meaning is the system of creating references.” (p.31) And what is Pichler’s collecting if not a systematic creation of references among the works in (COLLECTION)?

Craig Dworkin’s essay bizarrely and brilliantly connects Mallarmé with another system of creating references: Alphonse Bertillon’s identification system for the Parisian Préfecture de Police. Not only did the Bertillon system overlap with Mallarmé in the 19th century, it turns out that its principles map directly onto Mallarmé’s conception of Le Livre as stacks of unbound sheets filed in the cubbyholes of a filing cabinet and awaiting a theatrical performance of a séance leader’s withdrawing sheets to arrive at a poem (rather than the flic‘s pulling them to arrive at the identification of a suspect). Dworkin goes on to make convincing links to Klaus Scherübel’s styrofoam edition of Le Livre, to Dan Graham’s “Poem Schema”, to Ernest Fraenkel’s Les Dessins trans-conscients de Stéphane Mallarmé, to Mario Diacono’s and Marcel Broodthaers’ blotted versions of the poem, to Derek Beaulieu’s tattered sails (after un coup de des), and to Rainier Lericolais’ and Michalis Pichler’s die-cut perforations, among others. All of which leads to Dworkin’s assured conclusion: “The editions and appropriations of UN COUP DE DÉS alone are substantial enough to have led to an exhibition, and a sense of the assembled collection, UN COUP DE DÉS (COLLECTION), as an artistic work in its own right.” (p.67)

The “Catalog” section, which includes over 150 pages of images of book covers and spreads variously at 1:5, 1:2 and 1:1 scale against a black background, presents more items than are displayed in the exhibition. One of them is Pichler’s editorial intervention in that very first editorial intervention in the poem: the PRÉFACE required of Mallarmé in 1897 by Cosmopolis and reproduced by his son-in-law in the 1914 edition. Here Pichler’s annotations call out 10 key aspects of the poem and Mallarmé’s thoughts about it that would lead to the overlapping industry of artistic homage, appropriation, expropriation, transculturation, transvaloration and cannibal translation or bibliophagia as Pichler variously puts it.

This contribution from Pichler not only echoes many of Annette Gilbert’s points in mapping the field of appropriation literature but also confirms her assertion: “Pichler’s project … positions itself decidedly both as an independent artistic work and as artistic research, which demonstratively opens itself up to chance and serendipity through its collection policy – in resonance with a dice roll as the object of the collection ….” (p.39).

COUP DE DÉS (COLLECTION) — the bookwork — belongs in any library with an interest in Mallarmé, book art or the cutting edge of contemporary art. The exhibition at the Center for Book Arts closes on 1 May 2024. Copies of the catalogue for sale remain on hand as do free copies of the print Bibliophagia (2024) and the invitation from Pichler’s 2016 Exposition littéraire autour de Mallarmé.

As with the 2016 exhibition, the majority of items on display were accessible, making the exhibition a rare hands-on experience.

Courtesy of Center for Book Arts

Before the opening, the poem was chalked onto the floor of the main display room. Within minutes of the opening, the visitor traffic had erased most of it.

On the wall: Bibliophagia, 2016 and 2024. Hanging: UN COUP DE DÉS JAMAIS N’ABOLIRA LE HASARD (SCULPTURE) 2016;
Against the wall: UN COUP DE DÉS JAMAIS N’ABOLIRA LE HASARD (MUSIQUE) 2009
Michalis Pichler

UN COUP DE DÉS JAMAIS N’ABOLIRA LE HASARD (MUSIQUE) 2009
Michalis Pichler

UN COUP DE DÉS JAMAIS N’ABOLIRA LE HASARD (RUBIK’S CUBE) 2005; UN COUP DE DÉS JAMAIS N’ABOLIRA LE HASARD (POSTER) 2008
Aurélie Noury

Paul Heimbach was perhaps the first after Marcel Broodthaers to use translucent paper in an artist’s book interpretation of Mallarmé’s poem. In würfelwürfe, for each roll of the dice, the results on the upper faces appear on a recto page, the results on the bottom faces appear on the verso.

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Declaration of interest: COUP DE DÉS (COLLECTION): Books and Ideas after Mallarmé kindly cites Books On Books’ “‘Un Coup de Dés Jamais N’Abolira l’Appropriation’ — An Online Exhibition“.

Books On Books Collection – Colleen (Ellis) Comerford

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ABCing (2010)

ABCing: Seeing the Alphabet Differently
Colleen (Ellis) Comerford (2010)
Board book, illustrated paper-on-board cover. H160 x W160 mm. 66 pages. Acquired from Powell’s Bookstore, 29 June 2023.
Photos: Books On Books Collection. Displayed with artist’s permission.

Presented by the publisher as a primer for designers and students, ABCing is also an artist’s book in its own right. Page after page, Colleen (Ellis) Comerford wields each alphabet character, the pages themselves, the shapes from the space around and within a letter, and bold colors alongside the most abstract concepts, their dictionary definitions and etymology like canvas, brush and paint, or block and chisel. She breaks off the negative space in and around a letter and resizes, reorients and recombines the pieces into an image that is a visual metaphor for the named concept beginning with the letter. Each spread is an epiphany.

Sometimes the image represents an object that begins with the same letter as the concept. Consider for example the letter “m” (for metaphor). The artist repurposes the four shapes around the character on the left into a figure on the right that suggests “m is for moo” (or a Highland “koo”) in the analogous way that “a figure of speech in which one term is used to refer to something that it does not literally denote”.

Sometimes the image enacts the concept, as with the letter “n” — appropriately so for the concept of negative space. Illustrating the “figure-ground relationship”, the large hump under the letter becomes the smallest of the three shapes and recedes into the background while the small triangle by the letter’s ear becomes the largest and foreground element of the image.

On more occasions, ABCing avails itself of the alphabet-art tradition of anthropomorphism. “Z for zeitgeist” is an almost Futurist reminder of how often artists have used the human body to form the letters of the alphabet. There’s a skateboarder, a clown, an oversized Sherlockian eye and magnifying glass, and an angry face made up of the bits from around the letter “t” for tone.

ABCing‘s letter “z”;
“Alfabeto figurato” (1632)
Giovanni Battista Braccelli Etching, Naples.
Love Letters: An Anthropomorphic Alphabet (2008)
Rowland Scherman
Casebound, doublures, perfect bound. H178 x W180 mm. 34 pages. Acquired from Rowland Scherman, 3 March 2023.
Photos of the book: Books On Books Collection. Displayed with permission of Rowland Scherman.

Most often the image is oblique. For instance, in “g” for ground, we have a boat sailing along the edge of the flat, enlarged triangle, taken from the space just before the ear of the “g”. As a large background in contrast with the small figure of the sailboat, it does illustrate the concept, but the figure and shape also allude to the flat-earth beliefs buried in “<Old English grund, ‘foundation, ground, surface of the earth’ < Proto-Germanic grundus“.

Others are less oblique: for example, “i” for imagination with the shapes from the negative space forming a snippet of cinema film; “p” for Polaris, with one piece being the star and rest the sea and sailboat; “r” for rhythm with pieces forming a bass drum pedal; “v” for variety with a multi-flavored ice-cream cone; and “x” for x-height with a caliper.

The alphabet and abstraction are, of course, deeply connected. In function, the letters are abstract signs representing sounds. In pictographic origins, they are abstract signs representing objects whose names begin with that sound (A for aleph, “ox”). In composition, just a small combination of strokes are abstraction enough to identify the letters themselves. Here are Bruno Munari and Lisa McGarry presenting that latter point in two very different ways.

ABC con fantasia (2008)
Bruno Munari
Boxed set of shapes. H x W Acquired from Corraini Edizioni, 4 August 2020.
Photos of the work: Books On Books Collection. Displayed with permission of Corraini Edizioni. © Bruno Munari. All rights reserved to Maurizio Corraini s.r.l.

Twenty-six/Fragments (2012)
Lisa McGarry
Single sheet, collage, meander cut and fold. Closed: 70 x 70 x D15 mm. Open: 490 x 490 mm. Acquired from the artist, 20 March 2023.
Photos: Books On Books Collection. Displayed with artist’s permission.

ABCing, however, takes abstraction in a different direction — away from sounds and objects and toward ideas and concepts. The direction may be different, but the results are often like magnets pulling on works whose alphabet categories relate indirectly, subtly and delightfully to ABCing.

Consider this example in which the concept and object again start with the same letter: “h” (for harmony), where the bits of negative space construct a house or hearth.

It draws out the multifaceted subject of letters and architecture illustrated by Geofroy Tory’s Champ Fleury (1529/1927/1998), Antonio Basoli’s Alfabeto Pittorico (1839/1998), Giovanni Battista de Pian’s Alphabetto Pittoresque (1842).

Left to right: Tory/Rogers, Champ Fleury; Basoli, Alfabeto Pittorico; Battista de Pian, Alphabetto Pittoresque. Photos by Books On Books Collection.

Consider again the “m” for metaphor and moo. Animals are the most frequent category of alphabet books in children’s literature, and so while there are dozens of them in the Books On Books Collection, it is the yaks in Suse MacDonald’s Alphabatics (1986) and David McLimans’ Gone Wild (2016) that ABCing conjures up.

Alphabatics (1986)
Suse MacDonald
Paper on board, casebound sewn. H236 x 285 mm, 56 pages. Acquired from Book Depository, 10 September 2021.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.

Gone Wild: An Endangered Animal Alphabet (2016)
David McLimans
Casebound, illustrated paper over boards, illustrated doublures, sewn book block. Illustrated, debossed glossy paper dustjacket. H255 x W285 mm. 36 unnumbered pages. Acquired from Gargoyle Books, 25 August 2022.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.

Consider again the “n” for negative space and its use of perspective to form its visual metaphor. Doesn’t it pull up Lisa Campbell Ernst’s The Turn Around, Upside Down Alphabet Book (2004), and Menena Cottin’s La Doble Historia de un Vaso de Leche (2019)?

The Turn Around, Upside Down Alphabet Book (2004)
Lisa Campbell Ernst
Casebound, colored doublures, sewn. H241 x W241 mm, 32 unnumbered pages. Acquired from Thrift Books, 5 November 2021.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.

La Doble Historia de un Vaso de Leche (2019)
Menena Cottin
Casebound landscape, paper over boards, with orange-yellow doublures, sewn. H160 x W310 mm. 24 unnumbered pages. Acquired from the artist, 2022.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.

Consider, too, the board book format of ABCing. ABCing underscores the crossover between concept and craft when the imagination draws on the “artistic toolkit of the book”. It might send the reader off to alphabet board books like Harold’s ABC (1963, 2015) by Crockett Johnson in the collection, but here are board books not for the children’s section.

Chroma Numerica (2019)
Andrew Morrison
Perfect bound cased in quarter-hinged paper-on-board binding. H143 x W145 mm, 60 pages, printed on one side. Edition of 30, of which this is #17. Acquired from the artist, 2 September 2021.
Photos of the work: Books On Books Collection. Displayed with artist’s permission.

Sanctus Sonorensis (2009)
Philip Zimmermann
Perfect bound, self-covering board book, illustrated cover, gilt on top, bottom and fore edges. Gold-foiled title on the cover and spine. Four-color offset lithography. H273 x W208 x D35 mm. 90 pages. Edition of 1000. Acquired from Spaceheater Editions, 4 February 2024.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.

ABCing‘s abecedarian structure and its board book format underscore its intent in a wry manner. Introductory it may be, but its visual metaphors and use of negative space are subtle. Likewise, Chroma Numerica‘s counting book structure and board book format contrast with its Greco-Latinate title, limited print run and celebration of wood type printing, and the beatitudinal structure and religious gilding of the childhood book format of Sanctus Sonorensis heighten the biting condemnation in its message.

ABCing is more than “seeing the alphabet differently”. Like most effective artist’s books, it prods the reader/viewer into thinking about letter and image differently, the material aspects of the book differently — and looking for other artists’ books that take us further into reading and seeing differently.

Books On Books Collection – Catherine Macorol

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A is for Axolotl (2022)

A is for Axolotl: An Unusual Animal ABC (2022)
Catherine Macorol
Casebound laminated cover with dustjacket. H230 x W290 mm. 32 pages. Acquired from Saint Bookstore, 28 May 2023.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.

Unfortunately climate change makes possible a sub-collection of abecedaries on the subject of endangered animals. Since Dick King-Smith and Quentin Blake’s Alphabeasts in 1990, there have been more than a dozen. Catherine Macorol’s is the most recent within the Books On Books Collection.

Books On Books Collection – Inscription: The Journal of Material Text, Issue 4 on Touch

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Inscription: The Journal of Material Text, Issue 4 on Touch
Simon Morris, Gill Partington and Adam Smyth (eds.)
Cased perfect bound paperback, printed paper cover. 313 x 313 mm. 120 pages. ISSN: 2634-7210. Acquired from Information as Material, 29 November 2023.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.

Different readers will come to different conclusions on whether Inscription #4 dedicated to the subject of touch evokes the level of tactility in Melville’s famous Chapter 94 “A Squeeze of the Hand”. But all can agree that they share a certain seminality. Like Herman Melville with his preliminaries to Moby Dick, the editors of Inscription lead their fourth issue with definitions and choice quotations on the subject of “touch”, as much a Leviathan subject as that of Melville’s novel. Where Melville merged scholarly apparatus with narrative fiction to create a novel literary work, Simon Morris, Gill Partington and Adam Smyth have merged photography, poetry, augmented reality and audio with academic and critical essays to create a novel form of scholarship.

As noted in the review of Issue 2 on Holes, Inscription‘s composition is close to that of Aspen produced by Phyllis Johnson, and to this should be added the Fluxus productions inaugurated by George Maciunas, the AR Fluxus Box initiated by Art is Open Source (AOS) and Fake Press Publishing in 2010, and Franticham’s Assembling Box published by Redfoxpress (57 of them since 2010). Inscription‘s juxtaposition (sometimes fusion) of the imaginative with critical rigor continues to set it apart. In this particular issue, the contribution that most sets it apart from the preceding three is the editors’ reproduction of Robert Rauschenberg’s Automobile Tire Print (1953), with permission of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The original consists of twenty attached sheets of paper over the length of which John Cage drove his car at Rauschenberg’s direction. Rauschenberg had placed a pool of sticky black paint in the car’s path. Here is the editor’s description of their use of the print:

To make the journal operate as an artist’s book for issue 4 of Inscription, we used Robert Rauschenberg’s Automobile Tire Print from 1953 to allow metaphorically John Cage to drive right through our journal, from left to right, following the direction of type and providing breaks (pun intended) that demarcate the space between different sections. (p. 111).

How is it that this makes the journal “operate as an artist’s book”? Well, perhaps as an Oulipean artist/editor’s book. The 726.4 cm of the Rauschenberg/Cage artwork is divided into double-page spreads of 62.6 cm (the journal’s trim size is 31.3 x 31.3) and thereby takes up 24 pages, leaving the editors 96 pages of the 120-page issue to allocate to the rest of the journal’s content. It is the internal frame for the artist’s book. The tire tread print provides a unifying thread and spatial constraint for the remaining contributions the artists/editors can accommodate. Some would-be contributor has to be left on the side of the road, or parts have to be ganged together into the trunk (or boot), or someone has to deliver urgent roadside assistance to fill in for a missing part. All to work with the Rauschenberg/Cage tire tread frame.

If this seems metaphorically far-fetched, consider the framing allusions in two of the issue’s sections: the table of contents and “The Grid” from the Fraser Muggeridge Studio. The former is the usually expected front matter signaling what’s to come, except for its unusual cross-hatch, frame-like layout; the second is the unusually extant appearance of the usually invisible set of guidelines for the layout of the pages, presumably offered up as the visible touchpoints or tracks that the rest of the issue follows and fills in. So the two standard unifying frames for any book allude with their line-crossing to that page-crossing, book-crossing internal frame of tire treads. And if, up to this point, the reader still doubts the allusion, a handprint and fingerprints in sticky black ink conclude the Muggeridge grid. This self-reflexivity is quintessentially how artists’ books operate.

Aside from the table of contents, the introductory Melvillean definitions and quotations, the Grid and the colophon, there are thirteen internal components to this issue of Inscription to be interspersed among the Rauschenberg/Cage skids. Most of them evoke the issue’s theme of touch visually, metaphorically and conceptually.

“Marking Readers: Pain, Pleasure, and the Nineteenth-Century Tactile Book” by Taylor Hare and John Gulledge explores the history of reading by touch “to argue that reading by touch … constituted an event in which reader and book each took the position of marker as well as marked, subject as well as object” and that “haptic encounters between books and readers … layered pain and pleasure overtop of one another in ways that scholars have yet to fully appreciate” (p. 6). Just as the body of the book can be studied to learn about humans’ reading, the bodies of readers by touch can be studied to learn about the body of the book.

“Make the Poem aka Language Fabric” by Ben Miller is a four-section extract from the long hand-scribed visual-textual poem Make, which has been excerpted in several literary magazines. Its thick lettering and doodles and its multidirectional, multipositioned text bleed across the gutter and off the top and bottom of the pages. On the lead-in page, there is a typeset “Aside to the kind reader” that instructs “Pick a point on the edge of each spread and slowly move a finger across the terrain at any angle. The action, repeated three times, is how I re-read for editing” (p. 21).

“‘The Divell’s Hand’: Touching Special Collections” by Matthew Shaw provides a special collection librarian’s and curator’s mixed views and metaphors on touch in an entertaining scroll from the anecdote about Charles II’s touching a purported demonic invocation inscribed in a 1539 linguistic history in the “divell’s hand” to anecdotes about the role of touch in the coronation of Charles III.

“All Fingers & Thumbs: Reading/Handling/Editing: Nabokov’s Pale Fire” by Gill Partington combines her exposition of her own altered-book revision of Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire with a rumination on touch and reading.

Reading/Handling/Editing: Nabokov’s Pale Fire
Gill Partington

“Measuring the Sun –, 2023” by Jen Bervin and Deborah D. Mayer presents magnified photographs of embossments in packet VI of Fascicle 18 of Emily Dickinson’s poems held at the Harvard Houghton Library.

“The Felt Dimension: The Haptic Intuition of Hansjörg Mayer” by Bronac Ferran digs into the deep indentations that Mayer created in his Sixties works and makes the case that “we find traces of an early digital heritage embedded within the felt textures of print, given life within our fingers”.

“Sequences of Touch: Dried Flowers; Linen Rags; Rotten Potatoes; Wool Roving” by Sheryda Warrener, Claire Battershill, Amy E. Elkins, and Jayme Collins is a collaborative presentation of four hands-on engagements in craftwork: a poetry workshop based on the textile and matière-inspired work of Black Mountain artists Anni Albers, Josef Albers, Eva Hesse, Ruth Asawa and Sheila Hicks; an exploration of offcuts and hand papermaking; a revel in homemade inks potato prints; and a textile-production approach to Cecilia Vicuña’s poetry.

“Taction”, a poem by Vona Groarke, that challenges the reader: “bring your bare skin/ to the flesh of the words.”

“Letter as Monument: The Architectural Majuscule, the Inscriptional Page, and the Rise of Roman Type” by Katy Nelson makes a convincing case that the physicality of engraved Roman majuscules as well as their later ideal-driven geometric derivation secured their combination with the humanist miniscules in painting, manuscripts and printing.

“A Play Between Illusion and Awareness of Illusion” by the editors — Simon Morris, Gill Partington, and Adam Smyth — explores Natalie Czech’s prints that appear on the front and back covers as well as pages 84, 87-89 and 91-93. The prints’ trompe l’oeil character not only provides the theme of the essay, it prompts the shift from matte to coated paper. The Zephyr and Koh-In-All pencils look three-dimensional enough to roll off the covers and page if the issue is tilted.

This change of paper is surprisingly the only distinctive use of paper in the bound issue. There’s no other change of surface nor any use of embossing or debossing in the printing to address the reader’s sense of touch. Only two of the items included separately and shrink-wrapped with issue 4 do more than flirt with the physical sense of touch: Fraser Muggeridge Studio’s embossed card and Steve Ronnie’s and for you (love), which was originally produced with a Perkins mechanical Brailler.

Foilblock on 360 gsm Materica Gesso. Fraser Muggeridge Studio

Fabriano 5 300 gsm watercolor card with the characters “and for y” repeating over nine lines to surround the characters “love” in the fifth. Steve Ronnie.

Although all of the other items each vary in weight and finish, they primarily evoke the sense of touch visually, metaphorically or conceptually — like the bound issue except for its aforementioned one switch from matte to coated paper. There is one item, or rather feature, that has no weight or finish: a pair of QR codes, engineered by Katarina Rankovic and Ian Truelove, that enable the reader’s smartphone to activate the augmented reality features of Instagram when pointed at the front and back covers of Inscription 4 — and, of course, tapped with a finger.

First row, left to right: Leonora Barros, POEMA; Yoko Ono, Touch Poem for a Group of People; Harold Offeh, Holding On.
Second row: Alice Attie, Roland Barthes (from the series Annotations); Mohammed Hafeda, The touching of borders; Erica Baum, untitled (Finger-prints).
Third row: Graham Ellard & Stephen Johnstone, Geneva Express side of LP vinyl jacket; Geneva Express side of LP sleeve; jacket insert showing photo of Geneva Express installation; reverse of jacket insert showing photo of Wall of Death installation.
Fourth row: Ellard & Johnstone, Wall of Death side of LP vinyl record jacket; Wall of Death side of LP sleeve.

Papers made of stone, glass, plastic, metal, fabric and all sorts of vegetal material could have increased the variety of tactile sensations. Budget permitting, perhaps a future issue of Inscription will take the theme of “substrate” and demonstrate physically — as well as discuss and depict — how the surface of inscription contributes materially to the meaning of the inscribed. Nevertheless, like the previous three issues, Inscription 4 — as is — bursts with academic insights to appreciate and pursue, art and literature to enjoy and ponder, and production artistry at which to marvel.*

*In correspondence (21 February 2024), Simon Morris has mentioned a philatelic touch to be found in Jen Bervin and Deborah D. Mayer’s contribution on Emily Dickinson. To provide further clues would rob the feeling reader of the hunt and, perhaps, the editors of a subscription from a library yet to have recognized that any serious collection of works on art and literary theory or the history of the book or artists’ books must have these four issues (and those to come) on board.

Books On Books Collection – Inscription: The Journal of Material Text, Issue 3 on Folds

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Now here’s a rare thing — a journal issue that requires a video to show the reader h0w to open it.

Inscription: The Journal of Material Text, Issue 3 on Folds
Simon Morris, Gill Partington and Adam Smyth (eds.)
Printed boards over recurring origami square-base folded leaves. 300 x 300 mm. 120 pages. ISSN: 2634-7210. Acquired from Information as Material, 29 November 2022.
Photos: Books On Books Collection. [Front and back covers, Kimsooja’s bottari artwork commissioned for Inscription 3.]

The structure is built on the simple principle of an origami square base. A diagonal mountain fold bisects two corners of a square, followed by two perpendicular valley folds bisecting the edges of the square; then the north, south and west corners come together and down atop the east corner. For the printer, the not-so-simple principle is how one base connects to the next to make a book!

Inscription 3 has ten essays, including the editors’ introduction. As seen below, the latter neatly fits with the issue’s table of contents on a single unfolded sheet in a layout that offers considerable creative opportunities for structure and design to enact the theme of the issue.

The essays fall across eleven of these large unfolded sheets, with a twelfth sheet serving for the contributors’ biographies and description of the nine commissioned artworks shrinkwrapped with this journal issue. In general, each unfolded sheet breaks down into quadrants, and each quadrant breaks down into three columns to accommodate text and images. The designers run images across columns, across the vertical and horizontal folds dividing the quadrants and, later on, even in alignment with the diagonal fold.

The structure and layout of Inscription 3 take the star billing in this issue and, to varying degrees, interact with the content. Two essays in particular highlight this. In the issue’s first contributed essay (see above), Craig Dworkin and the editors seem to have conspired to present an essay that enfolds its subject with the design of Incription 3. While Dworkin’s essay explores Stéphane Mallarmé’s efforts to reconcile his ideal of the Book with his ambivalent inspiration for it from the spaciousness of newspaper print, it has to be read across a sheet of book paper unfolded like a Sunday newspaper spread out on the dining room table. To reveal the end of the essay, the sheet of pages must rise, fold and unfold like the wings of a bird. Compare that with Dworkin’s description of Mallarmé’s imagined fusion of newspaper and book in which his landmark poem Un Coup de Dés should appear:

Curving from their center fold like wings, the newspaper sheets in flight through the park – animated by the breeze and wafting like a feather from the birds they mimic – corroborate the operation of the mobile new book, in which the pages assume the rhythmic function of verse itself, abstracted and projected onto the architecture of the assembled volume with folded sheets smoothed into the single surface Un Coup de dés describes with the phrase insinuation simple [simple insinuation], where the etymology derives from the Latin insinuare [to fold in].

The second example coinciding with Inscription 3‘s structure and layout is Justine Provino’s “0, 1, 2, many folds”, which explores an artist’s book just as abstruse semantically and physically as Mallarmé’s poem:

What is the common denominator between the DNA of the fruitfly, the codex-form book and a floppy disk? They all fold. In a particular turn of events in the year 1992, DNA, codex and floppy disk managed to fold over each other through the collaborative making of the artist’s book Agrippa (a book of the dead), famous – or infamous – for the self-destructive intent programmed into it by its makers …

Agrippa (a book of the dead) by Dennis Ashbaugh, Kevin Begos, Jr. and William Gibson incorporates each of these elements, as Provino creatively and critically explains, in ways that ask

… what can – or should – an object that we call ‘book’ look like, and what purpose should it serve? We may easily visualise how pages of paper can be folded into a codex-form book to communicate and preserve reading matter. But can we establish an analogy between this topology underlying the functioning of a codex and the structures of DNA and floppy disk? Can we speak of ‘material texts’ (or even ‘books’) in the context of DNA and floppy disk in the way that we do for the codex?

As soon as the double helix of DNA structure is raised, the reader turning the pages of Inscription 3 will surely have a frisson of recognition.

The skill with which the structure and layout enhances the essays’ content presents a challenge to the nine standalone works of commissioned art. They are individually delightful, but only Daniel Jackson’s into and out of integrates with Inscription 3 “physically”, and then only by virtue of its augmented reality nature that works when pointed at artist Kimsooja’s bottari fabric art commissioned for the front and back covers.

First row: Daniel Jackson, into and out of; Pavel Büchler, Translate Here. Second row: Rick Adams & Simon Morris, Less is More. Third row: Eleanor Vonne Brown, War Unfolding. Fourth row: Marjorie Welish, Indecidability of the Sign; Erica Baum, Embrace. Fifth row: Daniel Starza Smith, Jana Dambrogio, Jessica Spring, and the Unlocking History research group (Letterlocked), It’s a Wonderful World [self-enveloping letter]. Sixth row: Abigail Reynolds, The Red Library. Last row: Nikos Stavropoulos, Folds [vinyl LP record jacket and sleeve, sides A and B].

One more point about structure and a pointer for the reader. This issue manages to include twelve diptychs on the reverse of the twelve large unfolded sheets. Each diptych presents a figure, diagram or list on one half and a sizable corresponding label on the other half. Getting to them is the trick not explained in the video.

Top-down edge view of figures, diagrams and lists. How to see them and their labels?

With a large unfolded sheet in view, turn (carefully!) the left half to the right. There is the label below the front cover. Now turn the whole over. There is the figure, diagram or list above the back cover. The figures, diagrams and lists deal with works by Samuel Beckett, Stéphane Mallarmé, James Joyce, Laurence Sterne, Daniel Spoerri, Guillaume Apollinaire, Italo Calvino, Raymond Queneau and (below) Christine Brooke-Rose.

By the way, the large unfolded sheet above is the last of the twelve in Inscription 3. In addition to providing the biographies of the contributors and the list of nine commissioned artworks, it offers one more diagonal flourish from the designers. Call it a cheeky parting kiss.

Books On Books Collection – Megan N. Liberty

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Craft & Conceptual Art : Reshaping the Legacy of Artists’ Books (2023)

Craft and Conceptual Art: Reshaping the Legacy of Artists’ Books (2023)
Megan N. Liberty, ed.
Perfect bound, embossed and ink printed cover. H302 x W229 mm. 118 pages. Acquired from San Francisco Center for the Book (CODEX), 5 February 2024.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.

Megan Liberty’s traveling exhibition and catalogue serve two related purposes. The first is to present 40 archival items (interviews, invitations, announcements, letters, broadsides, photos, etc.) and over 3 dozen artworks from the last 30 years of the 20th century in a way that highlights the “collaboration and crossover” among several key institutions of the period: Philadelphia’s Moore College of Art; New York’s Center for Book Arts, Printed Matter and Franklin Furnace, Washington, DC’s The Writer’s Center, the Minnesota Center for Book Arts and the San Francisco Center for the Book. Their collaboration and crossover were often manifest in exhibitions, which are noted in Liberty’s introductory essay as well as David Senior’s contribution to the catalogue (“An Expanded Field of Book Art: Exhibitions and Catalogues from the 1970s”).

The second purpose is to make the argument that “craft and conceptual art mutually informed the evolution of artists’ books during the 1970s and 1980s”, which presents a more fluid view of the world of book art than is usually presented. The factions of the dematerialized and conceptual works, the democratic multiples, the limited editions and the unique finely or rawly crafted works were not so walled off from one another as implied in polemics, manifestos and critical essays so concerned with defining the “artist’s book”, the existence or placement of its apostrophe and securing its role in the larger history of art.

In touching on several exhibition catalogues, Liberty and Senior begin the work of mapping out an institutional history of artists’ books through exhibitions:

Germano Celant’s Book as Artwork 1960/1972 (1972)
Dianne Perry Vanderlip’s Artists Books (1973)
Daniel Fendrick’s The Book as Art (1976)
Manfred Schneckburger’s dOCUMENTA 6 (1977)
Barbara London’s Bookworks (1977)
Penelope Suess’ Women and the Printing Arts (1977)
Jacki Apple’s Notebooks, Workbooks, Scripts, and Scores (1977)
Judith Hoffberg and Joan Hugo’s Artwords and Bookworks (1978)
Martha Wilson and Peter Frank’s Artists’ Books USA (1978)
Rose Slivka’s Book Makers (1979)
Horace Brockington’s Dialects: Diverse Bookworks by Black and Hispanic Artists (1980)
Norman Colp’s Entrapped: The Book as Container (1981)
Walker Art Center’s Artists’ Books Introduction (1981)
Clive Phillpot’s Collaborations (1982)
Norman Colp’s From Coast to Coast (1983)
Center for Book Arts’ The First Decade (1984)
Center for Book Arts’ Book Artists in Residence: 5 Programs (1985)
Betty Bright’s Midwest Contemporary Book Art (1985)
Steve Woodall’s Out West (1998)

Naturally the exhibition reflects many of the key themes, tools and techniques with which book artists were concerned during the period: the relationship between artists’ books and performance; the photocopier as an alternative printing tool; mail art; found art, collage and assemblage; feminism and the book as body; the AIDS epidemic; the passage of time and personal memory; racism in the art world; and mythology, religion and the mysticism of the book. Through these reflections, through attention to some of the period’s forgotten and less celebrated book artists, and through tracing the cross-fertilizations occurring across key institutions and their networks of individual artists and curators, Liberty revives Johanna Drucker’s definition of the artist’s book as a “zone of activity” where different disciplines, fields, and ideas intersect.

Alongside the exhibitions and catalogues it cites and those others it does not (see below), Craft and Conceptual Art stimulates a wishful longing for a blockbuster, truly international exhibition of book art and its history. Anna Sigrídur Arnar’s essay in On Curating (No. 33, June 2017) offers a model for contributions to it. Writing on the eve of dOCUMENTA 14 (2017), which was distinguished by the re-installation of Marta Minujín’s monumental 1983 The Parthenon of Banned Books (El Partenón de libros prohibitos), Arnar unearths documenta 5 (1972), documenta 6 (1977) and dOCUMENTA 13 (2012) as significant markers in the recognition and history of book art. As she notes, “it is actually documenta 5 where we first see a surprising number of artists producing and implementing books as a part of their practice”. If illustrated as well as Liberty’s and Arnar’s are, such an undertaking would rival the documenta 5 catalogue in size. Liberty’s exhibition and catalogue will find a place among its important predecessors and may be the spark for that larger more global institutional history of artists’ books through exhibitions.

Books On Books Collection – Emmy van Eijk

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Breaking Waves (2023)

Breaking Waves (2023)
Emmy van Eijk
Sculptural book. 140 x 140 x 40 mm (closed). Unique work. Acquired from Papertrail Handmade Books, 22 January 2024.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.

Breaking Waves spills over at least three categories of bookmaking: the bound blank book, designer bookbinding and sculpture. It would take a bold owner, however, to use the work in its first category. Fortunately that invitation quickly yields to another.

Photos: Left, Books On Books Collection; Right, Courtesy of the artist.

An invitation to touch and explore the textures of the cover, which consists of tracing paper, whiteboard, acrylic paint, chalk and ecoline. As the book opens, there’s the added invitation to see and feel how its exterior and the spine’s interior mimick waves rising and falling.

Photos: Left, Books On Books Collection; Right, Courtesy of the artist.

Laid flat and viewed from its edge, it can display different levels of water accumulates or diminished with the number of pages turned.

Photos: Books On Books Collection.

As with those sculptures meant to be viewed in the round, it’s hard to settle on an angle that offers the most satisfying view.

Photos: Books On Books Collection.

Images courtesy of the artist

Breaking Waves is one of several works in the Books On Books Collection that manage to capture the stillness as well as the movement, the transparency and always changing character, of water. An appreciation for Van Eijk’s technique and results grows alongside those of Camden Richards & Deborah Sibony in Water, Calling, Helen Douglas in The Pond at Deuchar and Nif Hodgson in Fluid Horizons.

A 2007 graduate of TU Delft in architecture, Emmy van Eijk has been both a practicing architect and, with the founding of Papertrail Handmade Books in 2017, a book artist. It’s no surprise then that several of her works (as yet not for sale) resonate also with the architecture-related works in the Books On Books Collection, would sit proudly with them and provide grist for appreciative comparisons and contrast. Courtesy of the artist, here is one such work.

Expectations (2023)
Emmy Van Eijk

Books On Books Collection – Camden Richards & Deborah Sibony

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Water, Calling (2021)

Water, Calling (2021)
Camden Richards & Deborah Sibony
Felt-covered, modified dragon-scale bound artists’ book, accompanied by audio equipment in custom box. Box: 262 x 262 x D170 mm. Book: H155 x W775 mm (closed). 110 pages. Edition of 15, of which this is #1. Acquired from the artists, 5 October 2022. Photos: Books On Books Collection. Displayed with artists’ permission.

Colophon
“Water, Calling is a collaborative artist book which explores the cyclical and omnipresent relationship of water and the self, inviting the reader to reflect upon water as more than a commodity, but rather as life giving: spirit, flesh and soul. Because water is evidence of all who came before us, it is a foretelling of all who will be; through it we are in conversation with our ancestors, our descendants, and with earth herself. Water, Calling traces these existential threads through waterscapes of text, image and sound, extending an invitation to enter more fully into a dialogue composed of acts requiring active listening, contemplative reading and deep seeing with the hope of inspiring sacred reciprocity.”

The initial attraction of Water, Calling was its modified “dragon-scale” binding (Chinese: longlin zhuang 龍鱗裝). Its lasting attraction has been how the binding and the structure within it join with the text, images, textures and sound to create this work of art so evocative of the element water.

Water, Calling‘s dragon-scale binding is a modified form of the method used with Chinese manuscripts in the 8th century CE and in the oldest printed book known — the Diamond Sūtra, dating back to 868 CE and found in the caves near Dunhuang, China in 1900. In the original structure, sheets of paper of different widths overlap one another with the narrowest on top and the widest on the bottom. They are aligned and attached along the left or right edge, and from the attached edge, the overlapping stack of leaves rolls into a scroll. Below are images from various sources (Drège, Song, and Chinnery).

Drège. Figure unnumbered (p. 197) and Plate XXIV (p. 205).

Song. Fig. 2 Diagrams of whirlwind bindings (top) ‘concertina’ xuanfeng zhuang (旋風裝) and (bottom) ‘dragon scale’ longlin zhuang (龍鱗裝).

Historically the dragon scale seems to occupy a transitional stage between scroll and codex, and the latter seems to inspire most of the modifications of the dragon scale in Water, Calling. Its dragon-scale-like overlapping occurs within each of seventeen codex-like signatures and across them. There is, however, no single widest sheet. The dragon-scale’s characteristic curling, outlying edge occurs due to a staggered fold of one leaf in each signature. The first signature, below with its the first page and edge of its third page showing, is a single-fold leaf that anchors the book block to the long felt cover. As the first signature’s last page is turned to the left, it pulls all of the next sixteen signatures with it. Viewed from the edge in the third image below, the staggered and overlapping signatures mimic waves of water (see the third image below).

A distinctive modification of the binding is the inclusion of a narrow-cut sheet of Gmund Transparent in the second signature that interleaves with the third signature. The dry facts printed on the transparency interrupt the flow of the text debossed at the end of the first signature and beginning of the second. Each of the remaining pairs of signatures has a narrow-cut linking sheet of dry facts making up one stream of text interweaving with the more lyrical text and water patterns debossed on the Rives BFK paper.

Set in the cursive Magdallena, the debossed text reads “through water we are in conversation, | with our ancestors, with our elders, our unborn descendants, our future — with earth herself.”

All eight of the translucent sheets can seen from this sideways rear view of the seventeen signatures. So the dry, however impressive, facts on the translucent sheets make up one stream of text interwoven with the more lyrical text and water patterns debossed on the Rives BFK paper.

A sideways view of the back of all seventeen signatures shows all eight of the translucent sheets.

Within each of the seventeen signatures, there is a double-page spread of artwork: a series of cyanotype prints of original photographs, image transfers sourced from historical maps, and watercolor art.

With the third double-page spread, a third stream of text and a material element of interweaving occurs. Richards introduces a more personal set of observations typeset in New Caledonian on a sheet of Sekishu paper attached to the lefthand edge of an underlying spread of artwork. Nothing quite like this appears in other works of dragon-scale binding. The presence of those Sekishu sheets requires some care in turning the pages, unscrolling and scrolling the work. This modification of the dragon-scale binding heightens its delicacy and slows down the process of reading, looking and reacting, which reinforces the artists’ words.

There are thirteen of these Sekishu sheets in total, leaving two double-page spreads at the beginning and two at the end uncovered. This is not by accident. Structurally it reflects the ouroboros nature of the debossed text on the Rives BFK: it ends as it began.

The width of the opened work and way the reader must almost embrace it to open it reflect the breadth of the artists’ meditation on various bodies of water—wild and managed, urban and rural. The interwoven leaves and text reinforce the makers’ (and water’s) call to “pay attention” and reconnect.

Other examples of dragon-scale binding in the Books On Books Collection include works by Barbara Hocker, Nif Hodgson, Rutherford Witthus and Zhang Xiaodong. It seems no accident that Hocker and Hodgson adopt the dragon-scale binding to evoke the element of water. But other artists in the collection who aim to evoke the element choose another structure that, like dragon scale, seems to be a transition from scroll to codex: the accordion fold or leporello and its variant the window-panel flag book. Among the leporellos are Helen Douglas’ Follow the River (2015-17), and for an example of the variant, there is Cathryn Miller’s Westron Wynde (2016). Of course, the codex is not antithetical to the theme. The sense of water pours from the “Coast & Dunes” and “Banks & Brooks” sections of Margaret (Molly) Coy & Claire Bolton’s Handscapes (2016) and Bodil Rosenberg’s Vandstand (2019), though the size, shape and texture of the latter may have more in common with the sculptural and equally evocative I think that the root of the wind is water (2016) by Susan Lowdermilk and Breaking Waves (2023) by Emmy van Eijk. Still, even in this century, the scroll continues to offer an effective conduit whether in paper or pixels as Helen Douglas’ The Pond at Deuchar (2011, 2013) demonstrates.

Of all these works, Water, Calling engages multimedia the most in its invocation and evocation of the element of water. Its environmental soundscape, created by Anne Hege with a hand-built, analog looping tape machine, consists of water recordings, instrumentals and vocal incantations. To listen to excerpts from the soundtrack, click here, or to listen to the full soundtrack, click here (password required; request access here).

The Space Between (2018)

The Space Between (2018)
Camden Richards & Deborah Sibony
Casebound with cloth-covered spine between bonderized steel covers in a cloth-covered custom box. Box: H216 x W305 x D24 mm; Book: H197 x W284 x D10 mm. 50 pages. Edition of 13, of which this is #11. Acquired from the artists, 5 October 2022.
Photos: Books On Books Collection. Displayed with artists’ permission.

An earlier collaboration between Richards and Sibony, The Space Between is based on ten original monotypes printed by Sibony at Studio 1509 on a Takach press and digitally reproduced for the book by Coast Litho on Grafix matte drafting film. The work’s text is set in Mark Simonson’s Goldenbook; its typographic layout, die-cuts and letterpress printing is by Richards at Liminal Press + Bindery on Somerset Book paper with a Vandercook 4 proofing press; and its handmade paper embedded with local Bay Area plant fibers comes from Pam DeLuco of Shotwell Paper Mill. The Space Between is bound in bonderized steel covers and housed in a custom box by John DeMerritt.

The ten monotypes were inspired by the gradual removal of the eastern span of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge after its partial collapse in 1989. About that inspiration, Sibony writes:

On the day of the Loma Prieta earthquake (October 17, 1989) I had just begun commuting from San Francisco to work at Fantasy Records in Berkeley. Thus began my long-term relationship with the Bay Bridge. The quake caused the collapse of a 50-foot section of the upper deck and led to the death of a 23-year-old woman. I was fortunate not to be driving home on the bridge at the time of the earthquake, when I could easily have been returning to San Francisco. I spent that night in Berkeley with a friend since the bridge was closed to all traffic, and would remain so for several weeks.

Twenty-four years later, on September 3, 2013, a wondrous, white, single-span was set to replace the damaged eastern section of the bridge. On the day before the eastern span was closed forever and the dismantling began, I drove across that compromised structure for the last time. As I shot video from the car, a feeling struck me on a gut level: it was the start of a new era for the geography and landscape of the Bay Area — and the beginning of the end for an iconic structure that would soon cease to exist.

From then on I took photos with my iPhone whenever I drove across the new eastern span, adjacent to the closed cantilevered section, documenting its gradual deconstruction until it finally disappeared. Using a special transfer process I incorporated those images into a series of monotypes that are reproduced in The Space Between.

Sibony’s monotypes are fragments that illustrate moments of a vanishing and a metamorphosis of wood, concrete, and steel. In The Space Between, Richards uses letterpress printing, translucent substrate and die-cuts to pair Sibony’s images with text inspired by a poem by Charles Koppelman and thereby reimagines the two-dimensional monotype form into a three-dimensional book form. As the reader turns the pages, the images simultaneously build upon one another and retreat from one another, mimicking the moments of transition and creating a sense of meaning that emerges from spaces in between.

The Space Between is made with both machined and organic materials — from sheet metal covers to drafting film to handmade paper embedded with plant fibers — materials that ground it squarely in space and time as both a human and natural byproduct. The result is a physical and metaphorical exploration (and experience) of thresholds between those we physically create, those nature creates for us, and the space in between where we exist. Given the name of Richard’s enterprise — the Liminal Press — this work must hold a signal position for the publisher.

In its object and the theme it finds in the object, The Space Between resonates not only with the architecture-inspired works of book art in the Books On Books Collection but also those inspired by typography. See below.

Books On Books Collection – Anne Moeglin-Delcroix

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Ambulo Ergo Sum: Nature As Experience in Artists’ Books (2015)

Ambulo Ergo Sum: Nature As Experience in Artists’ Books (2015)
Anne Moeglin-Delcroix and Richard Sadleir, trans.
Case bound, printed paper over board, with green endbands and matching doublures. H225 x W155 mm. 96 pages. Acquired from Book Depository, 21 August 2019.
Photo: Books On Books Collection.

For her extended essay, Anne Moeglin-Delcroix selected six works by Hamish Fulton, seven by Richard Long and five by herman de vries to demonstrate “three ways of coming closer to the experience of nature unfiltered by the artistic tradition” of “landscape as an artistic genre” (pp. 5, 30).

As she puts it:

The analysis of some artists’ books … should make it possible to show how the emphasis has been progressively placed no longer on landscape but on the search for the best means, differing according to the various artists, of rendering an experience in the strongest sense of the word: a lived experience of the world, a personal practice, that is to say, a deliberate way of being in the world rather than before it. The walking body is the touchstone of this, because walking compels one to supersede the limits of a purely visual of nature to become the experience of the whole artist, with his body, in nature. (p. 6)

Along the way, Moeglin-Delcroix distinguishes between the walk being art itself (performance), the walk being a form of art (protocol driven) and the walk as being “simply one of the most favourable conditions for expanding perception and thereby consciousness and knowledge” (p. 28). In Fulton, she finds that the act of collecting and listing takes the place of the traditional landscape point of view, although views at a physical or temporal distance are present (p. 8). In Long, she finds that the act of collecting and listing is governed by protocol, an inventorying by purpose not mere encounter, and the “view of the close at hand” replaces the distant landscape view (pp. 19-20). But it is in devries she finds that the distant and the close, the whole and the fragment are complementaries that yield ambulo ergo sum (“I walk therefore I am”) (p. 28).

de vries is the most transcendental of the three. For de vries, in Moeglin-Delcroix’s words, “Art does not represent nature because nature is art itself” (p. 25), which leads to boxes or portfolios of loose items collected from nature that the reader has to contemplate as such and reconstruct the totality from which they were drawn (as in his catalogue incomplète), or to details from nature so close up that they can only have been collected by being in nature not by merely observing it (as in les très riches heures de herman de vries) (p. 29).

As philosophical as all this may be, the conceptual is not very far from craft in these artists’ works or Moeglin-Delcroix’s appreciation of them. But craft may be the thin end of the wedge that re-asserts a boundary between art and nature.

Consider Handscapes by Molly Coy and Claire Bolton. It, too, has been formed by walks, collecting, sampling, listing and related activities noted by Moeglin-Delcroix about Fulton, Long and de vries. It has the distant and up-close perspectives of Fulton and Long, respectively. It has de vries’ embedding of samples from nature. Albeit in landscape format, Handscapes is also a deviation from the tradition of landscape art. Consider also The Pond at Deuchar by Helen Douglas. It, too, has been formed similarly. It has the up-close perspectives of Long and de vries that replaces that of the traditional landscape, and it further deviates from that tradition by paradoxically calling on a structure associated with Oriental landscapes — the scroll. When contemplating these two works so different from those of Fulton, Long and de vries, are they any the less examples of “nature as experience in artists’ books”?

Yet, in Handscapes and The Pond at Deuchar, there is a presence of craft that draws the reader/viewer at some points closer to the nature experienced by the artists and at other points closer to the material nature of the artworks. As elements of craft, do plant-printed images or Chinese paper draw us closer to nature or push us further away in these artworks? Is it possible that paradoxically they do both?

Books On Books Collection – Clotilde Olyff

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Lettered Typefaces and Alphabets by Clotilde Olyff (2000)

Lettered Typefaces and Alphabets by Clotilde Olyff (2000)
Jan Middendorp and Clotilde Olyff
Spiral-bound softcover of 78 pages and measuring H235 x W215 mm with a 28-page booklet measuring H165 x W115 mm bound in. Acquired from Klondyke Books, Almere, NL, 28 November 2023.
Photos: Books On Books Collection

This is the rare first edition as published by the late Jan Middendorp through his Druk Editions. It bears all the hallmarks of his eye for design — the black coated wired binding, the heavy embossed card cover, the use of color to underscore the text’s theme, the embedded booklet — all nevertheless centering and providing a platform for the art and design of Clotilde Olyff.

Perhaps mostly noted for her pebble alphabet, Olyff should be noted for her Munari-like focus on the relation of the basic forms of circle, triangle and square to the shapes of letters and numbers and her ability to express that in sculpture, book art and games as well as type. Her works, as Middendorp writes in the preface, “are the result of investigations into the essence of the letter, into the mechanisms and conventions that guide our perception”.

In addition to being remembered for his own typographic design and publications, Middendorp is owed a debt of gratitude for collaborating with Clotilde Olyff to document her work.

Books On Books Collection – Klaus Peter Dencker

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Dero Abecedarius! (2001)

Dero Abecedarius! (2001)
Klaus Peter Dencker
Loose folios in heavy card box, title on card pasted on front box cover. H298 x W210 mm. 34 folios. Inkjet on BFK Rives 210 gram. Edition of 50, of which this is #30. Acquired from Red Fox Press, 3 January 2023.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.

Visual poems in an ABC sequence and inspired by the Statue of Liberty. Klaus Peter Dencker belongs in the vast company of notable visual poets and “alphabet-etishists”, too many to list here, but within the Books On Books Collection, there are Jim Avignon & Anja Lutz, Jim Clinefelter, Martín Gubbins, Bernard Heidsieck, Karl Kempton and Sam Winston, all of whom offer fruitful comparisons.

Detail from B folio

Artist’s statement: I started the work on “Dero Abecedarius” in the mid of July 2001. The work should have two principles of order: the sequence of the pages should follow the normal ABC, and the basic theme should be the Statue of Liberty which I am collecting since many years. This subject is a public-relation one in many variations, so that I could work on the idea of freedom especially with these partly absurd copies of our consumer society, to question it poetically and theoretically.

There exist three structures: 1. A-C, D-F, G-I, J-L, M, N-R, S-U, V-Z; 2. A-C, D-F, G-I, J-L, M, N-R, S-T, U-Y, Z; 3. A-C, D-F, G-I, J-L, M, N-P, O-R, S-T, V-Y, Z on four levels: black/poetic, green/poetry, blue/ABC, red/autobiographically.

Within this work are personal experiences of many visits to the USA and the absurd idea, that a letter has its own meaning/importance. The ABC as an own sign-world and as an example for the dealing with seeming/apparent unliberties and so called rules. I work on the sequences usually by making first all collages on the pages, then the text-elements and finally a follow-up of a few corrections in the existing collages. The work should have had 28 pages and was done for an exhibition in the Buch- und Schriftmuseum Museum of the Deutsche Bibliothek Leipzig with the opening on the 8th of November 2001. On the 11th of September all collages on the pages were done and also some pages with text-elements. Looking back that particular day over my work I noticed some elements which I can`t explain: I saw some disturbing connections. So on pages F, M, O and Z. I added after the 11th of September some new elements only in the existing collages of page R and Y, and I added the last two pages after Z. So that now the work has 32 pages as a consequence of 11 September and was finished on the 21st of October 2001.

Although Dencker refers to 32 pages, there are 34. They consist of 1 cover, 1 English preface (typeset), 1 German preface (handwritten), 26 letter folios, 1 entitled Noch zwei fündstucke (“Two more findings”), 2 modified collages of R and Y, 1 entitled “Art sheet”, 1 colophon.

Redfoxpress (founded by Francis Van Maele) is one of the more active and important publishers and distributors of artists’ books in the post-Fluxus tradition since 2000 to the present.

Books On Books Collection – Margaret (Molly) Coy & Claire Bolton

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Handscapes (2016)

Handscapes (2016)
Margaret (Molly) Coy & Claire Bolton
Casebound, hand sewn and bound with doublures and two ribbon bookmarks. H260 x W310 x D30. 80 folios. Edition of 12, of which this is #9. Acquired from the artists, 19 October 2023.
Photos: Books On Books Collection. Displayed with artists’ permission.

Like its title Handscapes, one half of the inspiration for this work of book art comes from the tools and material in the artists’ hands; the other, from Western Australia’s varied southwestern landscapes that the artists walked. Even its table of contents signals this dual inspiration with a single large wood type ampersand joining up each of the five section titles. The way the colors of ink move from dark to light and back across coasts & dunes, heath & ridge, thicket & forest, banks & brooks, caves & cliffs promises a rich journey for the eye. The shift from textured flyleaf to the Somerset paper of the contents promises the same for the hand.

Hand-crafted from a variety of papers and printed using collagraph, etching, linocut, leaf prints, metal and wood type (both printed and blind embossed) and illustrated with watercolor, pencil and tinted wax, the sheets in landscape profile deliver on the offer made by the table of contents. The same textured paper used to open and close the book takes on different colors when it is used to open and close each of the sections. Perhaps it’s something to do with the change of colors from recto to verso, but somehow the feel of that leathery, elephant-hide-like paper seems to vary from section to section — sometimes rough, gritty, bristly or slick, sometimes warm or cool.

Each section’s opening recto page (above) relies on the text laid out like a concrete poem and playing with a blind debossed image to signal the landscape to follow, while completely different papers (below) give real shifts of touch in keeping with each change in landscape.

Clockwise: A foamy white cotton paper from “Coasts & Dunes”; a linen wove from “Heath & ridge”; several fibrous papers from “Thicket & Forest”; a vegetal paper from “Banks & Brooks”; and a loose weave so porous it mimics pumice from “Caves & Cliffs”.

Within each section, the pages also play off one another in ways that reflect the section’s landscape. Look at this sequence from “Coast & Dunes”. First comes a watercolor and acrylics with the colors of Sea Spurge (Euphorbia paralias) and Tucker Bush or Coastal Pigface (Carpobrotus virescens) and a painted, blind debossed print of Sea Spurge on the right — all in the foreground. In the distance, tide and strand meet.

When the painted page turns, the strandline shows through the reverse and carries over into the torn edge of the white cotton paper on the right. Is that edge the crest of a white sand dune with a dark blue ocean in the background? Or is it the crest of a breaker crashing down the recto page?

When the torn-leaf is turned to the left, it does become a dune over which the debossed Sea Spurge now peeks, and we are looking beyond the dune’s crest into a cloudy white sky. The revealed dark blue recto page becomes something else altogether. The figurative has been abstracted. The debossed and gold-ink lines are the traces of the tideline and the dune crest.

Several pages later on in the section, this is confirmed when the other half of the dark blue sheet appears with new tracery labeled “tidelines” and “shifting dunes” in black ink and initiates a new sequence ending with another painting that looks at the earlier scene from a new perspective.

This magic as the recto page turns to verso is performed in many different ways. From “Thicket & Forest”, strips of paper woven into a sheet present one image on the recto and another on the verso.

From “Coasts & Dunes” again, the simple turning of a passe partout and other cutouts transform the images preceding and those previously framed or masked. The blue and brown pattern in the square of marbled paper (suminagashi from the Awagami factory in Japan) evokes tidelines and strandlines while the layers on the right suggest fish, eels or seaweed rippling under dark green water. When the first layer from the right (the passe partout) turns left, the suminagashi sample becomes a framed print, and the image on the right grows into a larger expanse of green water. When the next layer (the fish or grass cutouts) turns, the green water is replaced with blue, the cutouts become whitecaps or porpoises breaking the surface, and, on the right, the letters tumble in a wash from left to right.

Moving through Handscapes is like a walk through an open-air gallery. You see the art with your ears as well your eyes and hands. Some Australian composer should offer to be the artists’ Moussorgsky to this exhibition. Anne Moeglin-Delcroix’s Ambulo Ergo Sum (2015), however, makes a more interesting foil for appreciating Handscapes than Moussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition.

Addressing several works by three other celebrants of nature — Hamish Fulton, Richard Long and herman de vries — Moeglin-Delcroix concludes her essay neatly:

The three artists studied here through some of their books offer three ways of coming closer to the experience of nature unfiltered by the artistic tradition: nature as experienced, felt. In this process of deconditioning, walking plays a vital role: it enables them to overcome the limitations of a visual and cultural experience, involving the whole body in contact with nature itself. The artists examined here replace the “point of view” presupposed by all landscape and the conventions of artistic representation with the more neutral and more objective approaches of the collection and the inventory, as if seeking to efface themselves before nature itself. That these approaches are governed by protocols, though summary, or reintroduce the mediation of an explicit or implicit method is not inconsistent with the quest for a more immediate relationship with nature. It is that, like automatism among the Surrealists or (a reference much more familiar to these artists) emptiness in Buddhism, the immediacy or evidence lost requires, in order to be regained, self-discipline, even an asceticism of subjectivity: discipline and asceticism are visible in how their books are constructed. P. 30.

From their title onwards, Coy and Bolton are very much filtering nature through their art. Nature does not seem any less experienced or felt. It is experienced and felt through the variety of their art. And vice versa: nature filters their art. As Coy describes it in her correspondence. “We started every individual section by (sitting, walking, talking) immersing ourselves in a specific environ, taking photos and collecting plants, then back to my studio and the project’s visual diary.”

For Handscapes, collection and inventory as an approach apply as much to the Coy’s and Bolton’s conventions, tools, techniques and materials of artistic representation as they do to nature itself. They throw their art into nature, and nature into their art. Look at the vegetal detritus in the papers. Look at the leaf prints. Look at the play with perspective — from the landscape point of view to the underfoot point of view. There’s little self-effacement before nature here. As the page-turning magic demonstrates, there’s a profusion of perspectives, colors, shapes, textures and techniques — as if to celebrate the profusion of nature.

Dried specimen of Sea Spurge (Euphorbia paralis) used for Handscapes. Photo: Courtesy of Molly Coy.

This is not to place Fulton, Long, de vries, Coy and Bolton in some sort of hierarchy. Rather it is to draw attention to differences in quests to express a relationship with nature and art. And to appreciate how Coy’s and Bolton’s approach is visible in how their book is constructed.

Books On Books Collection – Susan Lowdermilk

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I think that the root of the wind is water (2016)

I think that the root of the wind is water (2016)
Susan Lowdermilk
Hardback with open spine, Asahi cloth over board, debossed front cover with fitted, pastedown artwork, around folded structure with cut-outs, pop-ups and pastedowns. H236 x W182 x D20 mm. 14 pages. Edition of 30, of which this is #24. Acquired from the Abecedarian Gallery, 5 October 2023.
Photos: Books On Books Collection. Displayed with the artist’s permission.

Some book art illustrates a poem. Some converses with it. And some, like this one by Susan Lowdermilk, enact the poem.

I think that the Root of the Wind is Water—
It would not sound so deep
Were it a Firmamental Product—
Airs no Oceans keep—
Mediterranean intonations—
To a Current’s Ear—
There is a maritime conviction
In the Atmosphere—

#1302, Emily Dickinson. 1960. Complete poems [1st ed.]. T. H. Johnson (ed.). New Y0rk: Little Brown.

As she frequently does, Dickinson announces her core metaphor in the poem’s first line and goes on to develop and confirm or justify it in the lines that follow. As book artist, Lowdermilk has a slight advantage over the poet in being able to use the binding and printing to express herself even before the first line arrives. Before that first breath of air is taken, the Asahi book cloth’s color and the pressure print blue-gray pattern, which peeks from the exposed spine, is embedded on the front cover and flows over the doublure, evoke water, the sea and the maritime.

With the pop-up that follows, breathing the air above the page, Lowdermilk even manages to steal a march on the first half of the poet’s “Root of the Wind” metaphor. As the airy engineering is done with the paper printed with the watery pattern, enhanced by a reflective sheet of acetate beneath, it physically performs Dickinson’s entwining of wind and water. All that before and as the poem’s first two lines appear — and it just gets better with every turn of the page.

Because the blue-gray pattern plays so significant a role in this work, I asked the artist how the pressure print process works, especially in yielding the tonality of pattern.

I learned the pressure print technique at the Minneapolis Center for Book Arts while I was on a residency there in 2015. It is more akin to a rubbing that is created using light pressure on the letterpress than a relief print from something like wood or linoleum. Here is a brief description and a video. A plate in the bed of a cylinder press is inked. A low profile image (like paper cutouts for example) is placed onto the cylinder with the paper on top. The light pressure of the press touches the paper on top of the low profile image, giving a soft impression (like a rubbing) on the paper.The ink never touches the plate itself, just the plate’s pressure through the paper. If the pressure is too much, then the non image areas of the paper get printed. So, ink layer, thickness of the image plate, thickness of the paper, and height of the inked base plate have to be just right. … I used sheets of sticky backed mailing labels for my plates. As I layered them the highest points got the most pressure and were darkest, the two lower levels of the image plates had less pressure and therefore lighter. … I like the pressure print process for this project because the softness of the images really suited the mood and feeling of the poem for me. (Correspondence, 14 January 2024)

Lowdermilk and Dickinson are at one as they move from the first two lines of the poem to the next two. Dickinson has split the sentence into two lines and knows that, after a line break, the reader’s eye swims back to the beginning of the previous line to fish out the sense of the sentence: “It would not sound so deep/ Were it a Firmamental Product”. After the line break and page turn, Lowdermilk gives us a water spout — “a Firmamental Product” — and knows that pop ups always bring out the child in the reader — turning the pages back and forth to see the action again and again — so back we go for the fun and the sense. Lowdermilk’s waterspout also puns on top of Dickinson’s pun on “Airs”; the waterspout, too, is an air the ocean won’t keep.

The shoal of fish leaping off the page is Lowdermilk’s addition, prompted no doubt by Dickinson’s “Oceans”, “Mediterranean intonations” and “maritime conviction”, although the shapes of the fish seem a bit ear-like, echoing the “Current’s Ear”.

With the next turn, the images of currents, waterspouts and fish give way to that of seaweed that undulates from the bottom of the finely horizontally sliced page, placing Dickinson’s “Root of the Wind” in the deep.

As those narrow maritime strips bend up and to the left into the atmosphere above the page, they reveal and enact Dickinson’s final lines.

There are many fine illustrated books and artists’ books that pay homage to Emily Dickinson. Many of the latter achieve that inversion of ekphrasis so frequent in book art where the visual or sculptural work of art responds to and re-presents the poem. The best of them achieve a oneness. Susan Lowdermilk’s does just that.

Books On Books Collection – Richard J. Hoffman

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Richard J. Hoffman (1912-1989) was a fine press printer and taught print and design at California State University, Los Angeles. His interests in typography, miniature books and the alphabet are represented by two works in the Books On Books Collection: “Don’t Nobody Care about Zeds” (1987) and Otto Ege’s The Story of the Alphabet (1988).

Both books scratch the collection’s “alphabet itch”. The first provides the added satisfaction of complementing the children’s books that champion the alphabet’s last letter: Jon Agee’s Z Goes Home (2006), Alethea Kontis & Bob Kolar’s AlphaOops: The Day Z Went First (2012), Sean Lamb & Mike Perry’s Z Goes First (2018) and Lou Kuenzler & Julia Woolf’s Not Yet Zebra! . The second adds an alphabet history to the miniature abecedaries as well as a more than usually intricate design.

“Don’t Nobody Care about Zeds” (1987)

“Don’t Nobody Care about Zeds”
A Modest Book About an Oft-overlooked Character of the Alphabet Prepared for the Pleasure of Zamoranans* (1987)
Richard J. Hoffman
Hardcover, casebound. Cloth and paper cover with colored endbands and printed doublures. H160 x W120 mm. 176 pages. Edition of 200. Acquired from Scott Emerson Books, 5 September 2023.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.

Hoffman’s introduction, which explains the book’s title and final image, also touches the collection’s expatriate funny bone.

‘Zeds is what the English folk call the magnificent twenty-sixth character of our alphabet. This I learned while shopping at Covent Gardens in London some years ago. There I happened upon a flea market where from a pair of old wood type cases, an ‘uckster was peddling electrotyped initial letters. With a blob of sealing wax, he assured me, I could personalize my correspondence by stamping my initial in the soft wax. When I asked he had any Zs, he looked at me questioningly, then he beamed as I picked one up, very brightly responded that he still had some unsold, and then solemnly observed, “Don’t nobody care about Zeds.”‘

For those who consider the ampersand to be the alphabet’s twenty-seventh character, Hoffman’s book may remind them of Jan Tschichold’s A Brief History of the Ampersand (1957) or ~Zeug/Velvetyne Type Foundry’s Et & ampersands : une récolte internationale = a contemporary collection (2017), but those two come nowhere near Hoffman’s embellishments with fleurons and ornaments to highlight his extended sampler.

The Story of the Alphabet (1988)

The Story of the Alphabet
Its Evolution and Development… Embellished Typographically with Printer’s Flowers Arranged by Richard J. Hoffman (1988)
Otto F. Ege** and Richard J. Hoffman
Hardback, casebound in gray cloth over boards, endbands, printed doublures. H70 x W74 mm. 82 pages. Edition of 250. Acquired from Bromer Booksellers, 1 November 2023.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.

Color and embellishment in Hoffman’s The Story of the Alphabet perform an informative as well as decorative function. The cover cloth’s red, green, gray and blue are decoratively echoed on the title page and later are used in the color-organization of fleurons and ornaments described in the “Printer’s Note”. Little wonder that the book received a Distinguished Book Award from the Miniature Book Society in 1988.

“The first eight, printed in blue ink, show the Garamond units”

“The second group … use[s] the Granjon Arabesque …. These are printed in green ink.”

“The final group … feature[s] a typographic unit designed by Bruce Rogers…. These, because of their heavy weight, are printed in gray ink….”

*”Zamoranans” refer to the members of the Zamorano Club of Los Angeles, named after Augustin Zamorano, who brought the first printing press to California in 1834.

**”Otto F. Ege” serves another purpose for the collection. Without the artistic justification atributable to some book artists, Ege was a notorious biblioclast. Thinking to make them more widely available, he broke apart numerous illuminated manuscripts to create portfolios of samples. Fortunately he was not comprehensive in his efforts, and a large number of intact works made it into Yale’s Beinecke Library (see below).

Books On Books Collection – Nayla Romanos Iliya

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The Phoenician Alphabet (2022)

The Phoenician Alphabet (2022)
Nayla Romanos Iliya (art), Rose Issa, Susan Babaie and Peter Murray (text)
Casebound laminated cover. H205 x W185 mm. 108 pages. Acquired from Les presses du réel, 2 February 2023.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.

Herodotus first put forward the historical account that Cadmos, a prince from Byblos in today’s Lebanon, brought the Phoenician alphabet to the Greeks in ancient times (anywhere from the 12th to 8th century BCE according to scholars of the 20th and 21st centuries CE). The myth and story of Cadmos — his pursuit of his sister Europa kidnapped by Zeus, his founding the city of Thebes and his delivering the alphabet — are entertainingly recounted in the children’s book There’s a Monster in the Alphabet (2002) by James Rumford. The relative settling on the Semitic origins of Cadmos and the Phoenician alphabet is well covered in Johanna Drucker’s Inventing the Alphabet (2022).

Lebanon’s being the ancient source of this civilizing invention and the site today of ever-present conflict and ever-elusive peace is a challenging irony. Architect and artist Romanos Iliya meets that challenge with works like “On the Other Side of Time” (a soaring public sculpture in Beirut), Flower Power (forms made of concrete, steel and shell casings and splinters), 1001 Lights (an interactive sculpture of light, cubes and Arabic calligraphy) and the Phoenician Alphabet (public sculptures inspired by those shapes that Cadmos brought to capture the sounds of language). The monograph displays these works and more, including the limited edition series called Small Characters that she made for the National Museum of Beirut and the AUB Archaeology Museum.

Small Characters (2014) displayed in The Phoenician Alphabet.

Just as Ron King’s ABC Paperweights have done for the Latin alphabet, Romanos Iliya’s Phoenician letters suggest rather than replicate.

ABC Paperweights [nd]
Ron King
Resin sculptures on painted wooden board Acquired from the artist, 24 July 2021.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.

Alef, Beth and Gimel from the series Small Characters (2014)
Nayla Romanos Iliya
Sculptures in resin. 130 x 130 mm, variable height.Edition of 100 each, of which these are #26, #16 and #25, respectively. Acquired from the artist, 13 October 2023.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.

These three letters from the Small Characters series arrived too late to be included in the exhibition Alphabets Alive! at the Bodleian in Oxford. Had they arrived in time, however, they might have thrown the exhibition off track. The Alphabets Alive! exhibition began with a focus on artists’ books and the alphabet. A few non-print and non-book works slipped into the cabinets. But so resonant and evocative are these representations of the Phoenician alphabet that they would have — and have — led to a search for other sculptural works. Imagine the completely different and monumental display needed to accommodate these 26 artists alongside Romanos Iliya and King. Enjoy the links.

Hazem el Mestikawy

Dominault Evelyne

Emily Floyd

Glagolitic Alphabet Trail

Thierry Gouttenègre

Ebon Heath

Eric Ho & Kostika Spaho

Takanobu Igarashi

Collene Karcher

Marianne Larsen

Catherine Lesueur

Paco Torres Monsó

Claes Oldenburg

Jaume Plensa

Azza al Qubaisi

Peyton Scott Russell

Nicola Yeoman

Books On Books Collection – Carolyn Thompson

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Penguin’s 2007 series “Great Loves” is a twenty-book set of short paperbacks with selections from the usual suspects (D. H. Lawrence) and the unusual (Søren Kierkegaard). The selection of eleven tales from Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron provides Carolyn Thompson with the opportunity to create a work of altered book art enjoyable on several levels.

The unaltered cover promises one thing. Its “under-the-cover” title page delivers another.

The Eaten Heart (2013)

The Eaten Heart (2013)
Carolyn Thompson
Altered perfect bound paperback. H180 x W111 mm. 124 pages. Edition of 3, of which this is #2. Acquired from Eagle Gallery, 7 October 2023.
Photos: Books On Books Collection. Displayed with artist’s permission.

Thompson’s chosen technique of removing text with a scalpel enacts one of the paradoxical meanings of the revealed tell-tale title it presents: the scalpel has eaten away all the text on this title page except for the text chosen as the title. Boccaccio’s text is there but not there, and the “under-the-cover ” title nods toward his missing content. Leaving only words referring to the body, Thompson’s work of book art celebrates the raunchy “under the covers” innuendo in Boccaccio’s text.

The transparent tape that holds the body of cut pages together (just detectable in the image of the title page above) can be removed and the pages turned (carefully!). Below is page 11 “in motion”.

The sequence of pages 116 to 119 below shows that, while the verso pages do not play a role in the work, the movement of words on the recto side away from those that follow them, revealing the blank sheet at the end, invites musing about their possible relationship as well as marvelling at the artist’s delicate patience applied to the indelicate.

Later on, using the 50 books in the Penguin Modern Box Set (2018), Thompson created text pieces, drawings, embroideries, prints and additional altered books in the spirit of The Eaten Heart. The Laurence Sterne Trust exhibited the full set of works at Shandy Hall, York, in 2019. Eagle Gallery hosted them again in London in February 2020, and the same year, After Capote: When Truman met Marlon, her altered version of Truman Capote’s The Duke and His Domain in the series, won the Minnesota Center for Book Arts Prize People’s Book Art Award.

The more wide-ranging but more consolidating work that follows demonstrates Thompson’s indefatigable originality and insatiableness as a re-purposing artist.

The Beast in Me (2021)

The Beast in Me (2021)
Carolyn Thompson
Print. 130 x 130 cm. Acquired from Information as Material, October 2021.
Photos: Books On Books Collection. Displayed with artist’s permission.

Although The Beast in Me has a previous iteration from 2014, this one commissioned for the second issue of Inscription: The Journal of Material Text (the “holes issue”) expands to over 500 snippets of text beginning with ‘I’ from eight different novels. Its manner of doing so makes The Beast in Me simultaneously centrifugal and centripetal in its effect — perhaps more emblematic of Inscription‘s coverage in its “holes issue” than the impressive work chosen for the covers.

Here is Thompson’s description of the commissioned work:

The statements (over five hundred of them) are presented one after another in a circular narrative with no natural beginning or ending and can therefore be read from any point. When removed from their original context, they become ham-fisted stabs at self-revelation and blurted snapshots of confession. They contradict one another, and the narrator. The piece explores the power struggle within all of us, where different aspects of our personalities vie for dominance over one another at any given moment, while others yearn for internal balance. The narrative, whilst light and frivolous in places, descends into a sinister and uncontrollable rant in others.

If we accept the print’s invitation as we would a book’s invitation to read — to engage in narrative — we find that human identity’s ever precarious balance — between inward and outward forces, its introverted and extroverted elements, the being apart and the being a part of, and integration vs disintegration — is captured sharply. A blank center, a void or hole — there but not there — defined by fragments simultaneously flying outward and pressing inward.

Books On Books Collection – Ianna Andréadis

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Winter (2019)

Winter (2019)
Ianna Andréadis
Softbound with a waxed thread loop. H210 x W150 mm. 48 pages. Acquired from Happy Babies, 30 July 2023.
Photos: Books On Books Collection. Displayed with artist’s permission.

The language of the book is one we learn well before we learn to read. It has many rules and parts. One part is the single page, and one of its rules is to turn it. Another of its rules is that the page behind may affect the page before. Another part of book language is the double-page spread. One of its rules is that facing pages may affect one another and that the space between them might disappear. As with any native language, we absorb its rules and parts and use them without thinking about them. Ianna Andréadis’ Winter revels in the language of the book and invites us to page through a winter wood and confusing thicket to begin learning again what we absorbed so long ago.

Like our earliest children’s books, Winter‘s only word is its title. Inviting touch, its front cover reproduces the main image of the title page but with debossing, and the book paper that follows is heavy and translucent.

With a turn of the title page, the bird is behind us, and the branches and trunks obscured by the title page’s “winter fog” loom large in black with the woods beyond appearing through the fog continued with the translucent paper.

As we move further into the woods, we look down on a bush or small tree weighted with snow whose trunk and branches sink into the snow beneath. Having passed it, we find a stand of four saplings and the one furthest from us also sunk in snow.

But now look up. The tangle of black branches and the winter fog barely hide the broken limbs of the tree just behind.

Several more pages of thicket and fog come before we reach the center of the book. There the imposition imposes its mechanics. The two facing pages both bear black ink, and the viewer may wonder whether these are birchtree trunks or black trunks with footsteps and branches or clumps of tree fall in the snow-covered ground between them.

Whatever that view is, the shift in inking according to the imposition envelops us in a winter fog on the following double-page spread.

Andréadis and her imposition, however, will lead us out of the fog and thicket, and the “lightening sky” over the next several pages encourages us to look up and find another bird perched above.

After several more pages and perhaps too tired to keep looking up, our eyes turn back to the tree trunks and branches sunk in snow, until at the end, we can finally look back up, turn around and see the clear fork of a trunk behind which the wood has disappeared again in winter fog.

And if at the end, prompted by the feel of the back cover and perhaps childhood memories of first books to press the covers flat, we’ll find we have come full circle. The next-to-last page’s forking tree trunk now appears debossed on the back cover matched to its other half and the bird on the front cover. Let’s read it again!

Andréadis’ Winter is now scarce, but through the link behind the title, you might be able to locate an institution with it near you. To enjoy more of the artist’s work, several of her illustrations of others’ books are available in libraries and the used-book market. One such book is Le papillon et la lumière by Patrick Chamoiseau, which deserves publication in translation not only for its charming story but for greater access to Andréadis’ artwork.

For another means of re-experiencing the first encounter with the language of the book, try Bruno Munari’s I Prelibri, first published in 1980 and still available in a second edition from Corraini.

Books On Books Collection – Gennady Spirin

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A Apple Pie (2005)

A Apple Pie (2005)
Gennady Spirin
Casebound, laminated paper over boards, pastedown with matching endpapers, sewn. 275 x 275 mm. 32 pages. Acquired from Bud Plant & Hutchison Books, 13 March 2023.
Photos: Books On Books Collection. Displayed with permission of the artist.

“Never judge a book by its cover” does not mean “ignore the clues and promises there”. A laminated cover and lay-flat binding are not uncommon among children’s books. Nor is the spreading of an illustration across the back and front covers. What is unusual about Gennady Spirin’s A Apple Pie is how it uses them to offer clues and promises of the lesson this book offers beyond the lesson of the alphabet. It promises a lesson about perspective and the canvas of the book.

Look at how the back and front covers play with landscape perspective and the notion of the book as frame and canvas. The head of the spine interrupts the landscape to join the narrow orange frame that demarcates the edges of the landscape. All the same, the landscape’s hill of apples in the foreground overlaps the spine to descend into the landscape’s midground on the back cover, which deepens into a background of at least five levels like a medieval or Renaissance painting.

Another technique of perspective from those traditions is to place in the background things we know are large and in the foreground what we know is smaller. A temple or mansion behind, a mother and child or pie up front. These objects and figures often perform temporal double duty as in The Flight into Egypt, where the tiny workers misdirect the mass of Herod’s soldiers in the background while the Holy family looms large resting in the foreground. In Spirin’s illustration, the past apple-picking appears in the distance, and the resulting pie is near.

Spirin slyly multiplies this trick with his apple pie in the foreground with its tiny characters dancing around it. Yes, this book is going to replay the traditional celebration of the apple pie alphabet, but pay attention to relative sizes. The pie is monumental, larger even than the three-dimensional letter A that sits atop and casts its shadow over the banner of calligraphy, so watch for how the trick of shadows draws attention to perspective, to the roman vs calligraphic letters and to the surfaces on which the letters and tricks of perspective play out.

The very first double-page spread delivers on the cover’s clues and promises.

The oversized carved A serves as an arch to provide an example of a word beginning with A and casts its shadow over the oversized pie and cutting board that a team of elf-sized bakers has borne under it to the applause of mother and children who are mid-sized between the pie and bakers. The A is so oversized that its apex disappears from the image area. Bringing further attention to the image area and deepening its dimensionality, Spirin “cuts” the surface on which it is drawn and curls the cut section against the arm of the A.

In the world of letters, size matters — in the form of the upper and lower cases.

Further drawing attention to the art of illustrating the alphabet, not only does Spirin hand-draw examples of their forms in print and calligraphy, he leaves the guidelines for the base and x-height in place, eliminating them after (or before?) using them as the measure for the base and crust of a miniature pie in the margin. In a sense, the process of lettering has also become the canvas for A Apple Pie.

This process is displayed for every letter. Most also have a small apple vignette in the lower left or lower right corner.

As with the ants surrounding the apple, most of these vignettes serve up images that begin with the letters of their pages (for example, O for owl and P for pig) and are trimmed to re-emphasize the pages’ image space with which Spirin plays.

Letters other than A have images that cross the divide of pages. When they do, Spirin’s historical influences ranging from the medieval to the Renaissance to the Victorians stand out even more. His play with figures, color, perspective and shadow in the letter J pages recall Brueghel, Bosch, Patinir and, of course, Kate Greenaway.

Detail from Children’s Games (1560), Jan Brueghel, Kunsthistoriches Museum Wien
Detail from Garden of Earthly Delights (1490-1500), Hieronymus Bosch, Museo del Prado
A Apple Pie (c. 1886), Kate Greenaway, Internet Archive

The tradition of the “apple pie” mnemonic reaches almost as far back as the artistic ones. As noted on Spirin’s copyright page and confirmed in Peter Hunt’s International Companion, alphabet primers based on the mnemonic must have been well known prior to 1671 when the English cleric John Eachard referred to it. Compiled from the Bodleian Libraries’ record of “apple pie” items in the Opie Collection and from preparation for the exhibition Alphabets Alive!, here is a starting list for the industrious apple-picking artist interested in confecting an extension to the tradition. (Suggested additions to the menu are welcome in the Comments.) Scholarly baker’s apprentices should also start with the dissertation of the appropriately named A. Robin Hoffman (now at the Art Institute of Chicago); see Further Reading below.

1743. The child’s new play-thing : being a spelling-book intended to make the learning to read, a diversion instead of a task. consisting of scripture-histories, fables, stories, moral and religious precepts, proverbs, songs, riddles, dialogues, &c. the whole adapted to the capacities of children, … or for children before they go to school. London: Mary Cooper.

British Library (formerly British Museum)

1764. Tom thumb’s play-book : to teach children their letters as soon as they can speak. London. Contains “A Apple Pie” as well as “A was an Archer“.

1791. The tragical death of a apple-pye : who was cut in pieces and eat by twenty five gentlemen : with whom all little people ought to be very well acquainted. London: J. Evans. Internet Archive.

1800-12. The Tragical Death of a Apple-Pye, Who Was Cut in Pieces and Eat by Twenty Five Gentlemen with
Whom All Little People Ought to Be Well Acquainted. London: Printed for John Evans, 42, Long-lane, West-Smithfield. Folded sheet, as issued. 9.5 x 5.9 cm. Opie N 589.

1808. The History of the Apple Pie. Written by Z. London: John Harris and Son. Opie C 1152. Also viewable here.

1815. The History of Master Watkins : To Which Is Added, The Tragical Death of an Apple-Pie. Chelmsford: Marsden, printer. Opie N 887.

1820. Hone, W. & Cruikshank, G. The Political “A Apple Pie” … by the Author of “The House that Jack Built”. Sixth ed. London: Printed for the Author; sold by J. Johnston. Johnson e.1111.

1820, ca. The History of an Apple-Pie. Written by Z. London: Harris and Son. 17.3 x 10.5 cm. Opie N 582.

1827. The History of A Apple Pie. Written by Z. London: Orlando Hodgson.

1835-57. Marks’ History of an Apple Pie. King Pippin’s Alphabet for Good Children. London: J. Marks.
17 x 10.2 cm. Opie N 588. Also view here.

1836. Bouncing B. The History of an Apple Pie. William Darton and Son.

1837-45. The History of an Apple Pie. London: Darton & Clark. 16 x 10.5 cm. Opie N 583.

1841. The tragical death of an apple pie : who was cut to pieces and eaten by twenty-five gentlemen with whom all little people ought to be acquainted. Printed by J. Paul & Co. London: 2 & 3 Monmouth-court. View here.

1843-49. The History of an Apple Pie; with Ditties for the Nursery, by Dame Dearlove’s Ditties. London: Grant and Griffith. 17.9 x 10.8 cm. Colophon of S & J. Bentley, Wilson, and Fley, Bangor House, Shoe Lane. Opie N 584.

1851-74. The Apple-Pie Alphabet. London: John and Charles Mozley, 6 Paternoster Row. 13.1 x 8.2 cm. Colophon of Henry Mozley and Sons, Derby. This title number 26 in the publisher’s series of penny chapbooks. Opie N 580. See also Opie N 581.

1856-65. The History of an Apple Pie. Written by Z. London: Griffith and Farran. 17.6 x 11.5 cm. Reissue as a rag book of the 1820 edition published by J. Harris. Wrappers have the colophon of H.W. Hutchings, 63, Snow Hill, London. Opie N 585. See also Opie N 586 for larger version (18 x 19.8 cm). From the library of Roland Knaster.

1860, ca. The History of an Apple Pie. London: J. Bysh, 157 & 158 Albany Road, Old Kent Road. 13.6 x 10.7 cm. Opie N 587.

1860, not after. The Apple Pie. London: Darton & Co., 58 Holborn Hill. 25 x 17 cm. Darton’s Indestructible Elementary Children’s Books. Inscription dated 8 February 1860. Opie N 2. Also view here.

1861, not before. The History of A, Apple Pie. London: Dean & Son, Printers, Lithographers, and Book and Print
Publishers, 11, Ludgate Hill. 25 x 16.5 cm. (Dean’s Untearable Cloth Children’s Coloured Toy Books). Opie N 4.

1865, ca. A. Apple Pie. London: Frederick Warne & Co. 26.8 x 22.6 cm. Aunt Louisa’s London Toy Books. Colophon of Kronheim & Co. Opie N 1.

1865-89. The History of A Apple Pie. London: George Routledge & Sons. 31 x 25.2 cm. Rear wrapper has colophon of the lithographer L. van Leer & Co, Holland and 62 Ludgate Hill Opie N 5. Also see Pussy’s Picture Book. Opie N 1017.

1874. Routledge’s nursery album for children. London: George Routledge and Sons. A.

1886, ca. Kate Greenaway. A Apple Pie. London: George Routledge and Sons. Opie N 18. Also view here and here.

1890, ca. E.A. Cooke. The Story of A Apple Pie. London: R. E. King & Co.

1899. A.B.C. of the Apple Pie. Printed on linen. New York: McLouglin Bros. Viewable here.

19__, ca. A Apple Pie. An Alphabet from Modelled Designs by Mrs. Wm. Harbutt. Pen and Ink Drawings by Noel C. Harbutt A.R.C.A. London: Dean & Son, Ltd; Bathampton: W. Harbutt. Plasticine Works & Studio. 25.4 x 18.8 cm. Opie N 3.

1966. The Tragical Death of A. Apple Pie Who Was Cut in Pieces, and Eaten by Twenty-Six Little Villains.
[Whitstable, Kent: Ben Sands at his Shoestring Press]. Leporello. 11.5 x 13.4 cm. #185/225 copies. Gift of Roland Knaster. Opie N 590.

From the Bodleian Librairies’ copy of The Tragical Death … (1966)
Ben Sands
Photo: Books On Books.

1974. William Stobbs. A is an Apple Pie. London: The Bodley Head.

1986. Tracey Campbell Pearson. A Was an Apple Pie. London: Bodley Head.

1987. Gavin Bishop. A Apple Pie. Oxford University Press.

2011. Alison Murray. Apple Pie ABC. London: Orchard Books.

Books On Books Collection – Raj Haldar, Chris Carpenter & Maria Tina Beddia

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P is for Pterodactyl (2018)

P is for Pterodactyl: The Worst Alphabet Book Ever (2018)
Raj Haldar, Chris Carpenter & Maria Tina Beddia
Hardback, illustrated paper on boards, dustjacket. H222 x W286 mm. 40 pages. Purchased from Amazon, 17 August 2021.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.

If a posthumous revision of Eric Partridge’s Comic Alphabets were possible, this one would have to be included. But why did it take so long for the oddball abecedary and the oddities of spelling to meet in “The Worst Alphabet Book Ever“? Or maybe the 19th century spelling reformer Alexander J. Ellis compiled a still-to-be-discovered abecedary displaying a carp above the word ghoti.

Apropos of carp, though: the entry for bdellium is irritating on two scores. First, it is not the only word dumb enough to begin with “b”; there is also bdellatomy and bdellometer. Second, while true that the tree producing the gum resin bdellium is native to the East Indies and Africa, there are words other than dumb ending in a silent /b/ that the authors might have chosen to underscore their point. But they didn’t and fell into the sticky colonial trap illustrated (somewhat more obviously) below.

From Abc En Relief (1955)
Jo Zagula and Marguerite Thiebold
Photo: Books On Books Collection.

Bookmarking Book Art – An Open Post to Xu Bing and CODEX

2024/04/24Books On BooksLeave a comment

First, there was Tianshu or The Book from the Sky (1986-2012).

From a Visit to “Art for the People”, Xu Bing (Centro del Carme, Valencia, Spain, 2019)

Then, there was The Book from the Ground (2014).

From Xu Bing, Book from the Ground: From Point to Point (MIT Press, 2014)

And then, Tianshu Rocket (2019).

From “Xu Bing: Art Satellite—The First Animated Film Shot in Space” is on view at Santa Veneranda in Venice. (Central Academy of Fine Arts). © Xu Bing Studio.

Now comes Lake on a Satellite (2024), the first freeze-frame animated film shot in space being shown in the Cappella di Santa Veneranda at the Chiesa dei Santi Geremia e Lucia (Venice)

From “Xu Bing: Art Satellite—The First Animated Film Shot in Space” is on view at Santa Veneranda in Venice. © Xu Bing Studio.

With the launch of the “Xu Bing Art Satellite Creative Residency Project” (2024-27) inviting artists to create works using the art satellite SCA-1, a new opportunity for book art is here.

From “Xu Bing: Art Satellite—The First Animated Film Shot in Space” is on view at Santa Veneranda in Venice. © Xu Bing Studio.

Xu Bing, think of those “To/From” tags that we in the West affix to gifts.

Gift tags

CODEX, invite your prospective attending book artists to submit bookmarks to Xu’s SCR Project in the form of “To/From” tag to be projected to and received from the SCA-1 satellite for the 2026 Book Fair and Symposium.

2024 CODEX Book Fair at Henry J. Kaiser Convention Center in Oakland, California.

Bind the physical submissions in a codex format and

The Fall (1976)

Further Reading

ABCing (2010)

Further Reading

A is for Axolotl (2022)

Further Reading

Further Reading

Further Reading

Craft & Conceptual Art : Reshaping the Legacy of Artists’ Books (2023)

Further Reading

Breaking Waves (2023)

Further Reading

Water, Calling (2021)

The Space Between (2018)

Further Reading

Ambulo Ergo Sum: Nature As Experience in Artists’ Books (2015)

Further Reading

Lettered Typefaces and Alphabets by Clotilde Olyff (2000)

Further Reading

Dero Abecedarius! (2001)

Further Reading

Handscapes (2016)

Further Reading

I think that the root of the wind is water (2016)

Further Reading and Viewing

“Don’t Nobody Care about Zeds” (1987)

The Story of the Alphabet (1988)

Further Reading

The Phoenician Alphabet (2022)

Further Reading

The Eaten Heart (2013)

The Beast in Me (2021)

Further Reading

Winter (2019)

Further Reading

A Apple Pie (2005)

Further Reading

P is for Pterodactyl (2018)

Further Reading

Voilà! The Book to/from Sky and Ground.

Craft & Conceptual Art : Reshaping the Legacy of Artists’ Books (2023)