Books On Books

The Secret Books is a dialogue between the photography of Sean Kernan and the writings of Jorge Luis Borges.  It contains tritone photographs, short stories, poems and quotations as well as an essay by the artist.   Kernan explains how the dialogue began:

“There was an old book out on a table. I went to put it away, but instead I just opened it and gazed. I looked at the way the sharp metal type cut into the paper, at the blooms of foxing in the margins. I smelled its slight odor of papery rot, caught Latin words here and there and made out that they said something about the spirit and devotion. I stood there for the longest time. The book had stilled me.

On an impulse, I went to the closet where I keep a compost heap of props and got four black stones from a Japanese river. I set them out carefully in a line across the pages of the book. And suddenly it looked to me like…a poem. Or a kind of poem, at least. Maybe a Haiku or something by one of the Imagists, something that didn’t narrate or argue but just placed a few simple things before you and invited you to complete the work. This book with its stones was a pure image, the kind that can move from one mind to another and root there in some mysterious panspermic process. Joining things that didn’t logically go together–Latin meditations and Japanese rivers, black stones and creamy paper–broke apart some notion of what these things should say and set my imagination free to work. I had always wanted my photography to do this, and now I saw this wonderful composition open on the table before me.

I took a picture of this poem. And that was the beginning of these books.

After a while there were enough of them to suggest that they might themselves make a book, and indeed had to be a book. So I began to think about what might be necessary to make this happen. Perhaps it needed the armature of a text, but what that text might be and how it might work to unite the whole wasn’t clear. Then a designer friend, Lana Rigsby, saw the pictures and said they reminded her of Borges.

Of course! …

The Secret Books doesn’t attempt to illustrate Borges, and it doesn’t aspire to be a collaboration–as an artist I couldn’t hold his coat. I have simply found some instances in which he speaks directly about books and have put them with my images of books to make a kind of sequence, or perhaps a dialogue. And navigating thus under the star of Borges, I look at this book–words and images, side by side on the table before me–and find myself looking down dark, unfamiliar paths across the plane of the world with a rising sense, both exciting and ominous, that everything is about to change.”

The Secret Books was published in 1999 by Leete Island Books to coincide with the centennial of Borges’ birth and, by happenstance, with the start of the long journey to the EPUB standard.  The month before The Secret Books appeared the Open eBook Forum (now the IDPF) released the Open eBook Publication Structure (OEBPS) version 1.0.  A coincidence Borges would have relished.

Further Reading

“Hanna Piotrowska (Dyrcz)“, Books On Books Collection, 13 December 2019. In particular, see Twórca/The Maker.