Books On Books Collection – Abecedaries I (in progress)

Letter	Designer
A	Simon Arizpe
B	Camille Magaud
C	Peter Dahmen
D	Dorothy Yule
E	Eric Broekhuis
F	Yoojin Kim
G	Jess Tice-Gilbert
H	Angelo Ferrari
I	Lena Ignestam
J	Hiromi Takeda
K	Rob Kelly
L	Courtney McCarthy
M	Wai-Yin Kwan
N	Kelli Anderson
O	Kyle Olmon
P	Maike Biederstaedt
Q	Aurore Le Vilain
R	Julie Charvet
S	Isabel Uria
T	Sheila Hirata
U	Shelby Arnold
V	Damien Prud’homme
W	Shawn Sheehy
X	Katherine Belsey
Y	Tina Yeung
Z	Yevgeniya Yeretskaya

List of contributors from Movable Books Society site.

Published to commemorate the Movable Books Society’s 25th anniversary, A to Z: Marvels in Paper Engineering is aptly subtitled. A video created by Christopher Helkey gives 26 brief cameos to the artists above in which they demonstrate those marvels.

Books On Books Collection – Marion Bataille

2020/03/262025/05/01Books On Books1 Comment

ABC3D (2008)

ABC3D (2008)
Marion Bataille
Hardcover, paper on board, with holograph on front cover; H187 x W147 x D44 mm; 36 pop-up or movable pages. Acquired from Amazon.de, 31 May 2018.

“A” to “Z”

Becoming a “B”

“C” revealing a “D”

“X” sliding to “Y”

Although this book is available at retail, it is a delicate work. With small removable protective slips of paper inserted at points of friction, it is not a work to pull off the shelf, flip through and replace casually. “Flipping through” misses too much anyway. These are pages to tease apart, peer between, draw taut with fingers and thumbs holding the opposite edges tight, and work back and forth gently to appreciate the engineering.

VUES/LUES: Un Abécédaire de Marion Bataille (2018)

VUES/LUES (2018)
Marion Bataille
Leporello: H150 × W110 mm. Stitched card: H:110 x W250 mm. Acquired from Éditions ~zeug, 13 April 2020.

Vue means “view, sight, vision/eyesight or outlook”. “Picture postcard views” in French would be vues de carte postale. Lues is the past participle of the verb lire (“to read”) in the feminine plural. So, to say in French “Marion’s picture postcard views can be easily read as an abecedary” would be “Les vues de cartes postale de Marion peuvent être lues facilement comme une abécédaire“.

Facilement (“easily”), of course, depends on reading this leporello laterally in book fashion, not laterally in landscape postcard fashion. But is it “O” for bull ring or bull ring for “O”?

Books On Books Collection – Ludwig Zeller

2020/03/242023/05/31Books On Books2 Comments

Alphacollage (1979)

Alphacollage (1979)
Ludwig Zeller
Casebound in Holliston Sailcloth with foil stamping on the front and the spine, printed in two colours on Strathmore Grandee, composed in VIP Trump Medieval, in an edition of 200, of which this is #93.
H316 x W230 x D15 mm. Acquired from Atticus Books, 9 January 2020.

In 1980, Alphacollage received a certificate of merit from the Art Directors’ Club of New York. Its publishers (Tim and Elke Inkster of The Porcupine’s Quill) were invited to New York to accept the award. The tale of that event (as told by Tim Inkster) along with an introduction to Zeller and his work is as amusing (if not as surreal) as Alphacollage itself.

In his preface to the work, Zeller calls the inspiring vision that inspired Alphacollage an “alphabestiary [that] surrounds me”. In it, he sees

a unique alphabet in which the flute and the letter F prolong into an unending melody, … Botanical remnants, electrical apparati or bones, tools from catalogues or exotic customs are coupled with animals till they take on all the shapes of the metamorphosis and clamour for their place here, like beasts in heat. Ludwig Zeller, “Cutting Letters Out Means …”

Born in the desert of Atacama in the north of Chile, Zeller had an alphabet of 27 characters, including Ñ. Even this and Zeller’s lack of any English were not the chief challenge that the Inksters faced.

The main production difficulty encountered with the book was that some of Zeller’s raw material, his collection of nineteenth-century steel engravings, had been printed on coated stock, while others were originally printed on matte paper which had yellowed with age. The challenge (with the encouragement of Stan Bevington of Coach House) would be to colour-separate the two, which of course, could be achieved by no known photo-mechanical process. I spent the better part of three weeks during the summer of 1979, artwork in front of me, hunched over Elke’s negatives at the light table, cutting, with an X-acto knife, elaborate and intricate rubylith overlays. Tim Inkster, “Chapter Two: Stars and Stripes“, The Porcupine’s Quill. Posted on 27 September 2010. Accessed 12 January 2020.

All of the images except one appear on a recto page. The sole image appearing on a verso page — in fact, the last page of the book — is the image above, which is also the first to appear in the book. Not surprising, given the penultimate sentence of Zeller’s preface: “The circular edge of these images has twenty-seven eyes to decipher the name that contains within itself all the names of the universe.” In Spanish, the word for eye is ojo.

Books On Books Collection – Katsumi Komagata (I)

2020/03/222025/11/29Books On BooksLeave a comment

Les Livres de … Katsumi Komagata (2013)
Jean Widmer
Paperback, 170 x 225 mm, 176 pages. Paris: Les Trois Ourses, 2013. Photos: Books On Books Collection.

A catalog raisonné from Komagata’s early employer. Its photography captures the subtle layers and shadows of Komagata’s cutouts and his brilliant handling of colours and typography. Given the ongoing output of Komagata’s firm One Stroke, another catalogue will be needed in a few more years.

A Cloud (2007)

A Cloud (2007)
Katsumi Komagata
Perfect bound within hinged whiteboard; H250 x W310 mm; 26 pages.
Tokyo: One Stroke, 2007. Photos: Books On Books Collection.

Komagata presents both a narrative and a cloudscape by combining a choice of different papers for each page with carefully placed die cuts of cloud shapes to match the French, English and Japanese texts.

Little tree/petit arbre (2008)

Little Tree/Petit arbre (2008)
Katsumi Komagata
Perfect bound in greyboard covers, gold-colored ink within hole-punched tree shape on front cover; card paper in various colours and textures; H210 x W210 mm; 28 pages.
Tokyo: One Stroke, 2008. Photos: Books On Books Collection.

The pop-up is a key part of Komagata’s signature techniques, which include the masterful use of different coloured and textured papers, ink and typography. While this video and the collection photos here may provide a balanced view of those elements, they do not convey the integral trilingual text that is far more than a narrative of this little tree’s appearance and disappearance.

「Ichigu」(2015)

「Ichigu」(2015)
Katsumi Komagata
Eight 4-panel cards in a box. H235 x 77 x 28 mm. Acquired from One Stroke, 26 March 2020. Photo: Books On Books Collection.

In Buddhism, the word Ichigu is associated with a particular saying from the monk Saicho (767-822): 隅を照らす Ichigu wo terasu, which means “Light up one corner”. The word can also denote “landscape”.

One side of each card is screen printed black; the other remains white. The cards offer a wealth of views — individually and combined — landscapes that change with the light and from one juxtaposition to another. Komagata’s works have a philosophical and emotional profundity that makes them cherished and frequently revisited items in this collection.

Books On Books

Curated by Robert Bolick

Month: March 2020

Books On Books Collection – Abecedaries I (in progress)

Further Reading

Books On Books Collection – A to Z: Marvels in Paper Engineering

Further Reading

Books On Books Collection – Marion Bataille

ABC3D (2008)

VUES/LUES: Un Abécédaire de Marion Bataille (2018)

Further Reading and Viewing

Books On Books Collection – Ludwig Zeller

Alphacollage (1979)

Further Reading

Books On Books Collection – Katsumi Komagata (I)

A Cloud (2007)

Little tree/petit arbre (2008)

「Ichigu」(2015)

Further Reading