From the first wordless illustration onwards in Kitty Crowther’s Va faire un tour, you don’t have to know French to know that the book’s title means imperatively “take a walk” — or maybe even “take a hike” — in English. There is no mistaking the tone of Maman’s character nor the reaction of her little one stomping along, circling the globe, even under bodies of water, oblivious to characteristic scenery and inhabitants.
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The Circus of Dr. Lao (1982)
Charles G. Finney (text) Claire Van Vliet (design and illustration)
Hardback, cased in cotton cloth over boards, head and tail bands, sewn. H x W mm. 9 1/4 x 12 inches 140 pages. Edition of 2000, of which this is #996. Acquired from BlueMamaBooks, 9 February 2025.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.
If you have read Nathaniel West’s The Day of the Locust (1939) or Flannery O’Connor’s A Good Man Is Hard to Find (1955), Charles Finney’s novella illustrated by Claire Van Vliet will seem only marginally disturbing. If you have seen Tod Browning’s Freaks (1932), it will seem more than tame. Somewhere in between is the appropriate trigger warning for The Circus of Dr. Lao (1982).
Finney drops Dr. Lao’s circus of P.T. Barnum-esque carnival sideshows, a bestiary of distorted mythological creatures and exaggerated stereotypes, into the Arizona backwater of Abalone. The denizen of Abalone and their reactions — from gullibility, lubricious fascination, racist hazing, and violence to shrugs and a smug return to unexceptional normality — are the targets of Finney’s fevered satire. Van Vliet mirrors the range with her illustrations printed from original relief etchings and her selection of contrasting Plantin and Victoria display types.
Continue reading“Book of Hours was designed and created by Julie Chen & Keri Miki-Lani Schroeder. This long-distance collaboration, between California and Texas, took place during the 2020-21 pandemic. The format of Book of Hours is known as a blow book, a historical structure originally designed as a magic trick which allows the presenter to show completely different visual sequences of pages within the same book. … The first and last sequences on each side of the book were designed by the two artists collaboratively, and the other eight sequences were designed individually by each artist. …” — Colophon.
Book of Hours (2021)
Julie Chen & Keri Miki-Lani Schroeder
Box: H283 x W220 x D51 mm. Book: H279 x W216 x D48 mm. Artists’ book Structure #/88 Julie Chen 8 October 2024.
Photos: Courtesy of artists, and Books On Books Collection.
As with all blow books, hold the Book of Hours‘ spine in your left hand, place your right thumb at the upper end of the fore edge, and flick through the pages. A set of sequenced images appear from beginning to end. But start again, shifting the pressure of your thumb to a lower position on the fore edge, and a different set of sequenced images shows up in the riffling. Turn the book over on its horizontal axis, and yet another series of sequenced images become available. To distinguish one side of the Book of Hours from the other, Chen and Schroeder have designated one side as “ante meridiem” on its title page and the other side as “post meridiem”.
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The Red Thread (1988)
Tord Nygren
Hardback, casebound, sewn. H305 x W 215 mm. [30] including pastedowns. Acquired from Better World Books, April 2025.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.
The Swedish expression “den röda tråden” translates best as “the common thread”, the thing that links together otherwise disparate things and experiences. The literal translation, however, works best for Tord Nygren’s Den Röda Tråden (1987), leaving us to follow the red thread that the clown offers to the children on the front cover. The thread wraps around to the pastedown and across the fly leaf chased by the runaway carousel horse …
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Three Cats (1992)
Anne Brouillard
Casebound, illustrated paper over boards, sewn, dustjacket. H280 x W223 mm. [28] pages. Acquired from private seller, 27 August 2023.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.
This wordless picture book tells a humorous brief tale of three curious cats and three insouciant fish. It marks an early stage in Anne Brouillard’s journey from picture book artist to book artist.
Continue readingAlthough Theodore Roethke had a woman in mind when he wrote “The shapes a bright container can contain!”, the phrase readily comes to mind for this issue of Inscription once you’re past the difficult-to-open-up cardboard packaging. Not that you should rip through and discard it. The clues to proceed patiently are the label “recto” on one edge of the box and the page cut from a book and pasted on the box’s top. Is “recto” some sort of “this side up” label? If so, it seems topsy-turvy. Recto (or right-hand) pages are usually have odd-numbered, but the pasted-down book page is numbered 20. Wait a second; those random colored rectangles have been printed over the book page as if meant to draw attention to the “gridness” of the apartment blocks. Maybe this box is meant to be preserved and framed (after all, Toulouse-Lautrec drew on cardboard).
Amorous Embrace (2023)
Suzanne Moore and Titus Lucretius Carus (trans. A.E. Stallings)
Artist’s manuscript, stub bound to stone cover, tinted thread, gold leaf, kozo, paste paper. H220 x W148 mm. 12 pages. Unique.
Acquired from the artist, 5 February 2024.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.
Sometime in the first century BCE, the Roman poet Lucretius wrote the didactic epic De rerum natura (The Nature of Things). It celebrates the atomistic physics and philosophy that Epicurus and his followers recorded two hundred plus years before in thirty-seven volumes. Imagine the determination to press that Greek vision of the world from atoms to the cosmos into six volumes of Latin poetry. We’ll have to await further papyrology applied to the cinders of the Herculaneum library of scrolls and hope that it reveals more scraps of the Greek’s Περὶ φύσεως (On Nature). Only then will we know whether Lucretius based his poem directly on them.
In the meantime, wonder also that somehow …
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recomp (2013-23)
Cathryn Miller
Hinged and clasped diptych, housing an altered book, explanatory booklet, and loose colophon. Unique. Acquired from Vamp & Tramp Booksellers, 2025.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.
Recomp (2013-2023) is a collaboration with a colony of bald-faced hornets. Having reviewed Stephen Collis and Jordan Scott’s decomp (2013), their artists’ book devised by exposing several copies of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species to the elements, Cathryn Miller followed suit and hung her reviewer’s copy of decomp in a tree. Over time, the wind, rain, and snow sent the book to the forest floor where it fell apart. Hornets had done their part in its decomposition, nibbling away at its edges and weakening the structure. Their conversion of the book into cellulose for their nest was also the start of their artistic partnership with Miller. Eventually the nest, too, became prey to the elements or marauders and fell and broke apart on the ground. Miller and photographer husband David recorded all this and gathered up the book fragments and broken nest.
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