The Red Headed League: A Furlough Project(2012) Michael Dayand Lesley Guy, curators Pamphlet, saddle-stitched, staples. 100gsm recycled stock, with abaca insert. H210 x W146 16 pages. An edition of 300, of which this is #253. Acquired from Furlough, 24 April 2024. Photos: Books On Books Collection.
The title of this artists’ pamphlet might entice Sherlock Holmes fans, who may avoid disappointment if they are sticklers enough to miss the hyphenated parting of the League’s hair. More likely, the title’s amusingly appropriate typography, the nod of the format and price toward the “democratic multiple”, and especially the quirky introduction will entice the collector of artists’ books. They will not be disappointed, but they will need their pipes and deerstalker hats.
The most interesting art makes you feel and think as you perceive. Thinking vs overthinking is the hard part. If you can’t figure out what it is you’re meant to think when perceiving the artwork, how can you be sure of what you’re feeling? Although with book artists like Ed Ruscha, sometimes the thinking process is supposed to come up with “Huh?”
From the brief introduction to The Red Headed League, you might reach the intentions expressed in the extended curatorial statement here. It seems unlikely. In our age of appropriation art, you might spot a clue in Wilson’s assigned task of copying out encyclopedia pages. But only by knowing that each artist received a mere £4 for the assigned task of reworking one of the first thirteen images under the A’s in Encyclopedia Brittanica’s Micropædia would you recognize that there’s more afoot. And perhaps only a Sherlock Holmes would spot the selection criterion of red-headedness as a clue to the intention to call out art show curators’ “selecting artists based on nonartistic criteria”.
The Red Headed League is certainly more than a flippant homage, dear Watson.
Like the invitation to Wilson to get him out of his office, Day and Guy’s invitation is a distraction from the invitees’ “other more self-directed creative endeavours”. Just as the proposed £4/weekly remuneration might appeal to the Victorian businessman’s instinct, so too might this post-conceptual art proposal appeal to the artists as an endeavour worth the effort for its post-post modern mickey-take on the artist’s “nominal” role in society as well as art and originality.
Contemplating the fee, the task and freedom of expression, some artists inclined toward the vituperative and even scatological. Daniel Fogarty‘s contribution in response to an image of Aachen cathedral seems to be a sharp comment on the project: from “Start to End” as “This useless cooperative”. The outpouring from the cathedral window frames has the look of sewage. Kim Noble‘s ingestion of an image of Alvar Aalto and the subsequent defecation may be an outré response in the outré book art traditions of John Latham, Dieter Roth and Piero Manzoni.
The task clearly tickled some artists’ funnybones. Alice Bradshaw demonstrates the lengths to which an artist will sometimes go. Confronted with her source material — a photo of the annual flower festival in Aalsmeer — she tracks down Nicolaas Slotboom who appears in a green crocodile costume while sitting on a float waiting for the parade to start. What Holmesian detective work. And what a surprise, all text and no images. Perhaps it reflects that ongoing rivalry between text and image in the artist’s book tradition as art writ (or painted) large. Surely the curators and Bradshaw must have known that readers would be so intrigued by the description that they would engage in their own detective work to see Nicolaas sitting in his costume on the float.
Alice Thickett must be counting on that curiosity, too, but provides a tiny clue in the lower left of her image responding to Micropædia‘s photo of the 52-carillon bell tower in Aalst. By showing only half the clock, are we also being sent on a chase to count the rays drawn? Might there be 26 of them (half of 52) in a sly nod to the curators’ alphabetically restricted choice of images?
Cathrine Dahl ‘s and Lesley Guy‘scontributions show the associative mind and visual imagination of the artist at work. Give Dahl the image of perhaps the only termite-eating hyena in the world — the aardwolf — and you get a wolfman-like creature made of wood with a Pinocchio tattoo. Give Guy an image of Firmin Abauzit, the French philosopher with an encyclopedic mind and known for correcting the writings of Isaac Newton, and she sends a beam of light through an Abauzit-ic prism to be broken up into the ROYGBIV spectrum. (As co-curator as well as artist, is she winking at us with the single-hued page?)
The Red Headed League is as much zine as democratic multiple of an artist’s book. Each artist — Alice Bradshaw / Cathrine Dahl / Eddy Dreadnought / Tim Etchells / Daniel Fogarty / Dag-Arve Forbergskog / Chris Gibson / Lesley Guy / Lisa Murphy / Kim Noble / Jóhanna Ellen Ríkharðsdóttir / Mary Smith / Alice Thickett — has contributed as if to the issue of a zine. A rich variety of styles, techniques and artistic traditions is the result. Day and Guy have assembled the mysteries into a mystery-entitled work held together by the pamphlet’s cover, binding, and red-hued pages as well as their rule of selection for the artists, the source of starting images, and words framing the task. Mysteriously in the end, The Red Headed League operates simultaneously as a loose assemblage of mysteries, each requiring more or less detective work, and a singular mystery requiring its own.
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)
With the launch of the “Xu Bing Art Satellite Creative Residency Project” (2024-27) inviting artists to create works using the art satelliteSCA-1, a new opportunity for book art is here.
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.
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.
Underwood & Underwood Viewer
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.
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.
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.
Kent, Sarah. Paperwork. London ([12 Carlton House Terrace, S.W.1]): Institute of Contemporary Arts, 1979. On the occasion of Stuart’s first UK solo exhibition, ICA, 7 September – 7 October 1979. Kent’s extended essay in this pamphlet-cum-catalogue adds four larger (albeit black-and-white) photos to the thumbnail four-color ones in Mira Dayal’s essay above. Also see Kent’s essay in Stuart’s The Nature of Time (see below).
Stuart, Michelle. 2019. Michelle Stuart : The Nature of Time. London: Alison Jacques Gallery, 2019. Sarah Kent’s introduction expands on her extended essay for the 1979 ICA exhibition (see above).
Stuart, Michelle, and Anna Lovatt. 2013. Michelle Stuart : Drawn from Nature. Ostfildern, Germany: Hatje Cantz. On the occasion of exhibition curated by Lovatt at the Djanogly Art Gallery, Lakeside Art Centre, University of Nottingham, 16 February – 14 April 2013, the catalogue includes an essay by Nancy Princenthal, who highlights the sculptural nature of Stuart’s book art and their archaeological roots:
All these books, while implicitly a form of time-based art —the pages, even when loose, can be turned and experienced sequentially-are essentially sculptural; the materials of which they are made include earth, rocks, Hydrocal, and muslin-lined paper (a material Stuart first encountered as a mapmaker). At the time the books were produced, an epic surge in visual and textual information, some of it already being distributed electronically, had begun to cloud the cultural atmosphere with data divorced from physical experience. Stuart’s response was to celebrate the materiality of one of the oldest technologies for delivering and storing information- in secret, if need be. Many of her books contain elements not meant to be seen; she has said that “the whole book idea came from the Cave of the 1000 Buddhas,” referring to the caves in western China where masses of texts, in rolls and stacks, were buried, starting in the fourth century, and discovered fifteen hundred years later. — Princenthal, “Michelle Stuart: Horizon Effects”, p.27.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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)?
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.
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.
Mackey, Bonnie and Hedy Schiller Watson. 2017. Alphabet Books : The K-12 Educators’ Power Tool. Santa Barbara California: Libraries Unlimited. For a brief history and extended categorization of alphabet books.
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, Inscription4 — 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.
Further Reading
“Inscription 1“. 15 October 2020. Books On Books Collection.
“Inscription 2“. 29 May 2022. Books On Books Collection.
“Peter and Pat Gentenaar-Torley“. 10 October 2019. Editors of the seven Rijswijk Paper Biennial books. Books On Books Collection.
Fred Siegenthaler“. 10 January 2021. Books On Books Collection. Strange Papers presents dozens of sample papers made of exotic materials such as glass and asbestos as well as a wide range of vegetal sources.
Till Verclas“. 12 October 2019. Books On Books Collection. See Winterbook for an outstanding use of acetate as substrate.
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.
Further Reading
“Inscription 1“. 15 October 2020. Books On Books Collection.
“Inscription 2“. 29 May 2022. 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:
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.
“Klaus Groh and Hermann Havekost“. 2 July 2021. Books On Books Collection. Curators of Artists’ Books / Künstlerbücher Buchobjekte / Livres d’Artistes / Libri Oggetti (1986).
Alden, Todd. 1991. The Library of Babel. Buffalo N.Y: Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center.
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 monotypesthat 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.
Further Reading
“Architecture“. 12 November 2018. Bookmarking Book Art.
Chinnery, Colin. 1999. “Bookbinding”. International Dunhuang Project. London: British Library. International Dunhuang Project. Formed in 1994, this multilingual collaboration among eight international institutions provides images and information about manuscripts and other artifacts from the Eastern Silk Road. Chinnery is also a multimedia artist.
Drège, Jean-Pierre. “Les Accordéons de Dunhuang”, pp. 195-98, in Soymié, Michel; et al. 1984. Contributions Aux Études De Touen-Houang. Volume III. Paris: Ecole française d’Extrême-Orient : Dépositaire A.-Maisonneuve.
Books On Books 