Parallel Orders of Architecture (2024) Tony Broad Box with illustrated paper over boards with title board pastedown on top; enclosing three volumes. First volume: double-sided accordion with single- and triple panel inserts. Second volume: pop-up between illustrated paper over boards with magnet closure. Third volume: pop-up within French-fold box covered with illustrated paper over boards with magnet closure. Box: H137 x W413 x D45 mm. First volume: H130 x W110 x D30 mm. Second volume: H130 x W120 mm. Third volume: H130 x W120 x D38 mm. First volume: 60 panels. Second volume: spiral pop-up. Third volume: 4-layer pop-up. Unique. Acquired from the artist, 23 July 2025. Photos: Books On Books Collection.
Tony Broad’s Parallel Orders of Architecture (2024) consists of three differently structured volumes enclosed in a handmade illustrated box. The first is a double-sided accordion with single- and triple-panel inserts on both sides. The second is a single-panel pop-up book. The third is a variant on the tunnel book. With the raised outlay on its cover and the platformed interior, the box offers yet another order of structure that runs in parallel with the architectural orders from which Broad draws his inspiration.
Top of cover and interior of box.
The three volumes placedd atop box cover; empty interior of box.
The three works: accordion, pop-up, and modified tunnel book.
The kaleidoscope of perspective and viewpoints offered in the accordion volume echoes the effects of Giambattista Piranesi’s Carceri d’invenzione (1745-61), especially those in the second edition. Where Piranesi invented his architectural fantasies with pen and burin, Broad relies on collage with reproductions and on book structure. For the collage work, he reproduces prints from Perspective (1604-05) by Jan Vredeman de Vries and A Parallel of the Orders of Architecture (1936) by Charles Normand.
Broad’s sources of inspiration and images: left column, Charles Normand’s A Parallel of the Orders of Architecture; right column, Vredeman de Vries’ Perspective.
The accordion’s panels and its inserts play with Normand’s and Vredeman’s illustrations to generate labyrinthine and impossible structures. Staircases disappear. Valley folds sometimes reinforce, sometimes defeat, vanishing points. Arches wrap over mountain folds, coming forward and receding at the same time. Cutouts and notches in the panels multiply the views, but what can be viewed through the cutouts are parts of other panels whose perspectival lines sometimes extend, sometimes clash with, those of the framing cutout.
Front and rear views of the extended accordion book.
Center: valley fold reinforcing the vanishing point. Left and right: cutouts giving onto contrasting views.
Arches wrapping over mountain folds. Notch emphasizing horizon line.
The placement of single- and triple-panel inserts adds additional asymmetry. On the front of the accordion, moving from left to right, we have an insert sequence of triple-triple-single-triple-single. On the reverse side, moving in the same direction, we have a sequence of single-triple-triple-triple. Whether perceived by turning the accordion pages codex-style or viewing their extension from above, the asymmetry of the inserts runs parallel to a symmetry of recurrent spreads and a mirror-image symmetry created by image reversal.
Asymmetry of panel inserts seen from above.
Mirror-image symmetry.
The second and slimmest of the three books turns attention to columns, with its front cover displaying half of an inverted base of a Composite Order column alongside half of a capital of an Ionic Order column. When the magnetically sealed front and back covers are prized apart, a complete Ionic capital pops up, or at least the suggestion of one created by the joining of cross-sections of two volutes.
Second volume displayed against a background of the first volume.
Ionic capital pop up.
The third volume, displayed here against the first volume extended, highlights the Corinthian Order with the acanthus leaves and stalks that decorate its capitals.
Third volume displayed against background of the first volume.
When the magnetically sealed French fold cover opens, the Corinthian capital appears in two halves that will spread apart to reveal in tunnel-book fashion a headless Greek or Roman statue. The double visual pun on the leaf-covered capital hiding the caput-less but still well-endowed fig-leafless statue adds to the delight at the tunnel book’s action.
The Corinthian capital.
The Corinthian capital split to reveal a caput-less and figleaf-less statue.
The views available by rearranging the accordion book on its own or by arranging displays with the other two books seem endless. Having received the
Broad’s plinth box and three artist’s book structures underscore his parallels of symmetry and asymmetry, his visual puns, and his originality. Parallel Orders of Architecture deserves its own slowly rotating plinth to offer maximum.
Recipient of the UK Society of Bookbinders’ John Purcell Award, 1st Prize, in 2024,
Chaos (2023)
Chaos (2023) Tony Broad Box: H200 x W170 x D70 mm. Modified flagbook: H145 x variable W90-180 mm. 44 folds. Unique. Acquired from the artist. 23 July 2025. Photos: Books On Books Collection.
Similar to the paradox of symmetry and aysmmetry in The Parallel Orders of Architecture, Broad’s next work offers us chaos — simultaneously contained and exploding, bound and unbound, intact and shattered, in color and black-and-white, linear and cyclical, dark and translucent. It contrasts a derelict pier (Hotwells Dock in Bristol) with a working pier (parallel to Glaisher Street, upstream from Deptford Creek, London).
Front cover and back cover.
Broad blends artist’s book structures in Chaos. An accordion of translucent parchment anchors the construction from the front cover to back cover. From either end, another accordion, cut on a slant, overlays the translucent accordion. Both the overlying and underlying accordions depict the working London pier. Images of the derelict Bristol pier occupy the orange-tinted center. Midway to that center, the overlaid accordion yields place to a modified flag book structure, which eventually takes over the center of the book.
Chaos extended.
Details of the darker cut accordion folded over the lighter parchment accordion.
The point at which the layered accordions shift into a four-row flag book.
The flag book structure is well-suited to weaving multiple impressions together. The layered accordions build up to this ingeniously with multiple impressions of their own. Their images of the working pier are not aligned, so already we have multiple impressions. Also, from the center of the book, we have a split-view perspective, looking out to the end of the pier simultaneously on the left and on the right.
Split-view perspective. Detail from front cover moving right; detail from back cover moving left.
After the two layered accordion books become a four-row flag book, Broad introduces another effective transformation. As the structure approaches the center, a horizontally folded flag replaces the single-sheet flag in each of the four rows. In addition to intensifying the imagery, the combination draws further attention to the downward view into the water and the outward view to the end of the working pier.
The point at which the single-sheet flag shifts to a horizontally folded flag.
Broad does not stop there. At the center of the book, where the orange-tinted images of the derelict pier appear, he introduces angular folds and cuts. These have the effect of chaos exploding from the center of the book.
Harmonic chaos, chaotic harmony?
Finally, Chaos comes with an envelope of offcut shards to be scattered as display permits. Some of the shards bear the words from the book’s outside back cover, which gives the overall structure and its contrast of the two piers an enigmatic emotional coloring. The viewer wonders whether the author/artist once stood at the end of the now derelict pier and now stands in dreams at the end of the working pier.
Photo: Courtesy of the artist.
36 Days of Type (2019)
36 Days of Type (2019) Tony Broad Accordion with hardcover and raised letter Q. 110 mm square, D20 mm. [38] panels. Acquired from the artist, 23 July 2025. Photos: Books On Books Collection.
A welcome addition to the collection’s artists’ books inspired by the alphabet.
Key of D, electric e, flourishing f, and geometric g.
Holographic H, incandescent i, blue j, and kingly k.
Within Every Room There is an Echo of the First (2018)
Within Every Room There is an Echo of the First (2018) Sarah Maker Diagonally halved box, painted-paper over millboard, paste paper. H65 x W65 x D65 (closed) mm, W730 (extended diagonally) mm. [45] panels Unique. Acquired from Ink and Awl, Seattle, US, 10 December 2025. Photos: Books On Books Collection. Displayed with permission of the artist.
This small sculptural artist’s book that enacts its title is an engineered accordion with architectural pencil drawings on paste paper. Every aspect is remarkable. The millboard “cover” is a diagonally halved cube that forms the “corner” of the room from which its echoes will unfold. The accordion spine consists of folded tabs into which the pages are pasted. The pages have been shaped so that as the book is opened (the top page being pulled by its tab), they curve against each other like artichoke leaves and then spread as the angled spine pleats push them outwards.
The engineering recalls the ingenuity of Benjamin Elbel, Ed Hutchins, and Hedi Kyle, and Within Every Room exemplifies what happens when “material meets metaphor” in the hands and mind of an original book artist. The phrase comes from Richard Minsky, founder of the Center for Book Arts in New York, whose path Maker seems to be following and extending in Seattle, Washington. In 2017, she initiated (and still runs) the online program “areyoubookenough“, a bookbinding challenge to artists to create works within a month that respond to the month’s theme. In the same year, she founded Editions Studio, a community for book artists run by book artists. All that activity — along with Within Every Room and the next work — suggests that this artist is not only a maker but a builder.
The House that Book Built (2018)
The House that Book Built (2018) Sarah Maker Case-bound hard cover, felt and paper over boards, seven stub-sewn gatherings of folios of cotton printmaking paper, six loose twice-folded gatherings of folios of Cave(?) paper inserted between the stub-sewn gatherings. H85 x W105 x D58 mm. [220] pages in stub-sewn gatherings; [96] pages in loose gatherings Unique. Acquired from Ink and Awl, Seattle, US, 10 December 2025. Photos: Books On Books Collection. Displayed with permission of the artist.
In another connection to Richard Minsky, all of the paper and boards for The House that Book Built were salvaged from recycling at the Center for Book Arts in New York City. Like the book artists’ studios and homes I have seen, The House that Book Built is stuffed to the rafters with its core material. Of course, even the roof and exterior walls enter into the spirit. It would not be the same artwork with a flat roof of asphalt tiles and plexiglas siding.
The color of the laid-in folios reminds me of Your House (2006) by Olafur Eliasson, which in turn reminds me how inadequate a simple side-by-side exhibition of the two works would be. Both demand the viewer’s touch.
Below, the laid-in folios have been removed, letting the house exhale and give more visual room to the stud-sewn gatherings of cotton printmaking paper. If viewers were allowed do this in an exhibition, they would be appreciating the contrast between the rough cotton paper and the smoother book paper just removed as well as appreciating how the house front now takes on a semblance to a Gothic window without the stained glass.
Your House and The House that Book Built both offer the pleasure of nosing through another’s house. Your House invites the viewer to a page-by-page meditation of laser-cut interior space while doing so. Maker’s snug abode offers the Quaker-like contemplation of the homespun that has been spun with tools made by the spinner.
Punch cradle made specifically to punch the sewing stations for The House that Book Built. Photo: Courtesy of the artist.
Further Reading
“Architecture“. 12 November 2018. Books On Books Collection.
Reparations (2010) Emory Douglas Cover enclosing leporello. Cover: H102 x W105 mm. Leporello: H89 x W95 mm (closed); W380 mm (open). [4] panels.Edition of 100, of which this is #45. Acquired from the San Francisco Center for the Book, 30 June 2025. Photos: Books On Books Collection. Displayed with permission of the publisher.
“Emory Douglas is renowned for his iconic representations of the Black Panther Party through his work as the Party’s Minister of Culture. For decades, he communicated the power and charisma of the movement through his compelling straightforward graphic style. … The imagery for this edition was initially a painting by Mr. Douglas’ which was then translated into a 2 color, letterpress graphic. The pages of the book are a one-sided, accordion fold piece. The folded cover is made of Amate bark with hand-spun hemp and silk thread and letterpress printed in 2 colors with interior colophon page attached””–San Francisco Center for the Book
The chains fastened at the neck, wrist, and ankle of each letter and linking each human figure to the next propose a new orthography. What was spilled spells out the case. In the original mural on which this quietly loud artist’s book is based, the chains were colored red, white, and blue.
Happy 250th Anniversary, fellow citizens.
Further Reading
“Tia Blassingame“. 17 August 2020. Books On Books Collection.
Gabor, Nora. 18 February 2021. “Black History and Experiences through Book Arts“. The Full Text: News about library resources and services. Chicago, IL: DePaul University. Accessed 22 January 2024.
Gleek, Charlie. “Centuries of Black Artists’ Books“, presented at “Black Bibliographia: Print/Culture/Art” conference at the Center for Material Culture Studies, University of Delaware, 27 April 2019, pp. 7-8. Accessed 20 July 2020.
Its curatorial element makes Dave Dyment’s Artists’ Books and Multiples site an excellent resource for lovers of book art. Its existence also slyly highlights the recursive nature of his own bookwork. Book art is inherently self-referential. Be it the newspaper, a Kubrick film, a Ruscha work, a Beatles album, pop singles, TV series, photos or crossovers among media — all media constitute Dyment’s palette, brush, canvas, armature, chisel, pen, pencil, camera, sound recorder, surface and raw material for his own book art.
The book as medium has played a minor adjunct role in Kara Walker’s art. Freedom: A fable … (1997) is one of the few exceptions. Its paper engineering lifts Walker’s signature silhouettes off the page physically, and the pop-up’s association with children’s books fits well with Walker’s uneasy blend of humor, horror, the individual and the stereotype. It is also the first of her three-dimensional works, which emerged more frequently around 2007-09 and rose to the monuments of Fons Americanus (2019) and Unmanned Drone (2025).
Source: Kara Walker, “Riots and Outrages”, The Georgia Review , Spring 2010, 64:1, pp. 59-68. Images courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins and Company, New York.
Freedom goes beyond an illustration of text. Its offset lithographs and five laser-cut pop-up silhouettes on wove paper extend and complicate the fable in the self-reflexive manner often found in artists’ books.
First and last image of the book: the “Freedom” ship; opening line of the book.
The book’s title taunts the reader, artist, and narrator all at once (both the narrative and freedom are fables). Likewise, the black-on-white cutouts and lithographs trip up every party’s sensibilities, racial prehensions, and cultural memories. The opening display may evoke Gone with the Wind, but the heroine is the Negress. The narrator and artist matter-of-factly elevate the sexualization of “N____” to bisexual, scatological Creator/Mistress status. The abbreviated name, as if in a 19th-century tale of erotica, evokes denigrating of the “N” word. Designed to make the viewer tilt the book every which way to see what can be (and is meant to be) seen, the pop-ups evoke a feeling of prurience. In the final spreads, Walker and David Eisen, the collaborating paper engineer, use a pull tab to involve that prurience in a procreative delivery.
The power of this artwork is that it merges the self-reflexivity of the artist’s book with a self-cannibalizing societal condition.
After the Deluge (2007)
After the Deluge (2007) Kara Walker Casebound, illustrated paper over boards, black doublures. H270 x W225 mm. 120 pages. Acquired from Lacey Books, 26 August 2025. Photos: Books On Books Collection.
The immediate spur to After the Deluge (2007) and its associated exhibition was the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. The book is not a straightforward catalogue of the exhibition. Several works in the exhibition are not included; in fact, an entire wall is missing, and juxtapositions in the exhibition differ from those in the book. It is one of those books that goes beyond its proximate cause and differs from the exhibition that occasioned it.
Walker labels it a visual essay. While its blending of original work and appropriations with collage nudges it toward being an artist’s book, its structural principle is uncertain. Even the Table of Contents is puzzling. Preceded by a single-page black bleed, “Murky” begins with Walker’s brief introduction on page 7. The last page of that text concludes, however, on page 9, which is assigned to the visuals of pages 9 to 107. Perhaps 9 is a typo and should be 10. Whatever the case there, the individual labels in the Table of Contents are not given specific page references, and it is not always easy to match up the visuals with the labels.
Male Power Figure; Table of Contents.
Introduction; AP Images/Bill Haber.
The brief introduction sets out the driving analogy clearly enough though. Perhaps, when we cannot pin down the organization at every point, we have to fall back on the analogy of a murky muck:
Racist pathology is the Muck, aforementioned. In this book’s analogy, murky, toxic waters become the amniotic fluid of a potentially new and difficult birth, flushing out of a coherent and stubborn body long-held fears and suspicions.
Among the book’s other signals are the placement and handling of full-page bleeds. Contrasts of bleeds of black ink with white pages often serve to underscore juxtapositions of white western art with African artifacts and Walker’s works. Above, the single-page bleed of black preceding the Table of Contents presents us with Nkisi, a large African male power figure. In the exhibition, it loomed under a glass cover for viewing in the round. As can be seen above, and underscoring the difference between book and exhibition, it is a reduced figure, although Nkisi returns as a larger presence toward the end of the book.
The first double-page bleed is one in full color and does seem to match up with the label “Deep-Rooted Traditions” in the Table of Contents. It presents JMW Turner’s 1840 Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming On). In the following double-page spread, Walker’s 1996 Untitled, a cut-out silhouette and pastel on a white background, is crowded to the right and surrounded by a full-bleed margin of black. Its pastel double-stack steamboat spews fire in the background, perhaps frightening a black silhouetted horse into a fall in the foreground. Whatever the cause, the black silhouetted girl with an upraised cudgel becomes a visualization of the expression “beating a dead horse”. In Walker’s typical perverse irony, it’s a 19th-century white painter’s condemnation of slavery followed by a 20th-century Black artist’s black cutouts, shoved off center and shoving us to conclude that slavery is a dead horse she is beating. Deep-rooted traditions, indeed.
But slavery is not a dead horse. Its carcass has mutated into the historical, cultural, and personal condition that Walker calls “the Muck” and amniotic fluid in her introduction. The Muck and fluid juxtapose works from Walker’s American Primitives series and Middle Passages series with selections from the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts. The full-bleeds of black on single pages and double-page spreads punctuate this maelstrom of art that includes white American primitives such as JW Barber (1798-1885), John Carlin (1813-91), WP Chappel (1800-80); the European-influenced JS Copley (1738-1815), Winslow Homer (1836-1910), and Joshua Shaw (1777-1860); the French silhouettist Auguste Edouart (1789-1861); and earlier artists such as Jean Audran (French, 1667-1756), RN Zeeman (Dutch, 1623-63), and Pieter Nolpe (Dutch, 1614-53).
The Table of Contents’ label “Middle Passages” clearly refers to the images on pages 43 to 49 and matches up with Walker’s five Middle Passages works in the upper left of the exhibition wall below. In the exhibition, however, the images proceed in an order different from that in the book.
The exhibition wall matching up with pages 43-49 (“Middle Passages”) in the book.
The order of images in pages 43-49 differing from their order on the exhibition wall, the last two of five Middle Passages works now coming after the Homer.
Also, later on, the book uses enlarged details from three of the works on this wall: RN Zeeman’s Water from his series Four Elements (ca. 1651-52), Pieter Nolpe’s The Bursting of St. Anthony’s Dike, 5 March 1651, and Winslow Homer’s The Gulf Stream (1899). Zeeman’s and Nolpe’s works are only represented by enlargements in the book, but this is not just a case of trimming to fit the book. Both are displayed across double-page spreads. Also, a full image of Homer’s The Gulf Stream appears in a double-page spread between the pages displaying three then two of Walker’s Middle Passages works. Moreover, an enlarged detail from The Gulf Stream also appears toward the end of the book. Clearly, the change of order and handling of enlargements are intentional and thematic, not simply forced by the format.
Details from Nolpe’s The Bursting of St. Anthony’s Dike, 5 March 1651; from Zeeman’s Water; and from Homer’s The Gulf Stream used later in the book.
Walker’s use of the typewritten index cards from her American Primitives series may shed light on the labels in the Table of Contents that seem difficult to align with the images in their order in the book. On the dustjacket, Walker writes:
I brought together the art in this book (and the exhibition that preceded it) thinking like a draughtsman, perhaps absurdly so, as even the typewritten texts are from an ongoing series of text pieces I think of as drawings.
If Walker thinks of the American Primitives index cards “as drawings”, might we ought not consider the centered labels without pagination in the Table of Contents as textual drawing, too? Stacked as they are, they certainly echo the totemic Nkisi on the facing page. In Walker’s mind, labels such as “The Failure of Containment”, “Inundation”, “Going Under”, “Darkness”, and “Black” could also be strokes of charcoal, ink, or paint as evocative of Hurricane Katrina or any natural disaster such as those used by the genre painters. The power of After the Deluge lies in its collage of the commonplaces of such disasters with the silhouetted savagery and perversity of our racist pathology. After the Deluge presents that muck as the commonplace landscape (or Lands Cave) that is the US.
Kara Walker’s Lands Cave from the series American Primitives (2001), pairing silhouettes of a sailor-hatted, thumbsucking white boy with a mutilated Black woman about to give birth.
If it is not easy to match up all of the images with the labels in the Table of Contents, the final three double-page spreads align unmistakably with “Portents”: a single white page facing a single black page with Nkisi looming larger now than at the start, a double-page spread of white with Walker’s Burn (1998), a silhouette image of a pig-tailed girl immolating herself as a column of smoke rises in the shape of a Black female, and then the double-page spread of black that concludes these scenes and the entire book.
Bureau of Refugees (2008)
Bureau of Refugees (2008) Kara Walker Casebound paperback, sewn and glued. H240 x W215 mm. 120 pages. Acquired from Judd Books, 3 March 2024. Photos: Books On Books Collection.
To judge from images of the exhibition at Sikkema Jenkins & Co., 20 October – 21 November 2007, in New York, Bureau of Refugees (2008) does go beyond an aim at replicating that experience. But it barely exploits or challenges the codex form — less than do After the Deluge and Freedom, respectively.
Installation view: Bureau of Refugees New work, Kara Walker, Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York, NY, 2007 Photo: Luciano Fileti, courtesy of Sikkema Malloy Jenkins.
The exhibition was divided between primarily figurative works and others entirely text-based. Large-scale figurative works like Authenticating the Artifact and The Treasure Hunters, left and right above, dominated one room. The show took its name, however, from a series of smaller figurative works, which in turn took its name from its source: The Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands that operated from 1865 to 1872. Groupings of these smaller scale works occupied their own walls. In the Bureau’s Records, “Miscellaneous Papers” National Archives M809 Roll 23, Walker found a list of “Riots and Outrages”, and from this list, she incorporated into the titles of the figurative works the descriptions of the events and acts inspiring the images.
Grouping of the figurative works from the series Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands- Records, “Miscellaneous Papers” National Archives M809 Roll 23 New work, Kara Walker, Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York, NY, 2007 Photo: Luciano Fileti, courtesy of Sikkema Malloy Jenkins. Titles of the five works on the left, Committed an outrage and July 16 Black Girl Beaten and Threatened to kill her and her sister if they did not leave the county and Committed an outrage on a freedwoman and Mr. Alexander, colored preacher brutally beaten and forced to leave.
Another grouping of the figurative works from Bureau of Refugees series New work, Kara Walker, Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York, NY, 2007 Photo: Luciano Fileti, courtesy of Sikkema Malloy Jenkins. Titles of the four larger works, clockwise from the top, Freedman and Freedwoman thrown into a well in Jefferson Co. and A gang of ruffians and Bradley killed freedwoman with an axe and Between Danville + Somerville.
The second series in the show was the 52-panel Search for ideas supporting the Black Man as a work of Modern Art/Contemporary Painting. A death without end: an appreciation of the Creative Spirit of Lynch Mobs. Its title comes from the search string that Walker entered into Google to generate content for a series of panels handwritten in Sumi-e ink. Each panel (measuring 22.5 by 28.5 inches) compiles phrases that Walker culled from the search string’s results.
Installation view of the textual series: Search for ideas supporting the Black Man as a work of Modern Art / Contemporary Painting; a death without end, and an appreciation of the Creative Spirit of Lynch Mobs New work, Kara Walker, Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York, NY, 2007 Photo: Luciano Fileti, courtesy of Sikkema Malloy Jenkins.
The panel’s handwritten text delivers a rushing stream of consciousness, including misspellings, incomplete and ungrammatical sentences, half-scrawled letters and jumps in topic — much as occurs with the American Primitives text pieces in After the Deluge. As Merrily Kerr’s review puts it:
Search for ideas is a cacophonous brew of observations and perspectives. Here Walker explores the potential analogy between racist attitudes in America and those perpetuated by Americans overseas in texts that refer to Saddam Hussein as a “porch monkey” or Arabs as “sand niggers.” Under the rubric of aggressor and complicit victim, the text details rapes and torture, proffers that black soldiers are willing Klansmen, and asks, in the face of global jihad, “how can colored folks get on the winning side w/o giving up their hard-won right to jeans that fit …” Because the fifty-four [sic] parts are hung cheek by jowl and there is no obvious sequencing, it is unclear whether one is supposed to read them left to right, or top to bottom.
Where the exhibition separated the figurative from the textual, the book weaves them together. Three double foldouts are the closest the book comes to exploiting the codex form. The first presents two Search for ideas panels folded inwards and, when unfolded, a quadriptych of text panels. The second likewise consists of two text panels folded inwards, but when unfolded, they reveal a double-page image of the exhibition’s figurative 5-foot by 7-foot Authenticating the Artifact (2007) alongside one of the Search panels. Like the first, the third double foldout unfolds to present a quadriptych of text panels.
First double foldout still folded.
First double foldout unfolded.
Second double foldout unfolded.
The Search panels horrify with their words while the Bureau images horrify with their figures. Not all of the figurative works focus on America’s Reconstruction past. Some arise in the post-9/11 world and, like the Search series, find their horrors in the Sudan, the Congo, and Iraq. Woven together in the book, the two series underscore Walker’s perception of, in her words,
the continuity of conflict, the creation of racist narratives, or nationalist narratives, or whatever narratives people use to construct a group identity and to keep themselves whole–such activity has a darker side to it, since it allows people to lash out at whoever’s not in the group.
When viewing Kara Walker’s art, I am reminded of the refrain from one of Carly Simon’s songs: “You’re so vain, you probably think this song is about you, don’t you?”. It’s a double-edged irony. The addressee is damned if he doesn’t think it’s about him and damned if he does.
Walker’s is a multi-edged irony that cuts in many directions. Walker inhabits or projects a persona who is masochist and sadist, subject and object, self-centered and self-loathing, other-obsessed and other-fearing, Slave and Mistress. As a white viewer, collector, and writer about these works of book art, am I not entangled and complicit, too, however I respond to it? Caught out in shame and privilege, am I so vain that I think this art is about me? Damned if I don’t, damned if I do. Walker’s is the art of portraying a social madness. All parties — artist and viewer — are stuck in the muck of After the Deluge (2007), the muck of racist pathology. The terrible power of Walker’s art keeps our eyes fixed on it. Where either party can find solace is uncertain.
Further Reading
“Tia Blassingame“. 17 August 2020. Books On Books Collection.
“Emory Douglas“. 9 January 2026. Books On Books Collection.
“Sarah Matthews“. 15 February 2025.Books On Books Collection.
“Arial Robinson“. 15 May 2023. Books On Books Collection.
“Ruth E. Rogers“. 17 November 2025.Books On Books Collection.
“Clarissa Sligh“. 2 September 2020. Books On Books Collection.
“Carrie Mae Weems“. 14 February 2025. Books On Books Collection.
Gabor, Nora. 18 February 2021. “Black History and Experiences through Book Arts“. The Full Text: News about library resources and services. Chicago, IL: DePaul University. Accessed 22 January 2024.
Gleek, Charlie. “Centuries of Black Artists’ Books“, presented at “Black Bibliographia: Print/Culture/Art” conference at the Center for Material Culture Studies, University of Delaware, 27 April 2019, pp. 7-8. Accessed 20 July 2020.
Walker, Kara Elizabeth et al. 2003. Kara Walker : Narratives of a Negress. Edited by Ian Berry, Darby English, Vivian Patterson and Mark Rienhardt. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. This exhibition-based volume is closest to the Bureau of Refugees‘ near-artist’s-book status. Walker’s writings on 3×5 index cards play the same role that the 54 panels of Search for ideas play in Bureau of Refugees. The landscape book’s monumentality evokes the scale of installations such as Virginia’s Lynch Mob (1998) and For the Benefit of All the Races of Mankind (Mos’ Specially the Master One, Boss. An Exhibition of Artifacts, Remnants, and Effluvia EXCAVATED from the Black Heart of a Negress VIII (2002) that appeared in the exhibitions organized by The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College and the Williams College Museum of Art in 2003.
Silent Book, vol. 11 (2023) Ryuta Iida Altered book, camphor tree stump, and glue. H210 × W170 × D190 mm. Unique. Acquired from Fragile Books (Tokyo), 20 August 2024. Photos: Above, courtesy of Fragile Books; below, Books On Books Collection.
The cover, door, table of contents, numbering, text, and endnotes are all filled with a series of information. I thought to stop and crystallize all the functions of the “book,” … I decided to crystallize it. It took the time to go through the hands of people, the old book that finally reached me, sealed on a pedestal, it is now ripe for its next role. (Artist’s statement)
“Crystallized” is not the first word that comes to mind when viewing and handling this eleventh in Ryuta Iida’s series Silent Book. Perhaps it does for the angled planes of the cut block of camphor wood, but for the coverless codex, folded, draped, moulded, carved, and sculpted come closer. Two names that might not spring to mind (but should) are Giambologna (Jean Boulogne) and Gian Lorenzo Bernini. Like them, Iida offers us more than a single or primary vantage point from which to appreciate his work. Like Giambologna’s Abduction of a Sabine Woman (Loggia dei Lanzi, Florence) or Bernini’s Apollo and Daphne (Galleria Borghese, Rome) Silent Book must be circled and viewed in the round. The nine images below show the work turned right to left in stages.
Far as Silent Book is from the figurative, violent, and ornate features of the 16th and 17th century masterpieces, it still harbors its own complexities of line, shadow, texture, and form. There is a volume of dynamics between and among them that belies the work’s title. Note how the layers of pages echo the wood’s grain, and how the color and texture of the page surface contrasts with those of the book’s top edge, and how that contrast reverberates with the shifting colors of the wood. Iida has moulded and sealed the book block so that the top edge curves to a point in a duet with the cut angles of the wood block.
Silent Book has many kin in the world of book art, works that make the content of a ready-made volume inaccessible and make something anew from the material object. Too often this sub-genre has been dismissed as a fetishization of the book. This overlooks how Silent Book and its kin make us think about the book as a material for making art and as a source of metaphors, and we overlook what the individual artworks are. By sealing away the content of a book, giving the book block a sinuous shape, and fusing it with a carved block of wood, Iida invites us to look afresh.
In the Books On Books Collection, several other works share this play of inaccessibility with tangibility: Barton Lidice Beneš’s Untitled (1973), Andrew Hayes’ Offset (2013), Jacqueline Rush Lee’s The First Cut and Silenda (both 2015), Doug Beube’s Red Infinity #4 (2017), Lorenzo Perrone’s Kintsugi (2018), and Chris Perry’s 217 Ripples: Sediment(2020). Of these, Offset seems closest to Silent Book. Comparison can increase appreciation of each and their sub-genre.
Both Hayes and Iida have managed to elicit a sense of action and motion from their materials. From one view of Offset, metal embraces the body of the book; from another, the book pushes the metal apart. From one side of Silent Book, the upward-angled block of wood supports the coverless codex folding over and slipping down its pedestal; from another, the book drapes a protective arm over the sideways-angled block.
Views of Offset (2013) by Andrew Hayes and Silent Book (2023)
The titling of the two works raises appreciable similarities and differences. Offset suggests the printing method of the same name, which does involve metal plates. The overall shape, however, suggests some strange assemblage of early letterpress components: the bulbous ink balls (or dabbers) with their handles, the torque bar, and the metal furniture locks. The offset position of the piece’s “handle” also reflects the title. What can’t be appreciated from the images is that Offset wobbles if touched in the slightest.
“The two of printer’s dabbers” from Jost Amman’s 1588 deck of cards.
The BookBeetle Press, a portable screw press designed and built by Josef Beery. Reproduced with permission of Beery.
The title of Silent Book refers, of course, to the book block’s being sealed, an obvious visual/verbal pun. None of its information passes the lips of its pages. Like Offset, however, the title is also oblique. Although the derivation of the word book from the Old German Buche (meaning “beech”) is a debatable assumption, it’s widely accepted enough to allow that the block of wood is also a silent book.
Now imagine the substitution of a large block of pink bubble gum for the book material in Offset and Silent Book. Not a block of gum in the shape of a book, but an oversized, unchewed block of gum. Something very different to chew on now, isn’t it? The ways in which book artists manipulate the material and metaphor of the book vary every bit as much as the ways in which painters, sculptors, and other artists vary their techniques, materials, and subjects. Even within the slice of book art that focuses on physical inaccessibility, such as Marcel Broodthaers’ Pense-Bête (1964), Wolf Vostell’s Betonbuch (1971), Irwin Susskind’s Book Faced Down – Embedded in Plaster(1999), Jonathan Callan’s Rational Snow (2002), Anselm Kiefer’s Untitled (Constellation Book) (2004), Hanne Stochholm Exe’s Remake(2015), and Neil Nenner and Avihai Mizrahi’s Cover Story (2017), the variety abounds. Ryuta Iida’s series Silent Book is a resounding reminder.
This is not a stone (2017) Sunkyung Cho Exposed spine binding with cross weave filament tape, board-covered. 170 x 170 mm. Acquired from SpazioB**K, 6 April 2025. Photos: Books On Books Collection.
Just as you think this will be another two-dimensional riff on René Magritte’s The Treachery of Images (aka Ceci n’est pas une pipe), the Chinese fold title page turns to reveal a cutout well with a stone at the bottom.
With the turn of the next two pages, it appears we are in for a series of metaphors and riddles, and something more than a three-dimensional riff on the anti-metaphor and the gap between words (symbols) and objects. First, this not-a-stone is “an apple,” but then turn the next page, and the not-a-stone is also “a sun flower”. Is there some law of commutation that applies: If not-a-stone = apple, and not-a-stone = sun flower, therefore, apple = sun flower? Because it is round, because it is vegetal?
Over the next turns, we have “the Sun” and “the earth”, then “a crystal” and “a flake of snow in the Himalyas”, then “a beetle” and “a scorpion”, and on the pairs go, each separated with the spread “This is not a stone”. All along, while being urged to deny the evidence of reality, we are asked to accept the evidence of metaphor and imagination. Naturally our inbred pattern-seeking and ludic behaviors kick in, as if this were a game of “Twenty Questions”. But the pairs run the gamut of Animal, Vegetable, Mineral and beyond.
By the last page, it is as if we are playing “Twenty Questions” with the stone itself. That is, if the “I” is the stone saying, “and this will be I”. Is the stone uttering a deliberate a-grammatical union of subject (I) and object (me)? Is it a verbal visual pun (I-eye) evoking Emersonian Transcendentalism? Perhaps this stone that says “This is not a stone” is a Cretan philosopher’s stone, and round and round we will go.
On the artist’s website (www.somebooks.kr), the product page displays this Korean expression and its translation: 하나의 돌은 돌이자 다른 모든 것이다 [“One stone is a stone and everything else”]. It does not appear anywhere in the book, so perhaps it is unfair to invoke it as confirmation of any reading of This is not a stone. On the other hand, if you are going to play “Twenty Questions” with a Cretan philosopher’s stone, cheating may be your best option.
The other works by Sunkyung Cho in the collection are wordless, except for their titles, and lean more toward children’s books than This is not a stone. Like so many artists’ books, they occupy that crossover zone discussed by Sandra Beckett, Johanna Drucker, and Carol Scott (see Further Reading).
In the beginning (2012)
In the beginning(2012) Sunkyung Cho Softcover, sewn, exposed spine binding with cross weave filament tape. H260 x W150 mm. [36] pages. Unknown edition, of which this is #146. Acquired from SpazioB**K, 6 April 2025. Photos: Books On Books Collection.
From the artist’s website: 빛 이전의 태초, 사회화되기 이전의 인간에 대해 생각하는 책. [“In the beginning before light, a book that thinks about people before they became socialistic.”]
A translation that resonates more with the paper, structure, and images might be “A book contemplating the primordial state of the human before light and socialization.” Such a book would, of course, not have the normalized appearance we enlightened and socialized humans expect. Hence the black oddly shaped covers and leaves across which the gray, almost headless creature crawls on all fours and begins to sprout antlers or branches.
When other creatures enter the primordial state, they are oriented to it differently, which our branch-headed forebearer notices and tries to assume but fails.
Having failed, our precursor tries to merge with one of the other creatures, but this elephant-like being will have none of him and flings the proto-human off.
Whereupon, branch-head seeks affiliation with the vegetable kingdom and climbs toward the top.
Having reached the top, our forebearer confronts and succumbs to the source of light and, having fallen and lost the semblance of antlers or branches (or both), yearns with arms outstretched for what once was.
The book’s unusual shape recalls Helmut Löhr’s Visual Poetry (1987), Kevin Osborn’s Tropos (1988), and Philip Zimmermann’sHigh Tension (1993), where likewise the shape contributes to meaning.
The Blue Bird (2011)
The Blue Bird (2011) Sunkyung Cho Exposed spine binding with cross weave filament tape, board-covered. 200 x 200 mm. [40] not including 2 illustrated fly leaves. Acquired from SpazioB**K, 6 April 2025. Photos: Books On Books Collection.
The Blue Bird leans much more toward the children’s book end of the crossover spectrum than in the beginning. The website’s description of it — “Blue Bird and Boar’s story of how to be a child and parent” — underscores all of the physical evidence except for the delicate nature of the paper. It is hard to imagine a copy surviving childhood use. But that might well be in keeping with the tender mix of joy and sadness in the tale.
The simplicity and evocative sophistication of composition and line eliminate the need for any words to carry the narrative. In the sequence below, Boar’s protective parental handling of the egg against wind and wave ends in predictable exhaustion and birth.
The remainder of the book in which Boar introduces Blue Bird to the world of foraging, running, jumping, sky- and star-gazing is landbound. Boar climbs trees to let Blue Bird sleep there, but when returns to the ground to sleep, Blue Bird follows, preferring to nestle against Boar under the stars.
Boar’s continued efforts to teach Blue Bird about flight lead to a separation that some parents may not be ready to explain to a child.
Kiss (2015)
Kiss (2015) Sunkyung Cho Board-covered books, bound face-to-face, exposed spine binding with cross weave filament tape. H200 x W400 mm (open); W800 (open). [16] Chinese fold folios. Acquired from Somebooks, 6 April 2025. Photos: Books On Books Collection.
Kiss is far more whimsical. It works somewhat like a harlequinade, allowing multiple juxtapositions of images. The structure by which it does this is complex enough and the juxtapositions, subtle enough, that adult assistance is likely required. The book is actually two books joined at edges of their back covers, one opening to the left and the other, to the right.
The precision of the registration between the facing books will generate delight as a gorilla kisses a mouse. The mouse kisses a bird. The bird, a crocodile. The crocodile, a gorilla or octopus. The octopus, a mouse or frog. And so on with sharks, snakes, and others.
Among the effective subtleties that more experienced observers will note are Cho’s handling of bleeds and the facing sets of double-page spreads. The large expanses of white behind each of any two smaller figures facing each other from single pages contribute to a non-threatening delicate kiss. The larger, more threatening creatures extend across their double-page spreads and even bleed off their pages. When they meet, or when one of them meets a smaller figure, there is an edge. It may be an edge of curiosity on one side or the other or both, but it is likely also one of threat and unease.
Another subtlety is the handling of the human figure. It occurs in the recto book. Like the smaller figures, it occupies a single page with a page of white behind it. It is expressionless, regardless of what it faces whether fish or lion. Oddly, the fish seems to be curious, and the lion, reserved.
Here is another subtlety that Cho raises. The last figure in the recto book is a stone, large enough to extend over its double-page spread. No doubt it is an anthropomorphizing tendency to read something (puzzlement, curiosity, annoyance, etc.) into the silhouette of each creature confronting the stone. But it is only the stone and human that exude indifference.
Scott, Carole. 2014. “Artists’ books, Altered books, and Picturebooks”. In: B. Kümmerling‐Meibauer, ed.,Picturebooks: Representation and Narration. London, New York: Routledge.
Anne Covell bridges the domains of book art and the book arts. The Record offers a skillfully constructed artist’s book that documents one of the first Trump Regime’s acts of depredation against history and truth. Historical Binding embodies her respect for the history of one of the book arts’ loveliest of crafts: stitching.
The Record (2017)
The Record (2017) Anne Covell Letterpress printed accordion on Masa paper with sumi wash and hand brayering. Housed in a 4-flap French paper enclosure with button and string ties. Enclosure: H165 x W110 x D6 mm. Book: H164 x W108 x D3 mm (closed); H327 x W1080 mm (open). 6.5 x 4.25 x .25 inches (closed), 13 x 42.5 x .25 inches (open) [36] panels. Edition of 60, of which this is #1. Acquired from the artist, 10 September 2025. Photos: Books On Books Collection.
On January 20th, 2017, Donald J. Trump was sworn in as the 45th president of the United States. That same day, the official White House website (whitehouse.gov) began the digital transition to archive and replace Obama’s policies with those of the new administration. Immediately, people began to notice that key issues such as health care, education, and immigration were nowhere to be found. Keyword searches for terms such as “climate change,” “LGBT,” and “civil rights” all returned 404 errors. Even more conspicuously, the Spanish-language version and the disabled-accessible version of the site were no longer available. Internet Archive, a non-profit digital library that has been archiving webpages since 1996, captured 167 snapshots of whitehouse.gov that day. This book records the last snapshots taken of Obama’s policies before they came down, the 404 errors that followed, as well as the Internet Archive timestamps for when the information was last available and when it disappeared. (Anne Covell).
The fold-downs enact the digital shredding of the previous administration’s policies referencing existing laws that the Trump Regime opposed.
In response to the 6 January 2021 insurrection, Russell Maret and Sarah Moody published Three Constitutions, whose redactions and translations offer a view of the interim state of affairs reflecting “the cynical, ineffectual state of political discourse in the United States”. On the eve of the 25oth anniversary of the founding of the USA, will there be another work such as Covell’s or Maret and Moody’s to represent the second Trump Regime’s violation and shredding of law, judicial orders, and constitutional rights?
Historical Binding: Sewing Sampler (2025)
Historical Binding: Sewing Sampler(2025) Anne Covell Clamshell box. Open-spine binding with cloth-covered boards and plain doublures. Box: H330 x W120 x D45 mm. Book: H305 x W100 x D25 mm. [288] pages. Made to order. Acquired from the artist 10 September 2025. Photos: Books On Books Collection.
Spine sewing is one of the hidden book arts as it is most often covered by a case binding of paper, cloth, or leather (real or faux). Covell’s Historical Binding: Sewing Sampler:
is designed for bookbinders and book enthusiasts as a personal reference and/or for teachers/historians with a focus in book history and book conservation. This is a large folio size blank book featuring varied sewing techniques that can also be used as a ledger or unique journal or sketchbook. It includes one hardcover sampler book with the option to be housed in a custom clamshell box covered in natural linen bookcloth. The sampler includes 16 different sewing methods both sewn on supports (hemp cord, leather and taw, linen and cotton tapes, and Ramieband) and sewn without supports. The sampler highlights the historical sewing styles inherent to their structure and includes title descriptions that correspond to each sewing station. The styles progress chronologically across the spine from the earliest forms of multi-section sewing to more modern adaptations and sewing variants. (Anne Covell)
Untitled(2015) Ivon Illmer Book-shaped wood sculpture. Top: Almond wood, H100 x W65 x D27 mm.Bottom: Poplar wood, H123 x W78 x D27 mm. Unique. Acquired from the artist, 10 October 2014. Photos: Books On Books.
From Ivon Illmer’s website: Books preserve history and stories. Each book has its own individual story. This ranges from loving treatment to neglect to ostracism and even burning. The arc almost inevitably stretches from the fate of the book to the fate of man. Everyone should let their imagination run wild when touching the book sculptures and invent their own story for each book. Touching is important, the haptic experience flatters the sense of touch. You “grasp” the beauty of the wood. Imagining the book sculptures in the raw piece of wood is the art. Each piece is unique in shape, structure and grain. Accessed 14 October 2024.
Illmer categorizes his work as “book sculpture / book art”. The carvings from various woods primarily celebrate the shape and tactility of the closed codex. The similitude of the exterior, right down to the fore, top and bottom edges, belies the inaccessibility of the interior.
Untitled
If simply entitled Unreadable Book or A Closed Book, these works would lead us down a narrow path of interpretation. Another easy path of interpretation could be etymological. The derivation of the word book from the Old German Buche (meaning “beech”) is a debatable assumption. Still, it’s widely accepted enough to start us down the path that, since the paper of traditional books is made from wood, so, Illmer’s carved codices just represent another way of using wood to make a book. He could have entitled them Buchmaterial, which in English also captures the same pun between the book’s content and its material. In his self-published catalogue, however, Illmer is explicit that his use of “untitled” is totemic:
… each of my books represents every book published so far. That’s why none of them has a title, and that’s why none of them is based on a real book.
Illmer leaves it to the imagination of the viewer to determine whether and how his works “interrogate” the nature of the book.
Presenting physically inaccessible books is fairly common among wood carvers, sculptors, and painters. A closed or open book appears in the hands of countless saints and Madonnas and carries with it various iconological interpretations, depending on the bearer. From the St. Servatius Cathedral Treasury in Maastricht, here’s a library of letters, scrolls and books in the hands of the Holy Kinship.
And from Lisbon’s National Museum of Antique Art, here’s a Madonna and Child with book, which seems to underscore the interpretation in Christian art that an open book in connection with Mary indicates the fulfillment of the promise.
Madonna and Child (c. 1540-1550), Unknown sculptor, Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga, Lisbonne, Inv 1182 Esc. Photos: Books On Books Collection, 2015, at “Pliure. Prologue (la part du feu)”, Fondation Calouste-Gulbenkian, Paris.
The fifteenth-century Van Lymborch, or Limbourg, brothers of Les Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry fame, however, may be the first to have created an inaccessible book for the sheer pleasure of trompe-l’oeil and trompe-le-main. They made it from a block of wood, decorated its exterior to look like a sumptuous illuminated manuscript, and gave it to their patron as a New Year’s day joke. Another two centuries later in Venice, Francesco Pianta the Younger carved shelves of inaccessible wooden books for the Chapter Room in the Scuola Grande di San Rocco (1657-75). Arranged as if recently consulted and replaced on their shelves, the books provide the studious background for inconographic and allegorical sculptural figures of “Curiosity”, “Wrath”, “Melancholy”, and others. The influence of this particular fantasy has persisted in Venice and found an enthusiastic expansionist in Livio de Marchi, whose project entitled House of Books, begun in 1990, boasted three residential-sized installations by 2025. From the spine- and cover-clad exterior walls, to the carved splayed book for a roof, to the furnishings — everything is made from wood and has a bookish allusion in its shape or function, including the pen-shaped chimney and a pencil-picket fence. The more prolific joker, however, may be Alain Stanké, whose wood sculptures suggest there is no bookish pun he would not carve.
While facetiousness and jokery also characterize the path taken by conceptual book artists by making an inaccessible book the material of the artwork, there is now an edge. Marcel Broodthaers encased his previously published books of poetry in plaster to create Pense-Bête (1964), an elaborate farewell to literary aims. Following Broodthaers, Wolf Vostell purportedly encased his paper-based booklet Betonierungen (“Concretifications”) in a 40 x 28 x 6cm slab of concrete shaped like a book (Frengel et al.), not a farewell but rather an embodied manifesto. Vostell’s Betonbuch (1971) allows for both the interpretive paths of inaccessibility and punning on the book’s material. (Further trickery may be involved; radiographic examinations are inconclusive on whether there really is a booklet embedded in there; see White, below.) Despite, or because of, its title, Barton Lidice Beneš’ inaccessible Untitled (1973) plays differently with titular punning: Beneš has almost obliterated the titles of the condensed books from the spines of his sealed Reader’s Digest Condensed Books series. Jacqueline Rush Lee’s The First Cut (2015) soaks, rolls, and dries the three volumes of the Loeb translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses into a single firewood-like chunk; its inaccessibility and title join in a punning allusion to the transformation of Daphne and others into trees or plants to escape the grasp of the gods. Lorenzo Perrone’s inaccessible Kintsugi (2018) casts yet a different titular pun by applying “repair” lines of gold glue to a presumably unbreakable and pristinely white plastered book.
Moritz Küng’s exhibition catalogue Blank. Raw. Illegible … : Artists’ Books as Statements (1960-2022) devotes one of its fifteen thematic sections to inaccessible books, including Vostell’s Betonbuch. Among the ten works included, five of them introduce puns unlike those mentioned so far. They pun on a structural or material feature of “the book”. Timm Ulrich’s Dem Leser den Rücken zukehrend (1970/76) is an hermetically sealed book dummy, whose only text is the title (“Turning your back on the reader”) appearing on the spine of the book. Richard Olson’s Perfect Bind (1978), David C. Stairs’ Boundless (1983), and Nicolas Geiser’s Le non-livre (2006) are each bound on all four sides. Les Coleman’s Glue (2002) qualifies as a fifth inaccessible book with a book-material-referring title, although it does have an accessible table of contents to let you know the different types of glue used to make the different sections of the book inaccessible.
Like art and its history in general, book art is not linear. The point of Anthony Caro’s sculptures that include inaccessible books is not “the book” as it is with the conceptualists. His works carry more directive titles and nudge the viewer’s interpretation away from the inaccessibility and toward the subject the books illustrate or support. His minimalist Book of Eden (1999) is a pulp paper sculpture and lithograph. Its title clarifies, or is clarified by, the two outline images evoking the Adam and Eve myth: an apple and buttocks. Another example is Stave (2013), entitled after his death. The title comes from the source of the work’s inspiration: “a reproduction of an illustrated musical score that Caro had chanced upon inside a catalogue for an Italian exhibition about Duccio” (Sooke). Given Caro’s aims at associating his sculptures with music (see, for example, his Concerto series), Stave is probably not far from the mark and provides a very different example of the title’s directing the viewer’s interpretation. The sculpture may present an inaccessible book, but the suggestions of stave lines and musical notations rise in metal above the open pages. Likewise, Book of Eden‘s lithograph is the minimalist distillation from the blank white paper-pulp book under it.
Anselm Kiefer’s book art is a whirlwind of the above uses of inaccessible books, allusive titles, and the untitled. The several works of his like Das Buch (1979-85) that have an inaccessible lead book hanging against an acrylic-on-canvas background make for interesting pairings with Caro’s Book of Eden. Where Caro backgrounds his blank inaccessible Bible beneath his minimalist lithograph and allusive title, Kiefer foregrounds his books. As he writes in L’Alchimie du Livre (2015):
In the beginning was the word. But in my work, first there were the books made of lead. And those books are interesting in that they are impossible to read, they are too heavy, the lead lets nothing get through, it’s a complete concealment… Lead books are perfect paradoxes then. You can neither thumb through them nor read them, and you will never know what’s inside. (Minssieux-Chamonard, 237).
Kiefer’s Mesopotamia – The High Priestess (1985-89) with its 196 lead volumes ranged across two open book cases contrasts with Francesco Pianta’s loosely shelved, allusive but decorative wooden books in Venice. The work is not background to adjacent artwork or surroundings. Neither is Kiefer’s title an indirect pun allusively signaling after something more like those of other book artists. It is indeed allusive but to something that stands apart from the form and material of the artwork. The distance makes the viewer work backwards from the inaccessibility, the volume, and distressed appearance to connect with the title. When Kiefer uses “untitled” as a title, he often adds explanatory words in brackets after it, as in Untitled (Constellation Book) (2004). Although made of lead, this work, however, is not inaccessible. Its nearly 5.5-foot pages stand open to be read “in the round”.
Johanna Drucker is one of the few writers about artists’ books who has commented at any length on Kiefer’s artist’s books:
Anselm Kiefer’s large-scale books made of heavy dull grey lead, laid open on stands designed to hold their outsized form and ponderous weight absorb the viewer into their profound depths, rather than offering themselves for communication. Such works become affective pieces rather than textual vehicles or message bearing forms, their physical, tactile presence takes the iconic and cultural resonance of book forms and plays it out through an extenuated spectrum of propositions — “what if” this were a book and a book were this, what then? Books of bread, marble, granite, soap and dried leaves pressed with flowers delicate and impossible to manipulate without destroying them. Books of lost objects, found texts, destroyed titles, remade photographs — all gaining some value by using the book form, insisting on its familiar structure as a frame to the otherwise elusive meaning of these constructions. …. (Drucker, 114-15.)
Which brings us back to Illmer’s more totemic works. Each work celebrates the grain and flaws of its material by using the book form. It could do so with a different form (beads, animals, geometric shapes, etc.), but Illmer chose the book. Although an inaccessible book, the object gains s0me value by this choice. And with the totemic title of Untitled, each work demonstrates that title matters as much as material and shape. Untitled offers the viewer’s eyes and hands the challenge that all inert totems offer: to invest its shape, grain, colors, and markings with meaning. But where do such works sit in our appreciation of artists’ books and book art? What are the distinctions between them and those of Kiefer, Caro, Coleman, Geiser, Stairs, Olson, Ulrich, Perrone, Lee, Beneš, Vostell, and Broodthaers? Keep looking and, wherever possible, touching.
Further Reading
Drucker, Johanna. 2004. The Century of Artists’ Books [Second edition] ed. New York City: Granary Books. Others who have commented at some length on Kiefer’s books as artist’s books include Zdenek Felix, “The Readability of the World” (1991); Buzz Spector, “Anselm Kiefer’s Bookworks” in Art Forum in 1987 (reprinted in The Book Maker’s Desire); Elizabeth Long in The Journal of Artists’ Books 21 (2007), and Garrett Stewart in Critical Inquiry (spring 2010).
Drawn, Cut & Layered Werner Pfeiffer Plastic box containing illustrated pop-ups.Acquired from Toledo Museum of Art, 5 Jun 2017. Photos: Books On Books Collection.
Werner Pfeiffer’s playfulness finds its way into viewers’ hands with this offering from his Toledo Museum of Art exhibition in 2015. His archives are housed at Vassar College.
With its structures and photographic representation of Pfeiffer’s other works of paper engineering, Drawn, Cut & Layered demonstrates his breadth in that sub-domain of book art. Not detectable in the box, though, are Pfeiffer’s white altered book objects, which formed the 2010 exhibition at Cornell University, entitled censor, villain, provocateur, experimenter, and demonstrates his scope in the sub-domain of altered books.
In kind, they were preceded by Barton Lidicé Beneš‘ The Life of Gandhi and Beauty Book (both 1973), M.L. Van Nice‘s Swiss Army Book (1990) Irwin Susskind‘s Book Faced Down – Embedded in Plaster (1999). In kind and whiteness, they were followed by Jonathan Callan‘s Zurbarán’s Color Plates (2011), Michael Mandiberg‘s Print Wikipedia (2015), and Lorenzo Perrone‘s Kintsugi(2018).
Books On Books 