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), 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).
Beauty Book; The Life of Gandhi; Untitled (1973) Barton Lidice Beneš Mixed media book constructions. Acquired from Rago Arts and Auction Center, 23 March 2021; Allan Stone Gallery, New York; artist. Photos: Books On Books Collection.
Beauty Book (1973) Barton Lidice Beneš Altered book with human hair. H220 × W140 × D50 mm. Unique. Acquired from Rago Arts and Auction Center, 23 March 2021; Allan Stone Gallery, New York; artist. Photos: Books On Books Collection.
The Sleep of Reason (2023) Masoumeh Mohtadi Photo: Courtesy of the artist.
The Life of Gandhi Barton Lidice Beneš Altered book with embedded nails. H197 x W140 x D86 mm. Unique. Acquired from Rago Arts and Auction Center, 23 March 2021; Allan Stone Gallery, New York; artist. Photos: Books On Books Collection.
Beneš’ disrespectfully and adolescently entitled The Life of Gandhi may be the first artist’s book embedded with nails, although Lucas Samaras’ prickly Book 4 (1962) in the Museum of Modern Art might have provided inspiration. Later examples are Floating Concrete Octopus’s* Book of Nails (1992), Daniel Essig’s Book of Nails II (2003), Anne Maree Hunter’s Nailed (2005?), Sasha Meret’s Aggressive Book (2009), Werner Pfeiffer’s Difficult to Fit, Censored Nailbook, and Nailed Shut (ca. 2010-12), and manuel arturo abreu’s Kanga Book (2021). The frequency is considerably less than say treatments 0f Saint Sebastian in painting and sculpture, but the latter had centuries as a subject whereas the book nailed shut has only had decades.
Untitled (1973) Barton Lidice Beneš Altered volumes of Reader’s Digest, sanded and varnished. Each H197 x W140 x D85. Unique. Acquired from Rago Arts and Auction Center, 23 March 2021; Allan Stone Gallery, New York; artist. Photos: Books On Books Collection.
With his two Untitled volumes, Beneš may again lay claim to another first-of-its-kind in this category among artists’ books. Two volumes from the Reader’s Digest Condensed Books series have had their component titles almost completely sanded off. They have been sealed and varnished to constitute a work more naturally called Untitled than any other work of art assigned that ubiquitous title.
These works of book art and his 1970s mail art interactions with Aart van Barneveld and Ulises Carrión secured Beneš’ position among the Fluxus and neo-Dadaist crowd. His later AIDS-related art such as the Lethal Weapon series (199o’s), made with his infected blood, may dominate his legacy, but these three works of book art sculpture place him alongside John Latham and Dieter Roth as an original and vanguard book artist.
The hunt for Erica Van Horn’s Seven Lady Saintes has been long, but at last, in a glass case in Conway Hall at the Small Publishers Fair in London this year, there it was. Van Horn and Simon Cutts (co-founders of Coracle Press) have been a regular feature of the Small Publishers Fair since its first occurrence in 2002 at Royal Festival Hall.
Conway Hall, owned by the charity Conway Hall Ethical Society, first opened in 1929 and is named after Moncure Daniel Conway (1832-1907), an anti-slavery advocate and biographer of Thomas Paine. It has hosted the Fair since its second outing in 2003. In 2025, it had a cameo appearance in the spy drama series Slow Horses as the unlikely host for an ultra-right mayoral candidate’s campaign event. The setting provided the kind of sardonic humorous dig that Van Horn would appreciate (if she were a regular television viewer).
With stained-glass colors, Seven Lady Saintes splashes its own brand of sardonic humor across a stiff-card leporello produced in 1985 at the Women’s Studio Workshop Print Center in Rosendale, New York.
Seven Lady Saintes (1985)
Seven Lady Saintes (1985) Erica Van Horn Clear plastic-coated white-thread envelope, self-covered leporello, watercolor paper. Envelope: H270 x W215 mm. Leporello: H250 x W205 mm (closed), W3040 mm (open). 16 panels, including covers. Edition of 90, artist’s proof. Acquired from the artist 1 November 2025. Photos: Books On Books Collection.
Van Horn uses a sophisticated child-like style of text and image to laugh slyly, wryly, and grimly at religion and patriarchy. Her summaries parody the descriptions in the handouts usually available in museums, convents, and churches or in the flood of hagiographies long on the market. The sophisticated-naivete of the drawing in Seven Lady Saintes appears in other works such as La ville aux dames (1983) and With or Without (2010). If the story of her plan for a series of four children’s books had turned out differently from the account in Scraps of an Aborted Collaboration (1994), we would have even more evidence of the influence of children’s books on many artists’ books that the Huberts propose in The Cutting Edge of Reading (1999).
Martha, patron sainte of cooks and housewives
Agatha, patron against fire and diseases of the breast
Fina, patron sainte of San Gemignano
Reparata, formerly patron sainte of Florence
Lucy, patron sainte of Syracuse and diseases of the eye
Ursula, patron sainte of teachers and young girls
Cecilia, patron sainte of music and musicians
Walking the Portes (2025)
Walking the Portes: Winters in Paris 2014-2019 (2025) Simon Cutts and Erica Van Horn Casebound, book cloth over boards, blind stamped and inked spine, photo pastedown in recess on front cover, plain doublures. H182 x W132 mm. 216 pages. Edition of 300. Acquired from Books about Art, 15 September 2025. Photos: Books On Books Collection.
In the early 2000s, a series of hardbacks appeared called “Writer and the City”. John Banville covered Prague; Peter Carey, Sydney; Justin Cartwright, Oxford; Ruy Castro, Rio de Janeiro; David Leavitt, Florence; and Edmund White, Paris. White’s was the first, and it set the tone with its content and title: The Flâneur: A Stroll Through the Paradoxes of Paris. An enterprising paperback publisher might be enticed to reissue them and, allowing for a Parisian double-dip, to add Walking the Portes. Besides, I prefer Simon and Erica’s Paris to Edmund White’s, and Walking the Portes pairs better with Anne Moeglin-Delcroix’s Ambulo Ergo Sum (2015) anyway.
It is Simon’s plan to ride out to each of the entrances to Paris (the portes) and walk back to the apartment in the Marais. When it turns out that instead of twenty-one portes there are thirty-nine, Erica firmly responds accordingly:
In introducing Ambulo Ergo Sum, her extended essay on Hamish Fulton, Richard Long, and herman de vries, Moeglin-Delcroix writes:
The analysis of some artists’ books … should make it possible to show how the emphasis has been progressively placed no longer on landscape but on the search for the best means, differing according to the various artists, of rendering an experience in the strongest sense of the word: a lived experience of the world, a personal practice, that is to say, a deliberate way of being inthe world rather than before it. The walking body is the touchstone of this, because walking compels one to supersede the limits of a purely visual experience of nature to become the experience of the whole artist, with his body, in nature. (p. 6)
Whether Walking the Portes is an artists’ book or not, it does what Moeglin-Delcroix describes. It renders these artists’ lived experiences of Paris and their deliberate way of being in the world together.
Bates, Julie. 2023. “Erica Van Horn’s creative exercises“. Irish Studies Review, 31(1), 139–158. Interviewed Van Horn at the 2025 Small Publishers Fair, Conway Hall, London.
Spirit (2024) Chisato Tamabayashi Yellow cloth-covered slipcase. Leporello of 8 panels and enclosing cover. Slipcase: H168 x W129 x D24 mm. Book: H160 x W120 mm (closed); W2100 mm. 16 panels (excluding enclosing cover). Edition of 60, of which this is #2. Acquired from Chisato Tamabayashi, 5 November 2024. Photos: Books On Books Collection.
Chisato Tamabayashi’s leporello Spirit departs from her usual paper-engineering techniques. It relies on hole punching, paper sculpture, and display with light. Her crossover in techniques will remind close observers of Katsumi Komagata’s movement from Little Tree/Petit arbre (2008) to「Ichigu」(2015).
Spirit is accompanied by the 20th century poet Misuzu Kaneko‘s poem “Stars and Dandelions” (in English and Japanese) from which Tamabayashi has taken her inspiration.
Viewed standing or lying flat, the leporello’s arranged holes echo the seeds leaving the dandelion heads bare in the second stanza of the poem.
Just before the last spread of imagery, the upper edge takes on the shape of the ocean surface beneath which the stones mentioned in the first stanza lie.
A projection to the background echoes the stars from the first stanza of the poem.
A projection to the foreground echoes the stones on the seabed from first stanza of the poem. Photos: Courtesy of the artist.
Like Misuzu Kaneko’s poetry, Chisato Tamabayashi’s artwork appeals to children and adults, underscoring the link between children’s books and artists’ books explored so well by the Huberts in The Cutting Edge of Reading, Johanna Drucker in “Artists’ Books and Picture Books”, and Sandra Beckett in Crossover Picturebooks.
Tamabayashi’s and Komagata’s handling of holes, paper engineering, and display with light should be considered alongside the efforts of the book and paper artists’ explored in the second issue of Inscription as well as those of Eleonora Cumer and Jenny Smith.
Drucker, Johanna. 2017. “Artists’ Books and Picture Books: Generative Dialogues” in The Routledge Companion to Picturebooks, edited by Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer. London: Taylor & Francis Group.
Marlene MacCallum often applies unusual folds in her works. They appear in sleep walk (2024) and The Shadow Quartet (2018-25). With the two works below, however, — as with Chicago Octet (2014) — the fold becomes central to the whole work. Any other structural presentation would not deliver the precise fusion of image, text, and material to deliver the metaphor embodied by the work.
Send (2020)
Send(2020) Marlene MacCallum and Shani Mootoo A double-sided archival digital pigment print on paper, folded and pamphlet bound in an envelope enclosure. Images, design, printing and binding by Marlene MacCallum, poem by Shani Mootoo. Dimension: 10 × 25.4 cm (closed) and 47.5 × 10 cm (expanded). #11. Acquired from Marlene MacCallum, 26 October 2022. Photo of the work: Books On Books Collection.
Author’s statement: Send is a correspondence piece; a conversation between my images and structural concept and Shani Mootoo’s poem “Send All Possible Answers – We Have Questions To Match”. Shani Mootoo, writer and artist, gave me the gift of this poem to use in a piece as I saw fit, and together we send this letter to the world.
Opening envelope; inside of envelope.
First opening and unfolding.
Fully open view of poem.
Fully open view of image.
Rise (2020)
Rise(2020) Marlene MacCallum and Deborah Root Slipcase enclosure with passe-partout showing title. Double-sided folio in miura fold between two boards. Printed paper over boards. Slipcase H135 x W97 mm. Double-sided folio H133 x W93 mm (closed), W483 × H633 mm (open). Acquired from Marlene MacCallum, 26 October 2022. Photos of the work: Books On Books Collection.
Artists’ statement: Rise is a collaborative artwork by Marlene MacCallum and Deborah Root. This piece grew out of discussions about our shared fascination with the implications and meanings of the fold. The images and poem evolved through a call and response process, sharing them back and forth. The miura fold structure was selected early on for its structural strength and the way it allowed us to take a seemingly small object that expanded quite surprisingly to reveal a large field of imagery and poetry.
The fold is named for its inventor, Japanese astrophysicist Kōryō Miura.
Lightweight(2015) Ana Paula Cordeiro Custom storage box with passepartout on cover with title printed on translucent paper with colored diagram beneath and sculptural element inside top. Three-part construction Limp Vellum binding on dyed parchment. Box: H215 x W224 x D47v & D53r. Book: H190 x W215 x D18 mm [90] pages. 88 + 2 half pages for colophon. Edition of 21 sets, copy bound on request. Acquired from the artist, 27 August 2025. Photos: Books On Books Collection.
Dating back to the 13th century, the limp vellum binding for books involves a parchment or other flexible covering material that is the sole component of the cover. No stiff boards. It attaches to the textblock usually by sewing and without adhesive. According to the American Institute for Conservation, it was not merely a temporary solution until a more luxurious one with boards and ornamentation could be commissioned. Its presence in collections, its variety of formats, and its superior protection of works proven in the aftermath of the 1966 flooding of Florence, all suggest that, for a time, it was deliberately chosen for joining the artistic with the functional.
Ana Paula Cordeiro’s Lightweight is an artist’s book that pays elaborate homage to this distinctive form of binding. It weaves together metaphor, structure, material, and content in extraordinary ways.
Begin with the container, which offers a multitude of metaphors. On top of the cloth-covered box, a rectangular window has been cut. To look down through this window is to begin peering into the past. Beneath the translucent sheet bearing the title, a print motif appears whose mingling layers suggest the water, paper, ink, and silt that had to be sifted to save a Renaissance legacy of manuscripts, incunabula, and books from the Florence flood of 1966.
Left: passe-partout (window) on box top. Right: recurrent print motif appearing later in the book.
That strata of links running from blue to rust to gold becomes a recurrent print motif in the book, suggesting abstractly another metaphor: that of a continuum with endpoints playing off one another. As soon as you pick up the Canapetta cloth-covered box, the title itself — Lightweight — sets in motion a fresh instance of this continuum metaphor. Floating above the recurrent print motif, the title contrasts with the weight in your hands. As if to underscore this diametric contrast, the corners of the top and bottom of the box sit flush at the ends of one diagonal but gap at the other, easing the lifting of the weighted top from the box.
Inside, other decorative features offer further dual functionality. The sculptural element that provides the top’s weight also serves as a protective mould inside for the book and mirrors its dominant and recurrent physical feature: the creased shape slanting in parallel to the title slip tacked to the cover. Cordeiro refers to the creased shape as an “angled beam”.
For her, the angled beam distills the essence of the limp vellum structure and “supports” the variety of contemplation she pours into it. The angled beam puts forward the limp vellum structure as a historical link from binding’s past to its present. It stands for the binding structure’s durability, again linking past to present. Its linearity stands in for that continuum. It prompts thoughts of other continua along which one thing becomes another such as the line between night and day (twilight), between light and shadow, between one season and another. It evokes the continua between extremities, between the ordinary and the extraordinary, between mental acuity and dementia, and between life and death.
Following Emily Dickinson’s injunction — “Tell all the truth but tell it slant” — Cordeiro plants other angles in Lightweight. The ribbon tape that lies under the book is stiff, not soft and flexible, and it twists once and folds twice into an angular tool for lifting up the book. The trim of the book’s top and bottom edges slants. Creased into the covers, end sheets, and text block of this limp form, the angled beam is a physical constant echoing the metaphor of a continuum whose endpoints contrast and balance with one another.
Altogether there are seven gatherings in Lightweight. The “prelims” gathering provides the historical context underlying Cordeiro’s homage. Note the artist’s wish expressed in the envoi to this artist’s book in our hands: “May its message be its medium, may its artistry embrace eternity”. Here, Cordeiro introduces that self-reflexivity we expect in the best of artists’ books.
After the prelims gathering, the other six gatherings are labeled. In addition to bearing the creased angled beam, all six carry an “on-end outline” of it (see below). The five that are numbered, lettered, and labeled introduce themes reflecting different responses that relate to the continuum motif.
The Part 1, Section R gathering has announced cryptically that color will merge with form. How will this happen? As you turn the page, the opening text suggests how — along a continuum: “Continuum (measurement), anything that goes through a gradual transition from one condition, to a different condition, without any abrupt changes”.
The spread lays out this definition in a peculiar manner that seems to contradict the definition. On the verso page, the definition seems to run abruptly up against the seam, which bumps the words “abrupt changes” to the next line, while the recto page presents a truncation of those words: “rupt changes”. Hold that puzzle for a moment. So how can color and form be on a continuum? And will they merge gradually or abruptly? On the next spread, Cordeiro answers with the Sanskrit word rupa, which represents “color” and “form” and from which the section draws its label “R”.
un extremo se conoce bien por otro [one extreme knows well its other]
So, the merger is etymological. But at the same time, another spectrum comes into play: the color spectrum and the blue and red at its opposite ends. On the spectrum, of course, one gradually becomes the other, enacting the expression “un extremo se conoce bien por otro” [one extreme knows well its other]. If this seems a stretch, the next double-page spread reassures us that “continuum” has additional linguistic as well as mathematical roots.
Before the reassurance, however, we come back to the puzzle of “rupt changes”. Again, on the verso page above, the definition of “continuum” runs pell mell into the crease. To solve the puzzle, we have to look more closely at the structure of the Section R gathering. It consists of three oblong folios folded in half. On the reverse side of the center folio (what would be pages 5 and 8 of this gathering if the pages were numbered), the definition of “continuum” has been printed so that the fold splits the word “abrupt” between its syllables: “Continuum (measurement), anything that goes through a gradual transition from one condition, to a different condition, without any a | brupt changes.” In effect, the layout draws attention to our perception of breaks in continua.
View of “pages 5 and 8” separated by a detailed view of the break in the word “abrupt”.
If Section R has not prompted the reader to propose questions about the structure of the book or this book in particular, the Part 2, Section Q gathering provides a series of oblique questions very much focused on that but also on metaphorical matters. Again, what happens structurally in the gathering and on the surface of its pages presents puzzles and hints at solutions.
The geometrical images associated with the first question (“Do they hold surface tension like a soap bubble?”) seem to float or progress across the double-page spread, breaking up to punctuate the question. Reminding us of opposites and abrupt changes, the angular yellow overlapping squares and triangles puncture the text’s round verbal soap bubble. Before we can ask to what or whom does “they” refer, we are prompted by “Question:” to turn the page.
The next question (“Do they prowl like felines?”) prods at the unasked question: what or who are “they”? How is it that “they” are like prowling felines? Again, the images seem to progress across the spread, with the first image’s central diamond shape disappearing to leave the curvilinear second shape leaning over the printed question. Might these be diagrams of the limp vellum structure’s sewing holes and lacing? If so, has Cordeiro found another metaphor for limp vellum structures in the supple and sinuous strength of prowling felines? Do “they” refer to limp vellum structures?
The next question turns directly to a functional attribute of the book structure: turning pages. The yellow print gives an ambiguous view. The two-dimensional representation of the angled beam fluctuates between a mountain view and a valley view. Are we looking down on the splayed spine of a book or its gutter with pages splayed open? Either way, the print angles away from the physical angled beam, which sets up a metronomic pattern in the spread — the beam leaning to the right, then to the left, and again to the right — or a page turned to the right, then to the left, and back again to the right — or mountain fold, then valley fold, then mountain, then valley (the gutter), then mountain, then valley, then mountain until we come to the ambiguous two-dimensional print. Again, this is a continuum, and “they” seems to refer to limp vellum structures.
The next question enacts itself. To read the mirror-written script, we have to turn the page and look through its surface to the right-reading words: “Do they depend upon the turning of”. The question completes itself in a curious (again) metronomic motion. The syntax draws our eyes to “PAGES” on the right, while the oversized punctuation mark syntactically draws our eyes back to the left. The play between the reversed writing on a recto page, the right-reading script on the verso, the display type on the next recto, and oversized question mark on the adjacent verso provide self-reflexively an affirmative answer: Yes, limp vellum structures depend on the turning of pages.
Part 3 introduces rather more esoteric continua with which Cordeiro seeks to connect the genius of the limp vellum structure. The Section letters M, M and G are her reminders-to-self that this section excerpts passages from William James’ The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902): one on medical materialism (p.14) and another on genius (p.18).
Cordeiro brackets the excerpts with maze-like images constructed of mirrored forms across four different colors. So we have the continua of mind to matter and of genius to madness embedded in a continuum of color and form (color and form merging).
Note the 18o° turn of the beige image in the upper left to be mirrored by the magenta image in the lower right.
Part 4, labeled “Section L: Notes on Seasonal Fluctuations of Lightweight Discrepancies”, is the densest of the gatherings. Drawings, verse typeset in English and scribed in Portuguese, typographic arrangements, trimmed and segmented photographs, and linocut prints of a stone wall all find their way into Part 4.
Note how the colors of the tulip shapes echo the colors of the maze in Part 3.
The “Epilogue” tells us, “The handwritten text in Portuguese is a word play with the alliteration afforded by that language between the verb to see and the season summer, and translates roughly as: ‘summer shall see gone that which / by going is now new being. / seeing such an hour at birth is to / be seen alive.” Another continuum.
“a shadow aside / a step askew / escape afloat in shape of arrows”. The segmented photos of an Upper West Side building’s fire escape articulate with the angled beam shape to echo the text.
The text before the concluding “end-on” image in this gathering introduces another continuum: “(Life begins at the end of your comfort zone.)”
Part 5, Section Z is the wrap-up, conflating the end of the alphabet with the end of the day (twilight), but of course, twilight is also a point on the continuum of day into night.
Lusco-fusco = twilight.
At this point, the reader might register that a continuum whose extremities hang in the balance against one another and yet are still connected is also a description of metaphor itself. Two disparate terms are brought together to make a figure of speech. Cordeiro brings two disparate objects together — a softcover codex and the shape of an angled beam, a hard form of structural support — to shape her artist’s book. She materializes that metaphor, then uses it as a platform for textual, graphical, material, and structural metaphors that celebrate the limp vellum structure. It is a striking accomplishment that challenges readers to think with their hands as well as their minds.
Further Reading
“Carol Barton“. 10 August 2024. Books On Books Collection.
Drucker, Johanna. 2004. The Century of Artists’ Books [Second edition] ed. New York City: Granary Books. For investigation “of the book as a form through examination of its material, thematic, and formal properties “, see p. 93.
Hebert, Henry. 18 December 2011. “Limp Paper and Vellum“. Work of the Hand. Accessed 23 October 2025.
Magee, Cathie (compiler). 23 February 2024. “BPG Parchment Bookbinding“. AIC (American Institute for Conservation) Wiki. Accessed 22 October 2025. Citing Clarkson and Giuffrida.
Books On Books 