Book Art

Books On Books Collection – Lucas Blalock

Featured1 Comment

Making Memeries (2016)

Making Memeries (2016)
Lucas Blalock
Board book consisting of nine 3mm thick card leaves with 8 double-page large colour photos, all of which interact with a down-loadable app. H330 x W210 x D28 mm. [18] pages. Edition of 500. Acquired from David Bunnett Books, 31 July 2023.
Photos of the work: Books On Books Collection.

How do we respond to an artwork of collage or assemblage that is missing a piece — assuming that we can tell ? And if all of the elements are ephemera, does it matter to our appreciation of it? Do we keep returning in annoyance to the gap — like a tongue to a missing tooth? Do we give up on it — like the purchaser of a secondhand jigsaw puzzle missing a piece or two? Or do we sigh and suppose appreciatively that the disappearance of an element of ephemera from a collage or assemblage of ephemera proves the artwork’s point?

Lucas Blalock is an artist of augmented realities. With the right device and app pointed at his artwork, we should be able to see images floating and moving over its surface or seemingly in the surface among its images or transforming them. According to the back cover, we can download this app from the iTunes App Store to interact with the book’s images. The app, however, was removed from the App Store in July 2023. Using the WayBack Machine, we can find the publisher’s announcement of the Making Memeries installation with Blalock in the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall:

The London-based curatorial project Self Publish, Be Happy presents a programme of events that explore the blurring boundaries surrounding on/offline existence and distribution of photographs. The event, titled Making Memeries, will take place at Tate Modern during this year’s Offprint London art book fair from 20-22 May.

Artist Lucas Blalock has created an installation for the middle of the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall that functions as a staging area for workshops and performances. The installation consists of a set of eight movable panels that display a new suite of photographs by Blalock. The elements of the installation, conceived of specifically for this project, can be further activated via this app, Making Memeries.

The audience will be able to immerse themselves in, and interact with the work through the app, which uses your camera to produce a digitally augmented reality. Blalock’s work has long been interested in the cohabitation of the worldly and the virtual behind the photographic surface, and this project has allowed the artist to picture this cohabitation on both sides of that plane. Blalock has collaborated with REIFY, the augmented reality (AR) creative studio, to build an experience that blurs traditional boundaries and challenges one’s expectations of viewership.

Photos from old website of Self Publish, Be Happy. Accessed 26 October 2025.

Among the performances facilitated by the installation was Anouk Kruithof’s Connection, which also contributed to the aim of blurring the boundaries of the physical and digital.

Photos from Connection, installation by Anouk Kruithof. Accessed 26 October 2025.

But without the app or memory of the installation, we have a gap like that missing tooth. We can bridge the gap somewhat with online links and the book’s collaged imagery of mixed media and photographs to recognize that Making Memeries is also about how we perceive surfaces and what lies beneath — and what might come between. Consider the earplugs alongside the telephone below. Then there’s the pair of spectacles in the shape of fingers that would cover the wearer’s eyes. Now look back to the cover, and we find the view from behind those finger-spectacles.

Photo of the work: Books On Books Collection.

Or consider the images of the model of the epidermis with which the book opens and closes. ortunately, we have a YouTube link and Olga Yatskevich’s review to let us know that the “augmented reality radically changes the experience, making the image active rather than static – the app brings rounded depth to the model, shows blood running through the vessels, and allows us to explore the space around the object, its sides and the top”.

First and last double-page spreads. Photos: Books On Books Collection.

There’s something childlike, playful but serious conveyed in all this. Physically Making Memeries presents itself as an oversized children’s board book (or perhaps a board book for undersized adults). The use of the board book to make this cross-over can also be found in other artists’ books — Colleen (Ellis) Comerford’s ABCing and Phil Zimmermann’s Sonorensis, for example.

Fore edge of Making Memeries.

What the board book only partially conveys with the Connection link in hand, so to speak, is the intent expressed on the back cover and in the Tate’s announcement:

Making Memeries is set in a time when everyone has become a lifestyle photographer. It is still your life but the image production is decidedly public; and in that case temporary, verging on fleeting, because these public channels have so many content providers and, along with our attention spans, are in a perpetual state of refresh. [back cover]

Before the advent of the Internet the act of taking a photo was often intended to make memories; to store and preserve our past in still, printed images. In today’s digital age the act of taking photos can be enough for the photograph-taker. The act is exhausted by the process.  This can be seen in the way a mobile phone camera offers immediate satisfaction — producing a file that may never be looked at again. Today a photo has a different claim to time, being much more in the “now” than in the “this has been” of its 19th and 20th century pre-internet forbearers. We, in turn, live in a culture of the perpetual present, in a meme-driven world where photos can effortlessly be shared, but where they most often disappear into digital oblivion. [Tate Modern announcement]

It feels ironic that Making Memeries‘s “missing tooth” is digital. The same year of Blalock’s installation at the Tate, Pokémon Go arrived, and people began wandering into traffic to capture Pokémon figures that their cameras projected onto the streets around them. Nine years later, the company owning the app has sold for $3.5 billion, and the world’s richest country is governed by meme. Is art miming life, or life miming art?

Further Reading

“Colleen Ellis“. 7 March 2024. Books On Books Collection.

“Anouk Kruithof“. 19 July 2021. Books On Books Collection.

“Philip Zimmermann“. 14 January 2020. Books On Books Collection.

Art21. 11 September 2015. “Lucas Blalock’s Digital Toolkit“. Art21 “New York Close Up”. Accessed 26 October 2025.

Blalock, Lucas. 13 April 2020. “On Amusement Parks, Torture, and Making Photographs Look the Way the World Feels“. Zolo Press. Accessed 23 October 2025.

ICA LA Production. 27 June 2019. “Lucas Blalock: An Enormous Oar“. Los Angeles: Institute of Contemporary Art.

Yatskevich, Olga. 22 November 2016. “Lucas Blalock, Making Memeries“. Collector Daily.

Books On Books Collection – Hans Witte

Featured1 Comment

ABC of Advertising (2024)

Cover of the book 'ABC of Advertising' by Hans Witte, featuring vibrant collages of colors and typography, highlighting the title and the author's name.

ABC of Advertising (2024)
Hans Witte
Casebound, cloth spine and paper over boards, sewn to doublures. H150 x W105 mm. [40] pages. Acquired from Redfoxpress, 2024.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.

The ABC of Advertising is No. 205 in the RedFoxPress “c’est mon dada” series. The series name comes from the French expression meaning “it’s my thing”. Dada is also a colloquial child’s expression for “horsie” or “hobbyhorse”. So, of course, the French adopted it as the name for one of the avant garde movement of the early 20th century. Although you might think from The ABC of Advertising that wood type and letter press are Hans Witte’s “hobbyhorse”, it’s clear from his artist’s books, children’s books, and book object installations that he has a herd of them.

Continue reading →

Bookmarking Book Art – Bookscapes Collective

FeaturedLeave a comment

When I wrote earlier that knot theory seems to be having a moment this year, I was unaware that the Old Operating Theatre Museum and Herb Garret in London was hosting an exhibition called

Knots: Medicine and Superstition

The centerpiece of the exhibition is the Bookscape Collective’s sculpture “After dark vapors have oppress’d our plains” (2025). Hanging from the garret’s beams, this mass of red fibers, ribbon, thread, and wood aptly entwines the auras of art, poetry, and superstition together with the venue’s association with surgical knots and medicinal herbs.

“After dark vapors have oppress’d our plains” (2025)
Sculpture (red fibres, wood, red thread)
Bookscapes Collective
(Chris Ruston; Heather Hunter; Jo Howe; Jen Fox; Karen Apps; Jules Allen)

The sculpture’s title comes from the first line of this sonnet by John Keats (1795 – 1821):

After dark vapors have oppress’d our plains
For a long dreary season, comes a day
Born of the gentle South, and clears away
From the sick heavens all unseemly stains.
The anxious month, relieved of its pains,
Takes as a long-lost right the feel of May;
The eyelids with the passing coolness play
Like rose leaves with the drip of Summer rains.
The calmest thoughts came round us; as of leaves
Budding—fruit ripening in stillness—Autumn suns
Smiling at eve upon the quiet sheaves—
Sweet Sappho’s cheek—a smiling infant’s breath—
The gradual sand that through an hour-glass runs—
A woodland rivulet—a Poet’s death.

As the museum’s caption reminds the visitor:

Knots have been part of everyday life for millennia. Alongside practical uses, they have attracted many superstitious and magical properties. Knots are found among the earliest prehistoric amulets designed to ward off evil, and today knots are essential for suturing the body after surgery, with knot practice forming a fundamental part of contemporary surgical training.

The Bookscapes Collective brings together Chris Ruston, Heather Hunter, Jo Howe, Jen Fox, Karen Apps, and Jules Allen. In addition to the central collaborative piece, the exhibition displays twenty-six additional works by these artists that each reiterate the knots binding together the worlds of science and art.

Update: Here are some images from a visit.

Further Reading

Knots: Medicine and Superstition, Old Operating Theatre Museum and Herb Garret in London, 25 September through 30 November 2025.

“Jules Allen and ‘Designing English’“. 23 December 2017. Bookmarking Book Art.

“Joyce Cutler-Shaw“. 5 September 2019. Books On Books Collection.

“Heather Hunter“. 3 April 2013. Books On Books Collection.

“Hilke Kurzke“. 10 October 2025. Books On Books Collection.

“Richard Nash“. 21 April 2022. Books On Books Collection.

“Chris Ruston“. 20 August 2024. Books On Books Collection.

Books On Books Collection – Scott Teplin

FeaturedLeave a comment

Alphabet City (2009)

Alphabet City (2009)
Scott Teplin
Bolted folio. H270 x W360 mm. [29] pages. Edition of 26, of which this is L. Acquired from the artist, April 2023.
Photos: Books On Books Collection and Courtesy of the artist.

Scott Teplin’s Alphabet City follows in the long line of building designs based on alphabetical foundations. Perhaps first was John Thorpe (1565–1655?), an English architect, who drew up a property based on his initials. Thomas Gobert (1625-90), a French architect, produced Traitté d’Architecture dedié à Louis XIV, a manuscript whose building plans spelled out “LOVIS LE GRAND”. Anton Glonner (1723–1801) designed a Jesuit church and college around the monogram “IHS”. More famous is Johann David Steingruber (1702-87) and his Architectonisches Alphabeth (1773).

Teplin committed twenty years to his task (Steingruber committed ten) and came to it more from the school of graphic design than the school of architecture. While we might expect bewigged 18th century servants and lords to ride up in carriages to Steingruber’s A to Z, we would not be surprised to find characters from R. Crumb or Mad Magazine inhabiting Teplin’s alphabet-shaped houses, gaming arcades, strange laboratories, ice cream parlors, power plants, and other bizarre edifices. Some houses have no entries or exits. Some have doorless bedrooms. Others have rooms filled with oozing substances or piles of dirt. Some have outdoor swimming pools inside. One, seeming to float on a grass-colored sea, has a boat funnel inside, capped with a life ring, and rooms with deckchairs and portholes. Whimsical and bizarre free association drives Alphabet City.

Although the binding of Alphabet City is intended to facilitate removal and mounting of individual folios, it recalls Fortunato Depero’s “bolted book” and, by extension, the “startle” factor intended by Futurism, Surrealism, Dadaism, and all the -isms of that period. From original drawings in pen & ink to scanned images etched to magnesium plates and printed on Zerkall vellum, then airbrushed with Winsor & Newton and Holbein watercolors and pencilled with matching Prismacolor pencils, Alphabet City leans more toward a fine press livre d’artiste than an artist’s book. The foil-stamped Asahi bookcloth cover with its yellow Moriki endsheets would not be out of place at Arion Books or Three Star Books.

Continue reading →

Books On Books Collection – Hilke Kurzke

Featured3 Comments

Knot theory seems to be having a moment this year. In February 2025, there was the First International On-line Knot Theory Congress. Not to forget the regularly recurring Swiss Knots Conference (held in Geneva in June) and the 11th Sino-Russian Conference on Knot Theory (held in Suzhou, China in June-July). Or the “Danceability of Twisted Virtual Knots” produced by Nancy Scherich and danced by Sol Addison and Lila Snodgrass at the Math-Arts Conference in Eindhoven in July. And then in September the Scientific American and online media picked up two discoveries in knot theory — one by Mark Brittenham and Susan Hermiller and another by Dror Bar-Natan and Roland van der Veen.

Continue reading →

Books On Books Collection – Frédéric Bruly Bouabré

Featured2 Comments

Frédéric Bruly Bouabré (2013)

Frédéric Bruly Bouabré (2013)
Frédéric Bruly Bouabré (André Magnin, Yaya Savané and Denis Escudier)
Clothbound slipcase holding a set of four casebound, cloth-over-board volumes. 210 x 265 mm. 1436 pages. Acquired 2023.
Photos: Books On Books Collection. Displayed with permission of the publisher Éditions Xavier Barral.

Frédéric Bruly Bouabré designed the covers and bound each of the four volumes in this set the year before his death. For the Books On Books Collection, the thematic connection of this last monument by Bruly Bouabré lies in Volume two, L’Alphabet Ouest-Africain: Le Bété. Bruly Bouabré invented this syllabary for the Ivory Coast’s Bété peoples in 1954. Later he compiled it in a Toyota 1983 Agenda-Journal, which in effect created the artist’s book La méthodologie de la nouvelle écriture africaine “bété” : suivi de, L’alphabet de l’Ouest Africain (2003). An artwork version, entitled Alphabet Bété and consisting of 449 original drawings, resides at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Bruly Bouabré is one of the few individuals to have invented a syllabary or alphabet on his own. Sequoyah, the Cherokee Indian, was another. The Guinean brothers Ibrahima and Abdoulaye Barry also belong to the fellowship; they created ADLaM, a new alphabet for the Pulaar language of the Fulani people of West Africa.

Left: [This syllable is pronounced “LÔ.”] Right: [Eat it (the mushroom). This syllable is pronounced “LOU.” ]
Photos: Books On Books Collection. Displayed with permission of the publisher Éditions Xavier Barral.

Continue reading →

Books On Books Collection – Erica Van Horn (II)

FeaturedLeave a comment

Descriptions of Literature by Gertrude Stein: Handwritten by Erica Van Horn (2019)

Cover of the book 'Descriptions of Literature' by Gertrude Stein, handwritten by Erica Van Horn, featuring a light purple fabric texture with the title and author's name in contrasting text.

Descriptions of Literature by Gertrude Stein: Handwritten by Erica Van Horn (2019)
Erica Van Horn
Limited edition (unknown quantity). H157 x W146 mm. [144] pages. Acquired from Books about Art, 2 July 2025.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.

Appropriation has its reasons. Gertrude Stein’s description of literature with which Erica Van Horn begins her scribal appropriation of sixty-six of Stein’s exacting and elusive apothegms is particularly appropriate. In the brief afterword, Van Horn explains that she has always been proud of her handwriting and loves writing by hand. So, this book “shows that the next and best is to be found out when there is pleasure in the reason” as its next folio shows: Van Horn’s pleasure in the reason is her pleasure in the reason.

Continue reading →

Books On Books Collection – Linda Toigo

FeaturedLeave a comment

Altered books as artists’ books present a seemingly endless variety.

Some may be the conversion of old books into just-legible new ones as in A Humument redacted with ink, paint, excision, and collage by Tom Phillips, Tree of Codes mechanically excised by Jonathan Safran Foer, or The Eaten Heart scalpeled into existence by Carolyn Thompson. They give us a new work to read page by page extracted page by page from the earlier work, which remains more or less (mainly less) present in our hands.

Others like Marcel Broodthaers’ page-by-page redactions of Mallarmé’s Un Coup de Dés by ink in one case and excision in another or Michalis Pichler’s similar reformatting and excision of the same poem in clear acrylic or Jérémie Bennequin’s page-by-page erasures of Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past give us artists’ books that make the altered books illegible but still accessible page by page.

Other altered books as artists’ books are mainly one-off spatial objects that can be taken in in one go — not necessarily in just a glance but in the look or gaze given to a sculpture or painting. The ground up and encased works in Literaturwurst by Dieter Roth. The sealed, painted, nailed, and “hairied” works of Barton Lidice Beneš. The torn works of Buzz Spector. The sandblasted works of Guy Laramée. The glued and carved works of Brian Dettmer. The bullet-hole-ridden Point Blank by Kendell Geers. The pun-packed moebius-sculpted Red Infinity #4 by Doug Beube. They give us artists’ books that make the altered books illegible and inaccessible as books.

With Medieval and Modern History (Suggestions for Further Study for Jack Hroswith) (2013), a schoolboy’s textbook burnt into near illegibility but still accessible page by page, Linda Toigo adds an artist’s book that distinctively broadens the variety of alterations and their outcomes.

Medieval and Modern History (Suggestions for Further Study for Jack Hroswith) (2013)

Close-up of a worn book titled 'Medieval and Modern History', showing faded text and staining on a beige spine.
A casebound, altered hardback book with a textured green cover, resting on a wooden surface.

Medieval and Modern History (Suggestions for Further Study for Jack Hroswith) (2013)
Linda Toigo
Altered casebound hardback. H195 x W135 x D40 mm. 832 pages. Unique. Acquired from the artist, 30 August 2025.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.

Continue reading →

Books On Books Collection – William Wondriska

Featured2 Comments

A Long Piece of String (2010 [1963])

Cover of 'A Long Piece of String' by William Wondriska, featuring an illustration of a red elephant and a piece of string.

A Long Piece of String (2010 [1963])
William Wondriska
Casebound, illustrated paper over boards, illustrated pasteboards. H185 x W290 mm. [44] pages. Acquired from Thrift Books, 25 May 2025.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.

Continue reading →

Books On Books Collection – Marlene MacCallum and The Shadow Quartet*

FeaturedLeave a comment
Two artist's books titled 'Shadow Canto One: Still Life' and 'Still Life', featuring unique textured covers with a blend of greens and a window-like design.

Marlene MacCallum achieves distinctive results by painting with photography and sculpting with book structure in her artist’s books. Her painting with photography has involved not only collage work but pinhole cameras, digital cameras, digital layering and masking as well as a variety of transfer processes — digital and analogue photogravure, lithography, digital pigment printing, and digital inkjet printing. Sculpting with book structure mainly includes varying the binding as in the accordion with fold-out of Obvert (1997), the tunnel book structure of Do Not Enter (1998), the gatefold of Domestic Arcana (1999), the tile format fold-outs of pink story (2004-05), the accordion of Quadrifid (2009), the dos-à-dos of Glaze: Reveal and Veiled (2013), and the Miura fold of Rise (2020). It also includes altering books as in Withdrawn (2010) and varying the substrate as in the lace paper, Moriki, double matte Mylar, Lanaquarelle, and embossed leather of Townsite House (2006) and the etched copperplate and Tyvek of Trompe l’Oreille (2011).

Continue reading →