RAGE PEN (2025) David Blackmore and Michael Hampton Soft cover, mitre sawn head and foot, perforated fore-edge. H210 x W148 mm. [108] pages. Edition of 100. Acquired from Folium, 13 November 2025. Photos: Books On Books Collection.
Folium, the publisher, describes RAGE PEN as “developed from a relational piece of the same name held at Chisenhale Studios 2017/18”. Per the Museum of Modern Art, relational aesthetics is
A mode of art practice that establishes spaces, situations, or environments for a variety of social interactions. In essence, the social space or interaction becomes the work of art itself. The term was popularized by French critic and curator Nicholas Bourriaud in 1998.
RAGE PEN‘s environment was a safe rage room equipped with a variety of handheld tools. Anonymous members of the public, or “ventees”, were invited to name an object that had caused them frustration, don protective equipment, and enter the shuttered room to smash said objects. The interactions filmed and photographed by David Blackmore formed the images in RAGE PEN the book. Holding the book with its mitre-sawn top and bottom edges and its perforated, still-sealed fore-edges, we might suspect that we are being invited into our very own private relational aesthetic piece.
Nagori (2023) Ximena Pérez Grobet and Kati Riquelme Clothbound hardcover. H153 x W47 mm. Edition of 33, of which this is #14. Acquired from Ximena Pérez Grobet, 5 February 2024. Photos: Books On Books Collection. Permission to display from Ximena Pérez Grobet.
The Japanese word nagori has several meanings. Beware translation applications, but embrace the online discoveries that lead to Ryōko Sekiguchi, the Japanese expatriate writer, and Victor Burgin, the British conceptual artist and writer, who cites her. With Sekiguchi, you will find that it means “nostalgia for the season leaving us”, the longing for the taste of an early season fruit evoked by its late season taste, or a room’s sense of waiting for the return of someone who has just left. With Burgin, before he cites Sekiguchi, you will first find nagori‘s etymology — nami-nokori, referring to the remnant, remains or traces of receding waves. Burgin’s etymological explanation is obviously the most applicable to this collaborative artists’ book, but after you have put the book aside, you may feel a lingering nostalgia for the experience of it akin to the sensuousness Sekiguchi evokes.
A Never-Ending Stone (2025) Laure Catugier Open spine, dos-à-dos with grey bookbinding board. 210 x H260 x 210 mm. 104 pages. Edition of 250. Acquired from einBuch.haus, 3 December 2025. Photos: Books On Books Collection.
A Never-Ending Stone is Laure Catugier’s first monographic catalog. Her skill with collage, alignment, shadows, materials, and the book format transform it into an artist’s book very much driven by her fascination with architecture and especially the architectural theories and practice of Oskar and Zofia Hansen. The Hansens eclectically embraced “human-scale” architecture, “environment art”, and what they called the “open form” structure, using space and time as its key elements. The Hansens also proposed that the architect should not be the all-knowing expert but should partner with clients as co-authors of their space, respecting how their interior and outside activities and relations with one another defined them and their space. Though somewhat a forerunner to User-Centered Design, Open Form radically aimed at structures that would evolve with interaction with the user and, as they unfolded, also align with nature.
The Lively Dance (1983) Anne-Catherine Fallen Handbound book, sewn; endflaps secured at fore edge with bamboo twig to create wedge-shaped book. Laid flat, H223 x W157 mm; wedge fore edge, W75 mm. [18] pages. Edition of 200. Acquired from Stand 132, Zurich. 18 January 2026. Photos: Books On Books Collection. Displayed with the artists permission.
The Lively Dance is an elaborate and simple artist’s book. It consists of an eleven-line poem arranged across ten of eighteen pages displaying a stand of bamboo. Four pleated sheets of translucent paper, also displaying the stand of bamboo, overlap and bind those ten pages at the fore edge. Here is the book’s opening double-page spread with the translucent overlay first in place and then pulled back to reveal the poem’s invitation: “Come join the solemn dance”.
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.
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 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).
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).
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.
Books On Books 