Serpents (2025) Phil Zimmermann Blind embossed white slipcase holding two volumes. Slipcase: H265 x W217 X D17 mm. Deep-flap cover: H263 x W216 mm. Vol. I: H262 x W210 mm. Vol. II: H262 x W215 mm. Vol. I: [40] pages. Vol. II: [60] pages. Edition of 65, of which this is #22. Acquired from the artist, 9 February 2026. Photos: Books On Books Collection.
Serpents is a welcome chance to add an alphabetical offering by Philip Zimmermann to his works already in the collection. Two volumes, one of which is an addendum, make up Serpents.
The main volume combines Zimmermann’s own photographs of swampland in Costa Rica and Louisiana with details from The Garden of Earthly Delights (1490-1510) by Hieronymus Bosch and embedded an alphabetical poem The Last Acts of Saint Fuck You (1975) by Bern Porter against a background of rattlesnake skin. Its politically conscious content echoes Sanctus Sonorensis (2009), but with sharper vi(per)tuperation against what the artist describes as “the increasingly corrupt and fascistic direction of our national and global civilizations”.
Zimmermann wields the book as a catalytic medium in just the right way to bring theme and technique together in striking and satisfying artworks. Two points of comparison with his earlier work High Tension illustrate this. Serpent‘s diagonally cut pages recall those of High Tension (1993), but notice how the diagonality works differently to suit each book’s typography and theme. Like its theme of personal anxiety, High Tension’s diagonality is spiky. Like its theme of reptilian tyrants, Serpents‘ diagonality emphasizes the diamond-back rattlesnake pattern that runs through the collage, and in turn, the diagonally set text emphasizes the rattlesnake pattern.
While High Tension includes Masaccio’s 1425 fresco depicting the expulsion from the Garden of Eden and Serpents includes Bosch, Adam and Eve’s grief and shame play their brief role among multiple personal anxieties, whereas Bosch’s creatures continuously slip and slide into the swamp and rattlesnake background of the world state.
In Serpents, snippets of text from other sources (1984 by George Orwell, “Sympathy for the Devil” by the Rolling Stones/Mick Jagger, “This is America” by Childish Gambino/Donald Glover, “The Star-Spangled Banner” by Francis Scott Key, Hannah Arendt, John McCain, Thomas Hobbes, Marcus Junius Brutus, and Elisabeth Kübler-Ross) appear in small fonts in the corners, diagonally, and at the fore edges (Kübler-Ross). Their size and positioning require close attention and draw the eye into the details of the imagery.
In parallel with the poem’s alphabetical arrangement, the addendum presents cropped individual portraits of Donald Trump, his enablers, and fellow tyrants from around the world in alphabetical order with amber-tinted irises and green-hued faces. It implicitly flips the script on Donald Trump’s use of Oscar Brown’s song “The Snake” (1963) to justify his concentration camps targeting the immigrant population (“You knew damn well I was a snake before you brought me in”).
The next two volumes carry forward a series of works with a different socially conscious burden — the anthropo(bs)cene period of terrestrial evolution. They began with Landscapes of the Late Anthropocene (2017) and Melt (2023) but also echo images in the earlier works Sanctus Sonorensis (2009) and Incident in Deseret (2014).
Accelerated Entropy (2024)
Accelerated Entropy (2024) Phil Zimmermann Casebound, cloth spine, photoprinted paper over boards and paste-down end sheets, pamphlet stitch book with translucent paper cover. H285 x W225 mm. [40] pages. Edition of 50, of which this is #4. Acquired from the artist, 31 August 2024. Photos: Books On Books Collection.
As Marlene MacCallum (2024) points out, “Phil Zimmerman has consistently woven imagery and text in response to issues related to perilous conditions of our world and social structures.” What is particularly interesting in Serpents, Accelerated Entropy, and In the Desert is how that weaving differs effectively from book to book. In Serpents, the Porter text and rattlesnake skin are tightly woven together, acting as the main tapestry weave while the snippets of text and the images of the swamp and Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights act as a discontinuous weft creating a changing collage around the main weave.
In Accelerated Entropy, the text (a poem by Zimmermann) is held to the very end. In fact, it appears on the translucent pamphlet-stitched back cover inside the casing. So how does the poem weave with the imagery? The images are not without narrative. Progressive computer-derived halftone patterns and various types of rasters of photographs of lush vegetation constitute the visual tool with which the artist writes that narrative. Like Melt and Landscapes of the Late Anthropocene, the narrative concerns climate change. The final image has reduced the foliage to abstract tracery over a whitened background, which is repeated in end pastedown. By placing the text on the verso side of the translucent paper at the end of the book, the artist makes the poem hover over and between the final image.
Zimmermann’s poem uses prepress process and photomechanical terms to create an extended metaphor for describing the decay of climate change. The terms relate not only to the visual tools used to effect the book’s images of decay but also to the disappearing tools and techniques of printing technology. Perhaps we will recognize our effect on the world around us when it is expressed in printing metaphors, and perhaps we will recognize the world’s accelerating entropy in the pace of our own disappearing technology.
Accelerated Entropy (2024)
In the half-tone dawn, inky shadows stretch across the land, like faded offset prints or a poorly exposed digital-proof, where once vibrant greens have dulled to sepia.
The trees, deep-etched in the landscape, stand ghostly, their sharpened branches skeletal, a grayscale photogravure of decay captured in the blue-green emulsion of time.
Fields, once a vibrant chromolithograph, now monochrome under the bleaching sun, their chlorophyll pigments drained, a spectral rasterized image of non-repro loss.
Rivers meander in slow exposure, their currents a blurred stochastic motion, silt layering like goldenrod paper dust on forgotten lithographic negatives.
Flowers, their gradient petals curled as if caught in an overexposed platemaker, try to hold their process colors close, a palette fading under the harsh UV light.
In the off-register garden, soil hardens like the cracked surface of an old plate, roots digging deeper, vectored, searching for the latent image of life beneath.
We walk through this moiréd landscape, each step like a rejected blueline proof, a dithered trace of our presence on the fragile surface of the mottled earth.
The sky, a vast non-silver cyanotype, watches over the degradation of midtones, its rubylith hues shifting, fugitive, uncertain, in the developing tray of our making.
Here, in this moment of accelerated entropy, we find ourselves stripped and exposed, our actions angled and imprinted, each breath a part of the final composition, hoping for a renewal of resolution before the last shadow falls.
Clifton Meador’s observation in correspondence with Zimmermann nails how this text is woven into the images:
“The poem at the end of Accelerated Entropy is a great addition to the piece, and how could I not love an extended metaphor about climate change that uses print technology as the vehicle? It significantly changes the reading of the piece after the first encounter—I had to go back through the book again, with a vastly changed framework for reading. In the place of a reading of visual richness and formal invention, I looked for evidence of a history of print production. That’s a pretty cool trick—a textual moment that causes me to re-read with an entirely different framework in mind.” — Meador to Zimmermann, 31 August 2024.
In the Desert (2024)
In the Desert (2024) Phil Zimmermann Casebound, cloth spine, photoprinted paper over boards and paste-down end sheets, pamphlet stitch book. H285 x W225 mm. [40] pages. Edition of 50, of which this is #4. Acquired from the artist, 31 August 2024. Photos: Books On Books Collection.
Stephen Crane’s poem In the Desert sits at the heart of Zimmermann’s artist’s book by the same name. In red ink, it sits there like the creature in Crane’s otherwise featureless poem.
In the Desert (1895)
In the desert I saw a creature, naked, bestial, Who, squatting upon the ground, Held his heart in his hands, And ate of it. I said, “Is it good, friend?” “It is bitter—bitter,” he answered;
“But I like it “Because it is bitter, “And because it is my heart.”
The artist’s book is far from featureless. The images in the book come from Zimmermann’s photographs taken at Lake Lucero, a dry gypsum lake located in the White Sands Missile Range near Las Cruces, New Mexico. His artist’s statement describes it as
… a restricted part of the missile range and open to the public only a few times a year when National Park Service rangers take visitors holding US Passports on closed busses in to visit the dry lake. The dry gypsum crystals from the lake blow to the northeast and are the source of the famous white dunes in White Sands National Park. The park is located, as is the entire Missile Range, in the great Tularosa Basin.
Seven double-page spreads of barren desert scenery lead up to the poem’s first line, which squats in red in the dark foreground of a recto page. In the far foreground, a blurry human figure appears.
Over the next ten spreads, the poem’s two human figures (narrator and creature) gradually inhabit the pages alongside that solitary human figure, who is joined by an increasing then dwindling number of other silhouetted human figures in the far foreground. The last double-page spread is textless. A foregrounded leafless bush looms on the verso page standing in contrast to three human figures walking away in the far foreground on the recto page.
From spread to spread prior to the poem, the only action was the movement of dust from the salt flats in the air. With the poem’s appearance, we have two other sets of action. Like small signposts, the individual lines from Crane’s poem drive the reader’s page-turning as do the gathering and dispersing human figures.
On the book’s last page, the only text is the copyright line. There is no other text. There are no human figures. The foreground is punctuated by a red boundary marker. In the middle ground, dust from the salt flats hovers against the low hills and cloud. Sky and cloud occupy the upper reaches of the background. In its size, that red boundary marker is shriveled in comparison with the heart on the front cover.
“But I like it “Because it is bitter, “And because it is my heart.”
The most beautiful and perfect book in the world is a book with only blank pages, in the same way that the most complete language is that which lies beyond all that the words of a man can say. Every book of the new art is searching after that book of absolute whiteness, in the same way that every poem searches for silence. — Ulises Carrión: “The New Art of Making Books” Kontexts no. 6-7, 1975.
At the entrance to The Wittockiana. Back and front cover of the a minima catalogue.
If, as I did, you missed Moritz Küng‘s exhibition Blank. Raw. Illegible… Artists’ Books as Statements, 1960-2022 at the Leopold-Hoesch-Museum in Düren, Germany, in 2023, Didier Decoux‘s a minima presents an equally well-thought-out gathering of artists’ books that stretches out over 150 years (1876 – 2026). With 4 spacious rooms, 25 vitrines, 2 videos, and over 180 works, a minima requires several hours at a minimum to peruse and enjoy. Information on getting there is available here.
The comments and links below are in no way a substitute for visiting this exhibition, and keep in mind that Wittockiana also has permanent displays of presses, rare fonts, and books that should not be missed.
Reading Dick and Jane with Me (1989) Clarissa Sligh Saddle-stitched booklet, staples. H212 x W177 mm. [24] pages. Acquired from Marta Zlotnick, 6 October 2025. Photos: Books On Books Collection.
This is a painful artist’s book. In the repetitive style of the 1950s “Dick and Jane” beginning readers’ book, the child in the artist carries on a one-way conversation with children from those books. Dick, Jane, and Sally are white and upper middle class. They live in a suburban setting with their dog Spot and cat Puff, and the text of their lives is interpersed with “Fun”, “Fun”, “Fun”. They run and play, and tell the reader to “Look Look See us play”. Dick demands, “See me jump” and asks, “Who can jump Who can do what I do”. Sally insists on how pretty and white Puff is.
Alongside her redrawn versions of Dick, Jane, Sally, and their pets, the artist sketches in a cartoon self portrait and pastes in old photos of herself, siblings, and friends. For the first few pages, these images respond mutely to the “Dick and Jane” repetitions.
Facing the page below where a white picket fence separates the artist from Dick, she and her friends respond in a scrawled script (in contrast to Dick’s typeset exhortations to “Go up up up”). They invite Dick and the reader to “come to our school” where they “go up too”.
In the next spread, surrounded by imperatives to “See it go” and “See it go up”, Sally frowns and appears troubled by the encroachment of scrawls over the gutter and into her typeset page. On the facing recto page, the artist and friends stutter as they read the typeset lines: “We read See. it. go. see. it. go. up.” Maybe Sally is troubled by the words between the lines:
Between the lines: “We don’t talk like that but we try to read it anyhow”.
At this point, when the artist and her friends read “Run Dick Run”, the book takes a darker turn for us the readers — if we are reading with the child artist. Dick and Sally run across the double-page spread. Even though they are more roughly sketched than before and even though Dick wears a Ku Klux Klan hood, we know it is them. As the scrawled imperative RUN RUN RUN grows across the spread to its largest size, Dick’s mask slips aside. If you the reader are white, and if you understand that the scrawled (not typeset) command is in the artist’s voice, and if you are reading with the child who stands self-portrayed in the lower left hand corner and with the children in the photographs, maybe now you see what they see between the lines in Dick and Jane’s world.
From here on, the child artist addresses Dick and Jane (white society) more directly. She signals her “encroachment” by taking over the verso page with all of her scrawl and places Dick, Jane, and Sally within the drawn pages of their book in the foreground of the recto page. For the first time, her self-portrait is shaded as she stands in the background of the shaded Dick and Jane book.
As she explains how she and her friends differ from Dick and Jane (not likely to be listening, embedded as they are in their book), the child artist’s voice is soft but insistent in its “Dick and Jane” style repetition. For the first time, her self-portrait appears larger than the white child, and she is on the same side of the picket fence.
In the next spread, the impact of these “Dick and Jane” stories on her and her friends is spelled out and drawn to heartbreaking effect. Sally and “Pretty white Puff” stand in sharply drawn and typeset contrast to the erasure, the slipping away, of the self-portrait and the photograph. Even the book you hold in your hands and its hand scrawled text are smearing away in the lower left corner.
The artist’s voice is soft but, like the “Dick and Jane” style, insistent. In text and image, the message is heartfelt.
Reading Dick and Jane with Me also had an exhibition life, which Sligh describes on her website:
These cyanotype prints, 40 x 30 inches, 1990-2013, originated from artwork made for my artist’s book Reading Dick and Jane With Me while in residency at Visual Studies Workshop in 1989. The size of the original collage and the book page was about 8 ½ x 7 inches. During that residency at VSW, before the days of Photoshop, I learned to shoot the artwork onto film, strip and spot the films and make metal plates for the offset press printing of the book.
With the encouragement of Joan Lyons, the VSW Press director, I also used the large process camera to shoot and develop large negatives from the artwork. After returning home, I built a large light table, contact printed the negatives and processed them in my bathtub. The prints are sent to various exhibition sites. Viewers draw and mark on the prints in response to my image and text narratives. This process is done repeatedly until the prints are fully covered with marks and sketches left by the public.
The process continues. — Sligh website, accessed 17 July 2026.
As of this writing — in the time of Jim Crow 2.0, brutalization of children of color, and vicious beliefs in replacement theory and empathy as sin — Reading Dick and Jane With Me continues to insist — Read Dick. Read Jane. Read Sally. Read.
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. 2019. “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.
Sligh, Clarissa. 1 July 2006. Interview with Steve Miller, Book Arts Podcasts, School of Library Information and Sciences, University of Alabama. Accessed 20 July 2020.
Deconstruction and Reconstruction of the Book (1990)
Deconstruction and Reconstruction of the Book (1990) Norman Clayton Softcover, exposed spine, hand sewn. H250 x W205 mm. [50] pages, including 4-page foldout. Edition of 200, of which this is #90. Acquired from the artist, 23 June 2026. Photos: Books On Books Collection.
As a student at the Rhode Island School of Design, Norman Clayton journeyed back to the beginning of printed books in the western world with a Nikon FE2 and 55mm macro lens. He captured those elements that, during the age of incunabula (printed books before 1500), typesetters and printers-cum-editors were reshaping from manuscripts into what would become the received structure of the book. More satisfying, he poured those photos and the craft he was learning at RISD into an artist’s book. It is hand sewn over linen reinforcing tapes so that the booklet lies flat to offer up the images celebrating the title page, table of contents, illustrated capitals, illustrations and text, and printers’ marks — all drawn from thirty-six works in the Annmary Brown Memorial Library at Brown University in Providence, RI.
There are plenty of full color illustrated histories of the history of the book available, but Clayton’s black and white photographs, choice of font (Stempel Garamond Roman) and paper (Warren Lustro Cream), and neatly executed exposed-spine binding deliver a satisfying artist’s book with a sense of the texture and material of history.
Clayton’s introduction to his fold-out index elicits a smile and a wish that he had also captured a colophon or two. Perhaps there’s a revised edition project looking for an intern or future book artist.
The story goes that in 1945 or 1946 René Magritte gave Marcel Broodthaers a copy of Mallarmé’s poem Un Coup de Dés Jamais N’Abolira le Hasard: Poème (1914). Twenty-three or twenty-four years later, Broodthaers organized an exhibition in homage to the poem. Entitled Exposition littéraire autour de Mallarmé: Marcel Broodthaers à la Deblioudebliou/S (“Literary exhibition around Mallarmé at the Deblioudebliou/S”), it presented three versions of an appropriation of the poem. The three versions consist of ten copies numbered I-X on anodized aluminum, ninety copies numbered 1-90 on transparent mechanographic paper (the original edition), and three hundred copies on opaque paper (the catalogue edition).
On Broodthaers’ cover, the word Image occupies the same space as Poème on the cover of the 1914 edition arranged by Mallarmé’s son-in-law. On the title page, however, Image comes first and in type larger than the poem’s title beneath it. The poem’s title is even smaller that Broodthaers’ name. Already this promises to be a bold appropriation of Mallarmé’s poem.
When the poem first appeared in the May 1897 issue of Cosmopolis, Mallarmé reluctantly provided a preface at the editors’ request. So reluctant was he that the preface urges readers not to read it. Broodthaers obliges. He displaces all of Mallarmé’s dismissive text with the poem’s entirety in a justified block of type with the line breaks indicated by slashes. Until the colophon, that will be the only legible text to appear in this homage.
“Le modèle de cette image approximative est l’édition originale du poème ‘Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard’ de Stéphane Mallarmé, publié en 1914 par la librairie Gallimard.” Books On Books Collection.
Between these two islands of text, Broodthaers offers his “image” of the poem: printer’s leading of the same dimensions as the types in the original edition of the poem. The image is the homage. In light of Magritte’s poster-essay “Les mots et les images” (1929) and its translation and appearance as an accordion-formatted catalogue for the Sidney Janis Gallery’s Magritte show in 1954, Broodthaers could equally have been paying homage to Magritte.
Top: Printer’s leading redacts “UN COUP DE DÉS”. Bottom: The leading redacts “JAMAIS” and the next three lines, which were set in smaller type. Books On Books Collection.
The other two versions were materially even more striking, and with the rest of the elements in play in the Wide White Space Gallery, Broodthaers made an innovative advance for post-Surrealism.
Top: the anodized aluminum edition; image courtesy of Charles Bernstein. Bottom: the translucent edition; image courtesy of MACBA.
As visitors to Broodthaers’ 1969 show perused the three editions, a tape recording of Broodthaers’ reading the poem played in the background. Broodthaers’ Image was not the only homage for Un Coup de Dés on display. Three hanging black shirts, allegedly taken from the Dallas Police Department, bore the full text of the poem transcribed in thin white chalk. With its floor painted black (the poem’s abyss?) and the works on display, the installation at the Wide White Space was also not Broodthaers’ first curation as art.
In 1968, Broodthaers established Le Musée d’art moderne, Département des aigles [The Museum of Modern Art, Department of Eagles]. Through 1972, museum shows occurred in various locations: his Brussels studio, the Städtischer Kunsthalle and a basement room at Burgplatz 12 both in Düsseldorf, at documenta 5 in Kassel, the A379089 alternative art center in Antwerp, and Galerie Michael Werner in Cologne. A 1968 manuscript in the Musées royaux des beaux-arts de Belgique in Brussels shows sketches of works of homage to Mallarmé that Broodthaers assigned to his museum’s “Literary Section”.
Broodthaers’ multimedia homage would provoke dozens of artists to create works of double-, triple- even quintuple-homage over the following decades into the new century. Among the most prolific of hommageurs, Michalis Pichler mounted Pichler: Exposition Littéraire autour de Mallarmé” in Milan in 2016. There he displayed many of those works of homage alongside his own. Later in 2024 at the Center for Book Art in New York, Pichler formalized Broodthaers’ concept of curation as art form in a show and book entitled Coup de dés (Collection) Books and Ideas after Mallarmé. Two years before, Galerie Michael Werner hosted an exhibition entitled “Footprints of a collector: Reiner Speck. Mallarmé, Broodthaers et les autres” (2 May – 23 July 2022). In addition to outstanding copies of the Image works, the curator Sabine Schiffer and Reiner Speck included Garniture Symbolique (1975), a blue-tinted glossy photo strip with nine photos on glossy paper, showing excerpts and phrases from the poem. Also included was a painting entitled Un coup de dés jamais quand bien même… (oil, gold paint, felt pen on canvas) from 1969, which is owned by Speck and, according to his afterword in the catalogue, has appeared in every exhibition of Broodthaers’ work since. For anyone looking for a description of Broodthaers’ 1969 exhibition, Sam Sackeroff ‘s “Literary Exhibitions” in the Speck catalogue is the gold standard.
The following collections offer more images of Image:
A Voyage on the North Sea (1974) Marcel Broodthaers Paperback (English version), Chinese wrapped-back binding. H148 x W178 mm. 38 pages. Edition of 1000. Acquired from Marcus Campbell Art Books, 9 October 2024. Photos: Books On Books Collection.
That over-elaborate and arch admonition to the reader on the inside cover doubles its mystery when it reappears on the last page of the book. The title page’s reappearance on the inside back cover underlines it. If the warning has been ignored the first time, the reader knows that cutting the fore edge folds reveals the page numbers inside, but does its reappearance at the end prompt some doubt and regret? There’s no going back.
Last page and inside back cover.
Alongside a 16mm film with the same title, the book premiered at the headquarters of the Petersburg Press, Portobello Road, London on 28 January 1974. In addition to the 1000 copies, Petersburg Press produced a numbered edition of 100 copies, signed by the artist, and distributed in a box with a copy of the film. Although developed together, the film preceded the book in 1973 and was originally entitled Analyse d’une Peinture. The painting in question is one found by Broodthaers at a Parisian flea market. To produce the film, Broodthaers added his own photographs of yachts at sea in the port of Ostend to stills of the painting and its details. With simple cuts and juxtapositions divided into “Page 1”, “Page 2”, etc., the film proceeds more like a book than a cinematic narrative, but there is no “booby-trap” in the film comparable to the prefatory warning once the book was prepared. The flea-market painting was also placed on display at the premiere.
To celebrate the peculiarity of the anniversaries of the artist’s birth (28 January 1924), the artist’s death (28 January 1976), and the book-film’s debut screening (28 January 1974), David Platzker organized his Specific Object exhibition Marcel Broodthaers : A Voyage on the North Sea on 28 January 2009. Platzker’s description provides just the right preface to the film and conclusion to this Books On Books Collection entry:
The subject of the exhibition focuses on Marcel Broodthaers’ film and book, both titled A Voyage on the North Sea which were distributed together as part and parcel of the same publishing plot. The ostensibly related subject of both book and film consists mutually of 19th and 20th century nautical images including: 1. photographic reproductions and details of an amateur’s 19th century painting of a fleet of fishing ships and 2. photographs of a contemporary sailboat. Bringing together film, books, ephemera, drawing, and the artist’s original maquette for the book, this specific exhibition sets out to map the local coordinates of A Voyage on the North Sea’s maiden launch on January 28, 1974 at the London offices of Petersburg Press. …
Referring a contemporary audience to the original screening context of Broodthaers’ book-film—itself very much like a reading lesson–this exhibition asks how a contemporary audience might begin to unpack the particular dialectics, obtuse poetics, and critical cargo of Broodthaers’ confounding enterprise. “It is up to the attentive reader,” Broodthaers writes in the preface of the book, “to find out what devilish motive inspired this book’s publication.”
Book art always pushes at the edges. Whatever meets at the edges is book art’s business. Negative space and positive space. Letter stroke and counter. Margins and the gutter. Justified and unjustified. Legible and illegible. Bound and unbound. Art and craft. Unique and multiple. Self and other. Destruction and creation. Life and death.
Inscription 6 is about cuts and tears, mostly tears — creating edges. “Tears” is also a heteronym, a word whose meaning changes with the change of the sound of the vowel but whose spelling remains the same. We can have tears [/tɛ(ə)rz/ tairz] as in “torn parts or places, or rips asunder”. Or we can have tears [/tɪ(ə)rz/] as in “teardrops, or weeps”. Or, with art, we might paradoxically have both simultaneously as we shall see in this issue’s first contributed essay. Also, with art, we might find that tearing — creating edges — paradoxically binds what it divides.
But first, as subscribers have come to expect, Inscription 6 opens with a surprise. Buzz Spector invites us to join in his artistic practice of tearing things up.
The artist says that he is asked all the time how he stands the tedium, to which he replies it is a meditative state he is sorry to see end. He is right. Once the initial unease over tearing pages from the issue subsides, a certain satisfaction ensues.
The “second” tear. (See further above for the first.)
The result is the wake’s image restored in a composition of torn strips still bound to the book.
Rather than surrendering themselves to the bin, the removed strips beg to be reassembled for a wake on the other side of the gutter in keeping with the creative productivity of turning the singular into the plural.
Left: the Spector-esque result. Right: the removed strips rearranged.
Buzz Spector is the star of this issue. Images from fourteen of his works divide the main sections and each contribution from one another. Works of torn edges create edges or boundaries between the issue’s contents. A stroke of genius from the issue’s editorial and design team. The range of Spector’s sources also draws attention to other boundaries inherent in the body of his work and the issue’s theme: the border between high and low in art, East and West, and Art and Nature. After the 12-page exercise, we have the altered Chinese translation of the self-help book Ego is the Enemy by Ryan Holiday; before the colophon, we have an array of shells and stones on an unidentified altered book, a sculpture held in the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. In between, there are alterations of catalogues of Ansel Adams’ photos and the Polaroid Collection, an academic study of Antonioni’s films, a foundational Italian volume on ancient and Renaissance glassmaking, a gardening book, and sailing photobooks.
The altered sailing photobooks recall Spector’s North Sea (for M.B.) (1990), his homage to Marcel Broodthaers’ A Voyage on the North Sea (1974) in which Broodthaers juxtaposes a 19th century amateur painting of a tall-masted ship with his own photographs of a sailing ship. Tellingly for this issue of Inscription as well as the thrust of Spector’s homage, Broodthaers opens A Voyage with an elaborate warning not to cut the uncut pages of the book.
From A Voyage on the North Sea (1974) by Marcel Broodthaers. Photos: Books On Books Collection.
Spector’s homage is a work 10 feet long and presented on a table appropriately jutting out from the wall like a pier. The eleven “waves” of torn pages placed in a row on top of the steel shelf come from eleven copies of the Walker Art Center’s 1987 catalogue for Broodthaers’s first U.S. retrospective. Spector had all the pages in each copy painted with white gesso before tearing the pages. He saved the excised “wedges” and bound them at the fore edges. Because the gesso does not completely obscure the text and images from the catalogues, viewers who come close to the work can see slivers of some of Broodthaers’ works along with the word fragments typical of Spector’s altered books.
North Sea (for M.B.) (1990) by Buzz Spector
The echoes of Spector’s appropriation from the great appropriator (recall Broodthaers’ 1969 appropriation of Mallarmé’s poem in Image: Un Coup de Dés Jamais N’Abolira le Hasard) bring another set of boundaries into view: the space between originality and appropriation and the space between the auratic artwork and its mechanical reproduction raised in Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1936).
Across its 10 sections and 11 loose inserts, the sixth issue of Inscription takes the lead from Spector’s works and explores all these binaries and the cut or torn edges between them. As usual with Inscription, it isn’t all book art. There are prints, a vinyl record, bookmarks, postcards, installations, libraries, typography, a syllabary, and even moth-repellent cedarwood blocks, and its sources range from the London Missionary Society hospitals in early 20th century China, to an installation of Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s library shelves (at Washingon State University of all places), and to J.L. Carr’s home in Kettering. The eclecticism is a challenge to coherence as much as the number of contributors is a challenge to adherence to the theme. Complete success would be an issue that is an artwork of collage in itself.
Collage is naturally where the first contributor’s article begins. “What does it mean to make art out of torn-up paper?” Eric Robertson uses Hans (Jean) Arp’s déchirés (torn pages), Raymon Hains’ and Jacques Villeglé’s torn posters, and Sol Lewitt’s “rip drawings” to take us beyond categorizing such works as vandalism, desecration, or iconoclasm.
By discussing Arp’s posthumous collaborations with friend Kurt Schwitters and partner Sophie Taeuber under the heading “Tears of Mourning”, Robertson bridges the dual meanings of the heteronym and well prepares the ground for his moving quotation of Arp in conclusion: “By tearing up a piece of paper or a drawing, we bring into it the very essence of life and death”.
YuHao Chen‘s “Table of Phonetic Wounds” aims to make metaphorical connections among a host of pairings: surgical incision/skin, site of operation/cause for operation, the initial/final phoneme structure from the Wang-Peill Mandarin Syllabary, Western colonial intervention/China-the-sick-man-0f Asia, literacy/illiteracy, non-Christian/Christian, etc. Successful surgery equals achievement of literacy, healing equals conversion, etc., by which we should be convinced of causality (or not).
The justification running through the center of the article’s paragraphs offers a visual metaphor for all these binaries. Even the gap between the initial and final phonemes in the Mandarin Syllabary recalls the gap between the consonants of “tears”. It is a space in which something meaningful happens.
Reanna Brooks‘ “Cut and Paste: Virginia Woolf’s Bookcraft” provides a good case for looking carefully at the border between craft and art. Brooks finds a depth in Woolf’s bookbinding that should prompt us to ask more often, When do the book arts and book art overlap to create a new work of art?
Sally O’Reilly‘s “Birth, Accident and Death: A Narratological Probing of Die-Cut Holes” would not have been out of place in Inscription No. 2 on “holes”. Its presence here demonstrates the extension of the theme of tearing to include cutting and holes. Removal by tearing or cutting may overlap, but the techniques are sharply different in their results as we saw with Arp’s “Doll carrying Schwitters” and “Le Petit Prince”. The differences here point to the messiness of giving birth contrasted with the tidiness of the neatly designed and pocketable guide for midwives that shows the growing diameter of the cervix stage by stage through a die-cut hole.
The following juxtaposition of Lucio Fontana‘s Spatial Concept “Waiting” and Bas Jan Ader‘s I’m too sad to tell you draws attention to the heteronym “tears”. It is set off in its own section, knowingly bracketed by Spector’s Displacement after Lawrence Weiner (2024) — conceptual artist — and After Ansel Adams (2024) — photographer. It is a meaningful curatorial gesture meant to be on a par with, say, Robertson’s effective bridging of the heteronymic meanings under the heading “Tears of Mourning”.
Tear: N1 A torn part or place; V1 To pull or split apart. Tear: N2 A secretion of the lachrymal gland; V2 To weep.
Eleanor Baker‘s “Cut, Paste, and Pocketed” explores J.L. Carr’s 1066 and All That treatment of Chaucer’s “The Reeve’s Tale”. While Carr would surely have been familiar with Sellar and Yeatman’s 1930 comic book history, Baker pegs Carr’s approach as a form of collage rather than comic strip. As we’ll see later with Angela Szczepaniak’s contribution, the two can be combined to drive a narrative forward. In Carr’s case, as Baker points out, the pocketbook approach and cheeky fragments of collage combine to deliver a comically modern sense of Chaucer’s world and an inventive match to the fragmentary nature of “The Reeve’s Tale”.
Using knives and punches, A T Kabe Wilson removes every tenth word in Graham Greene’s The Tenth Man and replaces it with a synonym or as near a proxy as he can manage to challenge the notion of copyright. The resulting pages are arranged to make up an installation where visitors can read the entire set of altered pages. There is no edition of Copywrong. It turns Walter Benjamin on his head: “The Unique Work of Art Produced from Two Copies of a Mechanical Reproduction”.
To bring this relevant work within the bounds of Inscription, the editors provide images of Wilson at work and rely on Dennis Duncan (University College of London) to elicit from Wilson where the work’s strange status places it in relationship to artists’ books and other visual art.
Kabe Wilson’s choice of every tenth word takes its impetus from the book’s story of collective punishment in wartime (“choose ten from among your number to be executed”). But it also turns on its head the common fallacy that ten percent of a work can be reproduced without violating copyright: hence the title Copywrong. In Greene’s novel, when the rich tenth man contracts with a poor man to trade places and switch identities in exchange for the rich man’s inheritance, a whole vein of copywrongs reveals itself for mining. Wilson sees his creative destruction of the novel as a form of translation and betrayal of the original. While challenging us to think where the line between book and not-book lies, and even to think of its sheets of paper as 3D objects, Copywrong becomes a way of asking where the line between original and copy, legal and illegal, and life and death lies.
The next contribution is Fraser Muggeridge‘s “Cuts and Tears as Justified and Unjustified Typesetting”. While the article gives an informative sketch of the history and development of the straight and ragged edges of print, its argument that unjustified typesetting is “torn typography” does not convince. An unjustified line does not begin with a justified line from which spacing is torn or cut. A justified setting may give a page the visual effect of having been evenly cut down the right, and a ragged right setting may give the visual effect of a tear down the right side, but whether they contribute to a work’s artistic meaning — not just an aesthetic effect on readability — needs convincing examples. With Apollinaire and his calligrammes, Stefan Themerson and his “internal vertical justification”, and Christian Bök’s Diamonds, Muggeridge make a good start. Most of the other variations on justified, unjustified, and mixed, however, are far cries from, say, Mallarmé’s breaks of the line and play with page layout in Un Coup de Dés Jamais N’Abolira le Hasard or from the meaningful typographical tearing and cutting that the avant-gardistes of the early 20th century perpetrated.
It’s odd, especially as the Fraser Muggeridge Studio designs Inscription, that the article does not mention the center justification used in several of the issue’s other articles. Their paragraphs decline to show off those even edges of justified-left and justified-right typesetting. Instead, they go for a ragged left and ragged right with a book-mimicking gutter of justified left and right in their center. When proofreaders were more a feature in typesetting houses, they not only had to catch “typos” but also to watch for “rivers in the type”, those breaks between words in one line that aligned with breaks in the next several lines to create a white rivulet of space trickling down the page and distracting the reader from the sense of the sentences. In Chen’s article, the “river” is a medial surgical cut. In Duncan’s interview with Wilson, the clear gutter in the middle of the paragraphs offers a sharp contrast with the uncomfortable binaries that Copywrong bids us to engage. Kudos to Fraser Muggeridge and studio.
Left: from Chen’s article. Right: from Wilson-Duncan interview.
The next contribution — from the Leuven-based artists collective Rosetta, formed by Eva Moulaert, Anneleen Masschelein, and Willem Styfhals — continues with the topic of typesetting. Their starting point is those awkward phenomena of typesetting — widows and orphans. They are not deliberate renderings or loppings of words from a following or preceding sentence to be left stranded at the bottom or top of a page, respectively. But there they are. Are they tears or cuts, these weepy, abandoned strings of anthropomorphized type that are cause for tears among proofreaders, typesetters, and designers? No, they are cause for the fevered ponderings of the narrator in a book whose photographed pages make up this contribution.
No widows or orphans here.
This set of photographed double-page spreads (excised?) has plenty of widows and orphans. Even though they are likely deliberate, what is the point of them? And whose disembodied hand is that that keeps appearing, disappearing, and reappearing to hold the book facing out?
Orphan and widow.
The narrator winds “their” way through references to Gutenberg, Donald Knuth, Herman Zapf, Jean-François Lyotard, Martin Heidegger, Roland Barthes, Robert Bringhurst, Ellen Lupton, Frank Kermode, Amitav Ghosh, and half a dozen others to come to “a” point — an obsession with hyphenation. And the point of that? Why naturally for the narrator’s compound, hyphenated selves — Ro-set-ta — to hand over the pen to Rosetta, the widow at the end of “page 139”.
“The Extinctions Bureau” is a brilliant article with which to end this issue of Inscription. It offers readers a chance to wield scissors or papercutters if they are ready not to heed Broodthaers’ admonition above. It is also a clever conceptual extension of Will Eisner’s 1985 concept of “sequential art” that aimed to establish comics as a legitimate literary genre. Angela Szczepaniak first teases us with the narrative premise of a clothing moth-turned-detective on the trail of the Nylon Killer. If that is not hilarious enough, she posits conversion of the 2D linear narrative into a 3D existence around moth-repellent cedarwood. (She has created the blocks for exhibition display, but that’s not the point of the contribution.) Whether the blocks are more cruel to the detective or readers who now have to get their heads and hands around the idea of a “polysequential” story is a fine point. Readers who take up the challenge of cutting out the templates and folding them into cubes will have their own view.
By cutting and tearing the images for her collages from pulp comics, Szczepaniak rings all the bells of Inscription 6’s theme and reminds us of its subtitle: The Journal of Material Text.
Reminiscent of Aspen, Fluxus, The Journal of Artists’ Books, and the deluxe editions of Parenthesis, Inscription‘s artwork inserts contribute to the sense of the issue as an exhibition, a wunderkammer, a performance. No 33 LP this time; instead there is appropriately a cutdown 45-rpm record, albeit no instructions on “ripping” tracks from it to make up our own playlists. Putting together a thematically coherent journal is tricky. The artworks underscore and strengthen the issue’s theme of tearing and cutting. Two examples: Nick Thurston’s print Rips and Floods (2026) and Carolyn Thompson’s Tearjerker (2026) cover all the thematic notes of tearing, cutting, and weeping.
Thurston’s title for his print ensures that we don’t miss the heteronymic “tear”, which the visually torn phrase “A tear is an intellectual thing” might cause us to do. For those not well-versed in William Blake, a helpful note on page 160 identifies the phrase’s source as “The Grey Monk“. The editors mention Thurston’s truncation of Blake’s line, but leave it to us to supply the pun that it has been ripped from the poem. Blake’s preceding lines rule out the heteronymic meaning; for him, it’s the “Widow’s tear” that is ” an intellectual thing”. What makes Thurston’s print a strong work of art is how the tearing from the poem brings with it other key elements of the poem. For Blake, the Widow’s tears have more power than war to free the world from fear of the “Purple Tyrant”. In 2026, Thurston’s print reminds us that intellectual things — [/tɪ(ə)rz/] and [/tɛ(ə)rz/] — may have more power than Tangerine or Religious Tyrants.
Rips and Floods (2026), Nick Thurston
For her print, Carolyn Thompson excises words “from 30 works of literary fiction she has read since” 2016 to compose a sob story that well sums up the effects of Brexit (and the US election).
Tearjerker (2026) Carolyn Thompson
Pages 154-61 list the twenty-one artists/performers alphabetically with descriptions of their editions. Self-reflexively and in keeping with the issue’s theme, page 161 shows a blanked version of the torn segments from page 31 on which Partington and Smyth provide their introduction to the authors’ and artists’ contributions. (This blanked version is curious. If page 161 were showing the blank sides of the slips of paper, the four slips on the left would be flipped and on the right. Since one of the editors has let slip in correspondence that the theme of Issue 7 will be “blanks”, might this be an Easter egg?)
In homage to the journal and its edition contributors, below is a collage of the eleven loose inserts.
The wunderkammer nature of Inscription will send insatiable readers in search of more examples of creative destruction. To that end, here are a handful from the Books On Books Collection. If you can only find time for two, make it Eleonora Cumer’s Circoscrivere lo spazio No. 3 [Circumscribing space] (2021) and Cercare nella memoria [Searching Memory] (2021). They are her most sophisticated metaphoric works in the collection. They offer a circumvention of circumscription, which is another way of thinking about tears and the material text.
“Islam Aly“. 13 January 2020. Books On Books Collection. See 28 Letters (2013).
“Doug Beube“. 21 April 2020. Books On Books Collection. See Empty Talk (2016), Red Infinity #4 (2017), and Breaking the Codex (2011).
“Lizzie Brewer“. 4 July 2023. Books On Books Collection. See Babel(2019).
“Eleonora Cumer“. 6 September 2019. Books On Books Collection. See l’attesa/ l’attente (2010), visioni urbane/ visions urbane (2015), contaminazione (2015), Circoscrivere lo spazio No. 3 (2021), Cercare nella memoria (2021)
Codex Aeroscriptus Ehrenbergensis: A Visual Score of Iconotropisms (1990) Felipe Ehrenberg Casebound stiff cover, fly leaves around bifolios (fore-edge folded folios). H420 x W295 mm. 20 pages (10 bifolios, 9 with prints, 1 for title page and copyright page).Edition of 500. Acquired from Monograph Werks, 17 January 2024. Photos: Books On Books Collection.
In his introduction, Felipe Ehrenberg variously recommends that we read Codex Aeroscriptus Ehrenbergensis “like a detective novel” for its “various clues that you may unravel the wondrous and dramatic events surrounding the life of this artist, another witness to the end of a century” or “as a musical score, perhaps to be composed by someone wishing to recreate the background music of our daily histories” or a “formulation of hieroglyphs”. The book’s subtitle succinctly rolls up these metaphors: “a visual score of iconotropisms”.
Stephen Perkins calls it “a mini-retrospective of his explorations in this medium” — stencils.
This work came out of a residency Ehrenberg completed at Atlanta’s Nexus Press. The images for the works came from what he called his Visual Information Bank which was a box with all sorts of ephemera that he would dip into for images for his stencils. In contrast to the frenetic energy of the stencils, the inside of the publication has a bucolic and calm feeling that is mirrored in the original stencil work Ehrenberg created across the front pages of each book. (Perkins, 2024)
The accordion, concertina, or leporello structure adopted by so many 20th and 21st century book artists has its Aztec analogue called a screenfold format. Ellen Baird and Cristián Roa-de-la-Carrera included Codex Aeroscriptus Ehrenbergensis in the Newberry Library’s 2006-07 exhibition “The Aztecs and the Making of Colonial Mexico”.
… Aztec heritage has become a vital component of Mexican and Mexican-American identity, influencing the work of many contemporary writers, artists, and scholars. The inherent flexibility of traditional indigenous creativity facilitates combination with contemporary artistic practices. Traditional screenfold books are layered with contemporary collage and print techniques, and indigenous images are juxtaposed with colonial scenes and pop icons. Contemporary Mexican and Mexican-American artists use traditional Aztec images and techniques to explore both contemporary life and Mexican cultural heritage. The screenfold format is an emblem of ancient Mesoamerican culture, and has become charged with historical and political meaning. Contemporary artists combine this format with humorous and provocative imagery to explore the cultural and political dynamics of preconquest identity, the colonization of Mexico and current relations between Mexico, Europe, and the United States. (Baird and Roa-de-la-Carrera, 2006)
Ehrenberg’s title is dipped in sarcasm. Most of the barely surviving screenfold Mesoamerican works reside in Anglo-European institutions under names like Codex Borbonicus at the Bibliothèque de l’Assemblée Nationale in Paris, Codex Borgianusat the Vatican, and Codex Mictlan at the Bodleian Libraries in Oxford. Ehrenberg’s modern version reflects their pictorial style and even the layout of their repetitive serialized images. But in doing so, his images speak to the continuing impact of colonialism.
Still, Ehrenberg’s book art went beyond any reductive anti-colonial message. His “Visual Information Bank”, as he called it, held a wealth of contemporary cultural iconography. Its main sections included:
The Crashed Car Department Sports’ Frozen Moments Department Men in Suits & Ties Department Police File Photo Department Jet Set Department Women: Dream & Desire Department Masked Wrestlers Department Motel Room Drawings Department The Rubber Stamp Division
And he drew on this — especially from the televisual world — to create his glyphic stencils and rubber stamps.
The leporello edition of Codex Aeroscriptus Ehrenbergensis is rare, but fortunately the wrap-back bound edition shown in this entry is a little less so. The wrap-back format is a traditional Chinese/Japanese book format. Takako Saito, who joined Ehrenberg at Beau Geste Press in 1973, may have been an influence in this regard, but as she left in 1975, an influence from others at Nexus in Atlanta, GA, where Ehrenberg completed this work, seems more likely.
The double-sided leporello edition of Codex Aeroscriptus Ehrenbergensis is not a folded continuous sheet. Viewable on Stephen Perkins’ site, it appears to have been formed from the codex edition’s double-page spreads glued together at the fore edge. Ehrenberg’s residency at Atlanta’s Nexus Press would have overlapped with Clifton Meador’s presence, and Meador’s works frequently use the wrap-back format.
Reed, Marcia. 2022. “Codex Espangliensis: From Columbus to the Border Patrol“, in Materialia Lumina : Contemporary Artists’ Books from the CODEX International Book Fair. Edited by Elizabeth Fischbach and Nann Parrett. Berkeley, California: The Codex Foundation.
历史的”场 (Locus: Identified by the History) (2016) 方晓风 (Fang Xiaofeng) and 呂敬人 (Lu Jingren) Beijing Shi: Zhongguo jian zhu gong ye chu ban she.
Co-authored by architecture scholar Fang Xiaofeng and book designer Lu Jingren, Locus: Identified by the History (2016) springs from the Book – Architecture Project (书 – 筑 / Shu – Zhu Project), conceived by Lu Jingren, Fumihiko Maki (Japan), and Yi Ki-Ung (South Korea). The project initiated a multi-year series of exhibitions/forums called “Book – Architecture: Dialogues Between Architects and Book Designers” (2011-19) across all three countries. Locus was published on the occasion of the second exhibition/forum in 2016.
Locus pursues two overlapping lines of thought. The first and primary one rests on Lu’s design philosophy that a book is a built environment, a habitat for text and images to be engaged by readers and all five of their senses. Its layout, pacing, structure, and their interconnectedness with each other and the book’s materials mirror the architect’s design of rooms, hallways, stairs, windows, doors, thresholds, and their interconnectedness with each other and their materials. Likewise as habitats, they each have exteriors, are designed to occupy a locus in time and space, and relate to a world outside. In Lu’s philosophy, the design mechanics involve four pillars: binding + layout + editorial + information visualization. Successful execution results in an immersive spatial object (habitat) that triggers the reader’s visual, tactile, auditory, olfactory, and gustatory systems simultaneously.
This entry is preceded by “Abra Ancliffe (I)“, which describes the Personal Libraries Library (Winter 2009-10 to Spring/Summer 2021) and The Secret Astronomy of Tristram Shandy (2015).
The constellatory asterisks in The Secret Astronomy of Tristram Shandy also evoke those flowers that our Personal Libraries Library (PLL) Artist/Librarian “picks” from the PLL and, later, Oleg Polunin’s Flowers of Europe: A Field Guide (1969) to include in the periodic issues of ephemera. Perhaps this confluence of stars and flowers created a predisposition in our Artist/Librarian that drew her to Johannes Kepler’s Astronomia Nova (1609). Unlike Sterne’s novel, which was part of Calvino’s personal library, Astronomia Nova lies outside the five personal collections. Of course, since Maria Mitchell was an astronomer, the works in her personal library refer to Kepler, and similarly, Robert Smithson had multiple books about astronomy, even Arthur Koestler’s Watershed: A Biography of Johannes Kepler. Still, Kepler’s “New Astronomy, Based upon Causes, or Celestial Physics, Treated by Means of Commentaries on the Motions of the Star Mars, from the Observations of Tycho Brahe, Gent.“, to give it its full and translated name, appears in Ancliffe’s heavens and garden like a new galaxy or specimen.
Astronomia Nova provided and further refined the mathematical and observational proofs of the Copernican planetary model of heliocentrism first laid out in De revolutionibus orbium coelestium [On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres] (1543). A little over 400 years later, our Ancliffe noticed in Kepler’s watershed publication something previously unobserved, something peculiarly geocentric about its heliocentric model.
There is no florilegium or guide to these woodcut flowers, but there they are, sprinkled throughout Johannes Kepler’s 650-page investigation of Mars’ orbit, tracked by the observations of his mentor Tycho Brahe, Emperor Rudolph II’s imperial astronomer.
On one level, Ancliffe’s spiral bound handbook is the field guide to these flowers. Its photos of flowers , harvested from Pulinin’s Flowers of Europe, offer candidates for the historical real-life counterparts to the ornamental woodcuts. The handbook’s title, however, indicates another level: that of “a field guide to ‘a field guide’ “. But of what could such a meta-guide consist? In Ancliffe’s case, it is the artist’s book, the work before us that addresses the fields of vision and perspectives embedded in Kepler’s work, the engraver’s woodcuts, and the book artist’s work itself. The first three opening spreads of A Field Guide to “A Field Guide to the Flowers of ‘Astronomia nova‘ ” stake out the environment of the “field guide to a field guide” as well as the zooming-in approach it takes.
First three opening spreads: cityscape of Prague; map of Prague’s location and fragment of Astronomia Nova‘s title page; cropped page of AN showing ornamental flowers alongside cropped blown-up photo of the flower.
The field of vision hops from the cityscape of Prague to a geographical map, then to the cropped title page of Astronomia Nova, then to a detail of the Copernican model bracketed by ornamental flowers, and finally to a cropped blown-up image of one of those flowers from Polunin. The next two spreads that follow those first three underline the field guide’s zooming in across time and space.
The fourth and fifth spreads: close-ups of the ornamental woodcut flowers and live photos; from the 17th century to the 21st.
Later spreads showing similar zoomed-in images highlight that we have actually hopped from the second century (Ptolemy) to the seventeenth (Tycho Brahe) to the twentieth (Polunin).
Zoomed-in images of woodcut flowers and live flowers; from Claudius Ptolemy (2d century) to Tycho Brahe (17th century) to Polunin (20th century).
Planetary diagrams, celestial maps, mathematical models, descriptive text, woodcuts and engravings are all at several representational removes from one another and from actual planetary movements over time. Likewise, the woodcutter’s ornaments had their corresponding actual flowers in the gardens and meadows of Prague. The closeness in appearance between the woodcuts and photos argues that Kepler’s artist was drawing and cutting from real-life observation. And yet the photos lie at historical and medial removes that question their correspondence. Like Kepler’s and Brahe’s mathematical and textual models of planetary movements, the artist’s book’s photos are speculative models of the flowers Kepler’s woodcut artist would have observed in Prague at the turn of the 17th century.
The field guide’s movement across media — engraving, printing, woodcut, photography, casebound book, and spiral bound book — is underscored by Ancliffe’s variation and sequencing of spreads. Just as we start to assume an alternating verso/recto rhythm of print/image then image/print, Ancliffe interrupts the flow with a double-page spread of print/print.
There is also interruption within the interruption: the double-page spread of text is an English translation whereas so far the text has been in Latin. Is the translation’s appearance a reminder that the various media are means of translating the observed?
Other interruptions consist of image/image spreads followed by text/text spreads. The juxtaposition seems to suggest an abstract affinity of shapes, as if the side-by-side flowers hint at an abstract shape of the map spread, and the side-by-side maps hint at an abstract shape of the flower spread.
If that seems an interpretive stretch, consider the following sequence that draws comparisons between flower photo and cityscape detail, between zoomed-in cityscape detail and flower photo, and between zoomed-in cityscape detail and ornamental woodcut detail.
Note the sequence — photo/engraving; engraving/photo; and engraving/woodcut — drawing attention to translation from medium to medium.
If we step back to take in the whole of the artist’s book and note the changing rhythms and punctuations across the spreads, it is hard not to conclude that this artist’s book as field guide is teaching us how to read the environment it has created.
Opening and closing landscape spreads.
Ancliffe’s next work in her astronomy series extends her aim of teaching us how to read her artist’s books.
4522,. + K (companion volumes, to be read concurrently) (2024)
The cryptic title of this dual-volume work signals that we have some detecting to perform in order to read it. In fact, we have to read the companion volumes concurrently to perform our detective work. More teaching us how to read. The volumes’ respective title pages shed some light on the cryptic titles, but only a little. As the first volume’s title page spells out the vertically arranged numerical title 4522,., we learn at least that it has its roots in Ancliffe’s Personal Libraries Library series.
The title page of the second volume presents the title K inside a shaded irregularly shaped rectangle extracted from a map of Prague (1650) by Matthaus Merian and Martin Zeiller (which we can track through the last entry in K‘s bibliography). The letter K comes from the key to that map, which tells us that it marks the Jewish quarter of the city. It’s a “nice-to-know” detail but not essential for appreciating how to read the second volume.
The title page tells us that K is “a represencing” or “a satellite to a satellite” or “an attendant to be read in concurrence”. We already know about the concurrence from the first volume’s title page. As for “satellite to a satellite”, we can see that K is a satellite to 4522,., which makes 4522,. a satellite to something. But to what? More on that in a minute. As for “a represencing”, the volumes’ covers (above) give us a hint. Notice how the irregular rectangle on K‘s cover re-presents or represences a snippet of the floral poster image shown on the cover of 4522,. That is the recurrent pattern between the two volumes:
From the poster image shown in 4522,. on the left, a snippet is taken and displayed within the map segment in K on the right.
Just with the covers and two title pages, we have detected two of the “Four viewings through … the ephemeral posters of the Personal Libraries Library (2011-2023)”:
The PLL posters viewed in 3/4 scale (as seen in 4522,.)
Snippets of the posters viewed through the map segment (as seen in K).
The third “viewing through” has a physical and literal form. In 4522,. a hole is punched in the recto pages where the poster images are displayed. Through that hole in one poster, the poster underneath can be viewed. In K, when a recto page turns t0 the left, its poster snippet reappears on the verso but in reverse as if we were looking through the other side of stained glass window.
With both volumes’ recto pages having been turned, we can see the punched hole on the verso of 4522,., a new poster image on its recto page, the mirror image of the three minerals from K‘s preceding recto page, and the new poster image’s snippet in K’s new recto page.
In this third “viewing through”, there is also a clue to what 4522,. is a satellite of. The small hole punched in each leaf of 4522,. seems to meander in its position from leaf to leaf. Actually it tracks a very specific shape: an analemma — a tilted, figure-8-like form. An analemma is the visual representation of the data recorded in ephemerides (tables of star positions at fixed times). In 1627, Kepler published his Rudolphine Tables, which became the new standard for accuracy of this data. If we were to point a camera skyward from a fixed location at the same angle and take multiple photos at the same time of day throughout the year, the sun’s position would form that figure across all the exposures. This is because the earth tilts on its axis as it orbits the sun and moves along an ellipse rather than a circle. So, the placement of punched holes in 4522,. embodies this projection of our orbit around the sun, and if we miss the point, the following near-to-last double-page spreads from 4522,. and K drive it home.
On the left, 4522,. shows the analemma diagram composed of the tiny views of the PLL posters’ images viewable through the holes in the book’s preceding pages. On the far right, K recapitulates the punched hole from 4522,. and wittily drives home the star/flower coordinates by positioning the hole over the center of the flower on the next spread, which doubles the wit with a black-and-white spread save for the strategically placed spot of yellow in the moon-gray center of the flower. The PLL posters’ images “light up” the recto pages of 4522,., and K reflects those images. In other words, K is the lunar satellite to 4522,., which is the terrestrial satellite orbiting the sun (the PLL project). These are the “two orbits” from the title page of 4522,.
The fourth “viewing through” comes into play with the Bibliography at the end of K. Although we had recourse to it to lead us to the map of Prague, a closer look reminds us of the PLL posters and the personal libraries from which they emerge.
So of course, the “five ways of reading” signaled on the title page of 4522,. refer to the five personal libraries from which the posters are composed.
This extraordinary part-autobiographical, part-biographical, part-bibliographical artist’s book brings Abra Ancliffe’s twin obsessions with astronomy and botany to their highest pitch of unity so far. Ancliffe has built it with an extended epistolary poem, collaged images from Polunin’s Flowers of Europe, and photos of the map of Prague (1650) by Merian and Zeiller, pages from Kepler’s Astronomia Nova (1609), and family memorabilia.
The poem addresses “Dear Dear Woodcutter”, the unknown artist who decorated Kepler’s orbital diagrams with flowers. Ancliffe’s observation of the flowers stands out when you consider that the still standard Collected Works (1938) omitted the flower images. Trying to identify the woodcutter, Ancliffe tracked down the sole reference to his existence and even visited William Donahue, Astronomia Nova‘s translator, in New Mexico to discuss the mystery. More impressively, she identified the woodcut flowers, their scientific names, and various common names, and their local habitats in and around Prague. From their unexplained presence, Ancliffe launches lyric observations on flowers (their colors, parts, and growth), astronomy, ink, paper, type, woodcutting, bookmaking, the idea of the book, and the interconnectedness of it all.
The book opens with Ancliffe’s first letter to “Dear Woodcutter”. It includes a facsimile double-page spread from Astronomia Nova , pages 28-29, showing where she first saw his woodcut flowers. From the start, Ancliffe signals how tightly woven she feels this autobiographical, biographical, bibliographical artist’s book will be. Instead of being numbered 2 and 3, her pages leading to the facsimile spread are numbered 26 and 27. So, at that moment of turning from “page 27” to page 28, the 21st century work strangely becomes part of the 17th century work as the book artist reaches back through time and craft. The letter’s tone blends fondness and fascination with matter-of-fact yet evocative observations about ink, printing methods, and the geology underlying lithography.
The intensity of her reaction to the woodcutter’s flowers and her absorption in her subject and craft translates into an affinity with the woodcutter that has Ancliffe addressing him in the present. This is poetic license and invention. In the act of addressing him, she is addressing us, her readers/viewers. If we are in any doubt of this, the second letter concludes with at a pitch that eliminates it and leaves us with a clear assertion of what she intends:
I see you. I see your book of flowers. I am seeing you. I am seeing you to others. I am seeing your book of flowers to others.
After this introductory section, Ancliffe lays out a recurrent marker of the book’s structure: a facsimile spread followed by a page reproducing a selection of woodcut flowers. There are twelve such markers.
After each of them, the poem continues, accompanied by brightly colored jigsaw-like cutouts from photos of flowers Ancliffe has matched to the woodcuts. In each section, a jigsaw puzzle piece appears, then another and so on until the section ends with a page of accumulated pieces. Below is the section that follows the marker above. The accumulation (or gathering) page brings together the five preceding pieces.
There are 12 gathering pages, and they are all brought together in a closing double-page display.
Twelve “gathering pages”.
The closing accumulation page, a gathering of gathering pages.
There are also four labelled subsections or interludes that appear out of the blue.
The first entitled “The Blue of the Page or How to fix Blue when Blue cannot be Fixed” addresses the color of the paper, ink, and flowers, what Ancliffe can see and cannot see but perceives (color of paper), knows (ink), imagines (flowers), metaphorizes, finds, and names.
The second entitled “The Shape of the Book or Ellipses or Ellipsis” draws metaphorical, etymological, and visual links between books and orbits (ellipses) and sewing holes (ellipsis).
The third interlude “Interlude or Worms and Wormholes” develops an extended metaphor of the book’s sewn edge as a sinuous gathering together of nature, type production, planetary charts, and seasonal movements. It also makes another extended metaphor of the book spine as the most interconnected point of organization and confusion, the orbital point closest to the sun, and the shapes of a shallow papery cup, sewn folds, and flowers.
The fourth interlude is “Violets and Pansies or I Think of You or Waysides” plays on Paul Klee’s observation that “A line is a dot that went for a walk”. In Ancliffe’s case the line begins with the dot of the etymology of “violet” that leads both to the Jupiter/Io myth and Ancliffe’s grandmother’s name, that links Io to the origin of the exclamation point, which Ancliffe appends to grandmother Violet and the flowers, that jumps to Derek Jarman’s etymological linking of the common names violet/pansy/heart’s ease to the French “pensée” and thus to “I think of you”, that leads to wild pensée (wild thought), which leads back to the dubious etymology of via leading to violet and thereby “wayside”, which leads to thinking of you (woodcutter) and the flowers found by the waysides.
What links these subsections is their use of the elements of book production to support Ancliffe’s theme of interconnectedness. At the start of the book, she wonders whether the purpose of the woodcut flowers is that of bearing type, an insertion to prevent the weight of the press from breaking the finer woodcut lines of the orbits. Now, as the final gathering of gatherings approaches, she returns to that notion. Notice below how the layout of text and flowers on the left and the layout of the collage on the right mimic one another, which echoes Ancliffe’s observation
your flowers and Kepler’s orbits correlate.
They hold each other up,
bear the weight for one another so that one,
alone,
is not crushed.
But for Ancliffe, a mutual bearing up is not the whole story of the interconnectedness she is pursuing in Astronomia Nova Florilegia or A Strange Shallow Papery Cup or .888 inch. For her, interconnectedness (correlation) is historical, metaphorical, etymological, rhetorical, seasonal, geographical, typographical, material, and personal. She sees in the woodcutter’s Prague flowers a florilegium (“you hid a book within a book!”) and a purpose — “I am seeing your book of flowers to others” — for which she chooses the medium of the artist’s book. Because this medium is so frequently recursive or self-reflexive, it is well-suited to a book hidden within a book. Like a planetary system, an artist’s book often has multiple orbits and multiple points of orbit. As noted in the interludes, any element of “the book” and its production can play a role — punctuation, words and wordplay, ink and its color, type and typesetting, images and carving, paper, sewing holes, thread, and so on.
In a final honor to Dear Woodcutter and personalizing capstone, Ancliffe adds two appendixes: “the first, Appendix or A Book within a Book or .918 inch”, and the second, “K or a Represencing or Studying an Engraving of Prague in Topographia Bohemiae, Moraviae et Silesiae, 1650″.
In the first appendix, Ancliffe introduces the map of Prague, familiar from the two earlier artist’s books and then points us to K, the Jewish quarter, by filling it with a thumbnail flower. This is her book within a book: 37 flowers laid within the Jewish quarter of Prague 1650. Their color re-presences the absence surrounding the K in the map.
In the second appendix, Ancliffe begins with the materiality of type and setting it — how it’s made, how it feels, what it looks like — in particular for the letter K and her maternal grandmother’s married last name set in type. Again, it is an element of the book that provides the metaphor that pulls “what connects” into the orbit of Ancliffe’s artist’s book. Absence evokes presence; presence evokes absence. The absence around the carved upside down and reversed metallic strokes defines K as much as does the ink transferred from them. Likewise the presence of her grandfather Victor’s and grandmother Ruth’s metal and messy tools evokes their absence, and it is their impression on the artist that defines their presence in her,
which brings us to the autobiographical closing statement framed by Dear Woodcutter’s flowers.
Abra Ancliffe has created a body of works that, as Brian Davis puts it, “not only exploit the material and expressive possibilities of the book as object, they function as physical sites for compiling and organizing heterogeneous collections of textual artifacts for narrative and other expressive purposes”. As aesthetic objects, they demand more than a glance in an exhibition or flick-through at a book fair. They richly repay the greater attention.
Further Reading
“J. J. Abrams & Doug Dorst“. 12 December 2024. Books On Books Collection. Another example of what Davis calls a “book-archive”.
“Helen M. Brunner“. 15 April 2026. Books On Books Collection. Further example of the “book -rchive” artist’s book.
“Gracia Haby & Louise Jennison“. 28 May 2026. Books On Books Collection. Intensely colorful artists’ books exemplifying the notion of “book-archives”.
“Michael Hampton“. 8 May 2026. Books On Books Collection. Hampton’s notion of parabibliography has an affinity with Brian Davis’ notion of archival poetics. In particular, see 410/411 (2025.
Davis, Brian. 1 May 2024. “Part One: The Rise of Multimodal Book-Archives“. Book Art Theory. Starkville, MS: College Book Arts Association. Explores “archival poetics”, finding art by harvesting archives and libraries.
Gracia Haby and Louise Jennison are exuberant archival eco-artists whose palette embraces the digital collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Public Library, Rijksmuseum, State Library of New South Wales, State Library Victoria, and more. Their preferred media are paper, the artist’s book, and installations; their preferred technique, collage.
Dip and Bob (2021)
Dip and Bob (2021) Gracia Haby & Louise Jennison Casebound, softcover with five-panel irregular trim wraparound card. H149 x W110 mm. [72] pages. Edition of 50. Acquired from the artists, 21 February 2026. Photos: Books On Books Collection.
Like other works in the collection, Dip and Bob (2021) teases connections between the media of watercolor, artist’s book, performance, and installation. The cover is an original watercolor cover on Fabriano Artistico 300 gsm paper.
The 72 pages of prints on Impact 100% Recycled Uncoated 150gsm derives from a 620 cm long digital collage. Created for the 2021 NGV Melbourne Art Book Fair, its performance element was twofold. First, as the artists explain, the collage was made “in place of a swim”, the local pool being too busy. Second, toward the end of the making, several copies were bound live before the Book Fair attendees. Its installation element, however, is the greatest tease. There is and was no installation of the 620 cm long collage work. It rests in your hands, and you experience it by turning the pages, then turning them back, then turning them forward — like laps in the pool. Or if you happen to photograph the double-page spreads, you can jump out of the pool and look down on them joined end to end.
Their introduction, however, will lure you back into the collage, which is
Underwater, kind of. Yes. Dive in.
Don’t forget to hold your breath. …
Search the collection. Sift the collection. “Water”, Return key.
Invert a forest. A daguerreotype of poplars stretching across the plate could be bands of seaweed. …
A crab from a trade card. Not for the skillet. Zoom in, Moonfish.
The Young Saint John the Baptist hair tendrils ca. 1480–82, repurposed. Papyrus fragment with lines from Homer’s Odyssey, ca. 285–250 B.C., for kelp bands.
Haby and Jennison wear their eco-hearts on their sleeves and admit, or rather assert, “For us, above all, it is not the medium that is always of greatest import, but the message”, which is
Our only chance of a healthy, safe, joyous, and sustainable future is to return to being reciprocal with nature so nature can continue to look after us.
Stand up and fight for the oceans and the waterways.
And yet it is their long-held breath as they create their underwater collage and your breath caught as you paddle forwards and backwards over fore edges and through the collection of human and natural art that will most hold you.
The Remaking of Things (2023)
The Remaking of Things (2023) Gracia Haby & Louise Jennison Folded container with tab-and-slot closure, holding belly-band-secured front cover fold out, part of card cover casing a perfect bound book. Container: H186 x W228 x D15 mm. Book: H180 x W222 mm. [36] panels. Edition of 100, of which this is #25. Acquired from Vamp & Tramp, 21 May 2025. Photos: Books On Books Collection.
From 24 May through 20 August 2023, the Ian Potter Centre (NGV Australia) held hosted an installation of The Remaking of Things. This work produced for the exhibition comprises a silvery tab-and-slot folder, holding a casebound softcover artist’s book whose front cover opens into a desktop installation, making you wish for a sip of Alice’s “Drink me” potion or bite of the Caterpillar’s magic mushroom.
Tab-and-slot folder made of Silver Metalised Polyester satin paper 300 gsm, router cut, printed on a swissQprint inkjet printer. Image from Nicholas Caire‘s Fairy scene at the Landslip, Black’s Spur (c. 1878)
Although the work continues their archival poetics, drawing on “100 individual pieces in the NGV collection, spanning painting and photography by way of ceramics and silverware, textiles and works on paper”, it has its origin in Haby & Jennison’s restored eucalyptus forest habitat for the Grey-heading flying fox, the animal featured on the “wall” that serves for the front cover.
Front cover with and without belly band.
As the front cover unfolds, a double door appears, cut into one of the other walls. “Walking” to the right around the walls, you see the images that, enlarged, occupied the exhibition walls in Melbourne.
Within the exhibition rooms, a 24-minute for 24 hours sound track played as the lighting changed. Within the book, photographs of the exhibition rooms provide a sense of the visual experience and its scale.
The images within the book are likely to send you back to the images on your desktop installation. There, it is much easier to register James Sowerby‘s etching Tetratheca juncea (1793), John Lewin’s Warty-face Honey-sucker (1822), Richard Bunbury‘s Green native fuchsia (1844), Anne Paulson’s Sketches of Victorian bush flowers (c. 1861), Fanny Anne Charsley‘s The Wildflowers of Melbourne (1867), Eugene von Guérard‘s Ferntree gully (1867), Tom Humphrey‘s Summer walk (c. 1888), F.E. Striezel‘s Kookaburra carving (1915), A. Shelden‘s Possum and banksia (1920s), E.G. Adamson‘s Snow coral (1930s-40s), Grace Cossington Smith’s Bottlebrushes (1935), NASA’s Lunar Crater (1969), and the dozens of others listed in the center of the book that can be found on the NGV website. As Haby & Jennison indicate in the work, they “invite you to enter the pages of the book in a similar spirit as you would the gallery”. Across time, etchings, paintings, carvings, inkwells, snuff boxes, glass plate negatives, digital photographs and a host of other artefacts, they create a complex habitat of interconnectedness of art and species.
Given that aim, it is surprising that the fold-out cover is constructed for viewing around rather than within. Double-sided printing of the cover might have done the trick and offered an additional opportunity to show the change of lighting.
Looking for Green, Remaining Hopeful (2024)
Looking for Green, Remaining Hopeful(2024) Gracia Haby & Louise Jennison Accordion book. H135 x W92 mm (closed), W802 mm (open). [9] panels. Edition of 75, of which this is #4. Acquired from the artists, 21 February 2026. Photos: Books On Books Collection.
World Book Night’s 2024 theme was “in praise of birds”. Using old postcards from various locations and cut outs collected over the years, Gracia Haby and Louise Jennison selected 45 birds to arrange in this vertical collage in response. The Indigo Digital CMYK used on ecoStar 100 gsm for the body and ecoStar 300 gsm for the cover delivers the vibrant avian colors against a chroma-key-like green screen background. The choice of the green screen effect has layers of significance. One layer is its obvious echo of the “green” choice of 100% recycled paper. Another, not so obvious, requires the textual explanation from the covers:
A green screen enables video makers to fill in the background or environment behind actors after filming. Haby & Jennison’s mimicry of it says that we need to provide these avian actors with more befitting environments than those in the sepia and gray toned backgrounds. Against the minatory background, the exuberant “motley assortment of birds” points in signposts to the “potential environment” left to be filled in on the green screen.
Despite its format, this is not a perforated pack of postcards to be detached and dispatched. You want to see and keep it all at once, as prompted by the vertical zigzagging against the green screen. But you will want also to examine it panel by panel, as prompted by the key on the covers and the detail of the images. In doing so, you sense the celebration and take the warning that this conference of birds being celebrated may disperse into extinction as has happened with the Norfolk kākā (last recorded sighting, about 1851), Carolina parakeet (last recorded sighting, February 1918), Newton’s parakeet (last recorded sighting, 14 August 1875), Bonon wood-pigeon (last recorded sighting, 15 September 1889), and Great Auk (last recorded sighting, 3 June 1844).
Bilateral Symmetry (2024)
Bilateral Symmetry(2024) Gracia Haby & Louise Jennison Self-enclosing barn-fold artist’s book with tab-and-slot closure, pamphlet stitched, and pop-up components. H240 x W174 mm. [24] pages. Edition of 100. Acquired from the artists, 21 February 2026. Photos: Books On Books Collection.
Bilateral Symmetry (2024) is the most successful of the four of artist’s books in the collection. Every element supports its exploration of perception and bilateral symmetry: the sewing, the barn-fold structure, cut outs and pop-ups, the page spreads and alignment, the choice of imagery from the natural world and architecture, and presentation of text across moth-shaped pages.
From the start, it combines surprising trompe l’oeil with startling juxtapositions. On the front cover, a bookmark aligns with the architecture behind a ruined arch overseen by a giant lacewing perched on a tree-size plant leaf.
Opening the barn-fold book reveals a new set of perspectival surprises. Inside, there are two booklets facing each other. The edge of the recto page of the booklet on the left aligns with the edge of the verso page of the booklet on the right to form an image across a four-page spread. Between the two foregrounded columns and statues, we see a neatly divided and aligned building in a small formal landscape. Beyond the building and landscape, an arcade with statuary curves symmetrically to the left and to the right. In fact, the arcade extends in a circle that comes around to the columns and statues through which we are looking. But the proportions are impossible or, at least, surreal. Of course, the huge dragonfly, also neatly split by the pages meeting in the center, offers a strange perspective especially alongside the collage of other insects. Even the marbled columns offer peculiarities. Some are rounded, some are squared, some start square at the foot but end rounded at the capital. And the statuary, collaged with insects, are shadowed with bright marbled patterns.
With the turn to the next set of facing spreads, the two statues and view through the arcade disappear, yet the moths that were posed against them remain as lepidopteral pop-ups against double doors in the middle of seemingly detached greenhouse walls. On the left, a flying squirrel attributed to Louisa Atkinson (ca. 1849-72) hangs from a branch intruding through an open arch in the wall. Diversity and trompe l’oeil strain at the work’s bilateral symmetry.
The final spread on this side of the book displays further distortions challenging our perception — even of bilateral symmetry but somehow nevertheless underscoring the theme. The Scotts’ pop-up moths, each centered a booklet’s spine, are flanked by Atkinson‘s far too small ringtailed oppossum on the left and by Gerard Kreft‘s far too large water rat to the right, peering down on the scene. The huge mantis in the center hangs mid air against the formal tree lined garden abnormally far in the background. The garden is perspectivally more distant than the domed edifice behind it, and an impossibly large rodent peeps over it. Although the central rodent and mantis are not symmetrically divided, and although the scenes to the left and right of the spine are not symmetrical, the central spine bisects the garden and dome precisely. Likewise the left and right spines bisect the Scotts’ moths precisely, underscoring the theme of bilateral symmetry. Meanwhile, the spreads have reiterated the point about the variety and diversity of insects, flora, and mammals.
On the reverse side of the book, between the splayed-out back and front covers of the two booklets, a cut out moth with wings spread disappears in trompe l’oeil fashion into the facade against which it has alighted. Above the moth, the two-word title of the book appears on two engraved banners hanging over the two parallel open archways centered between two shuttered archways. Two Harriet Scott Emperor Gum moths hover in the two archways shown on the lower lobes of the cut out moth’s wings. (Did I mention how every element supports the exploration of bilateral symmetry?)
The book’s text appears on the reverse side of the cut out moth’s wings. As you turn to the first wing/page of text or turn to the last wing/page, you may notice how the two Emperor Gum moths have “jumped” from the cut out’s wings to the background underneath each wing. A sort of slow motion persistence of vision, it is another perceptual trick alongside the trompe l’oeil of the cut out moth.
The first paragraph of text picks up on this theme of visual legerdemain by recalling the first flea circus impresario Mark Scalliot. That is a rhetorical means of introducing Bilateral Symmetry as a “theatre for insects” and posing the depicted insects as “fellow exhibitors”, which in turn is a rhetorical sleight of hand by which Haby and Jennison place themselves and the insects on an equal footing as performers and artists. The equation elevates the insects from the hucksterism of the flea circus — “Not for them an ivory “landau with figures of six horses attached to it ….” and, in the next paragraph, even raises these performers over Robert Hooke’s fleas as large as “elephants seen with the naked eye”. The exhibitors of Bilateral Symmetry invite you to better Hooke’s microscope by crouching “by a potted plant and behold[ing] the wonderful world of insects, thrumming”.
Leaning into entomomorphism, the artists invite us “[d]own an ecological porthole [to] flitter, paying attention to the messages the ears on our chests might receive were we a mantis”. Familiar by now with the artists’ message, we know this leads to the ecological observation of declining diversity, but up to this point, their artistry has been primarily about visual perception. This is not to gainsay the message, but as important as the message is, their marvelous handling of the media (the archival sources, the innovative book structure, and the collage) and reorienting of our perspective do more than simply make us receptive to it. Only in its final two paragraphs does the text exhort the reader to care and do something about the decline in insect diversity. The paragraphs preceding them conjure a world of insect perception and behavior that is as surreal as the whimsical perceptual distortions of the collage. The collage may include insects registered as endangered, but the text does not identify them. If text and collage were to have included endangered insects such as the Angled Tiger butterfly, Beautiful Petaltail dragonfly, Illidge’s Ant-blue (Butterfly), Queen Alexandra’s Birdwing Butterfly, Fan-winged Katydids, or Zaprochilus ninae (Bush crickets), might we have arrived at the same exhortation on our own?
With its blend of architectural ruins and artificial landscaping with oversized and undersized insects at various stages of metamorphosis, Bilateral Symmetry urges a shift of perspective in our perception of nature and our interconnectedness. With its structural embodiment of bilateral symmetry and diversity, it offers a rich example of the perceptual and perspectival shift it urges.
Further Reading
“Carol Barton“. 10 August 2024. Books On Books Collection.
“Caren Florance“. 30 April 2026. Books On Books Collection. In particular, see L OO P (2019).
“Ernst Huebner“. 21 July 2023. Books On Books Collection.
“Willow Legge“. 16 February 2021. Books On Books Collection.
Books On Books 