Structures

Books On Books Collection – Laure Catugier

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A Never-Ending Stone (2025)

A wrapped book titled 'A Never-Ending Stone' by Laure Catognet, published in 2025, displayed on a black background.

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.

For Catugier and the book form, this translates into “no hierarchy between elements; each element influences the next and modifies the original situation … no table of contents, no beginning, and no end, no reading direction: the usual order of the book is upset” (Catugier, p.9). Her publisher einBuch.haus chimes in: “By superimposing and intersecting lines through collage, Catugier multiplies the potential variations of form. Playing with scale, perspective, and framing, she disrupts the conventional Cartesian coordinates of the x, y, and z axes”.

Variable page height and width combined with exacting registration form the key with which Catugier unlocks her superimpositions, intersections, collage, and disruptions. Below is a set of spreads that demonstrates this.

Above, in the spread on the left, the triangular image that falls on the recto page is actually a small folio to itself. The triangle’s right-hand edge aligns with the shadow of the image below it. This becomes apparent when the small folio is turned to the left, and now its verso image of shadows aligns with the shadow between the air-conditioning units (the small turned folio now hides nearer of the units).

A minimalist layout featuring images of architectural elements, including a projecting ledge and a small red balcony, arranged on a white background.
An open booklet showing two photographs, one featuring architectural elements in black and white with intersecting lines and textures, and another showcasing a red column against a dark background, both arranged on white pages.

Above, in the spread on the left, a small folio displays the russet concrete window box that seems to hang above the same-colored concrete pillar. When the small folio is turned to the left, the shadow on its verso page aligns with the shadow of a balcony to create the appearance of a building’s corner.

Given these architectural snapshots presented as dynamic collages echoing the Hansens’ theories, Catugier’s degrees in architecture and design at the École Nationale Supérieure d´Architecture de Toulouse are no surprise. Her turn to photography and then video, performance, installations and finally to artist’s books has been fortunate, in particular, for book art. The dos-à-dos structure of A Never-Ending Stone neatly echoes her trajectory. The title and choice of board for the covers reflect more specifically the architectural element. It was the French engineer and builder François Coignet (1814-88), one of the early inventors of concrete in France, who described it as “a never-ending stone.”

Bracketing the 28 folios that perform the dynamic collages above are an essay by Anna-Lena Wenzel covering Catugier’s background in architecture, photography, performance, video, installation, and book design, and an interview with curator Moritz Küng highlighting from the start another Catugier passion that also has its inspiration in Oskar Hansen’s architectural work: music and sound.

Architecture is Frozen Music # (2023)

Architecture is Frozen Music # (2023)
Laure Catugier
“Open Form” binding (French fold cover with slot fastening; two pamphlet-sewn booklets attached to verso and recto edges of cover with staggered top and bottom margins). Cover: H230 x W270 mm (closed), W575 mm (open); Pamphlet verso: H197 x W180 mm (closed), W330 mm (open); Pamphlet recto: H197 x W204 mm (closed), W384 mm (open). [8] pages in each pamphlet. Edition of 100, of which this is #41. Acquired from einBuch.haus, 1 October 2025.
Photos: Books On Books Collection. Displayed with permission of the publisher.

Hansen was commissioned to design a music pavilion “that would reflect contemporary thinking in music”, which he translated into a “search for ” ‘time and space’ qualities in music” [and a structure that would picture] the spatiality of music … enabling viewers to search for their ‘audio’ place and simultaneously experience visual transformations — to be in audio-visual space-time, and later on he would refer to design as “compos[ing] space like music” (Scott, pp. 140-47).

Catugier’s Architecture is Frozen Music project translates Hansen’s analogy into her installations and artist’s books. In Architecture is Frozen Music # (2023), she adds a French fold structure that engages the techniques of variable page height and width, registration, and dynamic collage across two facing interleaving booklets. Even the book’s fastening (see above) participates in the registration and dynamic collage techniques, which can be further appreciated by turning over the extended French fold cover (see below).

An open book or pamphlet displaying abstract graphic designs, including a clock face with minimalistic numbers and hands, set against a textured brown background.

French fold cover opened, displaying two booklets interleaved. Note the fastening slot on the left.

An artistic book spread featuring black and white architectural illustrations, with a textured brown background and printed text detailing the title and creator.

The two booklets separated, revealing the colophon. Note the difference in margins above and below from one booklet to the other, facilitated by the structure’s two spines.

A monochromatic collage of architectural spaces featuring geometric shapes and contrasting shadows, including walls, pathways, and textured surfaces.

Reverse of the extended French-fold cover, showing the collaged images that form the dynamic collage on the front of the closed book.

When the two booklets’ pages are turned, the differences in the top and bottom margins, the size of the leaves, and their positioning on the two spines become more evident.

A series of illustrated pages in a book, featuring black and white architectural sketches, including a figure climbing a wall and various building structures.

Below, the linear registration across the overlapping leaves of the two booklets suggest lined music sheets with the collage in the center playing the role of an oversized treble clef and musical note and enacting the title’s assertion that architecture is frozen music. Structure and image meet metaphor.

A collage of black and white architectural photographs featuring stairs, railings, and geometric patterns, arranged on a textured brown background.

Architecture is Frozen Music (2022)

A textured, light gray book cover with the text 'ARCHITECTURE IS FROZEN MUSIC' written in white on the bottom right corner.

Architecture is Frozen Music (2022)
Laure Catugier
Thin cardboard box; four pamphlet-sewn signatures attached to poster stock cut and folded into four overlapping flaps. Box: H218 x W258 mm; Cover: H210 xW250 mm (closed); Verso signature: H145 x W190 mm (closed); Recto signature: H155 x W190 mm (closed); Bottom signature: H162 x W172 mm (closed); Top signature: H210 x W170 mm (closed). All heights measured along sewn edge. [8] pages to each signature. Edition of 30, of which this is #14/30. Acquired from einBuch.haus, 1 October 2025.
Photos: Books On Books Collection. Displayed with permission of the publisher.

Preceding Architecture is Frozen Music # (2023), which was part of that year’s AMBruno Project, an even more complex and smaller editioned version of Architecture is Frozen Music appeared. In every sense, it was occasioned by exhibitions of the same title. Its cover is even a fragment of an artwork made of poster paper for one of the exhibitions. It exemplifies what Dick Higgins described in 1965 and 1981: intermediality.* It also exemplifies Catugier’s interpretation of the Hansens’ concept of “open form”.

An artistic composition featuring an envelope partially opened, revealing a geometric design inside that includes stairs and architectural elements.

Book closed.

An artistic representation of a window with a grid design, printed on a flat surface resembling a fragmented paper layout.

Reverse side of extended cover. Note the binding threads along the four spines/folds.

The binding and interleaving of four pamphlet-sewn signatures, each to an edge of the square in the middle of the cover, facilitates this “open form” book. On first opening it, there is, of course, a page on top. To that degree, the artist has imposed a beginning, and once all of each signature’s pages have been turned, there seems to be an end.

A collection of layered black and white architectural photographs arranged within an open envelope on a wooden surface.
An arrangement of architectural images and sketches displayed on a wooden surface, featuring various perspectives of buildings and structural designs.

Top: book open to four interleaved signatures. Bottom: All four signatures’ pages turned.

But go back to the opening. Although the structure imposes a first page to turn, it also offers four different orientations the reader could adopt. In the orientation below, the first page turns upwards, but with a 90° reorientation to the left, it would turn as a Western codex is expected to do. Another 90°, and the first page would turn downwards. And with a third 90°, it would open as an Eastern codex is expected to do.

We might turn to the idea of the fugue as a rough analogy for this particular “open form” book. A fugue generally has a “subject” (or main theme), an “exposition” in which voices or instruments each play out the subject, then an “episode” (or connecting passages) that builds on the previous material, then further alternating “entries” in which the subject is heard in related keys until a final entry that returns to opening key. Like the fugue, Catugier’s “open form” book is more a style of composition than a structural form.

Catugier’s main theme is “architecture is frozen music”. Her technique of dynamic collages creates a “fugal” effect with at least six elements or motifs or voices. One is the architectural motif (balcony, window, stairs, vents, or even furniture such as a chair) displayed. Another is the source or direction of light. Another is the alignment of shadows cast by the architectural motifs. Another is a geometric motif arising from the motifs of architecture, light, and shadow. Another is the dimension of the folios in the signatures. And yet another is the position of the signatures along the spines.

Below in the opening of the book, the architectural motif of an external staircase “sounds” out the subject on the first page. The geometric voice picks out a circular opening atop a rectangular column crossed by parallelograms ending in square balconies. The voice of signature placement aligns and extends the rectangular column with another column on an underlying signature’s top page. When the first page is turned (upwards), the voices of folio dimension, direction of light, and shadows come into play, and we find that the underlying column has been truncated and is perpendicular to a bright column of light on a wider structure receding into shadow. The architectural voice counterpoints the perpendicular columns with stairs slanting away from them at 45°. When the bottom signature’s top page is turned (downwards), those stairs are almost fully “sounded” on the right while the balconies motif returns in the downturned bottom signature.

A collection of black and white architectural photographs arranged on a wooden surface, showcasing various building elements and textures.
A collection of overlapping black and white photographs showcasing various architectural features, arranged on a wooden surface.

Left: book open to four interleaved signatures. Right: top signature’s first page turned (upwards).

The balconies motif increases in volume as the left signature’s top page turns (leftwards) to display a balcony grating and reveal another balcony in the center.

Left: bottom signature’s first page turned (downwards). Right: verso signature’s first page turned (leftwards).

From the view on the right above to the view below, the turning of the right signature’s top page (rightwards) reveals two more balconies. We now have a passage of balcony motifs moving from left to right like musical notes on a score.

An arrangement of architectural sketches in grayscale featuring various building elements like balconies, windows, and arches, displayed on a wooden surface.

Recto signature’s first page turned (rightwards).

The spread below provides an example of the geometric motif at work. In this view, the center of the open book presents a circular ornament, rectangles of bricks, window squares in a shadowed door, and a small triangle of shadow to the ornament’s lower right. In the overlapping pages above the center are small triangles and arcs alongside rectangles and squares. Below the center are a large broken circle of light on a black square page, and, beside that, the truncated rectangles of a balcony. The geometric parallels running from the top, the center, and to the bottom are matched by another set of geometric parallels formed by stair-stepping shadows moving from the left signature, across the center in the bricks, and onto the right signature’s shadows in the steps leading to the door. Across the harmonizing center, the top and bottom of the open book perform a counterpoint of breaking geometric forms to the theme of stair-stepping shadows from left to right.

A collage of black and white architectural photographs arranged on a wooden surface, showcasing various structural elements such as stairs, windows, and walls.

Geometric motifs.

There are as well, of course, geometric parallels between the top and left, the bottom and left, and between the top and right, and the bottom and right, but enough of verbal description of the visual music. Each of the signatures and motifs can be “heard” in its own right. Likewise, each view of the open book can be “heard” in its own right. And likewise, as each page turns, new harmonies and counterpoints can be “heard”. It all leaves us with the question to be debated, to paraphrase Douglas Hofstadter’s reflection in the “Ant Fugue” chapter in Gödel Escher Bach: Is the book more than the hum of its parts? What is certain is that, in bringing together architecture, music, photography, and the book, Architecture is Frozen Music offers an exceptional example of the artist’s book as intermedia.

*“Intermedia” is a term adopted by Dick Higgins from Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 1812 used “to define works which fall conceptually between media that are already known” but useful to Higgins in demystifying the avant-garde.

Split (2025)

A clear plastic envelope containing a folded sheet of paper with the word 'SPLIT' printed on it, alongside markings indicating a limited edition and the name 'Laure Cattier.'

Split (2025)
Laure Catugier
Pamphlet-sewn star book. H170 x W150 mm. [32] pages.Edition of 22, of which this is #2. Acquired from einBuch.haus, 1 October 2025.
Photos: Books On Books Collection. Displayed with permission of the publisher.

Split (2025) is another stab at the “open form” book. As a pamphlet-sewn star book without a front or back cover, it has no beginning or end.

An open book with multiple pages arranged in a fan shape, displaying various words printed on each page.
An overhead view of an open book with multiple pages fanned out in a star-like arrangement against a dark background.
An open booklet with several pages displayed, featuring minimalistic text labels such as 'City Map', 'Pharmacy', and 'Path'. The pages fan out in a star-like formation against a dark background.

It has sixteen double-page spreads. Each has a word in the upper right corner and an image in the center. Four spreads are the same, showing the word SPLIT and the binding’s single thick black thread. The heavy black thread is the drawing that illustrates the word or that the word defines or implies. In between those four, three spreads appear, each using the binding’s thread as part of the drawing on the double-page spread.

A view of a closed booklet with a black string binding, labeled 'SPLIT' on the cover.

The subjects of the drawings in each of the triads do not seem related to one another, but there is a progression from one drawing to the next. CEMETERY only requires one line intersecting the binding thread to construct the image suggesting it, ARROW requires two more lines, and KITE requires yet two more. The next triad — PATH, PHARMACY, CITY MAP — requires one line, then three, and then eight. The next triad — COMPASS, SNOW, WHEEL — requires one, then three, and one more. The next triad — DEAD END, BEAM, WINDOW — requires one, then one more, and finally two more.

An open booklet with the word 'CEMETERY' printed on the right page, and a simple cross drawn in brown ink across the center.
An open card with a simple drawing of a triangular arrow shape and the word 'ARROW' printed on the right side.
A simple drawing of a kite on an open card, with the word 'KITE' printed on the top right corner.
An open blank card with the word 'SPLIT' printed in black on the right page, featuring a black thread binding.

Many star book structures have front and back covers, so even if the text and images suggest no beginning or end, the covers undermine it. When exploring SPLIT, however, whether the reader chooses to turn the pages codex-style or carousel-style and whether the reader chooses the direction of adding lines or subtracting them from the images encountered, there is no beginning or end.

These four artist’s books demonstrate that Laure Catugier has found an effective muse in the Hansens’ open-form architectural theory. Her intermedial thinking, design skills, and craftsmanship have responded with inventive and outstanding artwork. It deserves a wide audience.

Further Reading

“Architecture“. 12 November 2018. Books On Books Collection.

“Celebrating the 250th Anniversary of Steingruber’s Architectural Alphabet“. 1 January 2023. Books On Books Collection.

Burzec, Marcelina. 16 November 2025. “Home is where the Hansen is: Poland pays tribute to open form architecture pioneers“. Euro.news. May remind you of Jim Ede’s Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge, England.

Deguy, Michel, and Bertrand Dorny. 1989. Le Métronome. Paris: Self-published. Interesting for a contrast and comparison on how structure in an artist’s book can analogize with music.

Higgins, Dick. 2001. “Intermedia.” Leonardo 34, no. 1: 49–54.

Hofstadter, Douglas R. 1979. Gödel, Escher, Bach : An Eternal Golden Braid. New York: Basic Books. P. 191.

Hubert, Renée Riese, and Judd David Hubert. 1999. The Cutting Edge of Reading : Artists’ Books. New York City: Granary Books. See pp. 104-06 for discussion of music and structure in Deguy and Dorny’s Le Metronome.

Scott, Felicity D. 2014. “Space Educates” in Alęksandra Kedziorek and Łukasz Ronduda (eds). Oskar Hansen : Opening Modernism : On Open Form Architecture, Art and Didactics. Warsaw: Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw. Pp. 137-60.

MacCallum, Marlene, et al. 2007. The Architectural Uncanny. Corner Brook: Sir Wilfred Grenfell College Art Gallery.

Books On Books Collection – Anne-Catherine Fallen

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The Lively Dance (1983)

A vertical view of a grey booklet titled 'THE LIVELY DANCE' secured with a thin bamboo stick.

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”.

Open book displaying a printed image of bamboo leaves on one page, with translucent paper covering the other page.
A close-up of bamboo leaves with a soft green filter, featuring the text 'Come join the solemn dance' in an elegant font.

COME JOIN THE SOLEMN DANCE

An open book with blank pages, showing a textured light gray background.

The second double-page spread with translucent overlays in place.

Lifting and holding back each translucent overlay, the reader/viewer may have the sense of wading into a stand of bamboo. Although each double-page spread displays the same image of bamboo, the overall impression is otherwise because the images on the translucent overlays differ from the one repeating underneath. Also slowing the perception of the sameness of that image underneath (or behind) the overlays, the text is physically and syntactically scattered. The eye jumps about to find the text and, having found it, jumps back and forth with its syntactic ambiguity. Is it that “the sun dances / leaping lightly over the leaves”, or is it that “leaping lightly over the leaves, we will dance”? Undoubtedly, it is both. If you have ever peered into the confusing density of a stand of bamboo, you will recognize that the syntactic jumping around echoes the visual jumping around as the eye tries to sort out the foreground from the background and vice versa.

A printed page featuring bamboo leaves in a soft green tone with text. The top text reads 'THE LIVELY DANCE' and the bottom text says 'leaping lightly over the leaves, we will dance.'

THE LIVELY DANCE
the sun dances
leaping lightly over the leaves, we will dance

An open notebook with blank, textured pages featuring a subtle pattern.
A close-up of bamboo leaves with a faded green overlay, featuring text that reads 'inhale the bitter breath' and 'the wind drifts' placed artistically among the foliage.

INHALE THE BITTER BREATH
the wind drifts
whispering gently through the leaves, we will drift

Open book pages with a textured, light-colored background.
A close-up view of bamboo leaves in soft focus, with text overlay that reads 'THE SWEET BREATH' and 'the shadows sleep' on the left, and 'settling softly on the leaves, we will sleep' at the bottom.

THE SWEET BREATH
the shadows sleep
settling softly on the leaves, we will sleep

A close-up view of an open book showing a faded, artistic representation of bamboo leaves on a translucent page, with a textured background.
A close-up image of bamboo leaves and stems, featuring a muted green color palette. The word 'RELEASE' is visible in the lower section of the image.

RELEASE

Stood upright, the book makes it difficult to access the underlying text and images, but it adds a sculptural dance that complements the memory of what has been read and viewed in codex fashion with the book laid flat. It also reveals another and crucial set of images. Closed, the book’s wedge shape created by the twig-fastened flaps gave a clue to that other set of images. Opened, the book’s pleated attachment of pairs of folios reiterated the clue to our fingers as we paged through the codex structure.

Close-up view of a book with textured green pages, partially open, sitting on a wooden surface.
An open book with textured green and patterned pages, displayed on a wooden surface.

Behind the pleated translucent attachment with its faint green images of the bamboo forest, we find sepia images of the forest’s interior. Like the image on the double-page spreads, the sepia images are really only one repeating image. We can only view it from the top or bottom edge of the book. Looking down, we see the brown individual trunks or stems of the trees rising from the forest floor.

An artistic display of textured paper folded into multiple sections, arranged in a fan shape against a dark background.
An open accordion-style book with textured green and beige pages, showcasing a bamboo forest illustration.
Close-up view of a folded book displaying intricate bamboo-themed artwork inside.
An open book with pages displaying textured designs, featuring natural elements and colors, resting on a wooden surface against a dark background.
A close-up view of an open book displaying textured pages with a blend of earthy colors and natural imagery.

Looking from the bottom edge, we can see the forest floor.

One other view or step in the dance can be had with the upright display. If the cover flaps are refastened to bring the book into a star book display with the translucent overlay’s pages pulled out and its pleated edges pinched together, we have the dense stand of bamboo in the round with its sepia interior hidden away.

By now, all this playing with the codex laid flat and stood upright will have prised apart the text and perhaps reminded the reader/viewer of the meaning of other woods “lovely, dark and deep”.

Fallen describes The Lively Dance on her website here. Among her observations on her site, she notes that her house is surrounded by bamboo. Except for one entry displaying snow on bamboo, The Lively Dance seems to be her primary artistic celebration of it. It is a celebration that provides a dual personal pleasure in the collection. When I am exploring the book, I am reminded of the local stand of bamboo and its density. When I am passing the bamboo on the daily dog walks, I am reminded of The Lively Dance.

Dense bamboo foliage with tall green leaves and slender brown stems.

East Hagbourne, Oxfordshire

Further Reading

Fallen, Anne-Catherine, William C. Allen, and Karen D. Solit. 2007. A Botanic Garden for the Nation : The United States Botanic Garden. [Washington, DC]: [U.S. GPO].

Fallen, Anne-Catherine, Herbert J. Sanborn, and Kevin Osborn.1986. In Context : Contemporary Artists’ Books and Their Antecedents : March 14-April 27, 1986. Alexandria, Virginia: The Athenaeum.

Fallen, Anne-Catherine, Kevin Osborn, and Instituto de Estudios Norteamericanos (Barcelona, Spain). 1986. New Narratives : American Bookworks in Print = Noves Narratives : Llibres d’Artista Nord-Americans = Nuevas Narrativas : Libros de Artista Norteamericanos. Barcelona: Institut d’estudis Nord-Americans.

Books On Books Collection – Tony Broad

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Parallel Orders of Architecture (2024)

An architectural diagram illustrating classical column orders, featuring detailed engravings and a title label reading 'PARALLEL OF ORDERS OF ARCHITECTURE'.

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.

A decorative box featuring a design of architectural drawings, including columns and classical elements, with the title 'Parallel of Orders of Architecture' prominently displayed.

Top of cover and interior of box.

A collection of intricately designed boxes featuring architectural patterns, displayed on a wooden surface. The main box is open, revealing additional compartments and a ribbon for easy access.

The three volumes placedd atop box cover; empty interior of box.

A collection of three intricately designed pop-up books featuring detailed architectural illustrations in black and white. The first book depicts a grand corridor with columns, the second contains abstract geometric shapes, and the third showcases ornate patterns and classical elements.

The three works: accordion, pop-up, and modified tunnel book.

The kaleidoscope of perspective and viewpoints offered in the accordion volume echoes the effects of Giambattista Piranesi’s Carceri d’invenzione (1745-61), especially those in the second edition. Where Piranesi invented his architectural fantasies with pen and burin, Broad relies on collage with reproductions and on book structure. For the collage work, he reproduces prints from Perspective (1604-05) by Jan Vredeman de Vries and A Parallel of the Orders of Architecture (1936) by Charles Normand.

An engraved portrait of a bearded man with curly hair, framed within an oval. The surrounding text includes Latin phrases discussing optics and vision. The image is part of a larger page featuring illustrations and artistic descriptions.
An illustrated title page for a book on perspective, featuring ornate architectural designs, decorative elements, and Latin text describing the art of perspective.
Title page of the book 'A Parallel of the Orders of Architecture: Greek, Roman and Renaissance' by Charles Normand, re-edited by R. A. Cordingley, published in 1936 by John Tiranti & Company.
Line drawing of three classical column styles: Ionic, Corinthian, and Composite, with detailed measurements and annotations.

Broad’s sources of inspiration and images: left column, Charles Normand’s A Parallel of the Orders of Architecture; right column, Vredeman de Vries’ Perspective.

The accordion’s panels and its inserts play with Normand’s and Vredeman’s illustrations to generate labyrinthine and impossible structures. Staircases disappear. Valley folds sometimes reinforce, sometimes defeat, vanishing points. Arches wrap over mountain folds, coming forward and receding at the same time. Cutouts and notches in the panels multiply the views, but what can be viewed through the cutouts are parts of other panels whose perspectival lines sometimes extend, sometimes clash with, those of the framing cutout.

A three-dimensional book displaying intricate architectural illustrations featuring columns, arches, and tiled floors, arranged to create a visually engaging perspective.
A detailed artistic representation of a three-dimensional architectural scene depicted in a folded format, showcasing columns, arches, and textured floors in monochrome.

Front and rear views of the extended accordion book.

An open artist's book featuring intricate black-and-white architectural illustrations, displaying columns and arches in a zigzag format on a wooden surface.

Center: valley fold reinforcing the vanishing point. Left and right: cutouts giving onto contrasting views.

Arches wrapping over mountain folds. Notch emphasizing horizon line.

The placement of single- and triple-panel inserts adds additional asymmetry. On the front of the accordion, moving from left to right, we have an insert sequence of triple-triple-single-triple-single. On the reverse side, moving in the same direction, we have a sequence of single-triple-triple-triple. Whether perceived by turning the accordion pages codex-style or viewing their extension from above, the asymmetry of the inserts runs parallel to a symmetry of recurrent spreads and a mirror-image symmetry created by image reversal.

A handmade accordion-style book featuring intricate pen illustrations of architectural interiors, showcasing arches and tiled floors.

Asymmetry of panel inserts seen from above.

Mirror-image symmetry.

The second and slimmest of the three books turns attention to columns, with its front cover displaying half of an inverted base of a Composite Order column alongside half of a capital of an Ionic Order column. When the magnetically sealed front and back covers are prized apart, a complete Ionic capital pops up, or at least the suggestion of one created by the joining of cross-sections of two volutes.

Artistic interpretation of architectural elements featuring detailed sketches of columns and decorative motifs, arranged in a dimensional format.

Second volume displayed against a background of the first volume.

A detailed pop-up book featuring architectural diagrams and illustrations, with intricate folds and designs visible on multiple pages, displayed on a wooden surface.

Ionic capital pop up.

The third volume, displayed here against the first volume extended, highlights the Corinthian Order with the acanthus leaves and stalks that decorate its capitals.

A collection of folded paper art pieces arranged in a circle, featuring intricate architectural illustrations and a central cover with stylized botanical patterns.

Third volume displayed against background of the first volume.

When the magnetically sealed French fold cover opens, the Corinthian capital appears in two halves that will spread apart to reveal in tunnel-book fashion a headless Greek or Roman statue. The double visual pun on the leaf-covered capital hiding the caput-less but still well-endowed fig-leafless statue adds to the delight at the tunnel book’s action.

A pop-up book display featuring intricate architectural designs with columns and foliage, set against a perspective backdrop.

The Corinthian capital.

A three-dimensional pop-up book displaying intricate architectural designs with columns and a central statue.

The Corinthian capital split to reveal a caput-less and figleaf-less statue.

The views available by rearranging the accordion book on its own or by arranging displays with the other two books seem endless. Having received the

Broad’s plinth box and three artist’s book structures underscore his parallels of symmetry and asymmetry, his visual puns, and his originality. Parallel Orders of Architecture deserves its own slowly rotating plinth to offer maximum.

An artistic arrangement of a folded book displaying architectural photographs, shaped into a star-like form, placed on a wooden surface.

Recipient of the UK Society of Bookbinders’ John Purcell Award, 1st Prize, in 2024,

Chaos (2023)

A side view of a brown box labeled 'Chaos' in a decorative font, placed on a wooden surface.

Chaos (2023)
Tony Broad
Box: H200 x W170 x D70 mm. Modified flagbook: H145 x variable W90-180 mm. 44 folds. Unique. Acquired from the artist. 23 July 2025.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.

Similar to the paradox of symmetry and aysmmetry in The Parallel Orders of Architecture, Broad’s next work offers us chaos — simultaneously contained and exploding, bound and unbound, intact and shattered, in color and black-and-white, linear and cyclical, dark and translucent. It contrasts a derelict pier (Hotwells Dock in Bristol) with a working pier (parallel to Glaisher Street, upstream from Deptford Creek, London).

A wooden table with an orange box containing several envelopes with images inside, labeled 'Chaos.'
An orange box containing photographs and artwork organized inside, with one visible cover labeled 'Chaos'.

Front cover and back cover.

Broad blends artist’s book structures in Chaos. An accordion of translucent parchment anchors the construction from the front cover to back cover. From either end, another accordion, cut on a slant, overlays the translucent accordion. Both the overlying and underlying accordions depict the working London pier. Images of the derelict Bristol pier occupy the orange-tinted center. Midway to that center, the overlaid accordion yields place to a modified flag book structure, which eventually takes over the center of the book.

An open artist's book featuring a series of layered photographs in shades of black, white, and orange, arranged in a folding format on a wooden table.

Chaos extended.

A zigzag folding photo book with black and white images, placed on a wooden surface with a hint of a title visible.
A close-up image of a fanned-out stack of black and white photographs, showcasing various historical scenes and details.

Details of the darker cut accordion folded over the lighter parchment accordion.

A folded photographic artwork featuring black and white images of a pier, showcasing structural details against a textured background.
A folded book or art piece featuring black and white photographs, displayed on a wooden surface.

The point at which the layered accordions shift into a four-row flag book.

The flag book structure is well-suited to weaving multiple impressions together. The layered accordions build up to this ingeniously with multiple impressions of their own. Their images of the working pier are not aligned, so already we have multiple impressions. Also, from the center of the book, we have a split-view perspective, looking out to the end of the pier simultaneously on the left and on the right.

An art book with a textured cover in muted colors, fanned open to reveal a series of black and white photographs printed on translucent pages, depicting wooden structures and water reflections.
A folded book showcasing a black and white photograph of pier supports, with reflections on water, next to a textured cover with abstract colors.

Split-view perspective. Detail from front cover moving right; detail from back cover moving left.

After the two layered accordion books become a four-row flag book, Broad introduces another effective transformation. As the structure approaches the center, a horizontally folded flag replaces the single-sheet flag in each of the four rows. In addition to intensifying the imagery, the combination draws further attention to the downward view into the water and the outward view to the end of the working pier.

A series of black and white photographs arranged in a 3D folding structure, showcasing various views of wooden supports and structures, displayed on a wooden surface.
A pop-up book structure made of black and white photographs, displaying various images that extend outward. The pages are intricately arranged, creating a dynamic three-dimensional effect against a wooden surface.

The point at which the single-sheet flag shifts to a horizontally folded flag.

Broad does not stop there. At the center of the book, where the orange-tinted images of the derelict pier appear, he introduces angular folds and cuts. These have the effect of chaos exploding from the center of the book.

An artistic installation featuring layered paper images with abstract designs in orange, black, and white, displayed on a wooden surface.

Harmonic chaos, chaotic harmony?

Finally, Chaos comes with an envelope of offcut shards to be scattered as display permits. Some of the shards bear the words from the book’s outside back cover, which gives the overall structure and its contrast of the two piers an enigmatic emotional coloring. The viewer wonders whether the author/artist once stood at the end of the now derelict pier and now stands in dreams at the end of the working pier.

An artistic display of folded paper resembling a book or sculpture, featuring a mix of colors and textures. Surrounding the main piece are paper strips with printed phrases like 'no longer', 'I can sail to you', and 'I search for you in dreams'.
An artistic display featuring a sculptural book made of layered, folded paper in various colors, arranged in a wave-like formation with scattered pieces nearby.

Photo: Courtesy of the artist.

36 Days of Type (2019)

A decorative letter 'Q' made of various colorful postage stamps, showcasing images of royalty and differing denominations against a brown background.

36 Days of Type (2019)
Tony Broad
Accordion with hardcover and raised letter Q. 110 mm square, D20 mm. [38] panels. Acquired from the artist, 23 July 2025.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.

A welcome addition to the collection’s artists’ books inspired by the alphabet.

Four colorful images in a row: the first features piano keys on a blue background, the second shows illuminated text reading 'one' on a textured background, the third displays a stylized letter 'J' in blue on a light background, and the fourth presents the letter 'G' in pink.

Key of D, electric e, flourishing f, and geometric g.

A collection of four colorful graphic designs featuring the letters H, I, J, and K, each with unique artistic styles and backgrounds.

Holographic H, incandescent i, blue j, and kingly k.

A colorful page featuring the number 5 in a fluffy text style against a gradient background.

Fuzzy 5, sigma 6, sleepy 7, and octo-legged 8.

Further Reading

“Alphabets Alive!“. 19 July 2023. Books On Books Collection.

“Architecture“. 12 November 2018. Books On Books Collection.

“Celebrating the 250th Anniversary of Steingruber’s Architectural Alphabet“. 1 January 2023. Books On Books Collection.

“Hedi Kyle’s The Art of the Fold: How to Make Innovative Books and Paper Structures“. 24 September 2018. Books On Books Collection.

Books On Books Collection – Sarah Maker

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Within Every Room There is an Echo of the First (2018)

A stack of triangular pyramids made of textured cards, displaying different colors and patterns, set against a dark background.
A small, folded piece of paper or booklet with a textured surface, resting on a dark background.
A geometric sculpture made of stacked square pages in varying shades of brown and gray, forming a pyramidal shape with a solid base.
A top view of a paper object resembling a miniature pyramid, made from folded paper with a glossy texture on one side, resting on a dark surface.

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.

A sculptural book with a zigzag design, featuring textured pages in shades of gray and purple, resting on a dark surface.
An arrangement of layered, textured paper shapes in various shades of brown and gray, placed on a dark background.
A collection of variously shaped and colored wooden pieces arranged in an overlapping pattern, showcasing a range of natural hues and textures.
An artistic arrangement of layered, curved metal pieces forming a pyramid-like structure against a dark background.
An artistic arrangement of layered, folded paper pages in varying shades of gray, pink, and brown, fanned out and partially stacked.
A close-up of several folded paper pieces arranged in a spiral, showcasing a mix of brown and reddish tones on a black background.
A series of abstract, curved metal shapes arranged in a zigzag pattern, showcasing a gradient of muted colors from gray to bronze against a dark background.

The engineering recalls the ingenuity of Benjamin Elbel, Ed Hutchins, and Hedi Kyle, and Within Every Room exemplifies what happens when “material meets metaphor” in the hands and mind of an original book artist. The phrase comes from Richard Minsky, founder of the Center for Book Arts in New York, whose path Maker seems to be following and extending in Seattle, Washington. In 2017, she initiated (and still runs) the online program “areyoubookenough“, a bookbinding challenge to artists to create works within a month that respond to the month’s theme. In the same year, she founded Editions Studio, a community for book artists run by book artists. All that activity — along with Within Every Room and the next work — suggests that this artist is not only a maker but a builder.

The House that Book Built (2018)

Artistic representation of a book shaped like a house, showing the spine and opened pages.

The House that Book Built (2018)
Sarah Maker
Case-bound hard cover, felt and paper over boards, seven stub-sewn gatherings of folios of cotton printmaking paper, six loose twice-folded gatherings of folios of Cave(?) paper inserted between the stub-sewn gatherings. H85 x W105 x D58 mm. [220] pages in stub-sewn gatherings; [96] pages in loose gatherings Unique. Acquired from Ink and Awl, Seattle, US, 10 December 2025.
Photos: Books On Books Collection. Displayed with permission of the artist.

In another connection to Richard Minsky, all of the paper and boards for The House that Book Built were salvaged from recycling at the Center for Book Arts in New York City. Like the book artists’ studios and homes I have seen, The House that Book Built is stuffed to the rafters with its core material. Of course, even the roof and exterior walls enter into the spirit. It would not be the same artwork with a flat roof of asphalt tiles and plexiglas siding.

A small, creative book with a unique shape, featuring a black and gray cover and several blank pages, set against a dark background.

The color of the laid-in folios reminds me of Your House (2006) by Olafur Eliasson, which in turn reminds me how inadequate a simple side-by-side exhibition of the two works would be. Both demand the viewer’s touch.

A closed, blank book with multiple pages, viewed from the side, resting on a dark background.

Below, the laid-in folios have been removed, letting the house exhale and give more visual room to the stud-sewn gatherings of cotton printmaking paper. If viewers were allowed do this in an exhibition, they would be appreciating the contrast between the rough cotton paper and the smoother book paper just removed as well as appreciating how the house front now takes on a semblance to a Gothic window without the stained glass.

A small, book-like object with a dark cover resembling a house, featuring pages that are tightly stacked.

Your House and The House that Book Built both offer the pleasure of nosing through another’s house. Your House invites the viewer to a page-by-page meditation of laser-cut interior space while doing so. Maker’s snug abode offers the Quaker-like contemplation of the homespun that has been spun with tools made by the spinner.

A small, beige cardboard box with an angled interior, placed on a wooden surface next to several circular paper cutouts and a pointed crafting tool.

Punch cradle made specifically to punch the sewing stations for The House that Book Built.
Photo: Courtesy of the artist.

Further Reading

“Architecture“. 12 November 2018. Books On Books Collection.

“Celebrating the 250th Anniversary of Steingruber’s Architectural Alphabet“. 1 January 2023. Books On Books Collection.

“Olafur Eliasson“. 17 May 2021. Books On Books Collection.

Books On Books Collection – Kara Walker

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Freedom: A fable: A curious interpretation of the wit of a negress in troubled times: with illustrations (1997)

Solid maroon hardcover book lying flat on a wooden surface.
A close-up view of the spine of a thick, red-covered book with embossed lettering.
An open book page featuring the title 'Freedom' by Kara Elizabeth Walker, with the subtitle 'A Curious Interpretation of the Wit of a Negress in Troubled Times' and presented by The Peter Norton Family. The design includes elegant typography with borders.

Freedom: A fable: A curious interpretation of the wit of a negress in troubled times: with illustrations (1997)
Kara Walker
Casebound, leather over boards, with plain doublures. H238 x W210 x D20 mm. [28] pages. Edition of 4000, published by the Peter Norton Christmas Project. Acquired from Los Angeles Modern Auction, 3 September 2025.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.

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).

A three-dimensional paper sculpture depicting a scene with two figures, one in a dark outfit and the other in a light color, interacting amidst stylized trees.
A three-dimensional paper sculpture titled 'Cabin' from 2009, featuring a red figure and various shaped black panels.

Source: Kara Walker, “Riots and Outrages”, The Georgia Review , Spring 2010, 64:1, pp. 59-68. Images courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins and Company, New York.

Freedom goes beyond an illustration of text. Its offset lithographs and five laser-cut pop-up silhouettes on wove paper extend and complicate the fable in the self-reflexive manner often found in artists’ books.

An open book page featuring the title 'Freedom: A Fable' by Kara Walker, along with publication details and a silhouette illustration of a ship.
An open book with blank pages featuring a small silhouette of a ship in the center.
Text page featuring the phrase 'The future vision of a soon-to-be emancipated 19th century Negress.'

First and last image of the book: the “Freedom” ship; opening line of the book.

An open book displaying text on a dark background, discussing themes of identity, race, and personal struggle, with a focus on a character's reflections about her brown skin and the societal implications of race.

The book’s title taunts the reader, artist, and narrator all at once (both the narrative and freedom are fables). Likewise, the black-on-white cutouts and lithographs trip up every party’s sensibilities, racial prehensions, and cultural memories. The opening display may evoke Gone with the Wind, but the heroine is the Negress. The narrator and artist matter-of-factly elevate the sexualization of “N____” to bisexual, scatological Creator/Mistress status. The abbreviated name, as if in a 19th-century tale of erotica, evokes denigrating of the “N” word. Designed to make the viewer tilt the book every which way to see what can be (and is meant to be) seen, the pop-ups evoke a feeling of prurience. In the final spreads, Walker and David Eisen, the collaborating paper engineer, use a pull tab to involve that prurience in a procreative delivery.

A pop-up book illustration featuring a winding path leading to a house, surrounded by dark silhouettes of trees and clouds.
A black paper cutout scene depicting a winding road leading to a house, surrounded by silhouettes of trees.
A paper cut-out scene depicting a winding road leading to a house, surrounded by silhouetted trees and hills.
A paper cutout scene depicting a silhouetted figure lying beneath a palm tree, holding a flower, with a minimalist landscape featuring a sun and distant trees.
A pop-up book illustration featuring a silhouette of a person lying under a palm tree, with the text 'Thinking her deed a deep meditation' visible in the background.
A silhouette of a person relaxing under a palm tree while holding a flower, with distant palm trees in the background.
A book open to a page featuring intricate black silhouette cutouts of figures, depicting a woman with a pail and a child, alongside text that highlights themes of identity and social dynamics.
An open book with layered black cutouts creating a silhouette of figures and a ship against a white background, accompanied by text on the right page discussing themes of rebirth and mystery.
A book page displaying a shadowy silhouette of a child walking hand in hand with an adult figure, along with a narrative text discussing the group's contemplation of a troubling scenario.

The power of this artwork is that it merges the self-reflexivity of the artist’s book with a self-cannibalizing societal condition.

After the Deluge (2007)

Book cover of 'After the Deluge' by Kara Walker featuring a silhouette of a woman against a backdrop of flames.
An open book resting on a wooden surface, featuring a striking cover design with red and black colors. The front cover displays the title 'After the Deluge' by Kara Walker in a stylish font, with an abstract flame-like pattern.

After the Deluge (2007)
Kara Walker
Casebound, illustrated paper over boards, black doublures. H270 x W225 mm. 120 pages. Acquired from Lacey Books, 26 August 2025.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.

The immediate spur to After the Deluge (2007) and its associated exhibition was the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. The book is not a straightforward catalogue of the exhibition. Several works in the exhibition are not included; in fact, an entire wall is missing, and juxtapositions in the exhibition differ from those in the book. It is one of those books that goes beyond its proximate cause and differs from the exhibition that occasioned it.

Walker labels it a visual essay. While its blending of original work and appropriations with collage nudges it toward being an artist’s book, its structural principle is uncertain. Even the Table of Contents is puzzling. Preceded by a single-page black bleed, “Murky” begins with Walker’s brief introduction on page 7. The last page of that text concludes, however, on page 9, which is assigned to the visuals of pages 9 to 107. Perhaps 9 is a typo and should be 10. Whatever the case there, the individual labels in the Table of Contents are not given specific page references, and it is not always easy to match up the visuals with the labels.

A visual essay by Kara Walker featuring a page with a sculpture on the left and text on the right, including a list of topics such as 'Deep-Rooted Traditions' and 'The Whiteness of the Wall.'

Male Power Figure; Table of Contents.

Introduction; AP Images/Bill Haber.

The brief introduction sets out the driving analogy clearly enough though. Perhaps, when we cannot pin down the organization at every point, we have to fall back on the analogy of a murky muck:

Racist pathology is the Muck, aforementioned. In this book’s analogy, murky, toxic waters become the amniotic fluid of a potentially new and difficult birth, flushing out of a coherent and stubborn body long-held fears and suspicions.

Among the book’s other signals are the placement and handling of full-page bleeds. Contrasts of bleeds of black ink with white pages often serve to underscore juxtapositions of white western art with African artifacts and Walker’s works. Above, the single-page bleed of black preceding the Table of Contents presents us with Nkisi, a large African male power figure. In the exhibition, it loomed under a glass cover for viewing in the round. As can be seen above, and underscoring the difference between book and exhibition, it is a reduced figure, although Nkisi returns as a larger presence toward the end of the book.

The first double-page bleed is one in full color and does seem to match up with the label “Deep-Rooted Traditions” in the Table of Contents. It presents JMW Turner’s 1840 Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming On). In the following double-page spread, Walker’s 1996 Untitled, a cut-out silhouette and pastel on a white background, is crowded to the right and surrounded by a full-bleed margin of black. Its pastel double-stack steamboat spews fire in the background, perhaps frightening a black silhouetted horse into a fall in the foreground. Whatever the cause, the black silhouetted girl with an upraised cudgel becomes a visualization of the expression “beating a dead horse”. In Walker’s typical perverse irony, it’s a 19th-century white painter’s condemnation of slavery followed by a 20th-century Black artist’s black cutouts, shoved off center and shoving us to conclude that slavery is a dead horse she is beating. Deep-rooted traditions, indeed.

An open book displaying two paintings; the left page features a stormy sea with ships battling high waves, while the right page showcases a fiery sunset over turbulent waters.
A silhouette of a child with a whip confronting a rearing horse, set against a softly colored background featuring a steamboat and clouds.

But slavery is not a dead horse. Its carcass has mutated into the historical, cultural, and personal condition that Walker calls “the Muck” and amniotic fluid in her introduction. The Muck and fluid juxtapose works from Walker’s American Primitives series and Middle Passages series with selections from the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts. The full-bleeds of black on single pages and double-page spreads punctuate this maelstrom of art that includes white American primitives such as JW Barber (1798-1885), John Carlin (1813-91), WP Chappel (1800-80); the European-influenced JS Copley (1738-1815), Winslow Homer (1836-1910), and Joshua Shaw (1777-1860); the French silhouettist Auguste Edouart (1789-1861); and earlier artists such as Jean Audran (French, 1667-1756), RN Zeeman (Dutch, 1623-63), and Pieter Nolpe (Dutch, 1614-53).

The Table of Contents’ label “Middle Passages” clearly refers to the images on pages 43 to 49 and matches up with Walker’s five Middle Passages works in the upper left of the exhibition wall below. In the exhibition, however, the images proceed in an order different from that in the book.

A gallery wall displaying a variety of framed artworks, including sketches and paintings, with a focus on maritime themes.

The exhibition wall matching up with pages 43-49 (“Middle Passages”) in the book.

The order of images in pages 43-49 differing from their order on the exhibition wall, the last two of five Middle Passages works now coming after the Homer.

Also, later on, the book uses enlarged details from three of the works on this wall: RN Zeeman’s Water from his series Four Elements (ca. 1651-52), Pieter Nolpe’s The Bursting of St. Anthony’s Dike, 5 March 1651, and Winslow Homer’s The Gulf Stream (1899). Zeeman’s and Nolpe’s works are only represented by enlargements in the book, but this is not just a case of trimming to fit the book. Both are displayed across double-page spreads. Also, a full image of Homer’s The Gulf Stream appears in a double-page spread between the pages displaying three then two of Walker’s Middle Passages works. Moreover, an enlarged detail from The Gulf Stream also appears toward the end of the book. Clearly, the change of order and handling of enlargements are intentional and thematic, not simply forced by the format.

Illustration of a stormy sea with large waves and a damaged ship amidst the turmoil, featured in an open book.
An open book displaying an illustration of a waterfall and rocky landscape, featuring detailed shading and textures.
A man reclining in a small boat, with his torso exposed, surrounded by turbulent ocean waves, depicted in an expressive painting style.

Details from Nolpe’s The Bursting of St. Anthony’s Dike, 5 March 1651; from Zeeman’s Water; and from Homer’s The Gulf Stream used later in the book.

Walker’s use of the typewritten index cards from her American Primitives series may shed light on the labels in the Table of Contents that seem difficult to align with the images in their order in the book. On the dustjacket, Walker writes:

I brought together the art in this book (and the exhibition that preceded it) thinking like a draughtsman, perhaps absurdly so, as even the typewritten texts are from an ongoing series of text pieces I think of as drawings.

An open book displaying two pages of text written in a handwritten style on lined paper, discussing themes of personality and memory.

If Walker thinks of the American Primitives index cards “as drawings”, might we ought not consider the centered labels without pagination in the Table of Contents as textual drawing, too? Stacked as they are, they certainly echo the totemic Nkisi on the facing page. In Walker’s mind, labels such as “The Failure of Containment”, “Inundation”, “Going Under”, “Darkness”, and “Black” could also be strokes of charcoal, ink, or paint as evocative of Hurricane Katrina or any natural disaster such as those used by the genre painters. The power of After the Deluge lies in its collage of the commonplaces of such disasters with the silhouetted savagery and perversity of our racist pathology. After the Deluge presents that muck as the commonplace landscape (or Lands Cave) that is the US.

An open book showing a double-page illustration featuring silhouetted figures of a boy and a girl under a branch. The background has a textured, light blue and gray color scheme.

Kara Walker’s Lands Cave from the series American Primitives (2001), pairing silhouettes of a sailor-hatted, thumbsucking white boy with a mutilated Black woman about to give birth.

If it is not easy to match up all of the images with the labels in the Table of Contents, the final three double-page spreads align unmistakably with “Portents”: a single white page facing a single black page with Nkisi looming larger now than at the start, a double-page spread of white with Walker’s Burn (1998), a silhouette image of a pig-tailed girl immolating herself as a column of smoke rises in the shape of a Black female, and then the double-page spread of black that concludes these scenes and the entire book.

An open book displaying a page with a large, intricate statue surrounded by various elements, set against a dark background.
An open book page featuring a silhouette of a girl surrounded by flames and smoke, illustrating a dynamic scene.
Open book with blank black pages on a wooden surface.

Bureau of Refugees (2008)

Cover of the book 'Kara Walker: Bureau of Refugees' featuring a silhouette of a woman holding a head, set against a geometric background in shades of brown, black, and gray.

Bureau of Refugees (2008)
Kara Walker
Casebound paperback, sewn and glued. H240 x W215 mm. 120 pages. Acquired from Judd Books, 3 March 2024.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.

To judge from images of the exhibition at Sikkema Jenkins & Co., 20 October – 21 November 2007, in New York, Bureau of Refugees (2008) does go beyond an aim at replicating that experience. But it barely exploits or challenges the codex form — less than do After the Deluge and Freedom, respectively.

A contemporary art gallery featuring abstract paintings on white walls. The artworks include geometric designs with dark tones and shapes, showcasing a variety of artistic styles.

Installation view: Bureau of Refugees
New work, Kara Walker, Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York, NY, 2007
Photo: Luciano Fileti, courtesy of Sikkema Malloy Jenkins.

The exhibition was divided between primarily figurative works and others entirely text-based. Large-scale figurative works like Authenticating the Artifact and The Treasure Hunters, left and right above, dominated one room. The show took its name, however, from a series of smaller figurative works, which in turn took its name from its source: The Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands that operated from 1865 to 1872. Groupings of these smaller scale works occupied their own walls. In the Bureau’s Records, “Miscellaneous Papers” National Archives M809 Roll 23, Walker found a list of “Riots and Outrages”, and from this list, she incorporated into the titles of the figurative works the descriptions of the events and acts inspiring the images.

A collection of framed artworks arranged on a white wall, featuring contrasting silhouettes and abstract designs in dark and muted colors.

Grouping of the figurative works from the series Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands- Records, “Miscellaneous Papers” National Archives M809 Roll 23
New work, Kara Walker, Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York, NY, 2007
Photo: Luciano Fileti, courtesy of Sikkema Malloy Jenkins.
Titles of the five works on the left, Committed an outrage and July 16 Black Girl Beaten and Threatened to kill her and her sister if they did not leave the county and Committed an outrage on a freedwoman and Mr. Alexander, colored preacher brutally beaten and forced to leave.

A collection of framed silhouette artworks displayed on a white wall, featuring various figures including a bride, a mermaid, and dynamic scenes in black and white.

Another grouping of the figurative works from Bureau of Refugees series
New work, Kara Walker, Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York, NY, 2007
Photo: Luciano Fileti, courtesy of Sikkema Malloy Jenkins.
Titles of the four larger works, clockwise from the top, Freedman and Freedwoman thrown into a well in Jefferson Co. and A gang of ruffians and Bradley killed freedwoman with an axe and Between Danville + Somerville.

The second series in the show was the 52-panel Search for ideas supporting the Black Man as a work of Modern Art/Contemporary Painting. A death without end: an appreciation of the Creative Spirit of Lynch Mobs. Its title comes from the search string that Walker entered into Google to generate content for a series of panels handwritten in Sumi-e ink. Each panel (measuring 22.5 by 28.5 inches) compiles phrases that Walker culled from the search string’s results.

A gallery wall displaying multiple framed sheets of paper with handwritten text, featuring various thoughts and reflections.

Installation view of the textual series: Search for ideas supporting the Black Man as a work of Modern Art / Contemporary Painting; a death without end, and an appreciation of the Creative Spirit of Lynch Mobs
New work, Kara Walker, Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York, NY, 2007
Photo: Luciano Fileti, courtesy of Sikkema Malloy Jenkins.

The panel’s handwritten text delivers a rushing stream of consciousness, including misspellings, incomplete and ungrammatical sentences, half-scrawled letters and jumps in topic — much as occurs with the American Primitives text pieces in After the Deluge. As Merrily Kerr’s review puts it:

Search for ideas is a cacophonous brew of observations and perspectives. Here Walker explores the potential analogy between racist attitudes in America and those perpetuated by Americans overseas in texts that refer to Saddam Hussein as a “porch monkey” or Arabs as “sand niggers.” Under the rubric of aggressor and complicit victim, the text details rapes and torture, proffers that black soldiers are willing Klansmen, and asks, in the face of global jihad, “how can colored folks get on the winning side w/o giving up their hard-won right to jeans that fit …” Because the fifty-four [sic] parts are hung cheek by jowl and there is no obvious sequencing, it is unclear whether one is supposed to read them left to right, or top to bottom.

Where the exhibition separated the figurative from the textual, the book weaves them together. Three double foldouts are the closest the book comes to exploiting the codex form. The first presents two Search for ideas panels folded inwards and, when unfolded, a quadriptych of text panels. The second likewise consists of two text panels folded inwards, but when unfolded, they reveal a double-page image of the exhibition’s figurative 5-foot by 7-foot Authenticating the Artifact (2007) alongside one of the Search panels. Like the first, the third double foldout unfolds to present a quadriptych of text panels.

A page featuring handwritten text addressing themes of identity, race, and social commentary, with phrases discussing global issues and cultural perceptions.

First double foldout still folded.

A printed pamphlet with handwritten text on multiple pages discussing themes of justice, identity, and history, featuring phrases about race and societal issues.

First double foldout unfolded.

An open book featuring a stylized silhouette of a woman holding a ball, surrounded by geometric patterns in dark tones. The opposite page contains handwritten text discussing themes of motherhood and identity.

Second double foldout unfolded.

The Search panels horrify with their words while the Bureau images horrify with their figures. Not all of the figurative works focus on America’s Reconstruction past. Some arise in the post-9/11 world and, like the Search series, find their horrors in the Sudan, the Congo, and Iraq. Woven together in the book, the two series underscore Walker’s perception of, in her words,

the continuity of conflict, the creation of racist narratives, or nationalist narratives, or whatever narratives people use to construct a group identity and to keep themselves whole–such activity has a darker side to it, since it allows people to lash out at whoever’s not in the group.

When viewing Kara Walker’s art, I am reminded of the refrain from one of Carly Simon’s songs: “You’re so vain, you probably think this song is about you, don’t you?”. It’s a double-edged irony. The addressee is damned if he doesn’t think it’s about him and damned if he does.

Walker’s is a multi-edged irony that cuts in many directions. Walker inhabits or projects a persona who is masochist and sadist, subject and object, self-centered and self-loathing, other-obsessed and other-fearing, Slave and Mistress. As a white viewer, collector, and writer about these works of book art, am I not entangled and complicit, too, however I respond to it? Caught out in shame and privilege, am I so vain that I think this art is about me? Damned if I don’t, damned if I do. Walker’s is the art of portraying a social madness. All parties — artist and viewer — are stuck in the muck of After the Deluge (2007), the muck of racist pathology. The terrible power of Walker’s art keeps our eyes fixed on it. Where either party can find solace is uncertain.

Further Reading

“Tia Blassingame“. 17 August 2020. Books On Books Collection.

“Emory Douglas“. 9 January 2026. Books On Books Collection.

“Sarah Matthews“. 15 February 2025.Books On Books Collection.

“Arial Robinson“. 15 May 2023. Books On Books Collection.

“Ruth E. Rogers“. 17 November 2025.Books On Books Collection.

“Clarissa Sligh“. 2 September 2020. Books On Books Collection.

“Carrie Mae Weems“. 14 February 2025. Books On Books Collection.

Evenhaugen, Anne. 3 September 2012. “Artists’ Books at AA/PG: Kara Walker’s Pop-up“. Unbound. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Library.

Gabor, Nora. 18 February 2021. “Black History and Experiences through Book Arts“. The Full Text: News about library resources and services. Chicago, IL: DePaul University. Accessed 22 January 2024.

Gleek, Charlie. “Centuries of Black Artists’ Books“, presented at “Black Bibliographia: Print/Culture/Art” conference at the Center for Material Culture Studies, University of Delaware, 27 April 2019, pp. 7-8. Accessed 20 July 2020.

Kerr, Merrily. Jan/Feb 2008. “Kara Walker at Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York“. Art on Paper. 12:3, 85-86.

Walker, Kara Elizabeth et al. 2003. Kara Walker : Narratives of a Negress. Edited by Ian Berry, Darby English, Vivian Patterson and Mark Rienhardt. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. This exhibition-based volume is closest to the Bureau of Refugees‘ near-artist’s-book status. Walker’s writings on 3×5 index cards play the same role that the 54 panels of Search for ideas play in Bureau of Refugees. The landscape book’s monumentality evokes the scale of installations such as Virginia’s Lynch Mob (1998) and For the Benefit of All the Races of Mankind (Mos’ Specially the Master One, Boss. An Exhibition of Artifacts, Remnants, and Effluvia EXCAVATED from the Black Heart of a Negress VIII (2002) that appeared in the exhibitions organized by The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College and the Williams College Museum of Art in 2003.

Walker, Kara Elizabeth et al. 2007. Kara Walker : My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love. Minneapolis: Walker Art Center.

Walker, Kara. 2010.”Riots and Outrages“. The Georgia Review. 64:1, 59-68.

Walker, Kara Elizabeth et al. 2016. The Ecstasy of St. Kara. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art.

Walker, Kara Elizabeth et al. 2019. Kara Walker : Fons Americanus. Ed. by Clara Kim. London: Tate.


Books On Books Collection – Sunkyung Cho

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This is not a stone (2017)

This is not a stone (2017)
Sunkyung Cho
Exposed spine binding with cross weave filament tape, board-covered. 170 x 170 mm. Acquired from SpazioB**K, 6 April 2025.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.

Just as you think this will be another two-dimensional riff on René Magritte’s The Treachery of Images (aka Ceci n’est pas une pipe), the Chinese fold title page turns to reveal a cutout well with a stone at the bottom.

With the turn of the next two pages, it appears we are in for a series of metaphors and riddles, and something more than a three-dimensional riff on the anti-metaphor and the gap between words (symbols) and objects. First, this not-a-stone is “an apple,” but then turn the next page, and the not-a-stone is also “a sun flower”. Is there some law of commutation that applies: If not-a-stone = apple, and not-a-stone = sun flower, therefore, apple = sun flower? Because it is round, because it is vegetal?

Over the next turns, we have “the Sun” and “the earth”, then “a crystal” and “a flake of snow in the Himalyas”, then “a beetle” and “a scorpion”, and on the pairs go, each separated with the spread “This is not a stone”. All along, while being urged to deny the evidence of reality, we are asked to accept the evidence of metaphor and imagination. Naturally our inbred pattern-seeking and ludic behaviors kick in, as if this were a game of “Twenty Questions”. But the pairs run the gamut of Animal, Vegetable, Mineral and beyond.

By the last page, it is as if we are playing “Twenty Questions” with the stone itself. That is, if the “I” is the stone saying, “and this will be I”. Is the stone uttering a deliberate a-grammatical union of subject (I) and object (me)? Is it a verbal visual pun (I-eye) evoking Emersonian Transcendentalism? Perhaps this stone that says “This is not a stone” is a Cretan philosopher’s stone, and round and round we will go.

On the artist’s website (www.somebooks.kr), the product page displays this Korean expression and its translation: 하나의 돌은 돌이자 다른 모든 것이다 [“One stone is a stone and everything else”]. It does not appear anywhere in the book, so perhaps it is unfair to invoke it as confirmation of any reading of This is not a stone. On the other hand, if you are going to play “Twenty Questions” with a Cretan philosopher’s stone, cheating may be your best option.

The other works by Sunkyung Cho in the collection are wordless, except for their titles, and lean more toward children’s books than This is not a stone. Like so many artists’ books, they occupy that crossover zone discussed by Sandra Beckett, Johanna Drucker, and Carol Scott (see Further Reading).

In the beginning (2012)

In the beginning (2012)
Sunkyung Cho
Softcover, sewn, exposed spine binding with cross weave filament tape. H260 x W150 mm. [36] pages. Unknown edition, of which this is #146. Acquired from SpazioB**K, 6 April 2025. Photos: Books On Books Collection.

From the artist’s website: 빛 이전의 태초, 사회화되기 이전의 인간에 대해 생각하는 책. [“In the beginning before light, a book that thinks about people before they became socialistic.”]

A translation that resonates more with the paper, structure, and images might be “A book contemplating the primordial state of the human before light and socialization.” Such a book would, of course, not have the normalized appearance we enlightened and socialized humans expect. Hence the black oddly shaped covers and leaves across which the gray, almost headless creature crawls on all fours and begins to sprout antlers or branches.

When other creatures enter the primordial state, they are oriented to it differently, which our branch-headed forebearer notices and tries to assume but fails.

Having failed, our precursor tries to merge with one of the other creatures, but this elephant-like being will have none of him and flings the proto-human off.

Whereupon, branch-head seeks affiliation with the vegetable kingdom and climbs toward the top.

Having reached the top, our forebearer confronts and succumbs to the source of light and, having fallen and lost the semblance of antlers or branches (or both), yearns with arms outstretched for what once was.

The book’s unusual shape recalls Helmut Löhr’s Visual Poetry (1987), Kevin Osborn’s Tropos (1988), and Philip Zimmermann’s High Tension (1993), where likewise the shape contributes to meaning.

The Blue Bird (2011)

The Blue Bird (2011)
Sunkyung Cho
Exposed spine binding with cross weave filament tape, board-covered. 200 x 200 mm. [40] not including 2 illustrated fly leaves. Acquired from SpazioB**K, 6 April 2025.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.

The Blue Bird leans much more toward the children’s book end of the crossover spectrum than in the beginning. The website’s description of it — “Blue Bird and Boar’s story of how to be a child and parent” — underscores all of the physical evidence except for the delicate nature of the paper. It is hard to imagine a copy surviving childhood use. But that might well be in keeping with the tender mix of joy and sadness in the tale.

The simplicity and evocative sophistication of composition and line eliminate the need for any words to carry the narrative. In the sequence below, Boar’s protective parental handling of the egg against wind and wave ends in predictable exhaustion and birth.

The remainder of the book in which Boar introduces Blue Bird to the world of foraging, running, jumping, sky- and star-gazing is landbound. Boar climbs trees to let Blue Bird sleep there, but when returns to the ground to sleep, Blue Bird follows, preferring to nestle against Boar under the stars.

Boar’s continued efforts to teach Blue Bird about flight lead to a separation that some parents may not be ready to explain to a child.

Kiss (2015)

Kiss (2015)
Sunkyung Cho
Board-covered books, bound face-to-face, exposed spine binding with cross weave filament tape. H200 x W400 mm (open); W800 (open). [16] Chinese fold folios. Acquired from Somebooks, 6 April 2025.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.

Kiss is far more whimsical. It works somewhat like a harlequinade, allowing multiple juxtapositions of images. The structure by which it does this is complex enough and the juxtapositions, subtle enough, that adult assistance is likely required. The book is actually two books joined at edges of their back covers, one opening to the left and the other, to the right.

The precision of the registration between the facing books will generate delight as a gorilla kisses a mouse. The mouse kisses a bird. The bird, a crocodile. The crocodile, a gorilla or octopus. The octopus, a mouse or frog. And so on with sharks, snakes, and others.

Among the effective subtleties that more experienced observers will note are Cho’s handling of bleeds and the facing sets of double-page spreads. The large expanses of white behind each of any two smaller figures facing each other from single pages contribute to a non-threatening delicate kiss. The larger, more threatening creatures extend across their double-page spreads and even bleed off their pages. When they meet, or when one of them meets a smaller figure, there is an edge. It may be an edge of curiosity on one side or the other or both, but it is likely also one of threat and unease.

Another subtlety is the handling of the human figure. It occurs in the recto book. Like the smaller figures, it occupies a single page with a page of white behind it. It is expressionless, regardless of what it faces whether fish or lion. Oddly, the fish seems to be curious, and the lion, reserved.

Here is another subtlety that Cho raises. The last figure in the recto book is a stone, large enough to extend over its double-page spread. No doubt it is an anthropomorphizing tendency to read something (puzzlement, curiosity, annoyance, etc.) into the silhouette of each creature confronting the stone. But it is only the stone and human that exude indifference.

For an interesting structural, line and color comparison with another osculatory work, see Antonio Ferrara’s Ventiquattromila baci (Twenty four thousand kisses) (2021).

Further Reading

“Philip Zimmermann“. Books On Books Collection.

Beckett Sandra L. 2013. Crossover Picturebooks : A Genre for All Ages. London: Routledge.

Golden Pinwheel. 23 July 2020. “Cho Sunkyunk, the many faces of illustration“. Golden Pinwheel.

Haughton, Chris. 13 September 2011. “5 1/2 months on Sunkyung’s sofa“. chrishaughton.com.

Mutty. 12 May 2020. “Sunkyung Cho – Living Objects“. Art Tribune.

Nikolajeva, Maria, and Carole Scott. 2007. How picturebooks work. New York: Routledge Taylor & Francis Group.

Outlaw, Christopher. 17 April 2017. “FILBo 2017“. The Bogotá Post. Accessed 30 October 2011.

Perkins, Stephen. 7 March 2023. “Antonio Ferrara, Ventiquattromila baci (Twenty four thousand kisses), Settenove edizioni, Cagli, Italy, 2021.” Accordion Publications.

Scott, Carole. 2014. “Artists’ books, Altered books, and Picturebooks”. In: B. Kümmerling‐Meibauer, ed., Picturebooks: Representation and Narration. London, New York: Routledge.

Books On Books Collection – Anne Covell

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Anne Covell bridges the domains of book art and the book arts. The Record offers a skillfully constructed artist’s book that documents one of the first Trump Regime’s acts of depredation against history and truth. Historical Binding embodies her respect for the history of one of the book arts’ loveliest of crafts: stitching.

The Record (2017)

The Record (2017)
Anne Covell
Letterpress printed accordion on Masa paper with sumi wash and hand brayering. Housed in a 4-flap French paper enclosure with button and string ties. Enclosure: H165 x W110 x D6 mm. Book: H164 x W108 x D3 mm (closed); H327 x W1080 mm (open). 6.5 x 4.25 x .25 inches (closed), 13 x 42.5 x .25 inches (open) [36] panels. Edition of 60, of which this is #1. Acquired from the artist, 10 September 2025.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.

On January 20th, 2017, Donald J. Trump was sworn in as the 45th president of the United States. That same day, the official White House website (whitehouse.gov) began the digital transition to archive and replace Obama’s policies with those of the new administration. Immediately, people began to notice that key issues such as health care, education, and immigration were nowhere to be found. Keyword searches for terms such as “climate change,” “LGBT,” and “civil rights” all returned 404 errors. Even more conspicuously, the Spanish-language version and the disabled-accessible version of the site were no longer available. Internet Archive, a non-profit digital library that has been archiving webpages since 1996, captured 167 snapshots of whitehouse.gov that day. This book records the last snapshots taken of Obama’s policies before they came down, the 404 errors that followed, as well as the Internet Archive timestamps for when the information was last available and when it disappeared. (Anne Covell).

The fold-downs enact the digital shredding of the previous administration’s policies referencing existing laws that the Trump Regime opposed.

In response to the 6 January 2021 insurrection, Russell Maret and Sarah Moody published Three Constitutions, whose redactions and translations offer a view of the interim state of affairs reflecting “the cynical, ineffectual state of political discourse in the United States”. On the eve of the 25oth anniversary of the founding of the USA, will there be another work such as Covell’s or Maret and Moody’s to represent the second Trump Regime’s violation and shredding of law, judicial orders, and constitutional rights?

Historical Binding: Sewing Sampler (2025)

Historical Binding: Sewing Sampler (2025)
Anne Covell
Clamshell box. Open-spine binding with cloth-covered boards and plain doublures. Box: H330 x W120 x D45 mm. Book: H305 x W100 x D25 mm. [288] pages. Made to order. Acquired from the artist 10 September 2025.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.

Spine sewing is one of the hidden book arts as it is most often covered by a case binding of paper, cloth, or leather (real or faux). Covell’s Historical Binding: Sewing Sampler:

is designed for bookbinders and book enthusiasts as a personal reference and/or for teachers/historians with a focus in book history and book conservation. This is a large folio size blank book featuring varied sewing techniques that can also be used as a ledger or unique journal or sketchbook. It includes one hardcover sampler book with the option to be housed in a custom clamshell box covered in natural linen bookcloth. The sampler includes 16 different sewing methods both sewn on supports (hemp cord, leather and taw, linen and cotton tapes, and Ramieband) and sewn without supports. The sampler highlights the historical sewing styles inherent to their structure and includes title descriptions that correspond to each sewing station. The styles progress chronologically across the spine from the earliest forms of multi-section sewing to more modern adaptations and sewing variants. (Anne Covell)

Alongside Strange Papers: A Collection of the World’s Rarest Handmade Papers (1987) by Fred Siegenthaler, Woven and Interlocking Book Structures (2002) by Claire Van Vliet and Elizabeth Steiner, and The Art of the Fold: How to Make Innovative Books and Paper Structures (2018) by Hedi Kyle and Ulla Warchol, Covell’s volume expands a sweet suite of reminders of the book arts underpinning book art.

Further Reading

Commodore, Debbi. 2018-19. Revealing Invisible Patterns : A Binding Sampler. Tacoma, Wash.: [Debbi Commodore?].

Lavadour, Roberta. 2019. Binding Sampler. [Pendelton, Oregon]: [Mission Creek Press].

Maret, Russell, and Sarah Moody. 2021. Three Constitutions. New York: Russell Maret.

Smith, Keith A. 2002. Non-Adhesive Binding. 3d edition. Rochester, N.Y.: Keith A. Smith Books.

VanderSchans, Arielle. 20 October 2019. “Models of Bookbinding Techniques: Sewing Structures“. Arielle’s Bindery.

Books On Books Collection – Werner Pfeiffer

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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).

Further Reading and Viewing

“Hedi Kyle’s The Art of the Fold: How to Make Innovative Books and Paper Structures (2018)“. 24 September 2018. Bookmarking Book Art.

“Movables Now and Then“. 31 August 2024. Bookmarking Book Art.

“Lorenzo Perrone“. 8 September 2019. Books On Books Collection.

“Werner Pfeiffer and Anselm Kiefer“. 17 January 2015. Bookmarking Book Art.

“Kevin M. Steele“. 18 July 2023. Books On Books Collection.

“A ‘white book report’ on ‘The White Heat’ at MARC STRAUS“. 5 June 2017. Bookmarking Book Art.

“drawn, cut & layered: The Art of Werner Pfeiffer”
6 February to 3 May 2015
Toledo Museum of Art

Books On Books Collection – Erica Van Horn (III)

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The hunt for Erica Van Horn’s Seven Lady Saintes has been long, but at last, in a glass case in Conway Hall at the Small Publishers Fair in London this year, there it was. Van Horn and Simon Cutts (co-founders of Coracle Press) have been a regular feature of the Small Publishers Fair since its first occurrence in 2002 at Royal Festival Hall.

Conway Hall, owned by the charity Conway Hall Ethical Society, first opened in 1929 and is named after Moncure Daniel Conway (1832-1907), an anti-slavery advocate and biographer of Thomas Paine. It has hosted the Fair since its second outing in 2003. In 2025, it had a cameo appearance in the spy drama series Slow Horses as the unlikely host for an ultra-right mayoral candidate’s campaign event. The setting provided the kind of sardonic humorous dig that Van Horn would appreciate (if she were a regular television viewer).

With stained-glass colors, Seven Lady Saintes splashes its own brand of sardonic humor across a stiff-card leporello produced in 1985 at the Women’s Studio Workshop Print Center in Rosendale, New York.

Seven Lady Saintes (1985)

Seven Lady Saintes (1985)
Erica Van Horn
Clear plastic-coated white-thread envelope, self-covered leporello, watercolor paper. Envelope: H270 x W215 mm. Leporello: H250 x W205 mm (closed), W3040 mm (open). 16 panels, including covers. Edition of 90, artist’s proof. Acquired from the artist 1 November 2025.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.

Van Horn uses a sophisticated child-like style of text and image to laugh slyly, wryly, and grimly at religion and patriarchy. Her summaries parody the descriptions in the handouts usually available in museums, convents, and churches or in the flood of hagiographies long on the market. The sophisticated-naivete of the drawing in Seven Lady Saintes appears in other works such as La ville aux dames (1983) and With or Without (2010). If the story of her plan for a series of four children’s books had turned out differently from the account in Scraps of an Aborted Collaboration (1994), we would have even more evidence of the influence of children’s books on many artists’ books that the Huberts propose in The Cutting Edge of Reading (1999).

Martha, patron sainte of cooks and housewives

Agatha, patron against fire and diseases of the breast

Fina, patron sainte of San Gemignano

Reparata, formerly patron sainte of Florence

Lucy, patron sainte of Syracuse and diseases of the eye

Ursula, patron sainte of teachers and young girls

Cecilia, patron sainte of music and musicians

Walking the Portes (2025)

Walking the Portes: Winters in Paris 2014-2019 (2025)
Simon Cutts and Erica Van Horn
Casebound, book cloth over boards, blind stamped and inked spine, photo pastedown in recess on front cover, plain doublures. H182 x W132 mm. 216 pages. Edition of 300. Acquired from Books about Art, 15 September 2025.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.

In the early 2000s, a series of hardbacks appeared called “Writer and the City”. John Banville covered Prague; Peter Carey, Sydney; Justin Cartwright, Oxford; Ruy Castro, Rio de Janeiro; David Leavitt, Florence; and Edmund White, Paris. White’s was the first, and it set the tone with its content and title: The Flâneur: A Stroll Through the Paradoxes of Paris. An enterprising paperback publisher might be enticed to reissue them and, allowing for a Parisian double-dip, to add Walking the Portes. Besides, I prefer Simon and Erica’s Paris to Edmund White’s, and Walking the Portes pairs better with Anne Moeglin-Delcroix’s Ambulo Ergo Sum (2015) anyway.

It is Simon’s plan to ride out to each of the entrances to Paris (the portes) and walk back to the apartment in the Marais. When it turns out that instead of twenty-one portes there are thirty-nine, Erica firmly responds accordingly:

In introducing Ambulo Ergo Sum, her extended essay on Hamish Fulton, Richard Long, and herman de vries, Moeglin-Delcroix writes:

The analysis of some artists’ books … should make it possible to show how the emphasis has been progressively placed no longer on landscape but on the search for the best means, differing according to the various artists, of rendering an experience in the strongest sense of the word: a lived experience of the world, a personal practice, that is to say, a deliberate way of being inthe world rather than before it. The walking body is the touchstone of this, because walking compels one to supersede the limits of a purely visual experience of nature to become the experience of the whole artist, with his body, in nature. (p. 6)

Whether Walking the Portes is an artists’ book or not, it does what Moeglin-Delcroix describes. It renders these artists’ lived experiences of Paris and their deliberate way of being in the world together.

Further Reading

“Erica Van Horn (I)“. 29 December 2020. Books On Books Collection.

“Erica Van Horn (II)“. 13 September 2025. Books On Books Collection.

Bates, Julie. 2023. “Erica Van Horn’s creative exercises“. Irish Studies Review, 31(1), 139–158. Interviewed Van Horn at the 2025 Small Publishers Fair, Conway Hall, London.

Bury, Stephen. 2015. Artists’ Books : The Book as a Work of Art 1963-2000. London: Bernard Quaritch Ltd. P. 111 shows a near life-size sleeved copy of Seven Lady Saintes, but mis-dates it as 1989.

Hubert, Renée Riese, and Judd David Hubert. 1999. The Cutting Edge of Reading : Artists’ Books. New York City: Granary Books. Pp. 207, 211-12.

Kuhl, Nancy. 2010. The Book Remembers Everything: The Work of Erica Van Horn. Clonmel: Coracle Press. Until the acquisition of Seven Lady Saintes, Nancy Kuhl’s The Book Remembers Everything (2010) was the only means in the Books On Books Collection by which to gain a sense of Van Horn’s more painterly bookworks such as La Ville aux dames (“second state”) (1983), a unique work that appeared in the 1986 Chicago exhibition “The Book Made Art“. Van Horn’s works are archived in the Beinecke Library at Yale University: Prints, Papers, Materials in the Digital Library, and the Simon Cutts Constructed Archive. Several, including Seven Lady Saintes, are viewable online at the Fleet Library Rhode Island School of Design. Accessed 27 November 2025.

Statue of Santa Reparata in the crypt in the Romanesque foundations of Santa Maria Maggiore, Florence. Photo: Books On Books Collection.

Books On Books Collection – Ana Paula Cordeiro

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Lightweight (2015)

Lightweight (2015)
Ana Paula Cordeiro
Custom storage box with passepartout on cover with title printed on translucent paper with colored diagram beneath and sculptural element inside top. Three-part construction Limp Vellum binding on dyed parchment. Box: H215 x W224 x D47v & D53r. Book: H190 x W215 x D18 mm [90] pages. 88 + 2 half pages for colophon. Edition of 21 sets, copy bound on request. Acquired from the artist, 27 August 2025.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.

Dating back to the 13th century, the limp vellum binding for books involves a parchment or other flexible covering material that is the sole component of the cover. No stiff boards. It attaches to the textblock usually by sewing and without adhesive. According to the American Institute for Conservation, it was not merely a temporary solution until a more luxurious one with boards and ornamentation could be commissioned. Its presence in collections, its variety of formats, and its superior protection of works proven in the aftermath of the 1966 flooding of Florence, all suggest that, for a time, it was deliberately chosen for joining the artistic with the functional.

Ana Paula Cordeiro’s Lightweight is an artist’s book that pays elaborate homage to this distinctive form of binding. It weaves together metaphor, structure, material, and content in extraordinary ways.

Begin with the container, which offers a multitude of metaphors. On top of the cloth-covered box, a rectangular window has been cut. To look down through this window is to begin peering into the past. Beneath the translucent sheet bearing the title, a print motif appears whose mingling layers suggest the water, paper, ink, and silt that had to be sifted to save a Renaissance legacy of manuscripts, incunabula, and books from the Florence flood of 1966.

Left: passe-partout (window) on box top. Right: recurrent print motif appearing later in the book.

That strata of links running from blue to rust to gold becomes a recurrent print motif in the book, suggesting abstractly another metaphor: that of a continuum with endpoints playing off one another. As soon as you pick up the Canapetta cloth-covered box, the title itself — Lightweight — sets in motion a fresh instance of this continuum metaphor. Floating above the recurrent print motif, the title contrasts with the weight in your hands. As if to underscore this diametric contrast, the corners of the top and bottom of the box sit flush at the ends of one diagonal but gap at the other, easing the lifting of the weighted top from the box.

Inside, other decorative features offer further dual functionality. The sculptural element that provides the top’s weight also serves as a protective mould inside for the book and mirrors its dominant and recurrent physical feature: the creased shape slanting in parallel to the title slip tacked to the cover. Cordeiro refers to the creased shape as an “angled beam”.

For her, the angled beam distills the essence of the limp vellum structure and “supports” the variety of contemplation she pours into it. The angled beam puts forward the limp vellum structure as a historical link from binding’s past to its present. It stands for the binding structure’s durability, again linking past to present. Its linearity stands in for that continuum. It prompts thoughts of other continua along which one thing becomes another such as the line between night and day (twilight), between light and shadow, between one season and another. It evokes the continua between extremities, between the ordinary and the extraordinary, between mental acuity and dementia, and between life and death.

Following Emily Dickinson’s injunction — “Tell all the truth but tell it slant” — Cordeiro plants other angles in Lightweight. The ribbon tape that lies under the book is stiff, not soft and flexible, and it twists once and folds twice into an angular tool for lifting up the book. The trim of the book’s top and bottom edges slants. Creased into the covers, end sheets, and text block of this limp form, the angled beam is a physical constant echoing the metaphor of a continuum whose endpoints contrast and balance with one another.

Altogether there are seven gatherings in Lightweight. The “prelims” gathering provides the historical context underlying Cordeiro’s homage. Note the artist’s wish expressed in the envoi to this artist’s book in our hands: “May its message be its medium, may its artistry embrace eternity”. Here, Cordeiro introduces that self-reflexivity we expect in the best of artists’ books.

After the prelims gathering, the other six gatherings are labeled. In addition to bearing the creased angled beam, all six carry an “on-end outline” of it (see below). The five that are numbered, lettered, and labeled introduce themes reflecting different responses that relate to the continuum motif.

The Part 1, Section R gathering has announced cryptically that color will merge with form. How will this happen? As you turn the page, the opening text suggests how — along a continuum: “Continuum (measurement), anything that goes through a gradual transition from one condition, to a different condition, without any abrupt changes”.

The spread lays out this definition in a peculiar manner that seems to contradict the definition. On the verso page, the definition seems to run abruptly up against the seam, which bumps the words “abrupt changes” to the next line, while the recto page presents a truncation of those words: “rupt changes”. Hold that puzzle for a moment. So how can color and form be on a continuum? And will they merge gradually or abruptly? On the next spread, Cordeiro answers with the Sanskrit word rupa, which represents “color” and “form” and from which the section draws its label “R”.

un extremo se conoce bien por otro [one extreme knows well its other]

So, the merger is etymological. But at the same time, another spectrum comes into play: the color spectrum and the blue and red at its opposite ends. On the spectrum, of course, one gradually becomes the other, enacting the expression “un extremo se conoce bien por otro” [one extreme knows well its other]. If this seems a stretch, the next double-page spread reassures us that “continuum” has additional linguistic as well as mathematical roots.

Before the reassurance, however, we come back to the puzzle of “rupt changes”. Again, on the verso page above, the definition of “continuum” runs pell mell into the crease. To solve the puzzle, we have to look more closely at the structure of the Section R gathering. It consists of three oblong folios folded in half. On the reverse side of the center folio (what would be pages 5 and 8 of this gathering if the pages were numbered), the definition of “continuum” has been printed so that the fold splits the word “abrupt” between its syllables: “Continuum (measurement), anything that goes through a gradual transition from one condition, to a different condition, without any a | brupt changes.” In effect, the layout draws attention to our perception of breaks in continua.

View of “pages 5 and 8” separated by a detailed view of the break in the word “abrupt”.

If Section R has not prompted the reader to propose questions about the structure of the book or this book in particular, the Part 2, Section Q gathering provides a series of oblique questions very much focused on that but also on metaphorical matters. Again, what happens structurally in the gathering and on the surface of its pages presents puzzles and hints at solutions.

The geometrical images associated with the first question (“Do they hold surface tension like a soap bubble?”) seem to float or progress across the double-page spread, breaking up to punctuate the question. Reminding us of opposites and abrupt changes, the angular yellow overlapping squares and triangles puncture the text’s round verbal soap bubble. Before we can ask to what or whom does “they” refer, we are prompted by “Question:” to turn the page.

The next question (“Do they prowl like felines?”) prods at the unasked question: what or who are “they”? How is it that “they” are like prowling felines? Again, the images seem to progress across the spread, with the first image’s central diamond shape disappearing to leave the curvilinear second shape leaning over the printed question. Might these be diagrams of the limp vellum structure’s sewing holes and lacing? If so, has Cordeiro found another metaphor for limp vellum structures in the supple and sinuous strength of prowling felines? Do “they” refer to limp vellum structures?

The next question turns directly to a functional attribute of the book structure: turning pages. The yellow print gives an ambiguous view. The two-dimensional representation of the angled beam fluctuates between a mountain view and a valley view. Are we looking down on the splayed spine of a book or its gutter with pages splayed open? Either way, the print angles away from the physical angled beam, which sets up a metronomic pattern in the spread — the beam leaning to the right, then to the left, and again to the right — or a page turned to the right, then to the left, and back again to the right — or mountain fold, then valley fold, then mountain, then valley (the gutter), then mountain, then valley, then mountain until we come to the ambiguous two-dimensional print. Again, this is a continuum, and “they” seems to refer to limp vellum structures.

The next question enacts itself. To read the mirror-written script, we have to turn the page and look through its surface to the right-reading words: “Do they depend upon the turning of”. The question completes itself in a curious (again) metronomic motion. The syntax draws our eyes to “PAGES” on the right, while the oversized punctuation mark syntactically draws our eyes back to the left. The play between the reversed writing on a recto page, the right-reading script on the verso, the display type on the next recto, and oversized question mark on the adjacent verso provide self-reflexively an affirmative answer: Yes, limp vellum structures depend on the turning of pages.

Part 3 introduces rather more esoteric continua with which Cordeiro seeks to connect the genius of the limp vellum structure. The Section letters M, M and G are her reminders-to-self that this section excerpts passages from William James’ The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902): one on medical materialism (p.14) and another on genius (p.18).

Cordeiro brackets the excerpts with maze-like images constructed of mirrored forms across four different colors. So we have the continua of mind to matter and of genius to madness embedded in a continuum of color and form (color and form merging).

Note the 18o° turn of the beige image in the upper left to be mirrored by the magenta image in the lower right.

Part 4, labeled “Section L: Notes on Seasonal Fluctuations of Lightweight Discrepancies”, is the densest of the gatherings. Drawings, verse typeset in English and scribed in Portuguese, typographic arrangements, trimmed and segmented photographs, and linocut prints of a stone wall all find their way into Part 4.

Note how the colors of the tulip shapes echo the colors of the maze in Part 3.

The “Epilogue” tells us, “The handwritten text in Portuguese is a word play with the alliteration afforded by that language between the verb to see and the season summer, and translates roughly as: ‘summer shall see gone that which / by going is now new being. / seeing such an hour at birth is to / be seen alive.” Another continuum.

“a shadow aside / a step askew / escape afloat in shape of arrows”. The segmented photos of an Upper West Side building’s fire escape articulate with the angled beam shape to echo the text.

The text before the concluding “end-on” image in this gathering introduces another continuum: “(Life begins at the end of your comfort zone.)”

Part 5, Section Z is the wrap-up, conflating the end of the alphabet with the end of the day (twilight), but of course, twilight is also a point on the continuum of day into night.

Lusco-fusco = twilight.

At this point, the reader might register that a continuum whose extremities hang in the balance against one another and yet are still connected is also a description of metaphor itself. Two disparate terms are brought together to make a figure of speech. Cordeiro brings two disparate objects together — a softcover codex and the shape of an angled beam, a hard form of structural support — to shape her artist’s book. She materializes that metaphor, then uses it as a platform for textual, graphical, material, and structural metaphors that celebrate the limp vellum structure. It is a striking accomplishment that challenges readers to think with their hands as well as their minds.

Further Reading

“Carol Barton“. 10 August 2024. Books On Books Collection.

“Ana Paula Cordeiro“. 12 July 2021. Bookmarking Book Art.

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

“First Seven Books of the Paper Biennial”. 10 October 2019. Books On Books Collection.

“Nicholas Rougeux“. 19 November 2022. Bookmarking Book Art.

“Rutherford Witthus“. 29 October 2021. Books On Books Collection.

Clarkson, Christopher. 1975. “Limp Vellum Binding and Its Potential as a Conservation Type Structure for the Rebinding of Early Printed Books: A Break with 19th and 20th Century Rebinding Attitudes and Practices.” In Preprints of the ICOM Committee for Conservation 4th Triennial Meeting: Venice 13-16 October 1975: 75/15/3/1-15. [Reprinted 1982, Red Gull Press]. Cited by Cordeiro.

Drucker, Johanna. 2004. The Century of Artists’ Books [Second edition] ed. New York City: Granary Books. For investigation “of the book as a form through examination of its material, thematic, and formal properties “, see p. 93.

Giuffrida, Barbara. 1974-75, 1976. “Limp and Semi-limp Vellum Bindings.” Designer Bookbinders Review. 4,5, and 8. Cited by Cordeiro.

Hebert, Henry. 18 December 2011. “Limp Paper and Vellum“. Work of the Hand. Accessed 23 October 2025.

Magee, Cathie (compiler). 23 February 2024. “BPG Parchment Bookbinding“. AIC (American Institute for Conservation) Wiki. Accessed 22 October 2025. Citing Clarkson and Giuffrida.

Pickwoad, Nicholas. 2019. “Italian Laced-Case Paper Bindings“. Journal of Paper Conservation. 20 (1–4): 122–51.

Rice, Doug. 2008 Limp Vellum: An Exhibition. Accessed 23 October 2025.