Books On Books Collection – Sunkyung Cho

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).

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.

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).

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.

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.

Books On Books Collection – Moritz Küng (ed.)

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Blank. Raw. Illegible… Artists’ Books as Statements, 1960-2022 (2023)

Blank. Raw. Illegible… Artists’ Books as Statements, 1960-2022 (2023)
Leopold-Hoesch-Museum and Moritz Küng (ed.)
Softcover with flaps, reversed “Fälzel” stitch bound. H280 x W200 mm. 272 pages. Edition of 1100. Acquired from Walther & Franz Verlag, 10 May 2023.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.

Published on the occasion of the exhibition by the same name at the Leopold-Hoesch-Museum in Düren, Germany, this tome is far more than an exhibition catalogue. With its thematic structure being a form of commentary on and insight into 259 individual works of 200 book artists, Blank. Raw. Illegible becomes one of the more important reference works on book art to have appeared in the last five years. And this is despite its singular focus on artists’ books blank (most of them), inacessible, or illegible.

The opening spreads for its fifteen thematic sections are shown below.

“wit weiss” takes its title from the third of six blank-page works by herman de vries. In addition to cataloging the other five, the section presents sixteen other variations on the theme, including Christiaan Wikkerink’s Conceptual Art for Dummies (1968, 1977, 2010).

“papierselbstdarstellung” presents us with thirty-three works of “paper self-portrait”. Blank or not, paper takes the conceptual and physical center stage in this section. It’s a pleasure to see the two rare works from the 1970s by J.H. Kocman introducing this group that includes another of herman de vries’ works, one of Bernard Villers’ Mallarméan pieces, some of the output of the prolific polymath Julien Nédélec, a unique piece from Paul Heimbach, Richard Long’s dipped River Avon Book, and more paper-allusive papierselbstdarstellungen.

“Book Articulations” takes its title from the work by Jeffrey Lew, which “articulates” the codex through various poses and color filters, but the fourteen other works included explore other forms of “articulation”. The Oxford English Dictionary gives nineteen definitions. Some of those are obsolete, but we can give Küng the benefit of the doubt that this section’s fifteen works exemplify the ones still active.

“Empty Days” takes its title from the last work in the section, a volume offered as an annual planner whose pages are blank, its months distinguished by different makes of paper, and its bookmarker printed on both sides with reminders of the names of the days and months. Leading with Bruce Harris’ gag book The Nothing Book, the section follows applications of the blank joke to newspapers, notebooks, exercise books, chronicles, and advice books.

The blank books of “life and work” demonstrate subtleties ranging from Paul Heimbach’s careful inclusion of 273 clear sheets to allude to the 273 seconds of John Cage’s 4’33” (1972) to Arnaud Desjardin’s Why I am no longer an artist.

Some of the blank works in “Hidden Meaning” play the joke of being the answer to the title, such as Reasons to Vote for Republicans (2017), a plagiaristic response to Michaels Knowles’ Reasons to Vote for Democrats (2017), published one month before. Other require the reader to uncover the hidden meaning (as in Christian Boltanski’s 2002 Scratch, which reveals images of atrocities when the surfaces of its silvered pages are scratched off) or to hide meaning (as in Russell Weeke’s 2016 blank postcard Hidden Meaning, which has only those words printed in the block where the stamp goes.

The thirty-one works in this section remind us that for book artists, black and white are also colors on the palette and tools in the book artist’s conceptual tool box. “Various colors in black and white” comes from the title of Pierre Bismuth’s 2005 book with onestar press. Onestar boasts that its artists’ books are “strictly unedited by the publisher”, but there is a cost-control constraint: no color inside the books. So Bismuth demanded a different color for each letter of his name and reproduced 139 monochromatic Pantone colors in black and white, representing a variety of hues in shades of gray.

raum means “space, room” in German and is the title of Heinz Gappmayr’s physically and metaphysically blank book. In this section, the other eight blank books take on a more sculptural aspect than others in the exhibition. There’s the massive Your House (2006) by Olafur Eliasson and the slim A Cloud (2007) by Katsumi Komagata, both examples of die cut leaves.

Ximena Pérez Grobet’s Around the Corner (2020) is an extraodinary example of flip-book and fore-edge printing combined. This spread represents the 312 pages of full-page samples of all 259 works in the exhibition.

Redaction, excision, erasure , and substitution are the only four “point blank” methods of making empty words in this section. The rest “verb” the word “empty” and go with pages emptied of words to meet the curator’s criterion for inclusion in “Empty Words”. Two exceptions: Roberto Equisoain’s gradual removal of word spaces and merging of the remaining letters into one in La lectura rápida … (2014) and Jürg Lehni and Alex Rich’s hole-punching of letters in their book naturally entitled Empty Words (2011).

“Anatomy of a Book”, whose title comes from the 2010 unique work by Fiona Banner (aka The Vanity Press), reminds us of how book artists can create works of art by focusing attention on individual parts of the book or simply naming its parts as George Brecht did with This is the Cover of the Book (1972).

The word hermetic means “sealed”. So naturally, “Textos Herméticos” presents ten examples of artists’ books that physically cannot be opened.

Elizabeth Tonnard’s entry The Invisible Book (2012) entitles this section of thirteen works. It was advertised on the artist’s website in an edition of 100, unnumbered and unsigned at the price of €0.00. After Joachim Schmid scarfed up all 100, Tonnard issued a second edition with a limit of one “copy” per customer. It, too, is now “out of print”. The catalogue’s full-page illustration for it is naturally blank, as is that for Enric Farrés Duran’s Para aprender a encontrar, primero hay que saber esconder (which was offered in a physical store for €20, resulting in only a receipt with the artist’s email address so that the buyer could arrange a face-to-face meeting to have the book explained verbally). Likewise Paul Elliman’s Ariel (the aptly named invisible and non-material typeface used, according to the inventor’s correspondence with Küng, to record extinct human and animal languages as well as sounds obsolete machines) is represented by a blank page.

The three invisible books “displayed”! Photo: Courtesy of Moritz Küng, photo by Peter Hinschläger.

There are seven works in this section “Fahrenheit 451”, although one of Dora Garcia’s is not numbered. None of them are blank, raw, or completely illegible. Nevertheless, their appropriateness for the exhibition is particularly underlined by the blackened pages of #241, which can be read if burned (see below).

“Utopia in Utopia” pays homage to Thomas More’s satire Utopia (1516) with sixteen works of varying illegibility, several engendered with invented fonts arising from More’s invention of an alphabet for the Utopians. No blank pages, unless you count Irma Blank’s entry (but we’ve had that pun in an earlier section).

The last section “Sounds of Silence” has only the one entry, and it is a vinyl LP album, not a book. To add to that quibble, there’s oddly no recording of John Cage’s 4″33″ among the tracks of this platter. But as the final entry in the exhibition, it extends the enterprise beyond blankness, rawness, and illegibility to inaudibility!

200 artists, 259 works.

Like Megan Liberty’s exhibition in the same year, Craft & Conceptual Art : Reshaping the Legacy of Artists’ Books, it also demonstrates that the factions of the dematerialized and conceptual works, the democratic multiples, the limited editions and the unique finely or rawly crafted works were not so walled off from one another as implied in polemics, manifestos and critical essays so concerned with defining the “artist’s book”, the existence or placement of its apostrophe and securing its role in the larger history of art. With its captions, numerous full-page images, and curation by Moritz Küng, Blank. Raw. Illegible. joins the list of significant exhibitions documenting the evolving history of the artist’s book that David Senior identified in his contribution to Liberty’s catalogue:

Germano Celant’s Book as Artwork 1960/1972 (1972)
Dianne Perry Vanderlip’s Artists Books (1973)
Daniel Fendrick’s The Book as Art (1976)
Manfred Schneckburger’s dOCUMENTA 6 (1977)
Barbara London’s Bookworks (1977)
Penelope Suess’ Women and the Printing Arts (1977)
Jacki Apple’s Notebooks, Workbooks, Scripts, and Scores (1977)
Judith Hoffberg and Joan Hugo’s Artwords and Bookworks (1978)
Martha Wilson and Peter Frank’s Artists’ Books USA (1978)
Rose Slivka’s Book Makers (1979)
Horace Brockington’s Dialects: Diverse Bookworks by Black and Hispanic Artists (1980)
Norman Colp’s Entrapped: The Book as Container (1981)
Walker Art Center’s Artists’ Books Introduction (1981)
Clive Phillpot’s Collaborations (1982)
Norman Colp’s From Coast to Coast (1983)
Center for Book Arts’ The First Decade (1984)
Center for Book Arts’ Book Artists in Residence: 5 Programs (1985)
Betty Bright’s Midwest Contemporary Book Art (1985)
Steve Woodall’s Out West (1998)

Others that could be added include

Susi Bloch’s The Book Stripped Bare : A Survey of Books by 20th Century Artists and Writers  (1973)
Clive Phillpot’s Artist’s Books : From the Traditional to the Avantgarde (1982)
Klaus Groh and Harmann Havekost’s Artists’ Books / Künstlerbücher Buchobjekte / Livres d’Artistes / Libri Oggetti (1986)
David J. Henry’s 1986. Beyond Words: The Art of the Book (1986)
Jeffrey Abt and Buzz Spector’s The Book Made Art (1986)
Todd Alden’s The Library of Babel (1991)
Carol Barton and Diane Shaw’s Science and the Artist’s Book (1995)
Cornelia Lauf and Clive Phillpot’s Artist/author : contemporary artists’ books (1998)
Mary Austin’s Exploding the Codex : The Theater of the Book  (2012)
Laura J. Hoptman’s Ecstatic Alphabets (2012)
Marcia Reed and Glenn Phillips’ Artists and Their Books : Books and Their Artists (2018)
Venetia Porter’s Artists Making Books : Poetry to Politics (2023)
Stefan Soltek’s Unbound (2023)
Kestutis Vasiliunas’ 1st International Artist‘s Book Triennial Vilnius (1997) to the “10th International Artist’s Book Triennial Vilnius (2024)

and Guy Schraenen’s boxed set of 25 catalogues of exhibitions organized by him and representing the archive donated to Neues Museum Weserburg in Bremen, Germany.

Above all, Blank. Raw. Illegible. … Artists’ Books as Statements (2023) demonstrates that the book constitutes a medium for, and genre of, Art. No library or collection that aims to represent book art or Art should be without it.

Books On Books Collection – Ruth E. Edwards

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Wisdom of the Ancestors (1999)

Wisdom of the Ancestors (1999)
Ruth E. Edwards
Cloth bag with painted stone amulet, hand-woven African mudcloth from Mali, containing metal ball bead chain through single-hole punched in cards, with gold talisman hanging. Bag: H145 x W135 mm. Cards: H130 x W76 mm. 30 cards. Eclectic Art and Collections 23 October 2025.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.

It appears the African ancestors had some inkling of and ancient words for the USA of 2016 and 2024.

Other expressions remind how best to learn. Others put growing anxieties about information overload in the shade of the ocean-wide context of knowledge.

The earth-tone cards “bound” with a metal ball bead chain and mudcloth bag imbue the thirty wise sayings with a further sense of the “make do” of craft and art, which carries its own wisdom

Books On Books Collection – LL’Editions

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Enthusiasts and collectors of artists’ books should congratulate LL’Editions (Göteborg, Sweden) on its leporello series not only for the artists enlisted so far but for the constraint to inspire them. Critics of book art have opined that book artists turned to the accordion structure in the 20th century for more freedom with visual images and another tool with which to question the notion of the book as book. LL’Editions has challenged its invited artists with a constraint: a fixed-format leporello of ten panels, nine folds and always H140 x W100 mm (closed). The works are printed on Mohawk Superfine Eggshell paper. Housed in a custom box with the title hot foiled both on its front and spine, each volume in the series is limited to 250 numbered copies.

The real pleasure in each work and across the series is how each artist handles the shape to make it dance to a personal style or stamp. With each new addition — brick by brick — LL’Editions is building a monument to book art’s most common structure.

Leporello #12 (2025)

Leporello #12 (2025)
Endre Tót
Box: 148×191×23 mm. Leporello: H142 x W99 mm (closed); W990 mm (open). 10 panels. Edition of 250, of which this #70. Acquired from LL’Editions, 28 August 2025.
Photos: Books On Books Collection. Displayed with permission of LL’Editions.

Bespoke Eska Board 1260 G/M2, Insert: F-Flute Black 500 G/M2, Hot-foiled title on front and spine. Mohawk Superfine Eggshell Ultrawhite 175 gsm.

Endre Tót has worked with a wide range of media: telegrams, postcards, posters, actions, and artist’s books. This one self-reflexively celebrates his signature gladness statements “We are glad if we are happy”, “I am glad that I have stood here”, “I’m glad that I can write one sentence after another”, “We are glad if we can demonstrate” and so on.

I am glad to have Endre Tót’s work in the Books On Books Collection.

Leporello #11 (2024)

Leporello #11 (2024)
Alejandro Cesarco
Box: H191 x W148 x D 23 mm. Leporello: H142 x W99 mm (closed). W990 mm (open). 10 panels. Edition of 250, of which this #229. Acquired from LL’Editions, 14 November 2024.
Photos: Books On Books Collection. Displayed with permission of LL’Editions.

These are the titles and durations of the songs making up The Cure’s 1989 album. With each song on its own panel, Cesarco (b. 1975) seems to have created a photo album to remind himself of his youth. Given his artworks referencing/co-opting/implicating/appropriating John Baldessari, Marcel Broodthaers, Félix Gonzáles-Torres, Allen Ruppersberg, Ed Ruscha, and other book artists, the less-than-fans of The Cure may wonder if Cesarco is deliberately wrong-footing their expectations for his tackling the book artist’s platform. If you are one of them, consider that your horizons have been widened and that The Ramones (An Autobiography) (2008) — his list in chronological order of every Ramones song that begins with the pronoun “I” — does not neatly divide by 10.

Leporello #10 (2024)

Leporello #10 (2024)
Kay Rosen
Box: H191 x W148 x D 23 mm. Leporello: H142 x W99 mm (closed). W990 mm (open). 10 panels. Edition of 250, of which this #116. Acquired from LL’Editions, 14 November 2024.
Photos: Books On Books Collection. Displayed with permission of LL’Editions.

There’s a lengthy and excellent essay entitle “The Gravity of Language” about Rosen’s work in Osmos Magazine (Winter 2019) by Stephanie Cristello. In it, she writes:

You will notice, by now, that the works discussed here are united by their allusions to the motions of up and down. Does this seem arbitrary to you? Or strike you as the imposition of a rule-based physics upon an artistic practice whose oeuvre certainly contains variances, divergences, and oddities–cut out for the purpose of being explored through a particular force? Perhaps. (Cristello, 2019)

Somehow this more recent artist’s book seems to confirm and repudiate the critic’s approach. As if to say, “Yes, I’m stuck in the muck despite my variances, divergences and oddities”, or “No, ducky, there’s no gravitas or gravity here”. Or perhaps it’s Rosen’s visual way of using permutations on language (starting with a common expression) to poke fun at LL’Editions’ constraint: “So you want to confine me like a duck in the muck? Well, quack, the joke’s on you”.

Leporello #9 (2024)

Leporello #9 (2024)
Pieter Laurens Mol
Box: H191 x W148 x D 23 mm. Leporello: H142 x W99 mm (closed). W990 mm (open). 10 panels. Edition of 250, of which this #111. Acquired from LL’Editions, 14 November 2024. Photos: Books On Books Collection. Displayed with permission of LL’Editions.

How many artists before and after Marcel Duchamp’s Prière de Toucher (1947) have played this joke in an artist’s book? Where Duchamp’s displayed work played against the usual museum injunction, Pol’s embraces and wrong-foots it with blind embossing.

Leporello #8 (2022)

Leporello #8 (2022)
Jonathan Monk
Box: H191 x W148 x D 23 mm. Leporello: H142 x W99 mm (closed). W990 mm (open). 10 panels. Edition of 250, of which this #175. Acquired from LL’Editions, 14 November 2024.
Photos: Books On Books Collection. Displayed with permission of LL’Editions.

It helps to know or remember that in 2002, Jonathan Monk published None of the buildings on Sunset Strip with Revolver. Here, he has used his iPhone in panoramic mode to appropriate again Ed Ruscha’s Every Building on the Sunset Strip (1966). But when Monk’s leporello is turned over, notice that this side of the Strip has been truncated. Monk’s thoughts on appropriation and self-reflexivity can also be enjoyed in the three-handed interview Books on Books (2011) with Jérôme Saint-Loubert Bié and Yann Sérandour.

Leporello #7 (2022)

Leporello #7 (2022)
Karl Holmqvist
Box: H191 x W148 x D 23 mm. Leporello: H142 x W99 mm (closed). W990 mm (open). 10 panels. Edition of 250, of which this #110. Acquired from Unoriginal Sins, 14 November 2024.
Photos: Books On Books Collection. Displayed with permission of LL’Editions.

Here’s one to add to Bruno Munari‘s collection of squares, circles, and triangles. While the yoga may also remind you of Ric Haynes‘s Aquatic Yoga with Dangerous Foods (1984), this leporello is a welcome opportunity to experience this Swedish artist’s ability to weld language and shapes together in perceptive and humorous (and sometimes acerbic) ways. Galerie Neu in Berlin has been astute enough to hold three solo exhibitions for Holmqvist since 2013; their display of his works here provides views of his several sculptures that chime with Leporello #7.

Leporello #6 (2022)

Leporello #6 (2022)
Maurizio Nannucci
Box: H185 x W148 x D 23 mm. Leporello: H143 x W90 mm (closed). W900 mm (open). 10 panels. Edition of 250, of which this #106. Acquired from Unoriginal Sins, 14 November 2024.
Photos: Books On Books Collection. Displayed with permission of LL’Editions.

It’s hard to believe that Leporello #6 may be one of only three accordion books produced by this prolific and inventive artist associated with Fluxus. The other two are Sessanta Verdi Naturali (Sixty Natural Greens) (1977) and Up Above the Wor(l)d/A Guide for Aliens (1981). In Leporello #6, he has made the accordion structure, panel layout, and language reinforce one another simultaneously to create an ouroboros artwork.

Leporello #5 (2022)

Leporello #5 (2022)
Shannon Ebner
Box: H185 x W148 x D 23 mm. Leporello: H143 x W90 mm (closed). W900 mm (open). 10 panels. Edition of 250, of which this #132. Acquired from Unoriginal Sins, 14 November 2024.
Photos: Books On Books Collection. Displayed with permission of LL’Editions.

Since her participation in MoMA’s Ecstatic Alphabets/Heaps of Language in 2012, Shannon Ebner has been a book artist to watch for bringing the alphabet and the artist’s book together.

Her Strike (2014) concretely rewarded the alert. The textures of melting ice in Leporello #05 and concrete blocks in Strike seem to leap off the letters and paper. From the LL’Editions’ description of Leporello #05:

Ebner has selected specific materials based on their self-reflexive relationship to the subject of the writing itself. Each photographic typeface is in essence a material response to the various cultural conditions and societal pressures at hand. For Ebner’s leporello, the meteorological term RIME ICE is its single subject, though the phenomenon itself falls into two categories, soft or hard rime. In either case it is rime ice that forms when liquid droplets comprised of supercooled water freeze onto surfaces. RIME ICE is an outtake from Ebner’s recent exhibition FRET SCAPES (2022). FRET is acronym for the Forecast Reference Evapotranspiration Report, a report that is generated by climate scientists to measure the rate at which water that falls to the ground will evaporate to the sky.

Leporello #04 (2021)

Leporello #04 (2021)
Ryan Gander
Box: H191 × W148 x D23 mm. Leporello: H142 x W99 mm (closed), W990 mm (open). 10 panels. Edition of 250, of which this #32. Acquired from Unoriginal Sins, 14 November 2024.
Photos: Books On Books Collection. Displayed with permission of LL’Editions.

Ryan Gander has repurposed his installation Staccato Reflections (2017-20) to create Leporello #04. The tiny text originates from the artist’s notebook. In Staccato Reflections, it appears in a normal-sized font in business-directory format on a freestanding reflective screen. Gander describes the installation this way in an interview in Art in America:

Staccato Reflections is based on the idea of the self in culture, the obsession with the me and the selfie and the narcissist wand. The surface is mirrored, so as you read the words, you see yourself. The work has devices in it that are self-referential. It asks you to touch the screen, and then says “don’t touch the screen.” So it seems like it is responding to you, but it’s not.” (Fullerton, 107)

Staccato Reflections (2017)
Ryan Gander
A large free standing backlit mirrored business infototem, as one would expect to see in the lobby of a corporate building. The display presents a word composition / beat poetry written by the artist, on the themes of narcissism, self reflection and the presentation of the self in everyday life, leaving the viewer with an associative but ambiguous stream of consciousness. The digital lobby sign is surrounded by a collection of domestic looking Monstera deliciosa plants (Swiss Cheese Plants).
© Ryan Gander. Photos: Youngjun Choi.

With its miniscule print requiring the enclosed rectangular plastic magnifying glass, and with its overprint in glow-in-the-dark ink of a waxing full moon, Leporello #04 marks quite a departure from the installation.

Leporello #03 (2021)

Leporello #03 (2021)
Fiona Banner
Box housing leporello. Box: H185 xW140 xD25 mm. Leporello: H140 x W100 mm. 10 panels. Numbered edition of 250, of which this #42. Acquired from Unoriginal Sins, 14 November 2024.
Photos: Books On Books Collection. Displayed with permission of LL’Editions.

With Leporello #03, Fiona Banner repurposes the previously repurposed conceptual artwork Bad Review. It has appeared as a C-type print with the words overlaid on a rearview mirror and as a sculpture. To reproduce the two words, Banner uses found letters photographed held up by hand and badly positioned. Is it serendipity or cheeky genius that, like readymades, the nine letters and space of Banner’s conceptual artwork fit the ten panels imposed by LL’Editions to give us another re-view?

Leporello #02 (2021)

Leporello #02 (2021)
Micah Lexier
Box housing leporello. Box: H185 xW140 xD25 mm. Leporello: H140 x W100 mm. 10 panels. Edition of 250, of which this #171. Acquired from Unoriginal Sins, 14 November 2024.
Photos: Books On Books Collection. Displayed with permission of LL’Editions.

Publisher’s description: A number of years ago Micah Lexier purchased a small paperback publication about the game of dominoes. The very end of the book consisted of a series of pages that reproduced a complete set of twenty-eight domino tiles. The images were printed on right-hand pages, four to a page, while the left-hand pages were blank. The idea was that you were supposed to cut these images out of the book and glue them to empty matchboxes to create your own do-it-yourself set. That sequence of pages, combined with the quality of their reproductions, was the inspiration for Lexier’s leporello. To that, he added two favourite print techniques – perforations and die-cut holes – to create a set of ten domino tiles. Lexier chose the denomination of each tile and its order in the leporello so that none of the thirty-four die-cut holes line up with each other, allowing each hole to be misread as a printed white domino dot.

If you stand Leporello #02 on its edge on a table and then lean forward to view the panels at eye level, the domino images seem to have grown into oversized hangings on gallery walls. You can see some of the die-cut holes if you look closely at the lower right corner below.

It’s a peculiar sensation, but it echoes Lexier’s website, which highlights mostly installations and large-scale works. Even more so it echoes Robert Birch Gallery in Toronto, which emphasizes his large wall displays. On both sites, Lexier’s play with patterns, shapes, tiles, and contrasts of black and white stands out. Although it’s not clear from those current sites, he has many book-related works. In the ’90s, he produced book sculptures in which each spine in a stack of books would have part of a life-size photo of a human subject printed on it. Properly stacked, the books display the human figure.

Taller Child (Adolescent Male) (1993) and Father and Son (1993)
Photos: CCCA Canadian Art Database Project, Centre for Contemporary Canadian Art. © Micah Lexier.

As can be seen in Leporello #02 and other works on display in the CCCA Canadian Art Database Project, Lexier likes to work with found objects. As can be seen in the book sculptures above and in the Database Project, Lexier’s art also reflects on relationships and community. Leporello #02 neatly and abstractly brings these two themes together with the found dominoes game book and the game’s communal roots.

Leporello #01 (2021)

Leporello #01 (2021)
Heimo Zobernig
Box housing leporello. Box: H185 xW140 xD25 mm. Leporello: H140 x W100 mm. 10 panels. Edition of 250, unnumbered. Acquired from Unoriginal Sins, 14 November 2024.
Photos: Books On Books Collection. Displayed with permission of LL’Editions.

If you extend Leporello #01 fully, you are likely at first glance to project onto it the common expression “this and that”, but thwarted, you then start looking for another phrase comprised of “His”, “IS”, “And”, but you run into “Ew” or “nEw”, which throws you into renewed pattern-seeking behavior. Should you count the “this’s” and “and’s” in each row? Maybe there’s something in the pattern of lowercasing and uppercasing? Is there anything to the fact that the word “new” never begins with an uppercase N, or that it occurs only twice? Maybe you should read the rows aloud? With that, you may remember that, in earliest writings, words were not spaced and mixed majuscule and miniscule didn’t come along until later. Now you see how the folds are the primary means of separating the words in this book. This becomes clearer if you read the book panel by panel, or page by page codex-style. But now there are other possible patterns: does the book begin with “thIs, This, thIS” and proceed to “tHis, nEw, thIS”, and so on?

Somehow the acronym “WYSIWYG” — what you see is what you get — pops to mind, but Leporello #01 seems also a case of “WYGIWYS” — what you get is what you see. Fully extended or panel by panel, Leporello #01 offers more to see than a glance will get you.

Leporello #01 continues Zobernig’s love affair with Helvetica, which is also on display in Farben Alphabet (2018) and CMYK (2013), also in the Books On Books Collection.

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

2025/08/302025/12/24Books On BooksLeave a comment

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

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

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Books On Books – Barbara Hocker

2025/08/052025/11/17Books On Books2 Comments

Watercourse I (2022)

Watercourse I (2022)
Barbara Hocker
Scroll in variant dragon scale binding. L152 cm (variable) x W12 cm. 64 panels. Unique. Acquired from the artist, 10 February 2024.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.

Works evocative of water often invoke a sense of meditative stillness, but Barbara Hocker’s Watercourse I prompts a sense of meditative activity. You can’t stop moving it about. Or if you’re not moving it, you find yourself moving around it to contemplate it. It is the layering of watercolor, sumi ink, photographic prints with archival inks on washi paper, and the ancient Chinese method of bookbinding called dragon scale (sometimes called “whirlwind” or “fish scale” binding) that achieves this. Traditionally, the binding method involves a long scroll of paper to which successively shorter folios are attached at one end, often secured with a bamboo rod. Hocker has modified this structure by attaching folios of the same size with hinges to the underlying long scroll at intervals allowing one folio to overlap the next and so on. In each case, the effect of the overlapping folios creates the appearance of dragon scales.

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This is not a stone (2017)

In the beginning (2012)

The Blue Bird (2011)

Kiss (2015)

Further Reading

The Record (2017)

Historical Binding: Sewing Sampler (2025)

Further Reading

Further Reading and Viewing

Seven Lady Saintes (1985)

Walking the Portes (2025)

Further Reading

Lightweight (2015)

Further Reading

Blank. Raw. Illegible… Artists’ Books as Statements, 1960-2022 (2023)

Further Reading

Wisdom of the Ancestors (1999)

Further Reading

Leporello #12 (2025)

Leporello #11 (2024)

Leporello #10 (2024)

Leporello #9 (2024)

Leporello #8 (2022)

Leporello #7 (2022)

Leporello #6 (2022)

Leporello #5 (2022)

Leporello #04 (2021)

Leporello #03 (2021)

Leporello #02 (2021)

Leporello #01 (2021)

Further Reading

Watercourse I (2022)