Books On Books Collection – Inscription: The Journal of Material Text, Issue 3 on Folds

Now here’s a rare thing — a journal issue that requires a video to show the reader h0w to open it.

Inscription: The Journal of Material Text, Issue 3 on Folds
Simon Morris, Gill Partington and Adam Smyth (eds.)
Printed boards over recurring origami square-base folded leaves. 300 x 300 mm. 120 pages. ISSN: 2634-7210. Acquired from Information as Material, 29 November 2022.
Photos: Books On Books Collection. [Front and back covers, Kimsooja’s bottari artwork commissioned for Inscription 3.]

The structure is built on the simple principle of an origami square base. A diagonal mountain fold bisects two corners of a square, followed by two perpendicular valley folds bisecting the edges of the square; then the north, south and west corners come together and down atop the east corner. For the printer, the not-so-simple principle is how one base connects to the next to make a book!

Inscription 3 has ten essays, including the editors’ introduction. As seen below, the latter neatly fits with the issue’s table of contents on a single unfolded sheet in a layout that offers considerable creative opportunities for structure and design to enact the theme of the issue.

The essays fall across eleven of these large unfolded sheets, with a twelfth sheet serving for the contributors’ biographies and description of the nine commissioned artworks shrinkwrapped with this journal issue. In general, each unfolded sheet breaks down into quadrants, and each quadrant breaks down into three columns to accommodate text and images. The designers run images across columns, across the vertical and horizontal folds dividing the quadrants and, later on, even in alignment with the diagonal fold.

The structure and layout of Inscription 3 take the star billing in this issue and, to varying degrees, interact with the content. Two essays in particular highlight this. In the issue’s first contributed essay (see above), Craig Dworkin and the editors seem to have conspired to present an essay that enfolds its subject with the design of Incription 3. While Dworkin’s essay explores Stéphane Mallarmé’s efforts to reconcile his ideal of the Book with his ambivalent inspiration for it from the spaciousness of newspaper print, it has to be read across a sheet of book paper unfolded like a Sunday newspaper spread out on the dining room table. To reveal the end of the essay, the sheet of pages must rise, fold and unfold like the wings of a bird. Compare that with Dworkin’s description of Mallarmé’s imagined fusion of newspaper and book in which his landmark poem Un Coup de Dés should appear:

Curving from their center fold like wings, the newspaper sheets in flight through the park – animated by the breeze and wafting like a feather from the birds they mimic – corroborate the operation of the mobile new book, in which the pages assume the rhythmic function of verse itself, abstracted and projected onto the architecture of the assembled volume with folded sheets smoothed into the single surface Un Coup de dés describes with the phrase insinuation simple [simple insinuation], where the etymology derives from the Latin insinuare [to fold in].

The second example coinciding with Inscription 3‘s structure and layout is Justine Provino’s “0, 1, 2, many folds”, which explores an artist’s book just as abstruse semantically and physically as Mallarmé’s poem:

What is the common denominator between the DNA of the fruitfly, the codex-form book and a floppy disk? They all fold. In a particular turn of events in the year 1992, DNA, codex and floppy disk managed to fold over each other through the collaborative making of the artist’s book Agrippa (a book of the dead), famous – or infamous – for the self-destructive intent programmed into it by its makers …

Agrippa (a book of the dead) by Dennis Ashbaugh, Kevin Begos, Jr. and William Gibson incorporates each of these elements, as Provino creatively and critically explains, in ways that ask

… what can – or should – an object that we call ‘book’ look like, and what purpose should it serve? We may easily visualise how pages of paper can be folded into a codex-form book to communicate and preserve reading matter. But can we establish an analogy between this topology underlying the functioning of a codex and the structures of DNA and floppy disk? Can we speak of ‘material texts’ (or even ‘books’) in the context of DNA and floppy disk in the way that we do for the codex?

As soon as the double helix of DNA structure is raised, the reader turning the pages of Inscription 3 will surely have a frisson of recognition.

The skill with which the structure and layout enhances the essays’ content presents a challenge to the nine standalone works of commissioned art. They are individually delightful, but only Daniel Jackson’s into and out of integrates with Inscription 3 “physically”, and then only by virtue of its augmented reality nature that works when pointed at artist Kimsooja’s bottari fabric art commissioned for the front and back covers.

First row: Daniel Jackson, into and out of; Pavel Büchler, Translate Here. Second row: Rick Adams & Simon Morris, Less is More. Third row: Eleanor Vonne Brown, War Unfolding. Fourth row: Marjorie Welish, Indecidability of the Sign; Erica Baum, Embrace. Fifth row: Daniel Starza Smith, Jana Dambrogio, Jessica Spring, and the Unlocking History research group (Letterlocked), It’s a Wonderful World [self-enveloping letter]. Sixth row: Abigail Reynolds, The Red Library. Last row: Nikos Stavropoulos, Folds [vinyl LP record jacket and sleeve, sides A and B].

One more point about structure and a pointer for the reader. This issue manages to include twelve diptychs on the reverse of the twelve large unfolded sheets. Each diptych presents a figure, diagram or list on one half and a sizable corresponding label on the other half. Getting to them is the trick not explained in the video.

Top-down edge view of figures, diagrams and lists. How to see them and their labels?

With a large unfolded sheet in view, turn (carefully!) the left half to the right. There is the label below the front cover. Now turn the whole over. There is the figure, diagram or list above the back cover. The figures, diagrams and lists deal with works by Samuel Beckett, Stéphane Mallarmé, James Joyce, Laurence Sterne, Daniel Spoerri, Guillaume Apollinaire, Italo Calvino, Raymond Queneau and (below) Christine Brooke-Rose.

By the way, the large unfolded sheet above is the last of the twelve in Inscription 3. In addition to providing the biographies of the contributors and the list of nine commissioned artworks, it offers one more diagonal flourish from the designers. Call it a cheeky parting kiss.

Books On Books Collection – Camden Richards & Deborah Sibony

FeaturedLeave a comment

Water, Calling (2021)

Water, Calling (2021)
Camden Richards & Deborah Sibony
Felt-covered, modified dragon-scale bound artists’ book, accompanied by audio equipment in custom box. Box: 262 x 262 x D170 mm. Book: H155 x W775 mm (closed). 110 pages. Edition of 15, of which this is #1. Acquired from the artists, 5 October 2022. Photos: Books On Books Collection. Displayed with artists’ permission.

Colophon
“Water, Calling is a collaborative artist book which explores the cyclical and omnipresent relationship of water and the self, inviting the reader to reflect upon water as more than a commodity, but rather as life giving: spirit, flesh and soul. Because water is evidence of all who came before us, it is a foretelling of all who will be; through it we are in conversation with our ancestors, our descendants, and with earth herself. Water, Calling traces these existential threads through waterscapes of text, image and sound, extending an invitation to enter more fully into a dialogue composed of acts requiring active listening, contemplative reading and deep seeing with the hope of inspiring sacred reciprocity.”

The initial attraction of Water, Calling was its modified “dragon-scale” binding (Chinese: longlin zhuang 龍鱗裝). Its lasting attraction has been how the binding and the structure within it join with the text, images, textures and sound to create this work of art so evocative of the element water.

Water, Calling‘s dragon-scale binding is a modified form of the method used with Chinese manuscripts in the 8th century CE and in the oldest printed book known — the Diamond Sūtra, dating back to 868 CE and found in the caves near Dunhuang, China in 1900. In the original structure, sheets of paper of different widths overlap one another with the narrowest on top and the widest on the bottom. They are aligned and attached along the left or right edge, and from the attached edge, the overlapping stack of leaves rolls into a scroll. Below are images from various sources (Drège, Song, and Chinnery).

Drège. Figure unnumbered (p. 197) and Plate XXIV (p. 205).

Song. Fig. 2 Diagrams of whirlwind bindings (top) ‘concertina’ xuanfeng zhuang (旋風裝) and (bottom) ‘dragon scale’ longlin zhuang (龍鱗裝).

Historically the dragon scale seems to occupy a transitional stage between scroll and codex, and the latter seems to inspire most of the modifications of the dragon scale in Water, Calling. Its dragon-scale-like overlapping occurs within each of seventeen codex-like signatures and across them. There is, however, no single widest sheet. The dragon-scale’s characteristic curling, outlying edge occurs due to a staggered fold of one leaf in each signature. The first signature, below with its the first page and edge of its third page showing, is a single-fold leaf that anchors the book block to the long felt cover. As the first signature’s last page is turned to the left, it pulls all of the next sixteen signatures with it. Viewed from the edge in the third image below, the staggered and overlapping signatures mimic waves of water (see the third image below).

A distinctive modification of the binding is the inclusion of a narrow-cut sheet of Gmund Transparent in the second signature that interleaves with the third signature. The dry facts printed on the transparency interrupt the flow of the text debossed at the end of the first signature and beginning of the second. Each of the remaining pairs of signatures has a narrow-cut linking sheet of dry facts making up one stream of text interweaving with the more lyrical text and water patterns debossed on the Rives BFK paper.

Set in the cursive Magdallena, the debossed text reads “through water we are in conversation, | with our ancestors, with our elders, our unborn descendants, our future — with earth herself.”

All eight of the translucent sheets can seen from this sideways rear view of the seventeen signatures. So the dry, however impressive, facts on the translucent sheets make up one stream of text interwoven with the more lyrical text and water patterns debossed on the Rives BFK paper.

A sideways view of the back of all seventeen signatures shows all eight of the translucent sheets.

Within each of the seventeen signatures, there is a double-page spread of artwork: a series of cyanotype prints of original photographs, image transfers sourced from historical maps, and watercolor art.

With the third double-page spread, a third stream of text and a material element of interweaving occurs. Richards introduces a more personal set of observations typeset in New Caledonian on a sheet of Sekishu paper attached to the lefthand edge of an underlying spread of artwork. Nothing quite like this appears in other works of dragon-scale binding. The presence of those Sekishu sheets requires some care in turning the pages, unscrolling and scrolling the work. This modification of the dragon-scale binding heightens its delicacy and slows down the process of reading, looking and reacting, which reinforces the artists’ words.

There are thirteen of these Sekishu sheets in total, leaving two double-page spreads at the beginning and two at the end uncovered. This is not by accident. Structurally it reflects the ouroboros nature of the debossed text on the Rives BFK: it ends as it began.

The width of the opened work and way the reader must almost embrace it to open it reflect the breadth of the artists’ meditation on various bodies of water—wild and managed, urban and rural. The interwoven leaves and text reinforce the makers’ (and water’s) call to “pay attention” and reconnect.

Other examples of dragon-scale binding in the Books On Books Collection include works by Barbara Hocker, Nif Hodgson, Rutherford Witthus and Zhang Xiaodong. It seems no accident that Hocker and Hodgson adopt the dragon-scale binding to evoke the element of water. But other artists in the collection who aim to evoke the element choose another structure that, like dragon scale, seems to be a transition from scroll to codex: the accordion fold or leporello and its variant the window-panel flag book. Among the leporellos are Helen Douglas’ Follow the River (2015-17), and for an example of the variant, there is Cathryn Miller’s Westron Wynde (2016). Of course, the codex is not antithetical to the theme. The sense of water pours from the “Coast & Dunes” and “Banks & Brooks” sections of Margaret (Molly) Coy & Claire Bolton’s Handscapes (2016) and Bodil Rosenberg’s Vandstand (2019), though the size, shape and texture of the latter may have more in common with the sculptural and equally evocative I think that the root of the wind is water (2016) by Susan Lowdermilk and Breaking Waves (2023) by Emmy van Eijk. Still, even in this century, the scroll continues to offer an effective conduit whether in paper or pixels as Helen Douglas’ The Pond at Deuchar (2011, 2013) demonstrates.

Of all these works, Water, Calling engages multimedia the most in its invocation and evocation of the element of water. Its environmental soundscape, created by Anne Hege with a hand-built, analog looping tape machine, consists of water recordings, instrumentals and vocal incantations. To listen to excerpts from the soundtrack, click here, or to listen to the full soundtrack, click here (password required; request access here).

The Space Between (2018)

The Space Between (2018)
Camden Richards & Deborah Sibony
Casebound with cloth-covered spine between bonderized steel covers in a cloth-covered custom box. Box: H216 x W305 x D24 mm; Book: H197 x W284 x D10 mm. 50 pages. Edition of 13, of which this is #11. Acquired from the artists, 5 October 2022.
Photos: Books On Books Collection. Displayed with artists’ permission.

An earlier collaboration between Richards and Sibony, The Space Between is based on ten original monotypes printed by Sibony at Studio 1509 on a Takach press and digitally reproduced for the book by Coast Litho on Grafix matte drafting film. The work’s text is set in Mark Simonson’s Goldenbook; its typographic layout, die-cuts and letterpress printing is by Richards at Liminal Press + Bindery on Somerset Book paper with a Vandercook 4 proofing press; and its handmade paper embedded with local Bay Area plant fibers comes from Pam DeLuco of Shotwell Paper Mill. The Space Between is bound in bonderized steel covers and housed in a custom box by John DeMerritt.

The ten monotypes were inspired by the gradual removal of the eastern span of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge after its partial collapse in 1989. About that inspiration, Sibony writes:

On the day of the Loma Prieta earthquake (October 17, 1989) I had just begun commuting from San Francisco to work at Fantasy Records in Berkeley. Thus began my long-term relationship with the Bay Bridge. The quake caused the collapse of a 50-foot section of the upper deck and led to the death of a 23-year-old woman. I was fortunate not to be driving home on the bridge at the time of the earthquake, when I could easily have been returning to San Francisco. I spent that night in Berkeley with a friend since the bridge was closed to all traffic, and would remain so for several weeks.

Twenty-four years later, on September 3, 2013, a wondrous, white, single-span was set to replace the damaged eastern section of the bridge. On the day before the eastern span was closed forever and the dismantling began, I drove across that compromised structure for the last time. As I shot video from the car, a feeling struck me on a gut level: it was the start of a new era for the geography and landscape of the Bay Area — and the beginning of the end for an iconic structure that would soon cease to exist.

From then on I took photos with my iPhone whenever I drove across the new eastern span, adjacent to the closed cantilevered section, documenting its gradual deconstruction until it finally disappeared. Using a special transfer process I incorporated those images into a series of monotypes that are reproduced in The Space Between.

Sibony’s monotypes are fragments that illustrate moments of a vanishing and a metamorphosis of wood, concrete, and steel. In The Space Between, Richards uses letterpress printing, translucent substrate and die-cuts to pair Sibony’s images with text inspired by a poem by Charles Koppelman and thereby reimagines the two-dimensional monotype form into a three-dimensional book form. As the reader turns the pages, the images simultaneously build upon one another and retreat from one another, mimicking the moments of transition and creating a sense of meaning that emerges from spaces in between.

The Space Between is made with both machined and organic materials — from sheet metal covers to drafting film to handmade paper embedded with plant fibers — materials that ground it squarely in space and time as both a human and natural byproduct. The result is a physical and metaphorical exploration (and experience) of thresholds between those we physically create, those nature creates for us, and the space in between where we exist. Given the name of Richard’s enterprise — the Liminal Press — this work must hold a signal position for the publisher.

In its object and the theme it finds in the object, The Space Between resonates not only with the architecture-inspired works of book art in the Books On Books Collection but also those inspired by typography. See below.

Books On Books Collection – Anne Moeglin-Delcroix

FeaturedLeave a comment

Ambulo Ergo Sum: Nature As Experience in Artists’ Books (2015)

Ambulo Ergo Sum: Nature As Experience in Artists’ Books (2015)
Anne Moeglin-Delcroix and Richard Sadleir, trans.
Case bound, printed paper over board, with green endbands and matching doublures. H225 x W155 mm. 96 pages. Acquired from Book Depository, 21 August 2019.
Photo: Books On Books Collection.

For her extended essay, Anne Moeglin-Delcroix selected six works by Hamish Fulton, seven by Richard Long and five by herman de vries to demonstrate “three ways of coming closer to the experience of nature unfiltered by the artistic tradition” of “landscape as an artistic genre” (pp. 5, 30).

As she puts it:

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 in the 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 of nature to become the experience of the whole artist, with his body, in nature. (p. 6)

Along the way, Moeglin-Delcroix distinguishes between the walk being art itself (performance), the walk being a form of art (protocol driven) and the walk as being “simply one of the most favourable conditions for expanding perception and thereby consciousness and knowledge” (p. 28). In Fulton, she finds that the act of collecting and listing takes the place of the traditional landscape point of view, although views at a physical or temporal distance are present (p. 8). In Long, she finds that the act of collecting and listing is governed by protocol, an inventorying by purpose not mere encounter, and the “view of the close at hand” replaces the distant landscape view (pp. 19-20). But it is in devries she finds that the distant and the close, the whole and the fragment are complementaries that yield ambulo ergo sum (“I walk therefore I am”) (p. 28).

de vries is the most transcendental of the three. For de vries, in Moeglin-Delcroix’s words, “Art does not represent nature because nature is art itself” (p. 25), which leads to boxes or portfolios of loose items collected from nature that the reader has to contemplate as such and reconstruct the totality from which they were drawn (as in his catalogue incomplète), or to details from nature so close up that they can only have been collected by being in nature not by merely observing it (as in les très riches heures de herman de vries) (p. 29).

As philosophical as all this may be, the conceptual is not very far from craft in these artists’ works or Moeglin-Delcroix’s appreciation of them. But craft may be the thin end of the wedge that re-asserts a boundary between art and nature.

Consider Handscapes by Molly Coy and Claire Bolton. It, too, has been formed by walks, collecting, sampling, listing and related activities noted by Moeglin-Delcroix about Fulton, Long and de vries. It has the distant and up-close perspectives of Fulton and Long, respectively. It has de vries’ embedding of samples from nature. Albeit in landscape format, Handscapes is also a deviation from the tradition of landscape art. Consider also The Pond at Deuchar by Helen Douglas. It, too, has been formed similarly. It has the up-close perspectives of Long and de vries that replaces that of the traditional landscape, and it further deviates from that tradition by paradoxically calling on a structure associated with Oriental landscapes — the scroll. When contemplating these two works so different from those of Fulton, Long and de vries, are they any the less examples of “nature as experience in artists’ books”?

Yet, in Handscapes and The Pond at Deuchar, there is a presence of craft that draws the reader/viewer at some points closer to the nature experienced by the artists and at other points closer to the material nature of the artworks. As elements of craft, do plant-printed images or Chinese paper draw us closer to nature or push us further away in these artworks? Is it possible that paradoxically they do both?

Books On Books Collection – Susan E. King

2024/01/10Books On BooksLeave a comment

Lessons from the South (1986)

Lessons from the South (1986)
Susan E. King
Modified flag book. Closed: H270 x W172 mm; Open: W670 mm. 20 pages. Acquired from Rickaro Books BA PBFA, 22 September 2023.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.

Lessons from the South presents a masterful weaving together of material, structure, technique and image with Susan King’s reminiscences and social observations of her birth state Kentucky. For King, growing up white and female in the South in the second half of the 20th century engendered a sense of otherness and rebellion. As with some white southerners, it led to mild acts of rebellion — sitting too far back in the bus, sitting next to black students in typing class, or finally leaving for other regions of the US. With the 21st century’s rise of the “Karen”, repression of voting rights and reproductive rights, and resurgence of white supremacy, can we afford to dismiss the expression of conscience as “mild”? Any expression of conscience is something. Lessons from the South is an artful expression of fondness, humor, closeness and distance — a sense of being ill at ease with a Southern heritage we all seem unable to escape — that should be revisited not only for the sake of its art but as encouragement to conscience.

Start with the cover above. In that light, at that angle, the corrugated plastic front and back covers of Lessons from the South resemble those backdoors in the South with frosted louvres that covered a screen and could be cranked open to let in cool air while the screen kept out insects. But the elbow crank was almost always cranky — particularly if the louvres had been closed tightly over a long period. Sure enough, it is a bit difficult to open this book.

A top-down view of the modified flag book structure.

As Johanna Drucker points out in The Century of Artists’ Books, the interior’s heavy translucent sheets attached to the spine “hold a hard fold, the crease of their edges functioning as a rigid element” that fights the reader’s access to the interior pages.

Even when the front cover is turned codex style, the binding and interior stiffness nudge you instead to pull and slide the front cover to the left, revealing the five sections of the book overlapping one another in a sideways continuation of the louvre motif.

Each section’s opening page carries a pair of quotations. The first pair comes from a billboard (or postcard), a bumper sticker, a joke, a common expression and a movie. The second pair in the lower right corners comes from the 19th century leaflet The Language of the Fan, produced by Duvelleroy, a fan maker in Paris, France, which complements the book’s opening billboard image “Greetings from Paris, KY”. After the italic book title that opens the first section, the section titles of the following four sections are parts of the phrase “A MID SUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM” and seem to be rubbings from an engraving.

The image under ” A MID” is the entrance to Bonaventure Cemetery in Savannah, Georgia . The second shows a tobacco field being inspected by a woman dressed all in white, including a large sun bonnet. The third is a night-time scene of a train crossing the High Bridge over the Kentucky River. The fourth — a photo of a Corinthian-columned university building — resembles a plantation frontage providing a visual complement to the text printed above it: “Frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn” (Rhett Butler, Gone with the Wind, the movie). “Coloring” the work as a recollection of growing up in the South, all of the images appear to have been scribbled over with a child’s crayon, as if they had been in a grandparent’s keepsake album. In keeping with that echo is the following anecdote.

At an annual camp meeting, King’s grandmother and her friends are rocking away on the front porch and discussing “whether or not, and how much they would cry at one another’s funerals”. King sadly notes the reality of her grandmother’s last wish — “to be buried in a wine red dress” — being denied and that “as the pictures of the open casket show, she was allowed to pass from this world to the next in something more subdued and suitable”. Those photos are not in the book, just that reference. Nothing so macabre finds its way into Lessons from the South. But between that anecdote and the photo of the plantation-style building, a discomfiting list of words and phrases runs down the accordion spine’s cutout tab to which the anecdote page is attached: “Black Magic / Blackface / Black Humor / Black Belt / Black Mammy / Blackberry / Blackball / Black Sheep / Black Widow / Black Boy”. The list juxtaposed with the anecdote about her grandmother’s “open casket” might suggest prescience of the first episode of the documentary Eyes on the Prize, which aired on 21 January 1987 and revived the memory of Emmett Till’s open-casket photo.

The absence of anything that shocking in Lessons from the South underscores King’s observation: “As far as I can see, the glory of the Ole South is held close to the heart through its relics rather than its reality”. The dashing chivalry of Confederate generals, the white columns, clinging vines and that bittersweet nostalgia the South “doesn’t deserve” seem to block out the reality of that other open casket. The final words of Lessons from the South — “In this effort to remember our past and re-invent ourselves” — seem a rueful fan flutter toward a reality with which King does not confront us. What would a more daring and intense work look like? Can a white Southerner — any white person for that matter — create an autobiographical artist’s book that authentically addresses racism’s realities? Dr. Lisa Whittington’s comments seven years ago during the controversy over Dana Schutz’s painting Open Casket offer some hope:

I don’t think it is wrong for a white person to paint Black subject matter. Art is a form of communication. Art gets people talking. Art documents mindsets and thought processes. But it has to be done responsibly, especially in this era of time. … racism is not a pretty or an easy topic to talk about let alone to paint a picture about it. It’s just not. But it is necessary because artwork can spark conversations that need to be had.

Coincidentally, seven years ago, Susan King returned to Kentucky, something she thought she “would never do” — a Grapes of Wrath in reverse as she puts it. On the journey home, she stopped in Memphis, Tennessee and visited the Civil Rights Museum, which incorporates both the façade of the Lorraine Motel where Dr. Martin Luther King was shot and James Earl Ray’s boarding house room from across the street. On her Paradise Press site’s blog, King recalls:

A woman stood on the other side of the street protesting the museum. I walked over to talk to her. She thinks black kids shouldn’t be taught their history. It is too painful. She wants the museum moved and low income housing built. In her world, we somehow can’t have both.

For most baby boomers and those from an earlier generation, a walk through the museum is a painful reminder of the history of racism in this country. Much of that history we saw unfold as youngsters. Almost too much to bear.

Thirty-eight years on, Lessons from the South remains an outstanding work of book art. It encourages the fusion of craft and engineering with art that followed on from the democratic multiples in book art to challenge the anatomy of the book. Thirty-eight years on, it piques the male conscience and white conscience differently than it did at any intervening point. It encourages more works to do even more — more than almost bear it — to bear witness.

Books On Books Collection – Kitty Maryatt and Scripps College Students

2023/08/01Books On BooksLeave a comment

Arch (2010)

Arch (2010)
Kitty Maryatt, Jenny Karin Morrill, Ali Standish, Alycia Lang, Jennifer Wineke, Mandesha Marcus, Catherine Wang, Kathryn Hunt, Ilse Wogau, Jennifer Cohen and Winnie Ding
Acrylic slipcase, leporello formed of self-covering booklets sewn together. Slipcase: H410 x W110 x D50. Leporello: H400 x W 90 mm (closed). 64 pages. Unnumbered copy from edition of 109. Acquired from Bromer Booksellers, 7 December 2022.
Photos: Books On Books Collection

Nôtre-Dame de Paris (1831), Archdeacon Claude Frollo points to the book in his hand and then to the cathedral and says, “This will kill that”. It is ironic that Hugo’s book (popularly known now by its English title The Hunchback of Nôtre-Dame) was written in large part to save the then-decaying cathedral (post-Revolution, it served as a warehouse), and it succeeded. It is also ironic that, while the fictional character’s metaphor has a point about the book’s permanence of replicability outlasting the building’s permanence of stone, it misses the collaborative foundations of both.

Arch (2010), created by ten students at Scripps College under the direction of Kitty Maryatt, reminds us that the creation of a book — even a work of book art — is a collaborative effort. All the students involved in the design, planning and production were women, a happenstance serendipitously blessed ahead of time by a Los Angeles Times article celebrating women architects. Drawing on that article and Maya Lin’s Boundaries (2000) as well as other research, the students agreed on a mission statement for the work: “Architecture, like books, is a deliberate balancing act between stability and motion, interior and exterior, aesthetic values and practicalities. Books, like buildings, are fundamentally inhabited spaces. They are incomplete without human interaction.”

Clever structural use of paper with a stone-like appearance, paired with apt choices of text matched with equally judicious choices in typography, evoke the similarities between books and buildings. Each architect/bookmaker’s contribution is a self-covering booklet in leporello format. Of different heights, the booklets are sewn together to create a tiered tower to be housed in an acrylic slipcase.

The first booklet, open below, incorporates Maryatt’s introduction, entitled “Blueprint”, all of which appears in the work’s entry in the publication Sixty over Thirty: Bibliography of Books Printed Since 1986 at the Scripps College Press (2016). The entry is reproduced in full further below.

The next booklet lists the sources of architectural inspiration, and as the lattice door on the list’s facing page turns, two sets of stairs, cutouts in contrasting colors, ascend on the verso page to the text that begins at the top of the recto page and ends at the foot of descending stairs on the next double-panel spread. Like Maya Lin, Maryatt’s students built their works by learning to think with their hands. The reader, too, has to think with the hands to experience fully this booklet and those that follow. The whole work conjures up the titles of Juhani Pallasmaa’s books — The Thinking Hand and The Embodied Image. Readers of this online entry will have to expand the images below, enjoy the words and imagine their way through with the title of another of his books — The Eyes of the Skin.

Books On Books Collection – Emmett Williams

2023/06/132024/02/27Books On BooksLeave a comment

abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz (1963)

abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz (“Alphabet Poem”) (1963)
Emmett Williams
Scroll in three parts printed offset on laid paper. H2228 x W60 mm. Acquired from Ozanne Rare Books, 29 September 2021.
Photos: Books On Books Collection. Permission to display from Ann Noël Williams.

More than seven feet in length, this alphabet scroll was originally published around 1961 by Verlag Kalender, the same publisher that published the Kalender Rolle, whose form influenced this work. Intended for performance, the scroll is gradually unfurled and read aloud. The “Alphabet Poem” was sold on its own and as a part of George Maciunas’ Fluxus 1. Other views online can be found in the Galerie Krinzinger archive, New York’s MoMA and Swarthmore College.

Exactly how the “Alphabet Poem” would be performed is unclear. Presumably read left to right line by line? How are the gaps to be handled? Should the reader pause for each letter missing in the gaps? Performance aside, the form and structure entice more of a visual engagement in the way that concrete and conceptual art and poetry most often do. The letters fall according to rule and constraints. The rule is to maintain the alphabetic sequence vertically, horizontally and in a zigzag diagonal. The constraints are the width of the paper roll, the spacing between letters in the top row and the spacing between lines. The visual patterns that result pull the eye away from the alphabetic/spatial rules, and it searches for entirely other pareidolic patterns — faces, constellations, etc. Just the way the eye discovers letters and shapes in everyday surroundings, the clouds, etc. All of which bumfuzzles our hemispherical brains — no doubt the concrete/conceptual intent?

There is no letter z!

Under Further Reading, other artists associated with Fluxus and visual (or concrete) poetry can be found in the Books On Books Collection. Beyond the collection, Hansjörg Mayer’s alphabetenquadrate (1966), in particular, should be compared and contrasted with Williams’ scroll. Like Williams’ scroll, Mayer’s leporello reads left to right and vertically. But where Williams’ alphabet seems to flutter away algorithmically and languidly into blank space at the end of the scroll, Mayer’s alphabet takes on a curving pattern that fills in a grid of 26 x 26 character spaces and finally overprints the completed grid to the point of illegibility.

Books On Books Collection – John Crombie

2023/06/102023/07/21Books On Books1 Comment

John Crombie formed Kickshaws in 1979 in Paris. Joined by Sheila Bourne, they published over 150 works. Apparent as the esoteric influence of visual poetry and the Oulipo movement may be, their works have the combined smell of the printer and typesetter’s workshop and artist’s studio that distinguish them from that crowd.

ABC in a maze (1987)

ABC in a maze (1987)
John Crombie
Spiral bound on four sides, double gate fold. H95 xW95 mm, 17 leaves. Edition of 300 (150 in English, 150 in French), of which this is Letter of 26 numbered A-Z. Acquired from Librairie Jean-Étienne Huret, 17 March 2022.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.

The cover of this work hides its title, just as the proper order of the pages hides in the reiterations of the alphabet across 17 leaves of this double gatefold puzzle and book.

The French title ABC Dédale carries more freight than the English. Not only does it convey the idea of the maze by reference to its inventor Daedulus, it refers to Cadmus, the Phoenician prince who brought the alphabet to Greece while on his quest to find his sister Europa, mother by Zeus to the Minotaur — the “monster in the alphabet”. If that seems a far-fetched allusion, then consider the additional hint in the name of the chosen typeface: Hélios, the Greek god and personification of the sun, to which Daedulus’ son Icarus flew too close in their escape from Crete.

Portrait évolutif du typographe
“Evolving portrait of the typographer” (1988)

Portrait évolutif du typographe. Fait par lui-même en collaboration avec sa presse en douze passages a partir des trois couleurs primaires
“Evolving portrait of the typographer. Made by himself in collaboration with his press in twelve passes using the three primary colors)”(1988)
John Crombie
Softcover, sewn and glued. 162 x 162 mm. 28 unnumbered pages. Edition of 60, of which this is #42. Acquired from Antiquariat Heinzelmännchen, 2 October 2022.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.

If a selection of works from the Books On Books Collection were made based on the theme of “artists’ books and color”, this small work would have to make the cut. Moving from five small splashes of color in the first pass, subsequent passes build up a multi-colored cartoon image of the typographer in a head-on eyeless gaze. At the seventh pass, however, the colors begin to fade; in the ninth, the features of the portrait begin to erode, and by the twelfth, only streaks of gray and the faintest impression of the outline remain.

A close look at the title reveals that same faint impression of the portrait’s outline. Were it not for its reference to the three primary colors, the title would have to be amended to a baker’s dozen of passes in collaboration with the press.

Books On Books Collection – Suzanne Moore

2023/06/062024/04/15Books On BooksLeave a comment

Rescuing Q (2023)

Rescuing Q (2023)
Suzanne Moore
Box enclosing softcover book. Box: H400 x W300 x D30 mm. Book: H380 x W285 mm. 32 pages. Printing by Sandy Tilcock (and Phoebe) at Lone Goose Press and Jessica Spring, Springtide Press. Unique copy of variant edition of 26. Acquired from the artist, 25 April 2023.
Photos: Books On Books Collection. Displayed with permission of the artist.

Rescuing Q is a manuscript book, consisting of original paintings, monoprints, collage, pigmented prints, embossing, debossing, gilding and handwork complementing the letterpress printing. It is one of several such works designed and created by Suzanne Moore after more than 20 years of experimentation.

Q is not normal. Q is quirky. Q floats away. Q comes in too many shapes and sizes and colors. So attractive, Q was bound to be hijacked by Q-Anon, political operatives and social anarchists.

But Q will not remain captive for long because it is always asking questions. And, if we want answers, then as Rilke says, we must “live the questions now”.

For most readers though, the question that will be uppermost is “How did she do that?” Moore is quick in her generosity and would insist on amending that question to “How did they do that?” Consider the selection of paper. More than Arches (a laid paper with visible mesh and watermark) had to be considered for these interactions of ink, gouache, gold leaf, palladium, debossing/embossing by etching press and hand, cuts and overlays.

What notes, movements and rhythms were playing when these colors and the sequences were chosen?

How do they think of paper and ink in three dimensions?

Who saw Q and questions in a bird’s nest?

And someone’s memory called up Cave Alphabet paper for the endpapers.

The fact that Moore and her colleagues can do all that (and more) and the fact that their gentle and pointed questions fuse with the art ensure that Rescuing Q does and will succeed.

A Musings (2015)

A Musings (2015)
Suzanne Moore
Tab-insert portfolio around softcover book. H370 x W230 mm, 24 pages. Edition of 26 variants, of which this is N. Acquired from Abecedarian Gallery, 13 February 2022.
Photos: Books On Books Collection. Displayed with permission of Suzanne Moore.

Title page

Another manuscript book, A Musings is an encounter between Suzanne Moore and the letter A, one of her 26 muses. As with any artist and muse, this naturally leads to portrayals of A in such varied positions, with such varied tools and techniques and such varied materials that the boxed and bound portfolio must take the amusing title A Musings. The muse finds itself posed across Magnani Aquaforte, Arches Text Wove, transparent kozo and other handmade papers enveloped by a stiffened, painted handmade paper. Moore’s musings fall on the historical, symbolic and spiritual aspects of the letter A with acrylic paint, pencil, freehand foil tooling, gold and palladium leaf, collage, debossing and embossing, sumi ink and gouache, sizing and varnish, monoprint, letterpress, folds and cutouts.

A separately provided copy of the artist’s plan for the pagination, structure and treatment per page offers a useful insight into the questions of how such a work is thought through and made. Page layout and the type of paper, in particular, play together sometimes like a clockwork mechanism and sometimes organically.

Painted cover

Left: Half-title. Right: Half-title turned to show translucency of kozo; note on the facing recto how the stroke from the debossed A on the title peeks through.

After the title page (see further above), the next double-page spread shows the title page’s debossed A in reverse on the verso page. Facing it is a square cutout through which multicolored lines forming overlapping As appear. Because the cutout page is translucent paper, we can see that the multicolored lines extend into a larger A on the next recto page. Turning the cutout page reveals that the cutout is actually a flap folded up and secured with white thread sewn in the shape of an A. This three-dimensionality of the flap is echoed by the way the crossbar swashes of the facing A seem to swirl around its two legs implying a spinning A.

From the single A interacting with a cutout, we move to a dozen evocations of the historic forms that the lowercase and uppercase A have taken. The lowercase “closed a” from the semi-uncial hand starting in the 5th century appears second down in the lefthand column, and the “perfected” Roman uppercase A appears at the bottom of the right column. Amusingly, some evocations blend periods of history. In the lower left, the drawing of a lowercase “open a”, which comes from the 8th century Carolingian miniscule hand, takes on the stylization of the 15th century’s bianchi girari (white-vine stem decoration). Just across from it, the stylized version of the Proto-Sinaitic (1700 BCE) form of aleph, meaning “ox”, has a burnt umber background that suggests markings in early cave dwellings.

Using a translucent leaf with set type shaping half an A, the next two double-page spreads play (or muse) on uppercase A’s bilateral symmetry poised between geometric and freehand approaches to lettering, between typography and calligraphy and between inking and debossing.

When the recto page above with its debossed line and angle is turned, another extraordinary integration of composition, paper, printing (inking, debossing and “embossing”) and, now, cutting occurs. Notice how the ink of the first and third As overlaps the now “embossed” angle, how the now “embossed” line becomes debossed as it crosses the gutter, how the previous double-page spread’s themes of geometry/freehand, printing/drawing and lowercase/uppercase likewise cross over, and how the cutout triangle uses the yellow ink showing through to form the crossbar of an A and the gutter to form the A’s lefthand stem.

There is much else to muse upon in the spreads above, but it’s in the last two spreads where Moore builds and unfolds a fantasia of calligraphy, color, debossing, cutting, gilding and painting. Notice how the gilt crossbar slots through the page and helps secure the debossed piece behind the cutout to the page.

And when the page turns, notice how its gilt crossbar reveals its red paper beneath and becomes the spot of red completing the crossbar for the cutout A. The red spot against white seems to set off the explosion of color and calligraphy on the black final page, printed by Jessica Spring from polymer. The different shapes for A here come from African alphabets. The images are unique monoprints, done on an etching press. With the letters placed to block out the black and overlap one another, a sense of depth and texture arises. Contributing to that sense of texture, the white letters are hand-painted in gouache — sometimes layered, sometimes blended.

Books are inherently collaborative affairs, and for artists’ books, collaboration can become almost another tool for the artist. Jessica Spring, mentioned above, also debossed the opening A, hand-set the half-A composition and contributed to Rescuing Q. Now a fine binder in her own right, Gabby Cooksey, a studio assistant to Moore and Don Glaister, was essential to A Musing‘s hand work, binding and wrapper. Part of Moore’s creative progression from contributing to overseeing to orchestrating can be traced from here across three other works in the Books On Books Collection.

A Blind Alphabet (1986)

A Blind Alphabet (1986)
Suzanne Moore
Accordion-fold. Closed H128 x W93 D28 (spine) D22 (fore-edge) mm; open 3200 mm. 34 pages. Edition of 200 of which this is #91.
Calligraphic letters designed and drawn by Suzanne Moore, printed by Harold McGrath on T.H. Saunders cold-pressed watercolour paper, bound by Claudia Cohen in marbled paper by Faith Harrison.
Acquired from Veatchs, 1 May 2018.

Here, as noted in the colophon to A Blind Alphabet, Moore has the creative role of originating artist, designing and drawing the alphabet — soloist, as it were, in the Cheloniidae Press reportory orchestrated by Alan James Robinson.

In Robinson’s wood engravings of birds, Moore plays a creative contributing role with much the same repertory company.

A Fowl Alphabet (1986)

A Fowl Alphabet (1986)
Alan James Robinson (etchings), Suzanne Moore(calligraphy)
Casebound. Marbled paper over boards. Doublures and flyleaves. H218 x W145 mm. 26 Folios untrimmed at head. Four-page prospectus loose. Acquired from Bromers Bookseller, 16 August 2022.
Photos: Books On Books Collection. Displayed with Suzanne Moore’s permission.

Again, Cheloniidae Press’ master printer Harold Patrick McGrath and “usual suspects” Arthur Larson (hand typesetting), Faith Harrison (hand marbling) and Claudia Cohen (binding) played their roles in this book. Here, Moore has the creative contributing role of designing the alphabet and, for the deluxe and full vellum editions (not shown), hand lettering.

In book art, an artist’s progression from contributor to orchestrator is not necessarily linear as can be seen in this subsequent work.

Bartleby, The Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street (1995)

Herman Melville, Bartleby the Scrivener: A Tale of Wall Street, 1853. Indulgence Press, 1995.
Typeetting, printing and binding by Wilber Schilling; Calligraphy by Suzanne Moore. Text paper by Janus Press. Endpapers by MacGregor & Vinzani.
Edition of 100 of which this is #71. H320 x W158 x D14 mm. Acquired from Indulgence Press, 17 December 2015.
Photos: Books On Books Collection. Displayed with permission of the publisher.

Wilber Schilling (Indulgence Press) orchestrated this edition of Herman Melville’s well-known story. Part of Schilling’s genius was to invite Moore to provide the calligraphy for Bartleby’s hallmark (his only) words “I prefer not to”. Another part was to print Moore’s calligraphy in ever-increasing size in ghostly ochre and in descending position across the pages of the book.

For more of Suzanne Moore’s works and artistic roles as well as others’ insight into them, see below.

Books On Books Collection – Sam Winston

2023/05/182023/10/22Books On BooksLeave a comment

One & Everything (2022)

One & Everything (2022)
Sam Winston
Casebound with illustrated paper over boards. H265 x W255 mm. 48 unnumbered pages. Acquired 23 November 2022.
Photos: Books On Books Collection. Displayed with artist’s permission.

Sometimes you just know that you have read a classic. This is one of those times. Winston and Candlewick Press (Walker Books in the UK) have worked a fresh tale, tone and meaning together with image, color, design and production values to an extraordinary level. Inspired by Tim Brookes’ “Endangered Alphabets Project“, Winston uses the striking shapes of letters and scripts from the Latin, Ogham, Cherokee, Armenian, Hebrew, Tibetan and dozens more alphabets and syllabaries to create the characters in his fable about the story that decides one day that it is the One and Only story.

Shapes like single-celled creatures (each filled with a different alphabet) represent the many stories existing before “The One” arrives.

“The One” is made of the English (i.e., Latin or Roman) alphabet. Will it listen to and make sense of all these other stories?

The fable of One & Everything does more than support the notion that alphabets and languages can be endangered. Implicit in the fate of the “One & Everything” story” is the message that Babel was more of a blessing than a curse.

Readers familiar with Winston’s A Dictionary Story and his collaboration with Oliver Jeffers in A Child of Books (both below) will recognize a growing refinement and, now, breadth and depth in Winston’s storytelling. The youngest audience and beginning readers will be held by the shapes, colors and simplicity of the story. Older readers will easily grasp its underlying meanings and be intrigued by the variety of letters and scripts and the idea that languages and alphabets can die. Still older readers and teachers will appreciate the helpful resources following the story’s ending invitation. At all levels, the audience will delight in Winston’s creation of his characterful abstractions with letters from the alphabets and scripts identified in those resources. Those with an eye for such artistry will appreciate Winston’s extension of a tradition embraced by Paul Cox, Roberto de Vicq de Cumptich, Sharon Forss and Nicolas McDowall.

A Child of Books (2019)

A forest made of fore-edges. A raft made of spines and its sail a book page. A wave and a path made of excerpts from books. In this fabulous world made from the features of books, the simpatico imaginations of Oliver Jeffers and Sam Winston deliver a heroine and an invitation that are hard to resist.

Promotional poster. Displayed with permission of Sam Winston.

In addition to the poster above and the trade book it promotes, Winston created an artist’s book edition celebrated by this hallway gallery below mounted by the British Library shortly after its appearance.

A Child of Books prints displayed at the British Library, 9 August – 27 September 2019.

Winston’s abiding love of letters, words and stories shines through in A Child of Books. Arguably, it has its origins in an earlier work whose story is told by his invention of a very different “child of books”.

A Dictionary Story (2001 – 2020)

Since its origin as a student project in 2001, A Dictionary Story has appeared in an accordion book form as a fine press edition and two trade editions and as single-sheet prints. The Books On Books Collection holds the fine press edition and the second trade edition, both of which have in common a vertical flush-right single-word column that tells the story and the immediately adjacent vertical flush-left column of definitions of the words in the story. In the fine press edition, the two columns meet at each mountain peaks of the accordion fold.

A Dictionary Story (2006)

A Dictionary Story (2006)
Sam Winston
Slipcased leporello between cloth-covered boards.H360 x W140 mm, 25 panels. Story text set in 9 point Times Roman by Sam Winston. Book designed by Richard Bonner-Morgan and Sam Winston. Printed by David Holyday at Trichrom Limited. Bound at Quality Art Reproductions, England. Published by Circle Press. Edition of 100, of which this is #68. Acquired from the artist, 30 May 2018.
Photos: Books On Books Collection. Displayed with artist’s permission.

“Once there was a time when all the books knew what they were about. But there was one book that was never sure of itself.”

Panels 2-5 from the fine press edition; detail of panels 2-3.

So begins Winston’s tale about this uncertain book. The book never sure of itself is the Dictionary, which of course it must be, otherwise the tale would not be called “A Dictionary Story”. The Dictionary is jealous of all the other books because they are “properly read”, whereas she is just flicked through from time to time. A bit like the “One” in One and Everything, the Dictionary seems to think she contains all the stories imaginable, because she contain all the words — just not in the right order. So she decides to bring her words to life as characters to see what will happen. Words and letters fly about, enacting the story as if in a concrete poem. A meaningful tussle between text and image is a frequent feature for artists’ books as well as visual poetry.

Another defining aspect of book art is its self-referential nature. In an interview with Typeroom, Winston captures this in his response to the question “What is Dictionary Story all about?”:

Dictionary Story is a playful way of exploring some of our presumptions around the printed word. Or you could say that it looks towards a tool we are given at a very young age – the Dictionary – and invites us to actually think about how that works. Here’s a device that is designed to explain a word’s meaning by offering further words in its place – to me that is remarkable. This is a type of knowledge that can only explain itself through referencing itself. As a visual person the image that comes to mind is a giant, never ending, Möbius strip of language twisting back on itself.

Of course for less visual persons, the Dictionary’s whim engenders chaos, which Winston, a dyslexic, can appreciate. So he brings onstage (or “onpage”) the Books, of whom the Dictionary was jealous, to remonstrate that if words become disconnected from their definitions, how will they the Books know what they are about? Insisting that she tame her words, they have the Dictionary’s Introduction introduce her bewildered words to the character “Alphabet”.

Making the journey over the hills and valleys of A Dictionary Story is satisfying, and re-making it is even more satisfying and delightful each time. The making and re-making of A Dictionary Story must also have been satisfying and delightful for Sam Winston; he has done it so many times.

A Dictionary Story (2013)

A Dictionary Story (2013)
Sam Winston
Three five-panel accordion folded sections in a plastic sleeve cover. Second trade edition. Sleeve: H205 x W160 mm. Sections: H200 x W150 mm, 15 panels. Acquired from the artist, 13 December 2020.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.

Watching the artist adjust the typography of A Dictionary Story to changing dimensions is like watching a star tennis player who is also a star basketball player and star soccer (football) player. There’s always a ball, there’s always a net, there’s always genius.

The trade edition splits the fine press edition into three less narrow leporellos and nudges some of the two columns (story/definition) into the valley fold. Below, in the trade edition across panels 3 and 4 is where the Dictionary decides to bring her words to life, and on the right side of the fourth panel, the words begin to slip away from the fold.

The same part of the story in the fine press edition occurs on the fourth panel below, and the words tilt against the fold.

These variations create subtly different narrative paces and visual impressions in the two editions. Not one better than the other, just different. The poster variations, however, subordinate narrative pace entirely to visual impression. At present, the posters are not in the collection, but the images below help to make the point. As with movie goers, some will like the prints more than the books, others the books more than the prints, and still others will marvel at the genius in all of them.

Books On Books Collection – Brynja Baldursdottír

2023/03/102023/03/09Books On BooksLeave a comment

Fuþorc (1992)

Fuþorc (1992)
Brynja Baldursdottír
Casebound in brushed and inked 1.6 mm zinc plate cover. Decorated doublures. Closed: H290 x W160 mm. Open: 320 mm. 32 folios. Edition of 144, of which this is #98. Acquired from the artist, 15 November 2021.
Photos of the work: Books On Books Collection. Displayed with permission of the artist.

Fuþorc, the name of Brynja Baldursdottír’s artist’s book, is the word made from the first six runes of the Runic alphabet, much as alphabet derives from the first two Greek letters alpha and beta. The shield-like covers, laid face down, display all twenty-four runes of the fuþorc. Over time and geography, the runes have changed in number, spelling and meaning, reflected in the explanatory and interpretive Norwegian, Icelandic and Anglo-Saxon versions of the “Rune Poem”. Baldursdottír’s version is “The Old English Rune Poem”, translated by Marijane Osborn and Stella Longland, which is we have the Old English fuþorc rather than the Scandinavian fuþark.

The Runic alphabet divides into three equal parts or ættir (pl. of ætt). In Fuþorc, Baldursdottír signals the beginning of each ætt with a double-page spread in which the eight runes of the ætt arc over a central image containing the ætt’s first letter. Different attributes attach to the ættir and each of the runes they embrace. Using layout of the text and imagery embedded in or surrounding the rune, Baldursdottír has evoked these attributes.

So, for the Ætt of Feoh, figures dance around the Maypole-like rune feoh, which is the first letter of Freyr and Freya who rule over this ætt associating it with agriculture, fertility and sexuality. Although Baldursdottír has Thor ruling over the Ætt of Haegl, it is the Watcher god and goddess Heimdall and Mordgud who rule over it. The seacliff-dwelling goat refers to Heimdall’s usual watch post. The snake to the left of the goat may be Jörmungandr, for which Thor goes fishing in the Prose Edda, which explains the presence of Thor’s hammer in the upper right of the image. Haegl means “hail”, and Heimdall is associated with the kind of disruptive weather threatening the ship at the foot of the image. For the Ætt of Tir, the arrowhead or spear shape of the rune evokes Tyr, the god of war, who rules over this ætt. By shaping each ætt with one of the fundamental geometric shapes of square, circle and triangle, Baldursdottír highlights the elemental nature of the Runic alphabet.

Ætt of Feoh, Ætt of Haegl, Ætt of Tir

In displaying each rune, it is as if Baldursdottír invites the viewer to peer through a rune-shaped stencil to that other world of associated attributes, but as with most divination, the images are partial and ambiguous. Is that a horse or a dragon behind feoh? Hail descending and melting behind haegl? A warship’s prow behind tir?

The runes feoh, haegl and tir

No doubt, more familiarity with the lore of runes would increase the reward of close attention to each image. But many are easily accessible. The image of horses shows well enough through the rune eh (or ehwaz), which means horse, horses or transport, but if there is any doubt, the explanatory text is laid out like reins and a bridle.

The book closes with the Valknut, sometimes called Odin’s knot, at the center of the Acknowledgments. Although runes and symbols such as this may be susceptible to misappropriation, the Acknowlegments themselves serve the Books On Books Collection as a welcome reminder that Fuþorc was first seen among other treasures at Ron King’s home.

Further Reading

Water, Calling (2021)

The Space Between (2018)

Further Reading

Ambulo Ergo Sum: Nature As Experience in Artists’ Books (2015)

Further Reading

Lessons from the South (1986)

Further Reading

Arch (2010)

Further Reading

abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz (1963)

Further Reading

ABC in a maze (1987)

Portrait évolutif du typographe“Evolving portrait of the typographer” (1988)

Further Reading

Rescuing Q (2023)

A Musings (2015)

A Blind Alphabet (1986)

A Fowl Alphabet (1986)

Bartleby, The Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street (1995)

Further Reading and Viewing

One & Everything (2022)

A Child of Books (2019)

A Dictionary Story (2001 – 2020)

A Dictionary Story (2006)

A Dictionary Story (2013)

Further Reading

Fuþorc (1992)

Further Reading

Portrait évolutif du typographe
“Evolving portrait of the typographer” (1988)