Dreamings (2023) Suzanne Moore Artist’s manuscript. Softcover, handsewn. Cloth-covered box with handwritten and painted title pastedown on the spine. H368 x W178 mm. 17 pages. A unique edition. Acquired from the artist, 15 April 2024. Photos: Books On Books Collection and artist.
Dreamings (2023) follows the artist’s Question Series, begun in 2008 considering questions of life and art while exploring the letter Q – “that quirky letter of distinct design” as Moore calls it. Other works in the series include:
Thirteen Questions (2008), drawn from Pablo Neruda’s The Book of Questions (1991) [Libro de las preguntas (1974)], unknown location.*
The Circus of Dr. Lao (1982) Charles G. Finney (text) Claire Van Vliet (design and illustration) Hardback, cased in cotton cloth over boards, head and tail bands, sewn. H x W mm. 9 1/4 x 12 inches 140 pages. Edition of 2000, of which this is #996. Acquired from BlueMamaBooks, 9 February 2025. Photos: Books On Books Collection.
If you have read Nathaniel West’s The Day of the Locust (1939) or Flannery O’Connor’s A Good Man Is Hard to Find (1955), Charles Finney’s novella illustrated by Claire Van Vliet will seem only marginally disturbing. If you have seen Tod Browning’s Freaks (1932), it will seem more than tame. Somewhere in between is the appropriate trigger warning for The Circus of Dr. Lao (1982).
Finney drops Dr. Lao’s circus of P.T. Barnum-esque carnival sideshows, a bestiary of distorted mythological creatures and exaggerated stereotypes, into the Arizona backwater of Abalone. The denizen of Abalone and their reactions — from gullibility, lubricious fascination, racist hazing, and violence to shrugs and a smug return to unexceptional normality — are the targets of Finney’s fevered satire. Van Vliet mirrors the range with her illustrations printed from original relief etchings and her selection of contrasting Plantin and Victoria display types.
“Book of Hours was designed and created by Julie Chen & Keri Miki-Lani Schroeder. This long-distance collaboration, between California and Texas, took place during the 2020-21 pandemic. The format of Book of Hours is known as a blow book, a historical structure originally designed as a magic trick which allows the presenter to show completely different visual sequences of pages within the same book. … The first and last sequences on each side of the book were designed by the two artists collaboratively, and the other eight sequences were designed individually by each artist. …” — Colophon.
Book of Hours (2021)
Book of Hours (2021) Julie Chen & Keri Miki-Lani Schroeder Box: H283 x W220 x D51 mm. Book: H279 x W216 x D48 mm. Artists’ book Structure #/88 Julie Chen 8 October 2024. Photos: Courtesy of artists, and Books On Books Collection.
As with all blow books, hold the Book of Hours‘ spine in your left hand, place your right thumb at the upper end of the fore edge, and flick through the pages. A set of sequenced images appear from beginning to end. But start again, shifting the pressure of your thumb to a lower position on the fore edge, and a different set of sequenced images shows up in the riffling. Turn the book over on its horizontal axis, and yet another series of sequenced images become available. To distinguish one side of the Book of Hours from the other, Chen and Schroeder have designated one side as “ante meridiem” on its title page and the other side as “post meridiem”.
These are Bruno Munari’s words that I share. I play and I have fun with my papers and my colours, but it is a job and a job, even if enjoyable, is a serious thing. My notes on image diaries are serious. A collection of thoughts translated into images, that are daily, just like a diary, “annotated” on nearly three hundred pages. I use the stencil technique with a monochromatic press, an imaginary thread connects them and creates a long history that develops, touching on events that have hit me in a particular way. It is my imaginary world, but at the same time, very real.Paper, card, fabric, needle, thread, colours and gouges are the materials that allow me to work and to leave my fantasy and creativity free. I have one very small study, but it is sufficient. It is welcoming, full of books, with a great ceiling window, three tables, two chalcographic presses and one press. When I am sitting in my workplace, I manage to isolate myself in my world. I can stay seated for hours without the passing time weighing on me, making me happy with this choice of life. — Eleonora Cumer
libro catalogo con interventi manuale (2019)
libro catalogo con interventi manuale / “book catalogue with manual interventions” (2019) Eleonora Cumer Sewn booklet, various papers including photographic, gold leaf, thread, mesh, string, wax. H200 x W220 (variable) mm. [16] pages. Unique. Acquired from the artist,. Photos: Books On Books Collection.
Many catalogues of individual artist’s books aim to be works of art themselves. Some attempt this with fine press production and limiting the edition, which sometimes succeeds. Some embody the very material and techniques that the artist used to create the items represented in their pages. Eleonora Cumer’s libro catalogo con interventi manuale / “book catalogue with manual interventions” (2019) is an extreme and stunning example of the latter. It is extreme because it is unique, not a limited edition. It lacks any identifying captions or list of works (the captions below appear only as a convenience for this entry in the Books On Books Collection). Libro catalogo con interventi manuale stands on its own as a stunning work of book art.
As the richly textured and gold-leafed cover turns, notice how Cumer presents the image of the catalogue’s first work: Parole non dette, frasi in sospeso / “Unspoken words, unfinished sentences” (2018). Split and pasted on two sides of the first folio, the glossy photograph of Parole non dette reunites with precise registration in the center of the folded folio.
When the right half of Parole non dette turns, the second work — controcorrente /”against the current” (2010) — comes into view.
Although pasted on one side of the folio, the photograph of controcorrente splits in two at the fold, the left side and right side precisely registered with one another on either side of the fold. This is subtle. First an image reunited and aligned by virtue of cut and fold, then second an image separated but aligned by virtue of cut and fold. We may be long used to how juxtaposition works artistically on the flat surface of collage or the multiple surfaces of assemblage. Cumer teaches this afresh with the flat and multiple surfaces of book structure as well as with the materials and techniques of bookmaking.
The next three works appear in a fold-out insert attached to the stub of a textured folio that also supports a brown paper folio following the insert. The colorful città / “city” (2018) reflects how Cumer’s palette and sculptural repertoire extends beyond the black and white leporello of controcorrente. The threads sewn in parallel over the photograph of città not only reflect another part of Cumer’s material repertoire, they also enact another part of her sculptural repertoire in the way they work with, in, and across the photographs and folios.
When the image of città / “city” folds out to the right, photographs of two more works appear: desiderio di … arte / “desire for … art” (2012) and illusione – delusione / “illusion – delusion” (2012). The image of desiderio highlights Cumer’s use of the flag book structure, although there is structurally much more to that work’s composition. The parallel threads that extended over the photo of cittá on the other side of the fold-out now pierce the photograph of illusione – delusione.
The next work to appear — il libro segreto /”the secret book” (2018) — carries on with the intervention and penetration by thread. The patterns formed by the thread reflect and extend those which can be seen in the photograph of il libro segreto. Leaping out of the photograph and penetrating the supporting brown paper folio, the thread introduces a new motif that will recur in just a few more pages.
The spread presenting the next work — fili intrecciati / “twisted threads” (2018) — reverts to the split aligned photo as used with controcorrente, but here the division comes at the center of the double-page spread. Off to the left side, the abstract figure in stitched thread echoes the technique used in fili intrecciati itself and starts another recurring motif in the catalogue.
No intervention occurs in the photograph of cancellazioni e riscruttare / “cancellations and rewritings” (2018). No cuts, no folds, no threads, but on the facing verso page, Cumer brings to life one of the cancelled/rewritten objects that can be seen in the photograph. Just as in fili intrecciati, the thread-bound bundle of strips of cut text has leapt from two dimensions to three dimensions, highlighting again how Cumer uses the flat and multiple surfaces of book structure as well as the materials and techniques of bookmaking to re-teach us how juxtaposition works artistically on the flat surface of collage and the multiple surfaces of assemblage.
Following but elaborating on the previous spreads’ motif of juxtaposing an extract of the work with a photograph of the work, Cumer places a red-threaded square of tartalan across from the cut and misaligned photograph of la poesia dell’universo / “the poetry of the universe” (2018). The cut photograph is split by a red stitch that divides in two itself.
Here is where the variation on the two dimensional becoming three dimensional introduced by il segreto libro recurs. Defying the gutter’s separation of the tartalan sample from the whole work and the severing of the photo on the recto page, threads from the sample cross the gutter, fall across one half of the photograph, and link up with the severing stitch. The thicker thread of the severing stitch passes under the other half of the photograph to exit from it on the right and fall across the image of red threads similarly exiting the work itself. The ways in which this double-page spread speaks to the self-reflexive nature of book art and the paradoxical relationship of art to what it re-presents are remarkable.
The final work in the catalogue — visioni urbani / “urban visions”(2015) — resides in the Books On Books Collection. More about it can be found here. Threads do not make an appearance in visioni urbani, but their triangular appearance here does reflect on urbanivisioni. If the space to the left of the red stitching can be counted as a page, this is a “three-page” spread echoing the three-way split of the photo of the work, which echoes the tripartite physical structure of the work itself.
In the colophons of several earlier works, Cumer has drawn attention to this practice in libro catalogo of recycling her works. She labels them as part of projects “born of work with old books”, “born from her artist’s books”, and “born of her work with old theater posters”. Three of them are explored below, and three others can be found in a previous entry on her work.
PRESENTE/OTASSA (2015)
PRESENTE/OTASSA / “Present / Tax” (2015) Eleonora Cumer Sewn booklet. H287 x W204 mm. [8] including cover. Edition of 50, of which this is #19. Acquired from the artist, . Photos: Books On Books Collection.
Whether read as otassa presente or presente otassa, the translation of this sewn booklet’s title comes out the same: a present tax. The phrase in the background — usa e getta — stamped over ghosted images of cutout book pages means “disposable” and is used as the title of a 2014 work. The ghosted book pages come from the Italian edition of Mario Puzo’s last novel Fools Die, a Hollywood/Wall Street potboiler. The front cover’s sealed plastic envelope containing cut-up sewing patterns, buttons, thread and an old photograph of a little girl wearing a knit shawl and sitting in a white wicker chair makes the intriguing juxtapositions only more so. What do these collaged and assembled elements have to do with one another?
Some clarity dawns with phrases on the interior pages: gli anni passano (“years go by”), i ricordi riaffiorano (“memories come back”), and nitide immagini del passato (“clear images of the past). “Disposable” alludes not only to the novel whose pages wallpaper the cover and interior pages but also to Cumer’s work of the preceding year — USA E GETTA (2014), a series of unique altered books. The series is the source of the images inside PRESENTE/OTASSA. Each shows a hollowed-out book with an object held in place between clear plates — a picture frame (empty except for the reflection of the foreground — the rest of the work it comes from), a stuffed toy, and a broken dress-up doll. Things of the past that in general are disposable (like sewing patterns no longer needed or broken dolls) nevertheless come back as clear images: a tax on the present.
radici/ in memoria dei miei genitori (2015)
radici/ in memoria dei miei genitori / “roots/ in memory of my parents” (2015) Eleonora Cumer Sewn booklet with stitching. H287 x W206 mm. [8] pages. Edition of 50, of which this is #11. Acquired from the artist, . Photos: Books On Books Collection.
The theme of memory continues in radici/ in memoria dei miei genitori / “roots/ in memory of my parents” (2015) but perhaps more poignantly than in presente/otassa. Drawing on the previous works moltitudine e solitudine/ “multitude and solitude” (2013) and no time no space (2015), the booklet also evokes Cumer’s passion for textile and fabric art. The small image of a sewing box in the lower left hand corner of the central spread may speak to a parental source of that passion, but the words on the other spreads — recise and solitudine e un grande dolore (“severed or sever or cut” and “loneliness and a great sorrow”) — turn that central spread into a collage of loss almost more so than a collection of memories. It is one of the more somber works by Cumer in the Books On Books Collection.
immagini (2015)
immagini / ‘“images” (2015) Eleonora Cumer Sewn booklet with stitching on the last page. H287 x W206 mm. [8] pages. Edition of 50, of which this is #20. Photos: Books On Books Collection.
The overlaid phrases immagini ritagliate, immagini scomposte, and immagini cucite can be translated as “cut out images”, “distorted images”, and “stitched images”, respectively. On the cover of the unreadable book displayed, the words FINZIONE / “fiction” and REALTÁ / “reality” are spelled in reverse. As in libro catalogo, there is self-reflexivity at play here. Cumer plays with the word ritagliate by printing ri in black and tagliate in white, creating two verbs — ritagliate (“cut out”) and tagliate (“cut”), which apply to the word itself, the technique in the poster displayed, and the fragment of it blown up on the double-page spread. By blurring the image on the recto page of the second double-page spread, she makes the spread play out the meaning of scomposte — “distorted”. And in the third spread, she playfully stitches over the word cucite — “stitched” — which comments not only on the word but also on the stitched unreadable book on the verso page.
*Giocare è una cosa seria! I bambini di oggi sono gli adulti di domani aiutiamoli a crescere liberi da stereotipi aiutiamoli a sviluppare tutti i sensi aiutiamoli a diventare più sensibili. Un bambino creativo è un bambino felice!
“Playing is a thing! Today’s children are tomorrow’s adults. Let’s help them grow up free from stereotypes. Let’s help them develop all their senses. Let’s help them become more sensitive. A creative child is a happy child!” Bruno Munari, on occasion of 1986
Bruno Munari, 1986, on occasion of a Children’s Workshop Laboratory, prompted by a series of seminars promoted in 1977 by Franco Russoli, Superintendent of the Pinacoteca di Brera.
The Negro Is Still Not Free (2022) Elaina Brown-Spence, Meera Mittari, Erica Honson, Jingnan Cheng, Xue’er Goo, Bryn Ziegler, Grace Johnson, Amanda D’Amico, and Sarah Matthews Double-sided single-page book in a pants fold. 152 x 152 mm. Acquired from Sarah Mathews, 6 August 2024. Photos: Books On Books Collection
The Negro is Still Not Free was created by Elaina Brown-Spence, Meera Mittari, Erica Honson, Jingnan Cheng, Xue’er Goo, Bryn Ziegler, Grace Johnson, Amanda D’Amico, and Sarah Matthews at the Borowsky Center for Publication Arts at the University of Arts in Philadelphia, PA during the month of February 2022. In its color and style, it reflects the influence of Amos Paul Kennedy, Jr. Its double-sided single-sheet pants-fold book structure, cleverly fuses the traditions of poster and book (or zine).
Inspired by the words of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr’s celebrated “I Have A Dream” speech from August 28, 1963, the work was created to support the Youth Art & Self Empowerment Project in Philadelphia, PA. Their mission is to “provide space for incarcerated young people to express themselves creatively and to develop as leaders both within and beyond prison walls.”
SPACE: Known/Unknown (2022)
SPACE: Known / Unknown Lauren Emeritz & Sarah Matthews Box with pastedown title enclosing softcover book. Box: 237 x W157 x D50 mm. Book: H230 x W150 x D25 mm. 48 pages and loose 4-page colophon in envelope attached to inside back cover. Edition of 15, of which this is #5. Acquired from Sarah Mathews, 6 August 2024. Photos: Books On Books Collection.
A collaborative project between Lauren Emeritz & Sarah Matthews, SPACE: Known/Unknown features three telling quotations:
“Open a book, open the universe”– Unknown “We are made whole by books, as by great space and the stars” — Mary Carolyn Davies “The Universe is under no obligation to make sense to you” — Neil deGrasse Tyson
The universe of this artist’s book is that of letterpress, handcarved letters, wood and metal type, embossed printer labels, multiple inks and foil stamping, die cuts, paper engineering, and multiple binding structures. This and its crazy quilt imposition make it a lively universe to explore, and it certainly lives up to deGrasse Tyson’s quip.
Does this book subscribe to the “argument by design” made by Socrates and St. Thomas Aquinas?
A universe in which page layout turns one way and then another is under no obligation to make sense.
A Turkish fold of constellations.
The artists must have traveled back in time to include one of these embossed sticky labels.
The universe and title page can appear in multiple places — even in the middle.
A sunburst — and then star label in case we missed it?
A multi-color galaxy of ink leads to die-cut black stars (or holes?).
Not exactly a dwarf red star, but it’s the artists’ universe, they get to decide.
Tau blau / Dew Blue (2013) Barbara Beisinghoff ; Solander box in linen, handbound Vera Schollemann; Flax paper, handmade by John Gerard. Solander box: H240 x W200 x D32 mm. Flagbook: H220 x W180 mm. Edition of 38, of which this is #22. Acquired from the artist, 30 December 2024. Photos: Books On Books Collection.
Familiarity with Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale Hørren /The Flax enhances appreciation of Barbara Beisinghoff’s Tau blau / Dew Blue. Andersen gives a voice to the plant that expresses its joy, pain, hope and observations at each stage of its blooming, being harvested, turned into linen and clothing then paper, and finally consigned to flames. The H.C. Andersen Centre offers Jean Hersholt’s translation of it here.
Only the opening paragraph of the story appears in Tau blau / Dew Blue, but Beisinghoff documents and illustrates the stages from her own cultivation of flax, observation of its growth and preparation of its processing. And with the etching, drawing, watermarking, handmade papers, linen cloth and thread, and binding structure, Beisinghoff suffuses the spirit of the tale’s metamorphosizing plant throughout the whole of Tau blau / Dew Blue.
From the blue of the plant’s blossoms to the white of its change into linen and paper to the red, burnt orange and black of its sparks and ash when it is consumed by fire in the end, all of the story’s colors are replayed across Tau blau / Dew Blue from its Solander box to its covers and spine like motives in a Baroque musical piece.
In a concerto, motives play off one another and develop. In Tau blau / Dew Blue, the motif of nature (the plant) plays off the motif of artifice and the manmade (the fairy tale, music, linen, paper, etc.). On the front cover (above), a young girl, surrounded by large damselflies, plays a fiddle or violin and seems to hover above a silver foil image of flax thread and tools for making it. In the spread above alongside the front cover, the specks rising over the staves and musical notes (a recurring motif in itself) recall the tale’s final passage in which the bundle of papers (made from linen rags) is cast into a fire:
“I’m going straight up to the sun!” said a voice in the flame. It was as if a thousand voices cried this together, as the flames burst through the chimney and out at the top. And brighter than the flames, but still invisible to mortal eyes, little tiny beings hovered, just as many as there had been blossoms on the flax long ago. They were lighter even than the flame which gave them birth, and when that flame had died away and nothing was left of the paper but black ashes, they danced over the embers again. Wherever their feet touched, their footprints, the tiny red sparks, could be seen.
Images of tools — whether for preparing flax or for making the products from it — also recur on the inside of the front and back covers and throughout the book. The human figures alongside the tools, however, appear engaged in more than manufacturing. Elsewhere in the book, they dance, they sit and meditate or write, they row on ponds beside the growing flax. The fairy tale, too, has these Romantic juxtapositions of nature, art and craft. So, again, the spirit of Andersen’s tale finds another way into Tau blau / Dew Blue.
Inside front and inside back covers.
The front cover also announces another motif in those coils of thread below the young girl’s feet. Within the coils is the image of a Fibonacci spiral, which appears on the back cover and throughout the book in different ways. It can be found drawn and printed. It can be found in watermarks in the handmade paper. It can be found in the arrangement of florets in flax. Being a composite flower, flax blossoms display the spiral based on the Fibonacci sequence 1, 2, 3, 5 … 233, and so on. These numbers are waterjet-drawn on the pure flax paper below and explained in an entry printed on the adjacent plain handmade paper folio. By appearing on the book’s front and back covers, the spiral echoes the beginning and ending cycles of birth and rebirth the flax goes through in the folktale.
The Fibonacci spiral on the front and back covers.
The sequence of Fibonacci numbers 1, 2, 3, 5 … 55, 89, 144, 233 … watermarked on handmade flax paper with a water jet.
Description of the Fibonacci spiral side by side with quotation from Thompson’s On Growth and Form (1917), drawing on Leibniz’s Rationalist philosophy.
To organize and weave her motives together, Beisinghoff uses an accordion spine to whose peaks eleven sets of folios are sewn with linen thread. Three of the eleven are 4-page folios consisting of blue handmade paper. Another three 4-page folios consist of pure flax paper (handmade by John Gerard). The remaining five gatherings have 8-page folios, each consisting of a pure flax paper folio around a blue or plain one.
Side and top views of the accordion spine.
The first pure flax folio begins the book, displaying two title pages (German and English) and two etchings on its first and last pages. In the center spread, two more etchings appear. A watermark symbolizing phyllotaxis shows through in the upper left, balanced by a watermark with a cross section of a flax stalk in the upper right of the center spread. The texture and weight of the flax paper allows the impress and shadow of the etchings to stand out on both sides against the inking and watermarks.
Inside front cover and Tau blau title page and etching.
Center spread of first flax paper folio. Note the watermarks in the upper left and right corners.
Dew Blue title page and etching, loop of flax fibers, first page of blue handmade paper folio; note its boating image repeated from the prior center spread.
Following the pure flax folio, the first all blue folio gives us that introductory excerpt from Andersen’s fairy tale. Next comes a description of flax comes from Leonhart Fuchs’ Book of Herbs (1543), then the series of planting and harvesting observations from Beisinghoff, then the refrain from Clemens Brentano’s poem “Ich darf wohl von den Sternen singen” (1835), then philosophical observations drawing on G.W. Leibniz from D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson’s On Growth and Form (1917), a much-quoted theorem of musical composition from Bernd Alois Zimmermann’s Intervall und Zeit (1974), and finally (below) a passage of text by Gottfried Benn from the Hindemith oratorio Das Unaufhörliche / The Neverending (1936). In the valleys of the accordion spine, some of the lines from Andersen, Fuchs, Beisinghoff and Been appears handwritten in orange paint.
Translated fragment of Benn’s lyrics for Paul Hindemith’s oratorio Das Unaufhörliche / The Neverending (1936).
Even with these additional texts, Andersen’s fairy tale remains the most central text in Tau blau / Dew Blue, despite the brevity of its excerpt. Brentano’s Romantic/religious expostulations (“O Star and Bloom, Garb and Soul, Love, Hurt and Time for evermore”) sound like those of the plant in the story’s final passage. The occurrence of Fibonacci’s spiral in the plant may be a physical fact, but Beisinghoff turns it into something more mystical by placing the description of phyllotaxis next to Leibniz’ and Thompson’s transcendental view of mathematical science and natural philosophy. Likewise she links the texts from Bernd Alois Zimmermann and Gottfried Benn to the fairy tale by placing them beneath the etching that captures the flax plant’s singing and dancing into its transformation by fire.
Below is the final folio of the work. Like the first, it is made completely of flax paper, but its center spread offers a fuller image: flax blossoms and stalks float in the foreground, and in the background is a sketch of Beisinghoff’s residence where she grows her flax. Like the Fibonacci spiral on the front and back covers, the first and last flax folios round out the work. But go back and listen for the hidden sound installations accompanying Dew Blue. Noticing Beisinghoff’s abstract musical notation, indulge yourself with recordings of a Swedish folk song (“Today is supposed to be the big flax harvest” here or here) to which the notation and phrases allude, and as the flax papers turn and wave on their accordion peaks, listen carefully for their musical rustle.
The final pure flax paper folio.
Tule Bluet damselfly perched on flax leaf. Photo: John Riutta, The Well-Read Naturalist (2009). Displayed with permission.
Die wilden Schwäne (2001)
Die wilden Schwäne (2001) Barbara Beisinghoff Box with embossed cover holding folios wrapped in chemise. H35o x W250 mm. 18 folios. Edition of 25, of which this is #6. Acquired from the artist, 20 December 2024. Photos: Books On Books Collection.
Barbara Beisinghoff’s Die wilden Schwäne is an exemplar of collaboration and craft. In it, she even requires collaboration between Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm. Andersen’s Die wilden Schwäne and the Grimms’ Die sechs Schwäne are based on the same tale of brothers turned into swans who are saved by their sister Elisa’s diligent and mute harvesting, pulping, spinning and sewing of stinging nettles into shirts that break the spell when donned. H.C. Andersen, however, is verbose and elaborate in his telling (even including vampires!), and Beisinghoff has done a bit of nipping and tucking with the more succinct Brothers Grimm to create a version more suited to the artist’s book she creates.
To match Elisa’s effort with stinging nettles, Beisinghoff enlisted the collaboration of Johannes Follmer, the owner of a paper mill. Together they obtained cultivated stinging nettles from the Institute for Applied Botany in Hamburg, cut the fibers, left them to rot, boiled them into a pulp, mixed that with water in a vat, scooped up layers in a sieve embroidered with illustrations, couched the sheets, then pressed and dried them into paper. Beisinghoff applied further drawings with a water jet, watercolor and pencil to the watermark-embossed sheets to illustrate aspects of the tale. To present the Andersen/Grimm “collage”, Beisinghoff had the type set and printed at the Gutenberg Museum. Andersen is printed in light green and Grimm in light red on seven numbered translucent sheets and interleaved with the nine folios of paper art (two more translucent sheets carry the cover page and colophon). To wrap the folios together, Beisinghoff made an embossed chemise or “feather dress” of pure nettle fiber, which could represent Andersen’s description of the brothers’ blowing off each other’s feathers every evening when the sun has set or one of the shirts that their sister makes to break their spell.
The “feather dress” of stinging nettle fiber.
“The King’s little daughter was standing in the cottage room, playing with a green leaf, for she had no other toys. She pricked a hole right through the leaf, looked up at the sun, and there it was, she saw the clear eyes of her brothers, but every time the warm rays of the sun shone on her cheeks, she thought of all their kisses.” Translation with DeepL.
“When she had fallen asleep, it seemed to her as if she were flying high through the air, and she met a fairy, beautiful and radiant, yet she looked very much like the old woman who had given her berries in the forest and told her about the swans with gold crowns on their heads.” Translation with DeepL.
“The swans swooped down to her and lowered themselves so that she could throw the shirts over them: and as she touched them, the swan skins fell off, and her brothers stood before her in the flesh, fresh and beautiful.” Translation with DeepL.
“Barbara Beisinghoff (head in the background) covers the frame with this transparent, embroidered and sewn gauze, which is used to scoop and emboss her nettle papers. This is how her large-format watermark illustrations end up on the sheets.” Translation with DeepL. Peter Holle. 30 August 2001. Frankfurter Rundschau. Photo: Oliver Weiner.
This art by watermarking recalls that of other artists in the collection: Fred Siegenthaler and Gangolf Ulbricht, in particular. The technique of pulp painting also finds other practitioners in the collection: Pat Gentenaar-Torley, John Gerard, Helen Hiebert, Tim Mosely, Maria G. Pisano, Taller Leñateros, Claire Van Vliet and Maria Welch. Beisinghoff’s blend of embroidered watermarks, waterjet marking and pulp painting, however, creates a bas relief effect that is echoed only in the collection’s works by Mosely, Taller Leñateros and Van Vliet, albeit achieved differently. These workings of the substrate — as material, color, surface, and even narrative — with the workings of book structure is one of the more magical locations of book art. It is perfect for Beisinghoff’s metamorphical interpretation of the Andersen/Grimm fairy tale.
Fortunato Depero’s Depero Futurista: Imbullonato (the “Bolted Book”) stands at the center of an uneasy off-rhyming of history. Where Depero and the avant-garde Futurists of the early 20th century rode the waves with Benito Mussolini and fascism, this 2016/17 facsimile edition of Depero Futurista coincided with the emergence of America’s “Tangerine Mussolini” and his MAGA movement.
In 2024, the original and facsimile editions of Depero Futurista appeared in an exhibition at the American Academy in Rome just as Trump was elected as the first Convict-in-Chief. And five days before he was sworn in, the Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art in London presented its copy of the original edition in an exhibition devoted to the poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, leader of the Futurist movement, good friend of Depero, and peripatetic pal to Mussolini.
Depero Futurista’s peculiar off-rhymings in history prompt questions about the intersection of art and our social contract. How is it that fascism weighs on Depero’s art but has not suffocated it, even when the association peeps out as it does in Imbullonato? How is it that communism weighs on El Lissitzky’s About Two Squares (1922) but has not buried it?
Günter Berghaus’ Futurism and Politics provides a nuanced view of Futurism, Marinetti, Depero and their links with fascism. Fabio Belloni traces the rise, fall and rise of Depero in his essay “The Critical Fortune and Artistic Recognition of the Work of Depero“, which appeared in the journal of the now defunct Center for Italian Modern Art. Gianluca Camillini’s 2020 doctoral thesis traces the disconnects and remaining connections with fascism in Depero Futurista after the 1924 break between Futurism and Mussolini.
Perhaps Depero’s case contrasts helpfully with that of Ezra Pound. Like Depero, Pound was an enthusiastic supporter of Mussolini. Pound coopted Marinetti’s and Depero’s Futurism into his and Wyndham Lewis’ Vorticism. Unlike Depero Futurista, however, Pound’s poetry — especially the Cantos –foregrounds that enthusiasm. The frequency of its appearance in Pound’s poetry and its ugliness weigh more heavily than the few mentions of Mussolini in Depero Futurista. Depero’s and Marinetti’s hero-worship appears mostly in their poetry and prose but without Pound’s anti-semitism. The connection with fascism that remains in Depero Futurista, however, appears in the bellicosity and glorification of war by this “book machine”.
In the American Academy’s exhibition, Depero Futurista sits alongside the anti-racism of William Kentridge’s Portage (2000) and Kara Walker’s Five Poems Rainmaker (2002). How does (can?) art deliberately associated with fascist, statist or authoritarian movements rise above them to be celebrated and fruitfully juxtaposed with the works of today’s artists more associated with progressive causes?
For the Books On Books Collection, Depero is also an important figure in the overlap of typography and the alphabet with architecture and the artist’s book. Depero defined typographic architecture as
that special architectural form suggested by typographie types which has been used with great efficacy in advertising artistic constructions, in pavilions, kiosks and advertising plastics of national and international exhibitions of decorative art and in industrial and commercial exhibitions. The painter Depero created, in 1927, the book pavilion of the Bestetti- Tumminelli and Treves publishing house at the international exhibition of decorative art at Monza, inspiring his work to this conception of typographie architecture.(p. 18)
And he reproduced an image of it in Depero Futurista.
From Depero Futurista: “Padiglione del Libro” (1927).
The book pavilion is not bellicose. It is bombastic as is much of what is in Imbullonato. The blast of its typography has much in common with that in Kurt Schwitters’ Die Scheuche Märchen (1925) and other artists’ works not associated with fascism, authoritarianism or statism. To focus on Imbullonato‘s innovation, technique, typography or cross-fertilization with architecture and compare and contrast them with that of other artists is not to forget its entanglements. In fact, the difficulty in focusing is a reminder of how art, too, can be bolted to the shameful.
Camillini, Gianluca. 2020. “Fortunato Depero and Depero futurista 1913–1927“. Dissertation thesis. Reading: University of Reading. “In the two reprints of Depero futurista 1913–1927 (1978 and 1987 by SPES Firenze), Luciano Caruso also repeatedly writes ‘libromacchina imbullonato’ (bolted machine-book, Caruso, 1987, 36).” (p. 14).
Caruso, Luciano (ed.) and Fortunato Depero. 1987. Depero Futurista. Firenze: Studio per Edizioni Scelte Salembeni.
Caruso, Luciano (ed.) and Fortunato Depero. 1978. Fortunato Depero Futurista. Firenze: Studio per Edizioni Scelte Salembeni.
A Slow Air (2016) Thomas A. Clark and Diane Howse Perfect bound softcover. H200 x W150 mm. 64 pages. Edition of 750. Acquired at the Small Publishers Book Fair, London, in 2018. Photos of the work: Books On Books Collection.
If you live where red kites thrive, you will see them most often singly, in pairs or threes. If you are lucky, you may see as many as eight or ten at a time. Near Harewood House in West Yorkshire where red kites were reintroduced in 1999, there are hundreds. In 2016, photographer/artist Diane Howse (Countess of Harewood) and poet/artist Thomas A. Clark collaborated on an exhibition at Harewood House: the grove of delight. Using objects, words and images, the exhibition turned the house’s Terrace Gallery into a symbolic grove; also displayed was a series of 15 photographs by Howse of red kites over Harewood. For the exhibition and under the direction of Peter Foolen, the diligent Dutch publisher of herman de vries, Peter Liversidge and others, A Slow Air (the book) was produced and published by Harewood House. Foolen and the artists have assembled and manipulated the photos in a sequence of color and image that exerts a forward movement like a film or narrative. Like a real sighting of these birds circling and banking as if to a slow musical air, the book mesmerizes.
Restless (2020) Jacobus Oudyn Loose sheets from plastic comb bound notebook in a clamshell box covered in Japanese paper. Box: H240 x W170 x D40 mm. 60 pages. Unique. Acquired from the artist, 2 January 2024. Photos: Books On Books Collection. Displayed with permission of Jacobus Oudyn.
Restless consists of a continuous drawing with graphite and collage across sixty loose sheets of 120gsm cartridge paper removed from a plastic comb bound notebook. Like Oudyn’s earlier work Out of Breath (2019), meant to represent the medical conditions of mesothelioma and black lung, Restless aims to evoke chronic restless leg syndrome.
Ebb and Flow (2023) Jane Cradock-Watson Concertina book with cloth hard bound covers. H155 x W27 mm (closed), W680 mm (open). 64 panels. Edition of 20. Acquired from the artist, 21 January 2024. Photos: Books On Books Collection. Displayed with artist’s permission.
An exploration, both visually and physically, the ‘edge’ of the sea where it meets the land, with its continuous ebb and flow of the breaking waves, rhythmically rolling back and forth onto the sand. (Artist’s description)
With the binding and her photography in Ebb and Flow, Jane Cradock-Watson has sculpted and painted the sea’s edge. Four digital photographs printed on Zerkal paper have been spliced together between two cloth-covered boards. The flexibility and extent of the concertinaed paper create an undulating structure that turns seascape stills into mesmerising cinema.
Books On Books 