Books On Books Collection – Robbin Ami Silverberg

Morning Prayer II (2000-04)

A two-layered stone sculpture featuring a square base and a smaller square top, both with a mottled gray and white pattern, resting on a black surface.

A stacked geometric sculpture with a textured surface, featuring a smaller square top and a larger rectangular base in shades of gray.

Morning Prayer II (2000-04)
Robbin Ami Silverberg
Tefillah-shaped box: H70 x W65 x D65 mm. Meander-fold booklet: 52 x 52 mm (closed); H250 x W150 mm (open). Mica inlay on bookle’t front cover. Edition of 20, of which this is #7. Acquired from the artist, 20 April 2026.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.

In the granite quarry at Mauthausen in Austria, there are 186 uneven steps made of stone leading out of it. These are the “Stairs of Death”, so named for the countless who died in the forced labor of carrying blocks hacked from the quarry up the nearly vertical climb. Morning Prayer II is a heart-breaking memorial to these victims.

A tefillah-shaped box holds a double-sided meander-fold booklet illustrated with archival photographs from the concentration camp. Tefillin (one worn on the arm, one on the head) honor the biblical commandment to remember the Exodus from Egypt and observe Passover. Associated with morning weekday prayers, they hold parchment scrolls with four verses from the Torah: (Exodus 13:1–10, Exodus 13:11–16; Deuteronomy 6:4–9, and Deuteronomy 11:13–21). They are usually made of leather.

In contrast, the container of Morning Prayer II appears as stone — mica embedded in its base and granite simulated on its paper covering. Instead of a morning prayer in remembrance of the trek to freedom and passing over of the angel of death, we have a mourning prayer counting each of the 186 stone steps of the staircase.

An open vintage photo album featuring black and white photographs, with a square frame at the front displaying a textured surface.

Instead of scrolls extolling the laws of the deity, we have a single sheet, cut and folded to open in a zigzag meander recalling and showing photos of the uneven granite steps.

An artistic fold-out book made of paper, displaying various textures and printed text, arranged on a dark background.

Instead of the calligraphy of verses from the Torah scrolls, we have the typeset counting of steps confined and justified left and right within four of the fourteen segments of the artist’s book.

A folded piece of paper featuring a collage of images depicting stone steps and brick patterns, interspersed with text in a repeated, structured format.

Instead of morning sunlight, we have gray ink on the reverse, mimicking marble or ashes.

A layered composition of various textured papers in shades of gray and beige, arranged in a unique pattern, with a small square frame integrated into the design.

Instead of the rhythm of scripture, we have the gaps between stones mimicked by the gaps between run-together words enumerating the 186 steps.

Black and white collage featuring images of stone stairs and a soldier holding a rifle, surrounded by text in a stylized layout.

Each stone in each step represents where prejudice, racism, and xenophobia lead. Each stone in each step recalls yesterday’s and today’s iniquity and inequity of persecuting those with the “wrong” color of skin, different beliefs, ethnicity, or geographic background. Each stone is the one cast against someone who is not you — until it is you.

La durée réelle: Make this cut first (2024-25)

A textured book cover with a dark purple fabric background and a small square cutout featuring a yellow-orange paper with red lines.

La durée réelle: Make this cut first (2024-25)
Robbin Ami Silverberg
Box: H388 c W229 x D58 mm. Book: H352 x W204 xD28 mm. Edition of 12, of which this is #10. Acquired from the artist, 20 April 2026.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.

Our experience of time is no small topic in philosophy, literature, and art. The title of Robbin Ami Silverberg’s artist’s book comes from Henri Bergson’s 1889 dissertation on the subject and his later collection of essays translated as Creative Evolution (1911). With his term la durée réelle (“real duration” or “lived time”) and metaphor-driven exposition, his books aim to describe time as a continuous, flowing, yet nonlinear stream of consciousness rather than surrender it to the mechanistic, linear, and causal descriptions of science. Silverberg’s artist’s book is her meditation on time and life expressed with handmade paper, watermarks, pulp painting, dry point, typography, quotations as if from a commonplace book, and the form of the book.

An open box with a yellow border showcasing a purple interior, a grayish-blue outer layer, and a sheet of parchment paper laid over a red base featuring a grid pattern.

Top view of a book with a red spine and a paper cover featuring a grid pattern in purple.

So much is going on in this artist’s book. Motives interact with technique, material, allusion, text, image, and structure. Motives interact with motives, techniques with techniques, material with material, allusion with allusion, and text with image. All of it like the crisscrossing strokes left on the cutting board and transferred to paper by drypoint.

An abstract artwork featuring a textured yellow background with visible scratch marks, framed by a pink border, and a small black outline of a bird in the bottom corner.

Embedded in the custom box, a cutting board used as a printing plate.

Consider the following sequence. On the verso page of chartreuse green paper, inside the impress of the printing plate, the small image of the fish in the lower left hand corner indicates the seasonal food being prepared in the Spring. On the recto page, the as-yet-illegible text showing through translucent paper mimicks the marks on the cutting board print. When the recto page turns to the left, the now legible text explaining techniques of cutting fish appears in different weights, different cases, and different orientations, mimicking the different blades and direction of cuts. The translucent paper on which the instructions are typeset bears a watermark grid in the shape of the cutting board. When the fold-over sheet of chartreuse green paper turns to the right, it shows another cutting board print. In the center of the triptych is a quotation drawn from Marcel Proust’s appreciation of Jean Siméon Chardin’s La Raie (“The Ray” or “The Skate” ).

By way of the season for fresh fish and the etched evidence of cutting, we have come to instructions for making the cuts. By way of the instructions, we have come to a description of Chardin’s still life of a gutted ray, the text of which is typeset on the cutting-board-watermarked translucent paper. By way of a still life freezing a moment in time, we have come to Marcel Proust, author of the septology In Search of Lost Time and its fictional exploration of the experience of memory. By way of Proust’s essay the “Essence of Things”, we have come to his good friend Henri Bergson and la durée.

As the translucent page with Proust’s text and the cutting-board watermark is turned to the left, we now have a diptych of two cutting board prints on the chartreuse green paper. We may think of the translucent pages and the accumulated cuts as evidence of times past, but the flow of the sequence, the feel of the different papers as they turn, and the interaction of associations offer a layer of experience approaching the essence of the thing Bergson calls la durée réelle. More than a static artifact, Silverberg’s artist’s book functions to evoke temporal experiences.

But can visual and physical art really represent or conjure up Bergson’s concept of the lived experience of time? Juxtaposition of images, techniques, texts as well as text and image, material, page with page, etc., is almost unavoidable — indeed is often sought — in an artist’s book. For Bergson, juxtaposition is static and does not fit with the concept of duration. Explaining that concept is not the point of Silverberg’s artist’s book, but if it sends you on a hunt for an explanation and you wind up at The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, you will find the following passage that chimes extraordinarily with La durée réelle: Make this cut first:

… Bergson calls intuition a method. … The method resembles that of the good butcher who knows how to cut at the articulations or the good tailor who knows how to sew pieces of cloth together into clothes that fit. On the basis of the division into extremes or into a duality, one can then confront our everyday “mixtures” of the two extremes. Within the mixture, one makes a division or “cut” into differences in kind: into matter and spirit, for instance. Then one shows how the duality is actually a monism, how the two extremes are “sewn” together, through memory, in the continuous heterogeneity of duration. — Lawlor, 2025.

Much has been made of Bergson’s influence on William Faulkner, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and others. Their technique of stream of consciousness in internal monologues captures the fluidity of time as experienced by single characters such as Benjy in The Sound and Fury, Molly Bloom in Ulysses, or Mrs. Ramsay in To the Lighthouse. There is no single character in Silverberg’s artist’s book unless we count the artist or the artwork itself as that character. The quotations from such a wide range of sources — Hans Christian Andersen, Matsui Basho, Jorge Luis Borges, Lewis Carroll, Charles Dickens, Janet Flanner, Franz Kafka, Etgar Keret, Alan Lightman, George R. R. Martin, István Őrkény, Plutarch, Marcel Proust, Bruno Schulz, and Wallace Stevens — appear in free association across the seasons of food preparation. They punctuate the images made with the cutting boards and the “images” made with phrases of instructive texts angled across the pages like so many cuts on the cutting board. The text jumps and glides like a knife from Plutarch’s anthropological/moral query about eating meat to István Orkény’s sly query of euthanasia for animals but not for humans. And then to the political violence in the excerpts from Etgar Keret and Wallace Stevens. And from culinary advice to self-harm cutting and statements about seppuku. From lines about skating to definitions for various types of knives.

As an aside: the repeated use of Bruno Schulz’s works, especially Street of Crocodiles (1934), conjures up Jonathan Safran Foer’s dissection of Street of Crocodiles to create Tree of Codes (2010). It is certainly apposite, but is it also a challenge to assumptions of male hegemony in the world of book art? With the use of cutting boards as printing plates, is there a sharp cut at the denigrators of women’s book art as kitchen table craftwork?

If you are still visiting The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy trying to make sense of Bergson’s concept of duration, consider how this passage below echoes with what La durée réelle: Make this cut first is doing with its multiplicity of quotations and cuts:

For Bergson, we must understand the duration as a qualitative multiplicity – as opposed to a quantitative multiplicity. As the name suggests, a quantitative multiplicity enumerates things or states of consciousness by means of externalizing one from another in a homogeneous space. In contrast, a qualitative multiplicity consists in a temporal heterogeneity, in which “several conscious states are organized into a whole, permeate one another, [and] gradually gain a richer content” (Time and Free Will, p. 122).

Silverberg’s cutting boards and their multiplicity of cuts do capture something of Bergson’s ideas of la durée réelle [“duration”]. The boards display linear traces of individual acts over time, and their accumulated presence represents the nonlinearity of the “duration”. Likewise, the unfolding diptychs and triptychs disrupt the usual expectation of linear paging through a book. Like Bergson’s concept, Silverberg’s artist’s book is complex. Much is going on in both. To grasp them, it is best to let them wash over you — like time.

An open book with brightly colored pages displaying safety instructions for using a knife, interspersed with illustrated cut lines. The left page features text on knife handling and safety tips, while the right page includes a marker note and a design element with cut lines.

Details from “behind the scenes”: the text-bearing translucent sheet is fixed to the chartreuse green folio and is watermarked with a grid; the impress of the cutting board plate appears in the lower right corner, and the different widths of cuts show up in the drypoint etching; the deckled edges of the differently colored handmade papers appear like torn food-stained wrappers.

An open cookbook page detailing fish preparation techniques, including filleting, removing bones, and cutting methods.

Text close-up

A close-up of a page from a book featuring a passage about culinary art and a description of fish on a table, highlighting elements like a skate and various fish, reflecting on beauty and memory.

Proust on Chardin’s La Raie.

Books On Books Collection – Clifton Meador

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From a body of work that goes back to 1982 and covers subjects as wide ranging as Soviet Russia’s White Sea-Baltic Canal, New Orleans’ 19th century cotton industry, the Dutch Golden Age’s roots in slavery, life in Tibet’s remote Ganze Autonomous Prefecture, the west coast of Newfoundland, and an Appalachian farm-turned-museum, the four works below are by no means sufficient to represent the geographical breadth of Clifton Meador’s art. They do present his particular combination of social conscience and experimental printing. It would seem axiomatic that visual narrative (or argument) proceeds by sequential illustration or tableaux. These four works illustrate how Meador moves his narrative and argument by manipulating the printing process and the structure and material of the book.

Acheiropoieta or Not Made by Hands and Concerning Archeiropoieta (2020)

A navy blue book cover with black stylized letters and shapes arranged in a grid pattern, featuring a red spine.

Acheiropoieta or Not Made by Hands and Concerning Acheiropoieta (2020)
A Book in Two Volumes
Clifton Meador
First volume: Softcover, hand sewn binding, black dust jacket with title die-cut, held in a portfolio made of cloth over boards with the title in black on front cover. Book: H482 x W319 x D10 mm. [36] pages. Portfolio: H486 x W322 x D16mm.
Second volume: Softcover, hand sewn binding, in stiff black dust jacket with title die-cut. H203 x W128 mm. [36] pages.
Edition of 115, of which this is #42. Acquired from the artist, 21 June 2024.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.

The Greek word acheiropoieta means “not made by hands” and names a class of religious icons purportedly created by miracle. The Shroud of Turin, Veil of Veronica, and Mandylion (or “Image of Edessa”) are the most famous Western examples. At times, believers have accepted them as unmediated objects of divine truth.

Other than the cover, title page, and colophon, there is no text in Clifton Meador’s Acheiropoieta. It has to be read by its images. The idea of the divine and unmediated image gives Meador a springboard for exploring whether, in light of photography’s fall from unmediated truth, authority, and trust — and, with digital photography, even from physicality — “images might be made to seem unmediated, [and] … made to revert to a kind of solidity”. There begins his search for a metaphor, and he turns to the substrate of those religious icons for it.

A visually striking image of three translucent garments hanging against a gradient background, showcasing colors of blue, green, and pink.

As Meador explains:

Woven cloth forms a raster, a grid of threads that forms a fabric. When seen by transmitted light, the warp and weft of the cloth forms a variable density grid-which calls to mind a halftone contact screen, a predigital piece of technology that translated continuous tone images into fields of halftone dots in order to simulate tonality. In this project, I created color separations of images, print them through dye sublimation technology onto cotton cloth, and use those pieces of cloth to directly expose offset lithographic printing plates, which would then be used to print three-color images. The weave of the cloth itself would break down the continuous tone image into dots of varying size. In a very literal way, I wanted to create a material metaphor to elaborate the idea of an acheiropoieton- where the lithographic shadows of the cloth images were multiplied into a book.

Left: woven-cloth raster. Right: Veronica’s Veil, an image of an image of an image of an image of an unseen acheiropoieton.

It is a mind-twisting metaphor. Is god the digital image that is about to be color-separated? Is god the piece of cloth from which the image will transfer to the offset lithographic plates? Is god the plate from which the image will transfer to the book? In the end, we are holding and looking at something solid that, by a process effected and affected by something solid, has sprung from something not solid.

Along with the metaphorical and metaphysical challenge, Meador weaves another challenge: one to our social consciences.

But there is a problem inherent in cotton cloth: Cotton production has a long and horrible history. Sven Beckert’s great book, Empire of Cotton, details not only the development of chattel slavery in the New World in response to the growing demand of the textile mills in England, but also the troubling history of cotton in the Old World. Cotton cloth-comfortable, easily dyed, beautiful-comes with a long, miserable history of human suffering and exploitation.

A spread of a book featuring a wide landscape image divided into two sections. The left side displays a brown and red textured ground with grass, while the right side shows a brighter, greenish field under a vast sky. A small blue shape is present in the upper right corner.

A vintage industrial landscape featuring stacks of tires and structures in the background, with a hazy atmosphere and muted colors.

After the images of the stripped field and waiting bales of cotton, the artist asserts page layout to develop the overlapping themes. In the first double-page spread below, when turned 90º, the steamboat in portrait issues bales of cotton as steam. That which drives the boat and economy clouds the air. In the second spread, the bale of cotton as acheiropoieton proliferates and equates with the acheiropoieton of Veronica’s Veil. With the repeating bales and veils interspersed across the wallpaper-patterned cloth, the third spread below drives home the metaphor of the icon borne on its own substrate to the extent that it extrudes only the cotton icons emblems on the recto page.

An artistic image depicting a blurred waterfront scene with a large ship and figures along the shore, combined with a rocky landscape on the right side.

An open book displaying a colorful abstract design on the left page and a repeated graphic pattern on the right page.

In the center of the book, the mechanics of the acheiropoietic process takes center stage. The metaphors of predigital photography, digital color separation, the printing process, and the acheiropoietic result roll across the spread.

An abstract illustration featuring layered shapes and colors on the left side, depicting a figure with a dark garment near a camera equipment. The right side displays colorful, overlapping geometric shapes.

From here on — until the final image — the historical social implications of the new technology dominate. The portraits come from the Library of Congress’ collection of daguerrotypes. They are the privileged and celebrities who could afford an appointment with the new technology and have their likenesses captured without human hands. As Meador puts it in the companion volume Concerning Acheiropoieta, “”we have evolved from seeking the divine to staring at ourselves”.

Artistic book cover featuring a colorful floral design on the left and a stylized portrait of a man on the right.

A digitally manipulated portrait of a woman in historical attire, surrounded by vibrant floral patterns and colors, combining art and textile design.

As the portrait sequence comes to an end, the overlaid images and separations obscure the faces. The pattern of colors and the floral figures take over the steamboat and its spouts of smoke. The book’s final image is the tool that brought us here — a daguerreotype camera box. It is so overlaid with a blue and red cotton print that it is almost unrecognizable. The image pushes the mind-twisting metaphor even further. The tool that creates “unmediated” images has its own likeness obscured by a pattern emblematic of the original substrate for acheiropoieta.

A three-dimensional object covered in a floral pattern featuring blue and red flowers, set against a plain background.

The camera overlaid with cotton fabric.

The die-cut cover of Concerning Acheiropoieta, the smaller volume, announces its companion relationship to the larger volume. Unlike its partner, though, it is printed on chartreuse paper and contains text. Text and image in the companion also begin with the grid of cotton cloth and icons not made by human hands and proceed to the fallow December cotton field, over which the text spells out the links with England’s industrial revolution, empire, and slave trade.

An open book with yellow pages containing text about the significance of cloth and cotton production, alongside a faded image of a cotton field.

Open book spread featuring abstract art with yellow and green colors, accompanied by text discussing the industrial revolution in England and its impact on cotton production.

The text then knots those threads to the explosion of demand for cotton cloth (in particular, printed cotton cloth), the spread of cheap mirrors, and invention of photography.

An open book featuring a two-page spread with a colorful abstract background, combining shades of yellow and dark colors. The left page contains an image of a mechanical device or camera, while the right page features text discussing the relationship between mirrors, photography, and cotton production.

The text also unpicks the structure of the daguerreotype camera. In doing so, it adds another layer to the theme of self-regard. Fitted with an achromatic lens, the wooden box held at its rear a copper sheet plated with mirror-polished silver and sensitized to light. Removing the lens cap projected the image of whatever was in front of the camera to the plate inside.

An open book displaying pages with text about daguerreotypes, featuring illustrative abstract imagery in shades of green and brown.

Although the text expands on the human cost of the demand, its primary focus and the entire focus of the images remain on the portrait sitters — despite their receding into “the soup of history”. The images are versions and details of those appearing in the larger volume most of whom are difficult to identify. It is at this point in the companion volume that the text’s typographical presentation begins to enact itself and gloss the images alongside which it appears. Notice how Meador jumbles the descriptions of the sitters on the verso page below.

An open book featuring a colorful background with a portrait and text about historical figures and events.

Notice also how, with the label “Unidentified woman” and names of the portrait sitters typeset perpendicularly to the image below, the typography enacts the metaphor of “the warp and weft of the cloth”. Meador is comparing the cloth and “technology” of the acheiropoieton with the page and technology we hold in our hands.

Text, image, and their interaction become the message in the smaller volume and also facilitate closer reading and appreciation of the larger volume. In fact, just the abundant presence of text in the smaller volume sends us back to the larger volume to check the impression that it has no text. In fact, there is one spread in the larger volume that does contain text. Faintly, behind the calico-like pattern composed of color-separated bales of cotton, the reverse image of the word COTTON appears.

Abstract pattern featuring vibrant colors including red, blue, green, and yellow, arranged in a geometric design with star-like shapes.

The image above from Acheiropoieta echoes the following text in its companion volume:

What if an entire book 
could be printed from cotton cloth
                 exposed onto printing plates?

                 Would that be a miraculous indictment 
                 or a demonstration of the ineffable?

Acheiropoieta is that entire book printed from cotton cloth, and with the companion’s text on the human cost, they lead to the next work in the collection.

Cotton Curtain (2018)

Cover of a decorative book with a gray background and an intricate floral design in the center featuring red flowers and green leaves.

Cotton Curtain (2018)
Clifton Meador
Archival box: H300 x W270 x D40 mm. In slipcase: H295 x W260 x D27 mm. Out of slipcase: H295 x W255 x D27 mm. [96] pages. Edition of 10, of which this is #10. Acquired from artist, 21 June 2024.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.

A version of Cotton Curtain and related installation first appeared in the exhibition “Four Proposals for Reading” at Seagar Gray Gallery in February 2015, which was well reviewed by David M. Roth (see below). Cotton Curtain (2018), a version with significant changes, performs its task through a remarkable integration of structure, material, sequence, pattern, text, typography, and image. On opening the archival box, we see a portfolio-style cover whose stunning printed muslin aligns perfectly with the same pattern over the book’s bolted wrapped-back binding, which places the folds at the fore edge.

A decorative fabric cover featuring a vibrant floral pattern in red, green, and blue hues, with intricate designs on a white background.

A decorative cover featuring a floral pattern in red, green, and blue on a white background, with a plain white spine and two brass buttons.

Lifted by its spine, the book’s pages flow downwards like the samples in a cloth or carpet sampler because they are cotton cloth. Loose threads trail from their edges. Together the wrapped-back binding and cotton cloth cause the half-title to billow as it turns to reveal a steamboat, streams of smoke, and river surface bearing the same print pattern.

Left: the “drape” of the book. Right: half-title folio “gapping” as it turns.

An artistic representation of a steamboat printed on fabric, featuring floral patterns at the bottom. The text 'COLLON curtain' and the author's name 'clifton meador 2013' are visible.

Title-page spread.

The double-page spread is the functional unit of the book, and the title-page spread is but the first that stops readers/viewers in their tracks. Drawing on the Detroit Publishing Collection archives in the Library of Congress, Frederick Law Olmstead’s The Cotton Kingdom, and other 19th and 18th century sources, the 44 spreads that follow display black and white etchings, tinted photographs, traditional Toile de Jouy with its muted single color patterns, toile with bright multicolors, typographic toile patterns, typographic mimicry of stitches and quilt patches, typographic mimicry of weave and weft, and slave inventories in script arranged to mimick decorative patterns.

The sequencing of the spreads builds toward a run of the photographic images depicting cotton bales on loading docks, in warehouses, and riverboats with the black labor and white management engaged. Other than the opening pair of etchings showing similar earlier scenes, the photos are the only type of image that appears in back-to-back groups. There are 21 of them, 9 in the first half and 12 in the second.

Paired etchings introducing the book.

In the first half of the book, the images of the docks are mostly separated by toile images.

From first half of the book: typographic toile followed by photo, followed by Toile de Jouy, followed by photo.

In the second half, the dock and work images come in groups of 2, 3, and 4 (as in the following sequence).

From the second half of the book: grouping of photos of cotton bales, riverboats and work scenes.

All of the brightly colored toile spreads occur before the mid point of the book. There are 4 of them (or 5 if you count the title-page spread). They deceptively lighten the impact of the tinted photographs.

A vibrant textile pattern featuring intricate floral designs in red, blue, and black on a white background.

An open book displaying a vibrant floral pattern with various colorful flowers and leaves on a white background.

Multicolored toile.

The first of 8 traditional Toile de Jouy in the book comes just before the mid point. It shows the expected bucolic scene — again, deceptively lightening. The second Toile de Jouy is a different matter. It gives us plantation scenes, dancing natives, and slave capture. A third depicts slave trading in Africa. A fourth displays a patriotic scene complete with a ribbon ironically proclaiming “Where Liberty Dwells, There Is My Country”. The fifth reverts to a bucolic theme, only to be followed by a slave raid in the sixth. The seventh and eighth come back to more traditional scenery, but the eighth and last Toile du Jouy is reproduced as a torn fragment.

Open book displaying detailed vintage-style black and white illustrations of landscapes, ruins, and figures amidst trees.

An open vintage book displaying a decorative fabric pattern with historical scenes, featuring multiple characters, animals, and vegetation in a rich reddish-brown color on a light background.

Toile de Jouy.

The text in the 4 typographic toiles comes from a variety of 19th and 18th century sources. The first 3 appear before the mid point of the book. Their multicolors contribute to the brightening effect of the multicolored toiles in the first half of the book, but their text does not. Almost illegible from the overlapping, some phrases can still be picked out from the fabric: notably those from Senator James Henry Hammond’s infamous “Cotton is King” sppech such as “No! you dare not make war upon cotton”, “the system of slavery is a necessary evil”, “The spinning machinery of England gave birth to the cotton cultivation in America”, which are ironically offset with Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s words “the Fruits of the Earth belong equally to us all, and the Earth to nobody!”

Typographic toiles.

The 4 spreads that mimick stitches, quilting patches, threads, and the weave and weft of fabric include the book’s mid point spread. Like the typographic toiles, they provide color that offsets the photographs, but their text darkens the tone. The first 3 list the names and capacities of the human beings from slave inventories: “Lucy”, “Polly”, “Simon”, “Henry”, “Cook and Washer”, “Field hand and jobbing carpenter”, “Infant”. The last repeats text from Hammond’s “Cotton is King” speech.

A piece of fabric displaying a pattern of names and text in various colors, arranged in a grid-like layout.

An open book displaying pages with colorful handwritten text in different fonts, featuring red, green, and blue ink on a light background.

Spreads mimicking stitchery, quilting, and sewing with type and script.

It is telling that the most intricate of these spreads typographically mimicking cross stitch and the weave and weft of cloth occupies the mid point of the book. The type bleeds red and blue ink as it threads down and across the white muslin. The names, roles, and numbers of slaves are its text — including a nameless infant. The evil of King Cotton is stitched and woven into the heart of this book.

An open book displaying a patterned page with red and green abstract grid lines on a white background.

Mid point spread of the book.

The book’s last 3 work scene photos are preceded by the Toile de Jouy depicting a slave raid, then separated by a bucolic Toile de Jouy, and paused for the run of the Rousseauvian typographic toile, the torn Toile de Jouy, and the stitchery-mimicking spread with phrases from Hammond’s “Cotton is King” speech. Hammond gets the last typeset word, and the image of the baling warehouse — a photograph taken between 1890 and 1910 — gets the last visual word.

Historical image of a riverboat dock with people engaged in various activities, including loading goods and socializing, captured in a vintage photograph.

Historic black-and-white image of a river dock featuring several steamboats and people engaging in commerce, with cobblestone pathways and wooden logs in the foreground.

A black and white historical image of a group of weary individuals wearing hats, sitting and standing near a boat, with the caption 'these toilworn people' visible at the bottom.

Detail from image on the left in the row above.

Page from the book 'Cotton Curtain,' detailing its original exhibition and purpose, with a note indicating it's copy 10 of 10.

A decorative fabric sample featuring a floral patterned edge and the word 'COLLON curtain' printed in bold black letters on a white background.

VOC (2022)

A book with a dark cover featuring an illustration of a figure with a colorful face and a white collar, alongside faint images of ships and people in a dramatic scene. The spine is bright orange.

A closed book with a textured dark cover featuring abstract designs and an orange spine.

VOC (2022)
Clifton Meador
Hardcover, casebound. H371 x W155 mm. [96] pages. Edition of 100. Acquired from the artist, 4 February 2024.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.

The Vereenigde Oost Indische Compagnie (Dutch East India Company), referred to as the VOC, was the first publicly-traded corporation in the world. Chartered in 1602, the VOC could “independently wage war, coin money, negotiate treaties, establish colonies, enslave people, massacre indigenous populations, and create spice monopolies by burning entire islands they did not control clear of spice plants”. (VOC, colophon) The resulting “embarassment of riches”, as Simon Schama entitled his history of the Dutch Golden Age, led to much of the art and objects now housed at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. Clifton Meador’s social conscience and imagination saw the Rijksmuseum’s ongoing project to digitize and post its holdings as a creative opportunity too great to pass up.

On his site, Meador offers this project statement about VOC:

I imagined this project as a museum catalog gone completely wrong: reproductions mangled, images misregistered, odd fragments recombined from wildly different sources, cropped badly, with colors transformed into something from a hallucination. I imagined that in this catalog all text—including the vitally important informative, contextualizing captions for the images—would be removed. Gone would be the gallant, abridged histories provided by any museum, normally present in the image descriptions, but now entirely absent. The reader would be left to construct their own narrative from this unreal evidence.

And my hope is that the evidence of this museum catalog is so unreliable, so tainted by its own distorted agenda, that the reader is left with nothing other than a vague impression of a horrific cataclysm swimming around illusory objects of great beauty, virtue, and price.

Marlene MacCallum and Ruth Rogers have both registered insights into Meador’s blend of experimental printing, metaphor, and art that confirm his hope.

Central to Cliff Meador’s process in making VOC is a willfully disruptive strategy. … In text and music, we are accustomed to the suspension of comprehension, but in visual forms, we expect the coalesced image, and when this is withheld, we are challenged. We experience incomprehension. We lose our place. And in a piece where the artist wonders “about the real cost of wealth”, this is fitting. VOC is a work of dreadful beauty. The images are alluring, shimmering, and horrible. This parallel the difficult-to-reconcile reality that, quoting from the colofon, “At the same time the VOC was becoming a force for terror …, the Dutch Republic was a haven for liberal thinking”. (MacCallum, 2024)

The first page spread of the book is the title page of Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations printed opposite the official manuscript charter of the VOC, with lead seals attached. But the words are sliding off the page, the colors are wrong, and everything is out of focus. Could this distorted mise-en-page be a reference to the corruption of wealth and power? … In this unreliable museum catalogue, richly made objects that represent the vast wealth of the Dutch golden age are combined and deformed. … There are no captions, and the reader must find the narrative within seemingly disparate images. Enlarged engravings from early printed books that chronicle colonial domination are layered over photos of domestic objects and people with kaleidoscopic effect. … In his book, the luxury goods, paintings, exotic spices, and weapons are the spoils of an extractive colonialism. But there is no text. Instead, Meador uses dissonant color and layered, dislocated imagery to provoke the reader’s complacency with the historical narrative. — (Rogers, 2025)

Open book page featuring colorful distorted text from 'The Wealth of Nations' by Adam Smith, printed in 1776. The page includes references to inquiry into nature and wealth.

An open book with colorful abstract designs, showing a historical document on the right page and an empty blue page on the left, featuring the text 'Eenige Indische Compagnie.'

The book’s front and back covers certainly promise disruption, dislocation, and dissonance. The artist has achieved this by color-separating the high-resolution files from the Rijks, recombining the images of documents, fine possessions, portraits, paintings of battles, and engravings with each other, and skewing the registration of the separations when printing.

An open book featuring a colorful artistic composition of a ship and a decorative vase, surrounded by abstract patterns and vibrant hues.

An art book open to a two-page spread featuring a stylized portrait of a historical figure surrounded by intricate line drawings and abstract elements, with wooden hands holding the book edges.

The book has three unnamed sections: objects, portraits, and scenes of travel and battle.

As MacCallum points out, the book’s tall narrow shape and tight binding also make it an awkward customer. Overly tight bindings are not usually intentional, but given the strange combinations in the centers of the double-page spread, there is not much doubt here. Not only do images disappear into the gutter because of the binding, they slip over the fore edges and onto the next page.

An artistic display of vintage objects including a clock, spoon, and decorative pieces, presented in vibrant colors and layered transparencies across the pages of a book.

A vibrant illustration of various antique items, including a pen, a teapot, decorative vases, and a clock, featuring colorful abstract overlays.

But not always. The artist frequently misfoots that expectation and many others as with forks having tines on both ends, chairs suspended from the top of a page, and folio stuck in the middle of a chandelier.

A vivid and abstract image of an open book displaying colorful illustrations of ornate furniture, including a chair and a decorative cabinet, with artistic layering and blending of colors.

An open book featuring a colorful illustration of an ornate chandelier on the left page, with swirling, vibrant lines. The right page displays a lush, abstract floral arrangement in pastel colors.

For the curious, the project statement shows the process as applied to the portraits section of the book, which follows the objects section.

A digitally manipulated portrait of a historical figure, featuring intricate patterns and textures layered over the face and background, including depictions of ships and landscapes.

A split portrait of a historical figure, showing the left side in a faded white and black style while the right side features a detailed depiction with a ruffled collar and fur embellishments.

Project statement: “Unseparated images from pages 76-77. This spread was printed in Pantone 801, Pantone 806, Pantone 810, and two different black inks.”

In the portraits section, we can detect scenes from images of travel and battle faintly layered over some of the faces. In the last section of the book, however, focused entirely on travel and battle scenes, the technical fireworks build at a furious pace, ending with a depiction of an Anglo-Dutch sea battle.

An open book featuring an illustrated seascape with ships on the water, surrounded by clouds and a harbor view. The artwork is rendered in shades of blue and black.

An open book displaying a colorful illustration of ships on water, surrounded by a coastal landscape with trees and hills.

Just within these four works, Meador’s art evolves. How it has developed across his incredibly broad historical and geographical interests since the 1980s awaits a catalogue raisonnée of his prolific output. In the meantime, exploration of VOC, Cotton, Acheiropoieta and its companion volume yields an embarrassment of riches to enjoy, however uneasily.

Books On Books Collection – Anne Lydiat

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Cover of a book titled 'A Maiden's Voyage' by Anne Lydiat, featuring an anchor graphic and the publisher Rocktheboat Press, London.

A Maiden’s Voyage (2015)
Anne Lydiat
Paperback. H145 x W180 mm. 36 pages. Edition of 50, of which this #31. Acquired from the artist, 28 August 2026.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.

Anne Lydiat’s A Maiden’s Voyage (2015) pays homage to the Belgian conceptual artist Marcel Broodthaer’s “book-film’” A Voyage on the North Sea (1973).

Two art books displayed side by side. The left book is titled 'A Maiden's Voyage' by Anne Lydiat, published by Rocktheboat Press, London, featuring an anchor illustration. The right book is titled 'A Voyage on the North Sea' by Marcel Broodthaers, published by Petersburg Press, London, featuring a nautical illustration.

The reader/viewer of Broodthaers’ book faced three challenges, the first two of which are outlined in its preface. The first, whether to cut or not cut its uncut pages and reveal or leave hidden its page numbers. The second, to make sense of its juxtaposition and manipulation of images of a 19th century sailing ship painting and a photographed 20th century yacht. The third challenge was access to its associated film (which only came with the deluxe edition) and make sense of its relation to the book.

The reader/viewer of Lydiat’s homage does not face that first challenge. She is explicit in her preface —”there are no cutting remarks” — and the book is fully trimmed top, bottom, and fore edge. Her disavowal’s phrasing, however, slyly envelopes the reader/viewer in a different challenge. Does this homage really have no “cutting remarks”, no rebukes? Noting the rarity of depictions of women in maritime history, the second paragraph concludes otherwise: “this artist’s book is a space that marks this gendered absence”. A Maiden’s Voyage pays a passive/aggressive homage to a male artist and his work that unconsciously participates in that gendered absence.

Open book pages with text discussing Marcel Broodthaers and his work, including 'A Maiden's Voyage' and 'A Voyage on the North Sea'. The left page features a black and white photo of a boat at sea, while the right page shows a historical image of women and a child on a ship.

We still have the second challenge with A Maiden’s Voyage: to make sense of its juxtaposition and manipulation of images.

Lydiat is an accomplished artist working in photography, sculpture, and installations as well as books. She could have chosen to work her found painting and subject of gendered absence into another medium, another frame. But she chose the medium of the book and the frame of Broodthaers’ A Voyage and his projected Analyse d’une Peinture. While A Voyage juxtaposes present and past images, A Maiden’s Voyage contains no such juxtapositions. Paradoxically it makes itself the juxtaposition of present and past. Lydiat has juxtaposed her “space” with Broodthaers’ artist’s book and intent. Her space is the present; his space is the past.

The title of Broodthaers’ projected project implies that the subject of A Voyage concerns the analysis of a painting, an expensive one at that. In parallel and contrast, Lydiat takes a cheap found painting of the past and “analyzes” it, breaking it down into clipped details, stripping it of color, and framing the results as Broodthaers did in A Voyage. In doing so, she underscores that her present space is shaped by the past, implicitly arguing that “gendered absence” in the past shapes the present. It is not a situation that Lydiat lets lie. By contrasting the costs of the found paintings, she neatly slips in one of those disavowed “cutting remarks”.

An open book displaying two pages: on the left, a colorful painting of ships sailing in rough waters, and on the right, a black-and-white illustration featuring a group of people in a small boat, surrounded by sails.

From A Maiden’s Voyage.

An open book displaying two images: on the left, a color painting of a classic sailing ship on the water; on the right, a black and white photograph of a sailboat sailing on the ocean.

From A Voyage on the North Sea © Broodthaers Estate. Photo: Books On Books Collection.

A spread of a book page featuring five maritime paintings, including ships on water and a group of people in a small boat.

From A Maiden’s Voyage.

An open book page displaying four small images of sailing ships on water, alongside a larger, vibrant painting of similar boats navigating the ocean.

From A Voyage on the North Sea © Broodthaers Estate. Photo: Books On Books Collection.

An open book featuring two pages with paintings of maritime scenes; the left page shows a colorful image of sailing ships on calm waters, while the right page displays a black-and-white illustration of a small boat with several people navigating through rough seas.

From A Maiden’s Voyage.

As for the third challenge, the Fondation Marcel Broodthaers provided a solution for access. Likewise, Anne Lydiat provides a link to her film that accompanied the maiden launch of A Maiden Voyage at Chelsea Cafe Project (Chelsea College of Arts).

Like Broodthaers’ “book-film” (his term), Lydiat’s book-film presents image frames as numbered pages. At least since Dick Higgins’ introduction of the term “intermedia” in the mid ’60s, interest in the hybrid work that crosses media and occupies the space between painting, film, music, performance, installation, sculpture, the book, computers, and now the Web has grown — especially among book artists. In 2013, the topic held center stage at the MCBA Book Art Biennial in an exhibition entitled “Directed: The Intersection of Book, Film and Visual Narrative”. Works recently added to the Books On Books Collection occupy this intermedial space (see examples below). Anne Lydiat’s book-film A Maiden Voyage brings the added edge of appropriating form, technique, and content from an arch-appropriator and focusing them on a persistent social blindspot.

I first came across Anne Lydiat’s work at the Wittockiana in Brussels. There in the a minima exhibition was Lost for Words … (1999). Displayed as below, no one could tell that it is a blank book. Not even the subtlety of the blind embossed ISBN on the back could be seen, nor could the quotation from Maurice Blanchot on the inside flap (“About this book I had promised myself to say nothing …”). The context of the exhibition was a hint about the book’s theme — or an aspect of it — “absence, loss and nothingness” — as Lydiat’s website notes.

A closed book with a plain cover featuring the title 'lost for words...' in gray text.

Lost for Words… (1999) by Anne Lydiat also appeared in the exhibition Blank. Raw. Illegible…Artists Books as Statements, 1960-2022 (2023) organized by Moritz Küng.

Although not a part of the Books On Books Collection (at least not yet), it is mentioned here as an additional gloss on her intermedial style of conceptual art. Lost for Words … first appeared in an exhibition at the Freud Museum entitled “Permission to Speak”, after which it was deposited in Sigmund Freud’s library. So where is the intermediality? It lies in her performance of secretly depositing Lost for Words … in libraries that she has visited around the world. The only means of knowing where they are is the follow-up volume — … of the book — which lists the libraries.

Books On Books Collection – Ricky Jay

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The Magic Magic Book (1994)

The Magic Magic Book : An Inquiry into the Venerable History & Operation of the Oldest Trick Conjuring Volumes, Designated ‘Blow Books’ … (1994)
Ricky Jay et al.
Blue silk clamshell box decorated with red and silver metallic playing card motif, housing two softcover casebound and sewn volumes. Box: H270 x W217 x D43 mm. Books: H254 x W206 mm. 106 and 80 pages, respectively. Edition of 300 copies, of which this is #208. Acquired at Swann Auctions, 22 April 2025.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.

Ricky Jay’s The Magic Magic Book explains and presents a structure well suited to the artist’s book but one rarely used. The structure is called the “blow book”. Most of us know the apparatus from childhood birthday parties as the “magic coloring book” in which the clown or magician flips through a book of blank figures to be colored, calls on the birthday boy or girl to blow on the closed book, and then reopens it to show all of the pictures colored in. Hard-to-see tabs or alternating page widths enable the performer to produce the effect. Until Jay’s production with the Whitney Museum Library, there had never been an extended serious study of the blow book by scholars of magic, iconography, children’s literature, or the history of the book.

The Magic Magic Book ‘s two softcover volumes are housed in a blue silk clamshell box whose front cover displays the optical illusion of a house of cards. The card motif reflects both the blow book structure’s use in trick decks of cards and Jay’s reputation in the 90s as “perhaps the most gifted sleight of hand artist alive” (Singer, 1993). The first volume gives an illustrated essay on the history of the blow book. The second volume (a blow book itself and in a dos-à-dos structure) features illustrations by contemporary American artists Vija Celmins, Jane Hammond, Glenn Ligon, Philip Taaffe, and William Wegman as well as painted devils and harlequins, letterpress alphabets, figures in silhouette, and instructions (in four languages) for operating the blow book. After one flick through the book showing blank spreads, the next flick yields a dance of eight harlequins.

Two figures dressed in colorful harlequin costumes are depicted on an open page. The figure on the left is reaching forward, holding a piece of paper, while the figure on the right stands with a stick, looking upwards, showcasing their vibrant attire.

Illustration of two figures dressed in colorful patchwork outfits, one striking a pose with a stick while the other gestures, set against a plain background.

The next flick turns the harlequins into alphabets.

A two-page spread featuring a creative and artistic representation of the alphabet with illustrated letters on the left and a bold typographic layout in red and black on the right.

Stylized alphabet letters in ornate designs on two pages, with left side featuring decorative black and white letters and right side showcasing elegant red cursive letters.

The next flick transforms the alphabets into fire-breathing, fire-farting devils (the images courtesy of Thomas Stauss to Jay).

Illustration of a humanoid figure with animal features, displaying fiery hair and tail, set against a blank background.

An illustrated figure of a mythical creature with horns and flames, depicted in a dynamic pose. The creature has a human-like body with a dark color and reddish hair-like flames around its head.

With the next flick, we get the English, then French, then German, and finally Spanish instructions for operating the book.

An open book titled 'To Operate The Magic Magic Book' featuring instructions on how to use it, with decorative borders and printed text visible on both pages.

Open pages of a book titled 'Pour Faire Marcher Le Livre de Magie Magique,' featuring text written in French, surrounded by decorative borders.

And with the last flick, Philip Taaffe’s fern-like, starburst abstractions appear, gradually shrinking and ordering themselves into columns of four and rows of five. When the dos-à-dos is turned, Taaffe’s series returns (again last in the sequence of flicks) but in reversed order, the columns and rows dispersing into other patterns and increasing in size.

An open book displaying vibrant starburst patterns in various colors including black, green, and red against a light background.

An open book displaying a page with intricate geometric patterns of starburst shapes in various colors, including green, black, and red on a cream background.

The blow book offers artists a tool that can shape meaning, metaphor, and perspective. It can elicit performance by the reader to enact ideas, narrative, and structural effects. Its close association with the rise of the printing press, affordable paper, and binding capabilities recommend the blow book to book artists intent on demonstrably tying their works to the history of the book. The hard-to-see tabs or alternating page widths that enable the performer to produce the blow book’s effects offer a means of enhancing the materiality of the artist’s book. Its mechanics offer the chance to use flip (or flick) book’s animating effects, which have appealed to numerous book artists. Its twist on those effects lends it to juggling the layout of text and image in a non-traditional manner. Its mechanics can also enhance binding structures like the dos-à-dos, a structure also borrowed for magic tricks. Its reliance on manipulating a book’s fore edge offers the chance to emphasize both form and tactility, a characteristic theme of artists’ books. The two volumes of The Magic Magic Book itself incorporate “watercolors, woodcuts, etchings, hand-colored engravings, lithography (black-and-white and colored), mimeograph, drawings, decals, stencils, photo-offset — even leaves from other books” (“Prologue”, p.2) — surely another enticement to book artists to explore the form.

In the Books On Books Collection, Julie Chen and Keri Miki-Lani Schroeder’s Book of Hours (2021) and Horst Antes’ Flickbuch (2000) are the only two artists’ books that exploit the blow book structure. As examples, they show the form’s scope for artists to work their individual magic and demonstrate the blow book’s magical transformations that make us query the nature of “the book”.

Books On Books Collection – Timothy Mosely (II)

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There is more to Timothy Mosely’s art than meets the eye or touch. It rises equally on an intellectual plane and a physical plane. It is the art of visual touch or haptic seeing.

ep’s (2018)

ep’s (2018)
the first book from the series of artists books ”representation by touch”
Timothy Mosely
Casebound in felt with plywood backing, pulp printing and silkscreen on recycled cotton paper. H52o x W345 x D58 mm (closed), W693 (open).
7 interleaved folios: 4 folios of H438 x W608 mm, 2 folios of H220 x W310 mm, and 1 folio of H307 x W210 mm. Unique. Acquired from the artist, 31 October 2024.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.

ep’s (2018) is the first of four works in the series “representation by touch” that offers the results of Tim Mosely’s ongoing studio research into the relationship between touch and sight / the haptic and the optic. His drive to draw us into involving touch in our reception and evaluation of art has its roots in a long tradition of concern that Western society has become too ocularcentric for a whole-bodied appreciation of art. If the artist’s aim is to express how the world touches us (as Cézanne put it), a full appreciation of art requires all the senses.

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Books On Books Collection – Sarah J. Colman

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4 p. and 33mm (2013)

A closed art book with cream-colored pages fanned out, resting on a wooden surface, featuring a white cover that displays title, author, and ISBN information.

4 p. and 33mm (2013)
Sarah Colman
Card folder with title, author, publisher. Perfect binding of 4.33 folios. H66 x W148 mm [10] pages. Acquired from the artist, 1 August 2026.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.

Colman’s 4 p. and 33 mm. was on display in the exhibition a minima at the Wittockiana in Brussels. If the work ‘s title directs us to consider first the four full folios and then the folio trimmed to half their size, then the item is displayed upside down in the image below. Observant visitors may have noticed it. Western books read from left to right.

Left: 4 p. and 33 mm. (2013). Sarah Colman. Geneva: Boabooks. Right: 4’33” (1993). John Cage. New York: Peters No. 6777a.

Being able to manipulate this work drives home the right orientation. First come the 4 pages that measure 66 mm and then the page that measures 33 mm. Of course, it ends hanging in air — just as Cage’s composition leaves the audience hanging as it ends after 4 minutes and 33 seconds.

In other words, Colman has turned Cage’s temporal art into spatial art. Given the performance origin of the next work, though, it’s not hard to imagine an invitation from Colman to watch her open 4 p. and 33 mm., place it atop a piano, and then close it at the conclusion of 4 minutes and 33 seconds.

Semiotics of the Studio (2015)

A folded booklet titled 'Symbols Of The Studio' by S.J. Cohan, displaying a list of words organized in a grid format.

Semiotics of the Studio (2015)
Sarah Colman
Leporello H300 x W85 mm (closed), up to W425 mm (open). Five panels. Edition of 10, of which this is #10. Acquired from the artist, 1 August 2026.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.

First, here is Martha Rosler’s Semiotics of the Kitchen (1975).

Like 4p. and 33mm, the Semiotics of the Studio translates a different medium into that of an artist’s book and very much insists on being experienced on its own terms.

Laid flat or standing, Semiotics of the Studio presents itself as an accordion book, but the order of reading its text is not as straightforward (or downward) as the first panel’s alphabetical order suggests. The alphabetical order in panel 1 becomes a red herring in panel 2. With “Cube”, “Drill”, “Easel”, and “Finger”, Panel 2 resumes an alphabetical order only to abandon it, and in panel 3, there are no alphabetical pairs or triples at all.

A close-up of two columns of text with various words and phrases, including terms related to art and objects, displayed in a vertical orientation.

Perhaps we should read from left to right across the three panels instead of down. Is the blank space at the top of the third panel showing us the product of “Absence” in the first panel and “Paint” in the second panel? But wait, maybe we should read backwards from “Paint” in the second panel to “Brush” in the first; after all, further down, we have “”Juxtaposition” in panel 1, then “Two” in panel 2, and “Put” in panel 3, suggesting that we put two in juxtaposition.

Just below that, if we put “Kitsch” and “Balloon” together with “Pop”, do we have a dig at Jeff Koons? And much further down, is the juxtaposition of “Urinal”, “Urinal”, and “Drop” taking the piss with Duchamp?

What about “Object”, “Hammer”, and “Bang”? If we are trying to figure out sentences from this, Subject, Verb, and Object seem to jump about. We need to put “Chin” (panel 3) on “Hand” (panel 2), and “Question” (panel 1) what is going on.

Another puzzle is that some words are repeated across from each other in panels 1 and 2. “Drill”, “Easel”, “Plinth”, “Rubber”, “Spirit Level”, and “Urinal”, as we have seen. Sometimes, panel 2 gives an example for the word in panel 1 (e.g., “Computer” for “Technology”). Sometimes, the words are descriptive or synonyms of one another (e.g., “Neon” and “Light” and “Void” and “Empty”, respectively).

Closer inspection reveals that the three columns of words do not precisely align horizontally. They cascade. “Absence” is slightly higher than “Paint”, “Paint” is slightly higher than “X”, and so on. Moreover, panel 1 has 26 words, panel 2 has 22, and panel 3 has 23. So perhaps we should be looking for sense in multiple directions, which is pretty much where semiotics as a discipline has landed.

Context, too, matters. Colman reaps the benefit of Martha Rosler’s kitchen setting for her subversive purposes. While Colman is in the studio, which suggests that her exploration of semiotics is one of creative process, she also slips in terms that challenge the clichés and politics of art, terms like “Beret”, “Kitsch”, and “Viagra”. It’s the artist’s book equivalent of donning the aprons and maintaining a deadpan delivery in the video.

By putting art words to work in a work of art — especially in the form of an artist’s book — Semiotics of the Studio “interrogates” itself and its subject.

Books On Books Collection – Philip Zimmermann (II)

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Serpents (2025)

A closed white folder with the word 'SERPENTS' embossed on the front, resting on a wooden surface.

Serpents (2025)
Phil Zimmermann
Blind embossed white slipcase holding two volumes. Slipcase: H265 x W217 X D17 mm. Deep-flap cover: H263 x W216 mm. Vol. I: H262 x W210 mm. Vol. II: H262 x W215 mm. Vol. I: [40] pages. Vol. II: [60] pages. Edition of 65, of which this is #22. Acquired from the artist, 9 February 2026.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.

Serpents is a welcome chance to add an alphabetical offering by Philip Zimmermann to his works already in the collection. Two volumes, one of which is an addendum, make up Serpents.

Two illustrated covers for a publication titled 'Serpents' and 'Serpents Addendum,' featuring detailed depictions of mangrove roots and aquatic plants reflecting in water.

The main volume combines Zimmermann’s own photographs of swampland in Costa Rica and Louisiana with details from The Garden of Earthly Delights (1490-1510) by Hieronymus Bosch and embedded an alphabetical poem The Last Acts of Saint Fuck You (1975) by Bern Porter against a background of rattlesnake skin. Its politically conscious content echoes Sanctus Sonorensis (2009), but with sharper vi(per)tuperation against what the artist describes as “the increasingly corrupt and fascistic direction of our national and global civilizations”.

Zimmermann wields the book as a catalytic medium in just the right way to bring theme and technique together in striking and satisfying artworks. Two points of comparison with his earlier work High Tension illustrate this. Serpent‘s diagonally cut pages recall those of High Tension (1993), but notice how the diagonality works differently to suit each book’s typography and theme. Like its theme of personal anxiety, High Tension’s diagonality is spiky. Like its theme of reptilian tyrants, Serpents‘ diagonality emphasizes the diamond-back rattlesnake pattern that runs through the collage, and in turn, the diagonally set text emphasizes the rattlesnake pattern.

While High Tension includes Masaccio’s 1425 fresco depicting the expulsion from the Garden of Eden and Serpents includes Bosch, Adam and Eve’s grief and shame play their brief role among multiple personal anxieties, whereas Bosch’s creatures continuously slip and slide into the swamp and rattlesnake background of the world state.

In Serpents, snippets of text from other sources (1984 by George Orwell, “Sympathy for the Devil” by the Rolling Stones/Mick Jagger, “This is America” by Childish Gambino/Donald Glover, “The Star-Spangled Banner” by Francis Scott Key, Hannah Arendt, John McCain, Thomas Hobbes, Marcus Junius Brutus, and Elisabeth Kübler-Ross) appear in small fonts in the corners, diagonally, and at the fore edges (Kübler-Ross). Their size and positioning require close attention and draw the eye into the details of the imagery.

A creative collage featuring various illustrated elements, including figures engaged in action, a tropical background, and text blocks listing various concepts, all arranged in a visually striking layout.

In parallel with the poem’s alphabetical arrangement, the addendum presents cropped individual portraits of Donald Trump, his enablers, and fellow tyrants from around the world in alphabetical order with amber-tinted irises and green-hued faces. It implicitly flips the script on Donald Trump’s use of Oscar Brown’s song “The Snake” (1963) to justify his concentration camps targeting the immigrant population (“You knew damn well I was a snake before you brought me in”).

An artistic spread featuring a close-up of a face with a prominent eye, rendered in green hues, alongside a grid of smaller portraits with similar stylized effects.

A close-up view of stylized eyes in green ink on a printed page, with a collage of various eye images on the right side.

A collage featuring eyes of various political figures, labeled with their names in a grid format, titled 'SERPENTS Addendum.' The individuals are arranged alphabetically, including well-known names like Donald Trump and Tucker Carlson.

A grid of portraits showing close-up images of various individuals, including eyes and upper faces, with greenish tints. The individuals are listed in an 'Alphabetically arranged swamp scum' format with names like Melania Trump, Marco Rubio, Stephen Miller, and others, suggesting a political theme.

The next two volumes carry forward a series of works with a different socially conscious burden — the anthropo(bs)cene period of terrestrial evolution. They began with Landscapes of the Late Anthropocene (2017) and Melt (2023) but also echo images in the earlier works Sanctus Sonorensis (2009) and Incident in Deseret (2014).

Accelerated Entropy (2024)

Accelerated Entropy (2024)
Phil Zimmermann
Casebound, cloth spine, photoprinted paper over boards and paste-down end sheets, pamphlet stitch book with translucent paper cover. H285 x W225 mm. [40] pages. Edition of 50, of which this is #4. Acquired from the artist, 31 August 2024.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.

As Marlene MacCallum (2024) points out, “Phil Zimmerman has consistently woven imagery and text in response to issues related to perilous conditions of our world and social structures.” What is particularly interesting in Serpents, Accelerated Entropy, and In the Desert is how that weaving differs effectively from book to book. In Serpents, the Porter text and rattlesnake skin are tightly woven together, acting as the main tapestry weave while the snippets of text and the images of the swamp and Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights act as a discontinuous weft creating a changing collage around the main weave.

In Accelerated Entropy, the text (a poem by Zimmermann) is held to the very end. In fact, it appears on the translucent pamphlet-stitched back cover inside the casing. So how does the poem weave with the imagery? The images are not without narrative. Progressive computer-derived halftone patterns and various types of rasters of photographs of lush vegetation constitute the visual tool with which the artist writes that narrative. Like Melt and Landscapes of the Late Anthropocene, the narrative concerns climate change. The final image has reduced the foliage to abstract tracery over a whitened background, which is repeated in end pastedown. By placing the text on the verso side of the translucent paper at the end of the book, the artist makes the poem hover over and between the final image.

Open book displaying lush green monstera leaves on one page with a blank white page on the opposite side.

An open book featuring a page of text titled 'Accelerated Entropy' by Philip Zimmermann, alongside a vibrant, abstract illustration of intertwining colors and patterns resembling nature.

Zimmermann’s poem uses prepress process and photomechanical terms to create an extended metaphor for describing the decay of climate change. The terms relate not only to the visual tools used to effect the book’s images of decay but also to the disappearing tools and techniques of printing technology. Perhaps we will recognize our effect on the world around us when it is expressed in printing metaphors, and perhaps we will recognize the world’s accelerating entropy in the pace of our own disappearing technology.

Accelerated Entropy (2024)

In the half-tone dawn, inky shadows stretch 
across the land, like faded offset prints 
or a poorly exposed digital-proof,
where once vibrant greens have dulled to sepia.

The trees, deep-etched in the landscape, 
stand ghostly, their sharpened branches skeletal, 
a grayscale photogravure of decay
captured in the blue-green emulsion of time.

Fields, once a vibrant chromolithograph, 
now monochrome under the bleaching sun, 
their chlorophyll pigments drained, 
a spectral rasterized image of non-repro loss.

Rivers meander in slow exposure, 
their currents a blurred stochastic motion, 
silt layering like goldenrod paper dust 
on forgotten lithographic negatives.

Flowers, their gradient petals curled 
as if caught in an overexposed platemaker, 
try to hold their process colors close, 
a palette fading under the harsh UV light.

In the off-register garden, soil hardens 
like the cracked surface of an old plate, 
roots digging deeper, vectored, searching 
for the latent image of life beneath.

We walk through this moiréd landscape, 
each step like a rejected blueline proof, 
a dithered trace of our presence
on the fragile surface of the mottled earth.

The sky, a vast non-silver cyanotype, 
watches over the degradation of midtones, 
its rubylith hues shifting, fugitive, uncertain, 
in the developing tray of our making.

Here, in this moment of accelerated entropy, 
we find ourselves stripped and exposed, 
our actions angled and imprinted, 
each breath a part of the final composition, 
hoping for a renewal of resolution 
before the last shadow falls.

Clifton Meador’s observation in correspondence with Zimmermann nails how this text is woven into the images:

“The poem at the end of Accelerated Entropy is a great addition to the piece, and how could I not love an extended metaphor about climate change that uses print technology as the vehicle? It significantly changes the reading of the piece after the first encounter—I had to go back through the book again, with a vastly changed framework for reading. In the place of a reading of visual richness and formal invention, I looked for evidence of a history of print production. That’s a pretty cool trick—a textual moment that causes me to re-read with an entirely different framework in mind.” — Meador to Zimmermann, 31 August 2024.

In the Desert (2024)

A book cover featuring a large, sculptural representation of a heart in a desert landscape, with grass and a salt flat visible in the background under a cloudy sky.

In the Desert (2024)
Phil Zimmermann
Casebound, cloth spine, photoprinted paper over boards and paste-down end sheets, pamphlet stitch book. H285 x W225 mm. [40] pages. Edition of 50, of which this is #4. Acquired from the artist, 31 August 2024.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.

Stephen Crane’s poem In the Desert sits at the heart of Zimmermann’s artist’s book by the same name. In red ink, it sits there like the creature in Crane’s otherwise featureless poem.

In the Desert (1895)

In the desert
I saw a creature, naked, bestial,
Who, squatting upon the ground,
Held his heart in his hands,
And ate of it.
I said, “Is it good, friend?”
“It is bitter—bitter,” he answered;

“But I like it
“Because it is bitter,
“And because it is my heart.”

The artist’s book is far from featureless. The images in the book come from Zimmermann’s photographs taken at Lake Lucero, a dry gypsum lake located in the White Sands Missile Range near Las Cruces, New Mexico. His artist’s statement describes it as

… a restricted part of the missile range and open to the public only a few times a year when National Park Service rangers take visitors holding US Passports on closed busses in to visit the dry lake. The dry gypsum crystals from the lake blow to the northeast and are the source of the famous white dunes in White Sands National Park. The park is located, as is the entire Missile Range, in the great Tularosa Basin.

Seven double-page spreads of barren desert scenery lead up to the poem’s first line, which squats in red in the dark foreground of a recto page. In the far foreground, a blurry human figure appears.

A panoramic view of a desert landscape with a clear sky filled with clouds. In the foreground, a solitary figure stands on the dry, cracked ground. The text 'in the desert' appears in red.

Over the next ten spreads, the poem’s two human figures (narrator and creature) gradually inhabit the pages alongside that solitary human figure, who is joined by an increasing then dwindling number of other silhouetted human figures in the far foreground. The last double-page spread is textless. A foregrounded leafless bush looms on the verso page standing in contrast to three human figures walking away in the far foreground on the recto page.

From spread to spread prior to the poem, the only action was the movement of dust from the salt flats in the air. With the poem’s appearance, we have two other sets of action. Like small signposts, the individual lines from Crane’s poem drive the reader’s page-turning as do the gathering and dispersing human figures.

A panoramic view depicting a barren landscape with a large, leafless tree on the left and three figures walking on a sandy shore under a cloudy sky.

On the book’s last page, the only text is the copyright line. There is no other text. There are no human figures. The foreground is punctuated by a red boundary marker. In the middle ground, dust from the salt flats hovers against the low hills and cloud. Sky and cloud occupy the upper reaches of the background. In its size, that red boundary marker is shriveled in comparison with the heart on the front cover.

Landscape image featuring a vast, arid terrain under a cloudy sky, with a prominent red pole in the foreground.

A book cover featuring a large, stylized heart sculpture against a desert landscape with clouds in the sky. The title 'In the Desert' and author's name 'Philip Zimmermann' are prominently displayed.

“But I like it
“Because it is bitter,
“And because it is my heart.”

Bookmarking Book Art – The Wittockiana, Museum of Book Arts and Bookbinding in Brussels

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The most beautiful and perfect book in the world is a book with only blank pages, in the same way that the most complete language is that which lies beyond all that the words of a man can say. Every book of the new art is searching after that book of absolute whiteness, in the same way that every poem searches for silence. — Ulises Carrión: “The New Art of Making Books” Kontexts no. 6-7, 1975.

a minima

(20 March 2026 – 27 September 2026)

At the entrance to The Wittockiana. Back and front cover of the a minima catalogue.

If, as I did, you missed Moritz Küng‘s exhibition Blank. Raw. Illegible… Artists’ Books as Statements, 1960-2022 at the Leopold-Hoesch-Museum in Düren, Germany, in 2023, Didier Decoux‘s a minima presents an equally well-thought-out gathering of artists’ books that stretches out over 150 years (1876 – 2026). With 4 spacious rooms, 25 vitrines, 2 videos, and over 180 works, a minima requires several hours at a minimum to peruse and enjoy. Information on getting there is available here.

The comments and links below are in no way a substitute for visiting this exhibition, and keep in mind that Wittockiana also has permanent displays of presses, rare fonts, and books that should not be missed.

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Books On Books Collection – Inscription: The Journal of Material Text, Issue 6 (Tears)

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Inscription: The Journal of Material Text, Issue 6 (2026)

An open cardboard box with one side slightly torn, resting on a wooden surface.

The first tear.

A collage featuring St. Paul's Cathedral, with a geometric paper cutout overlay, blending historical architecture with modern design elements.

A collage image featuring geometric shapes in the center overlaying pages of text about 20th-century architecture.

Front and back covers: from Abigail Reynolds’ Universal Now series, collages of time and space. Photos: Books On Books Collection.

Inscription: The Journal of Material Text, Issue 6 (2026)
Simon Morris, Gill Partington and Adam Smyth (eds.)
Cased perfect bound paperback, printed paper cover. 313 x 313 mm. 168 pages. ISSN: 2634-7210. Acquired from Information as Material, 22 June 2026.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.

Book art always pushes at the edges. Whatever meets at the edges is book art’s business. Negative space and positive space. Letter stroke and counter. Margins and the gutter. Justified and unjustified. Legible and illegible. Bound and unbound. Art and craft. Unique and multiple. Self and other. Destruction and creation. Life and death.

Inscription 6 is about cuts and tears, mostly tears — creating edges. “Tears” is also a heteronym, a word whose meaning changes with the change of the sound of the vowel but whose spelling remains the same. We can have tears [/tɛ(ə)rz/ tairz] as in “torn parts or places, or rips asunder”. Or we can have tears [/tɪ(ə)rz/] as in “teardrops, or weeps”. Or, with art, we might paradoxically have both simultaneously as we shall see in this issue’s first contributed essay. Also, with art, we might find that tearing — creating edges — paradoxically binds what it divides.

But first, as subscribers have come to expect, Inscription 6 opens with a surprise. Buzz Spector invites us to join in his artistic practice of tearing things up.

Instructions for tearing away the first twelve leaves of the journal 'Inscription,' emphasizing the image of a ship's wake and the process of revealing letters in the journal's name.

The artist says that he is asked all the time how he stands the tedium, to which he replies it is a meditative state he is sorry to see end. He is right. Once the initial unease over tearing pages from the issue subsides, a certain satisfaction ensues.

An open book featuring a page titled 'Wake' by Buzz Spector, with a partially torn edge revealing a black and white image of water. The left page includes explanatory text about the book's design.

The “second” tear. (See further above for the first.)

The result is the wake’s image restored in a composition of torn strips still bound to the book.

An open book spread with a faded image of water on one page and text titled 'Wake' by Buzz Specter on the opposite page.

Rather than surrendering themselves to the bin, the removed strips beg to be reassembled for a wake on the other side of the gutter in keeping with the creative productivity of turning the singular into the plural.

An open book with a textured, faded image of water on the pages, featuring the word 'inscription' elegantly displayed across the top.

Left: the Spector-esque result. Right: the removed strips rearranged.

Buzz Spector is the star of this issue. Images from fourteen of his works divide the main sections and each contribution from one another. Works of torn edges create edges or boundaries between the issue’s contents. A stroke of genius from the issue’s editorial and design team. The range of Spector’s sources also draws attention to other boundaries inherent in the body of his work and the issue’s theme: the border between high and low in art, East and West, and Art and Nature. After the 12-page exercise, we have the altered Chinese translation of the self-help book Ego is the Enemy by Ryan Holiday; before the colophon, we have an array of shells and stones on an unidentified altered book, a sculpture held in the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. In between, there are alterations of catalogues of Ansel Adams’ photos and the Polaroid Collection, an academic study of Antonioni’s films, a foundational Italian volume on ancient and Renaissance glassmaking, a gardening book, and sailing photobooks.

Open altered book titled 'Ego' by Buzz Spector, showcasing crumpled pages with Chinese text on the right and a blank left page with publication details.

An open book displaying a textured page with a fragmented image partially obscured by torn paper strips, alongside a blank white page featuring printed information about the book.

An open book displaying an artwork titled 'Destiny Session' by Peter Sutherland from 2013, featuring a collage with a prominent eye and various textured layers. A caption in the center provides information about the piece.

A spread from an art book featuring a collection of sea shells on the left and various smooth stones on the right, with text seeping in between, highlighting a unique artistic display.

The altered sailing photobooks recall Spector’s North Sea (for M.B.) (1990), his homage to Marcel Broodthaers’ A Voyage on the North Sea (1974) in which Broodthaers juxtaposes a 19th century amateur painting of a tall-masted ship with his own photographs of a sailing ship. Tellingly for this issue of Inscription as well as the thrust of Spector’s homage, Broodthaers opens A Voyage with an elaborate warning not to cut the uncut pages of the book.

A book opened to two pages, featuring a painted scene of historic sailing ships on the left and a black-and-white photo of a sailboat on the right.

An open book page featuring bold text warning readers about cutting the pages, accompanied by a photograph of a sailboat on the sea. The opposite page header reads 'A Voyage on the North Sea' and is attributed to Marcel Broodthaers.

From A Voyage on the North Sea (1974) by Marcel Broodthaers. Photos: Books On Books Collection.

Spector’s homage is a work 10 feet long and presented on a table appropriately jutting out from the wall like a pier. The eleven “waves” of torn pages placed in a row on top of the steel shelf come from eleven copies of the Walker Art Center’s 1987 catalogue for Broodthaers’s first U.S. retrospective. Spector had all the pages in each copy painted with white gesso before tearing the pages. He saved the excised “wedges” and bound them at the fore edges. Because the gesso does not completely obscure the text and images from the catalogues, viewers who come close to the work can see slivers of some of Broodthaers’ works along with the word fragments typical of Spector’s altered books.

A minimalist art installation featuring a long table made of flat surfaces resembling open books, with black sculptural pieces shaped like ships positioned on top.

A small decorative ship sculpture made of cast iron, positioned on a white wooden surface with a textured grain.

North Sea (for M.B.) (1990) by Buzz Spector

The echoes of Spector’s appropriation from the great appropriator (recall Broodthaers’ 1969 appropriation of Mallarmé’s poem in Image: Un Coup de Dés Jamais N’Abolira le Hasard) bring another set of boundaries into view: the space between originality and appropriation and the space between the auratic artwork and its mechanical reproduction raised in Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1936).

Across its 10 sections and 11 loose inserts, the sixth issue of Inscription takes the lead from Spector’s works and explores all these binaries and the cut or torn edges between them. As usual with Inscription, it isn’t all book art. There are prints, a vinyl record, bookmarks, postcards, installations, libraries, typography, a syllabary, and even moth-repellent cedarwood blocks, and its sources range from the London Missionary Society hospitals in early 20th century China, to an installation of Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s library shelves (at Washingon State University of all places), and to J.L. Carr’s home in Kettering. The eclecticism is a challenge to coherence as much as the number of contributors is a challenge to adherence to the theme. Complete success would be an issue that is an artwork of collage in itself.

Collage is naturally where the first contributor’s article begins. “What does it mean to make art out of torn-up paper?” Eric Robertson uses Hans (Jean) Arp’s déchirés (torn pages), Raymon Hains’ and Jacques Villeglé’s torn posters, and Sol Lewitt’s “rip drawings” to take us beyond categorizing such works as vandalism, desecration, or iconoclasm.

An open book page featuring an article titled 'Tearing Up: Artists' Radical Uses of Paper' by Eric Robertson. The left side contains text discussing the use of torn paper in art, while the right side features an image of an artwork with intricate calligraphy and designs on aged paper, highlighting the aesthetic of torn paper.

An open book page featuring two artistic works by Hans Arp, one resembling a slender figure with a geometric pattern and the other an abstract, torn form. Surrounding text discusses themes of loss and artistic collaboration in relation to the pieces.

By discussing Arp’s posthumous collaborations with friend Kurt Schwitters and partner Sophie Taeuber under the heading “Tears of Mourning”, Robertson bridges the dual meanings of the heteronym and well prepares the ground for his moving quotation of Arp in conclusion: “By tearing up a piece of paper or a drawing, we bring into it the very essence of life and death”.

YuHao Chen‘s “Table of Phonetic Wounds” aims to make metaphorical connections among a host of pairings: surgical incision/skin, site of operation/cause for operation, the initial/final phoneme structure from the Wang-Peill Mandarin Syllabary, Western colonial intervention/China-the-sick-man-0f Asia, literacy/illiteracy, non-Christian/Christian, etc. Successful surgery equals achievement of literacy, healing equals conversion, etc., by which we should be convinced of causality (or not).

The justification running through the center of the article’s paragraphs offers a visual metaphor for all these binaries. Even the gap between the initial and final phonemes in the Mandarin Syllabary recalls the gap between the consonants of “tears”. It is a space in which something meaningful happens.

An academic page discussing the history of phonetic wounds and literacy programs at the London Missionary Society hospitals in early 20th century China, featuring a historical image captioned 'Men's small ward.'

Reanna Brooks‘ “Cut and Paste: Virginia Woolf’s Bookcraft” provides a good case for looking carefully at the border between craft and art. Brooks finds a depth in Woolf’s bookbinding that should prompt us to ask more often, When do the book arts and book art overlap to create a new work of art?

A page from a book featuring images of a bookshelf with various books, some rebound with distinctive patterns and materials, alongside text discussing Virginia Woolf's bookcraft.

Sally O’Reilly‘s “Birth, Accident and Death: A Narratological Probing of Die-Cut Holes” would not have been out of place in Inscription No. 2 on “holes”. Its presence here demonstrates the extension of the theme of tearing to include cutting and holes. Removal by tearing or cutting may overlap, but the techniques are sharply different in their results as we saw with Arp’s “Doll carrying Schwitters” and “Le Petit Prince”. The differences here point to the messiness of giving birth contrasted with the tidiness of the neatly designed and pocketable guide for midwives that shows the growing diameter of the cervix stage by stage through a die-cut hole.

An open book page featuring text and illustrations about a unique pocket guide titled 'Vaginal Examination,' detailing topics related to birth and maternal health. The left side includes an excerpt from the guide, while the right side displays diagrams related to fetal descent and vaginal examination.

The following juxtaposition of Lucio Fontana‘s Spatial Concept “Waiting” and Bas Jan Ader‘s I’m too sad to tell you draws attention to the heteronym “tears”. It is set off in its own section, knowingly bracketed by Spector’s Displacement after Lawrence Weiner (2024) — conceptual artist — and After Ansel Adams (2024) — photographer. It is a meaningful curatorial gesture meant to be on a par with, say, Robertson’s effective bridging of the heteronymic meanings under the heading “Tears of Mourning”.

An open book displaying two artworks: on the left, a piece titled 'Spatial Concept Waiting' by Lucio Fontana featuring a slit on a beige canvas, framed in wood; on the right, a black-and-white photograph by Bas Jan Ader titled 'I'm too sad to tell you' depicting a man with a distressed expression, holding his head.

Tear: N¹ A torn part or place; V¹ To pull or split apart. Tear: N² A secretion of the lachrymal gland; V² To weep.

Eleanor Baker‘s “Cut, Paste, and Pocketed” explores J.L. Carr’s 1066 and All That treatment of Chaucer’s “The Reeve’s Tale”. While Carr would surely have been familiar with Sellar and Yeatman’s 1930 comic book history, Baker pegs Carr’s approach as a form of collage rather than comic strip. As we’ll see later with Angela Szczepaniak’s contribution, the two can be combined to drive a narrative forward. In Carr’s case, as Baker points out, the pocketbook approach and cheeky fragments of collage combine to deliver a comically modern sense of Chaucer’s world and an inventive match to the fragmentary nature of “The Reeve’s Tale”.

Using knives and punches, A T Kabe Wilson removes every tenth word in Graham Greene’s The Tenth Man and replaces it with a synonym or as near a proxy as he can manage to challenge the notion of copyright. The resulting pages are arranged to make up an installation where visitors can read the entire set of altered pages. There is no edition of Copywrong. It turns Walter Benjamin on his head: “The Unique Work of Art Produced from Two Copies of a Mechanical Reproduction”.

To bring this relevant work within the bounds of Inscription, the editors provide images of Wilson at work and rely on Dennis Duncan (University College of London) to elicit from Wilson where the work’s strange status places it in relationship to artists’ books and other visual art.

A close-up view of an open book featuring an interview between Dennis Duncan and T Kabe Wilson on the left page, with blurred focus on a person who appears to be deep in thought. The right page contains text discussing concepts of copyright and interpretation in literature. A partially visible book titled 'The Tenth Man' by Graham Greene is seen in the foreground.

An open book on a wooden table showing text, with a person's hand holding a page.

Kabe Wilson’s choice of every tenth word takes its impetus from the book’s story of collective punishment in wartime (“choose ten from among your number to be executed”). But it also turns on its head the common fallacy that ten percent of a work can be reproduced without violating copyright: hence the title Copywrong. In Greene’s novel, when the rich tenth man contracts with a poor man to trade places and switch identities in exchange for the rich man’s inheritance, a whole vein of copywrongs reveals itself for mining. Wilson sees his creative destruction of the novel as a form of translation and betrayal of the original. While challenging us to think where the line between book and not-book lies, and even to think of its sheets of paper as 3D objects, Copywrong becomes a way of asking where the line between original and copy, legal and illegal, and life and death lies.

Close-up of a book page featuring the word 'within' highlighted among other printed text.

The next contribution is Fraser Muggeridge‘s “Cuts and Tears as Justified and Unjustified Typesetting”. While the article gives an informative sketch of the history and development of the straight and ragged edges of print, its argument that unjustified typesetting is “torn typography” does not convince. An unjustified line does not begin with a justified line from which spacing is torn or cut. A justified setting may give a page the visual effect of having been evenly cut down the right, and a ragged right setting may give the visual effect of a tear down the right side, but whether they contribute to a work’s artistic meaning — not just an aesthetic effect on readability — needs convincing examples. With Apollinaire and his calligrammes, Stefan Themerson and his “internal vertical justification”, and Christian Bök’s Diamonds, Muggeridge make a good start. Most of the other variations on justified, unjustified, and mixed, however, are far cries from, say, Mallarmé’s breaks of the line and play with page layout in Un Coup de Dés Jamais N’Abolira le Hasard or from the meaningful typographical tearing and cutting that the avant-gardistes of the early 20th century perpetrated.

A page from a book titled 'Cuts and Tears as Justified and Unjustified Typesetting: From Bayer to the Kindle' by Fraser Muggeridge. The page contains a detailed discussion on typography, justified and unjustified typesetting, and mentions Herbert Bayer's work. The layout features various paragraphs, illustrations, and examples related to typographical practices.

It’s odd, especially as the Fraser Muggeridge Studio designs Inscription, that the article does not mention the center justification used in several of the issue’s other articles. Their paragraphs decline to show off those even edges of justified-left and justified-right typesetting. Instead, they go for a ragged left and ragged right with a book-mimicking gutter of justified left and right in their center. When proofreaders were more a feature in typesetting houses, they not only had to catch “typos” but also to watch for “rivers in the type”, those breaks between words in one line that aligned with breaks in the next several lines to create a white rivulet of space trickling down the page and distracting the reader from the sense of the sentences. In Chen’s article, the “river” is a medial surgical cut. In Duncan’s interview with Wilson, the clear gutter in the middle of the paragraphs offers a sharp contrast with the uncomfortable binaries that Copywrong bids us to engage. Kudos to Fraser Muggeridge and studio.

A page from a book discussing the history of anesthesia and the contributions of Sidney Pell and the LMS hospitals, featuring text and a black-and-white image of Yid teaching a patient to read.

A close-up image of a person's hands writing on a piece of text, with a focus on the written words in a book, possibly during a discussion about presentation in art and literature.

Left: from Chen’s article. Right: from Wilson-Duncan interview.

The next contribution — from the Leuven-based artists collective Rosetta, formed by Eva Moulaert, Anneleen Masschelein, and Willem Styfhals — continues with the topic of typesetting. Their starting point is those awkward phenomena of typesetting — widows and orphans. They are not deliberate renderings or loppings of words from a following or preceding sentence to be left stranded at the bottom or top of a page, respectively. But there they are. Are they tears or cuts, these weepy, abandoned strings of anthropomorphized type that are cause for tears among proofreaders, typesetters, and designers? No, they are cause for the fevered ponderings of the narrator in a book whose photographed pages make up this contribution.

A close-up view of an open book's pages, discussing graphic design principles related to typography and formatting, with visible text and page numbers 124 and 125.

No widows or orphans here.

This set of photographed double-page spreads (excised?) has plenty of widows and orphans. Even though they are likely deliberate, what is the point of them? And whose disembodied hand is that that keeps appearing, disappearing, and reappearing to hold the book facing out?

An open book on a wooden surface, showing text on two pages. A hand is positioned on the left page, partially obscured, reaching toward the text.

Orphan and widow.

The narrator winds “their” way through references to Gutenberg, Donald Knuth, Herman Zapf, Jean-François Lyotard, Martin Heidegger, Roland Barthes, Robert Bringhurst, Ellen Lupton, Frank Kermode, Amitav Ghosh, and half a dozen others to come to “a” point — an obsession with hyphenation. And the point of that? Why naturally for the narrator’s compound, hyphenated selves — Ro-set-ta — to hand over the pen to Rosetta, the widow at the end of “page 139”.

“The Extinctions Bureau” is a brilliant article with which to end this issue of Inscription. It offers readers a chance to wield scissors or papercutters if they are ready not to heed Broodthaers’ admonition above. It is also a clever conceptual extension of Will Eisner’s 1985 concept of “sequential art” that aimed to establish comics as a legitimate literary genre. Angela Szczepaniak first teases us with the narrative premise of a clothing moth-turned-detective on the trail of the Nylon Killer. If that is not hilarious enough, she posits conversion of the 2D linear narrative into a 3D existence around moth-repellent cedarwood. (She has created the blocks for exhibition display, but that’s not the point of the contribution.) Whether the blocks are more cruel to the detective or readers who now have to get their heads and hands around the idea of a “polysequential” story is a fine point. Readers who take up the challenge of cutting out the templates and folding them into cubes will have their own view.

By cutting and tearing the images for her collages from pulp comics, Szczepaniak rings all the bells of Inscription 6’s theme and reminds us of its subtitle: The Journal of Material Text.

A visually striking illustration featuring a collage of diverse images and text, arranged in a cross-like pattern, showcasing themes of nature, literature, and personal reflections.

Aside: below are images of the completed cedar block cubes on display in Nottingham. Photos courtesy of the artist.

Reminiscent of Aspen, Fluxus, The Journal of Artists’ Books, and the deluxe editions of Parenthesis, Inscription‘s artwork inserts contribute to the sense of the issue as an exhibition, a wunderkammer, a performance. No 33 LP this time; instead there is appropriately a cutdown 45-rpm record, albeit no instructions on “ripping” tracks from it to make up our own playlists. Putting together a thematically coherent journal is tricky. The artworks underscore and strengthen the issue’s theme of tearing and cutting. Two examples: Nick Thurston’s print Rips and Floods (2026) and Carolyn Thompson’s Tearjerker (2026) cover all the thematic notes of tearing, cutting, and weeping.

Thurston’s title for his print ensures that we don’t miss the heteronymic “tear”, which the visually torn phrase “A tear is an intellectual thing” might cause us to do. For those not well-versed in William Blake, a helpful note on page 160 identifies the phrase’s source as “The Grey Monk“. The editors mention Thurston’s truncation of Blake’s line, but leave it to us to supply the pun that it has been ripped from the poem. Blake’s preceding lines rule out the heteronymic meaning; for him, it’s the “Widow’s tear” that is ” an intellectual thing”. What makes Thurston’s print a strong work of art is how the tearing from the poem brings with it other key elements of the poem. For Blake, the Widow’s tears have more power than war to free the world from fear of the “Purple Tyrant”. In 2026, Thurston’s print reminds us that intellectual things — [/tɪ(ə)rz/] and [/tɛ(ə)rz/] — may have more power than Tangerine or Religious Tyrants.

A split image featuring bold text that reads 'A TEAR IS AN INTELLECTUAL THING' in black on a bright green background.

Rips and Floods (2026), Nick Thurston

For her print, Carolyn Thompson excises words “from 30 works of literary fiction she has read since” 2016 to compose a sob story that well sums up the effects of Brexit (and the US election).

A printed page filled with text discussing the author's experiences and emotions related to crying, highlighting the difficulty and complexity of expressing emotions.

Tearjerker (2026) Carolyn Thompson

Pages 154-61 list the twenty-one artists/performers alphabetically with descriptions of their editions. Self-reflexively and in keeping with the issue’s theme, page 161 shows a blanked version of the torn segments from page 31 on which Partington and Smyth provide their introduction to the authors’ and artists’ contributions. (This blanked version is curious. If page 161 were showing the blank sides of the slips of paper, the four slips on the left would be flipped and on the right. Since one of the editors has let slip in correspondence that the theme of Issue 7 will be “blanks”, might this be an Easter egg?)

An image of a historical illustration titled 'The Composition' featuring a figure seated at a desk with a scroll, surrounded by text and decorative elements.

A layout of various pieces of torn white paper arranged on a light-colored surface.

In homage to the journal and its edition contributors, below is a collage of the eleven loose inserts.

A collage featuring various images, text, and printed materials, including a book, torn paper with the phrase 'A tear is an intellectual thing', colorful graphics, and a layout of poems. The composition is layered with diverse textures and designs.

Contributors: Bas Jan Ader, Erica Baum, David Beech, David Bellingham, Stephen Emmerson, Lucio Fontana, Queneau Reading Group (Joe Gilmore, Simon Morris, Tom Rodgers, and Patrick Wildgust), Jo Hamill, Simon Morris, Abigail Reynolds, Rosetta (Eva Moulaert, Anneleen Masschelein, and Willem Styfhals), Buzz Spector, Carolyn Thompson, Nick Thurston, and Steven Zultanski. As noted at the beginning, Buzz Spector’s contributions appear in the issue’s pages as do Bas Jan Ader’s and Lucio Fontana’s photographs, while Abigail Reynolds’ art appears on the cover. All the other works are inserts.

The wunderkammer nature of Inscription will send insatiable readers in search of more examples of creative destruction. To that end, here are a handful from the Books On Books Collection. If you can only find time for two, make it Eleonora Cumer’s Circoscrivere lo spazio No. 3 [Circumscribing space] (2021) and Cercare nella memoria [Searching Memory] (2021). They are her most sophisticated metaphoric works in the collection. They offer a circumvention of circumscription, which is another way of thinking about tears and the material text.

“Islam Aly“. 13 January 2020. Books On Books Collection. See 28 Letters (2013).

“Doug Beube“. 21 April 2020. Books On Books Collection. See Empty Talk (2016), Red Infinity #4 (2017), and Breaking the Codex (2011).

“Lizzie Brewer“. 4 July 2023. Books On Books Collection. See Babel (2019).

“Eleonora Cumer“. 6 September 2019. Books On Books Collection. See l’attesa/ l’attente (2010), visioni urbane/ visions urbane (2015), contaminazione (2015), Circoscrivere lo spazio No. 3 (2021), Cercare nella memoria (2021)

“The First Seven Books of the Rijswijk Paper Biennial“. 10 October 2019. Books On Books Collection. See Tijdloos papier = Timeless paper (2002).

“Jonathan Safran Foer“. 8 November 2024. Books On Books Collection. See Tree of Codes (2010).

“Jo Hamill“. 23 June 2026. Books On Books Collection. See Gutter Words (2019).

“Julie Johnstone“. 4 June 2020. Books On Books Collection. See a book of tears (2006) and Point of View: skyline tideline (2012).

“Katsumi Komagata (I)“. 22 March 2020. Books On Books Collection. See A Cloud (2007) and Moon Phase (2019).

“Katsumi Komagata (II). 16 August 2024. Books On Books Collection. See Piece of Mind (2022), one of his last limited edition works.

“Masoumeh Mohtadi“. 5 February 2021. Books On Books Collection. See Blindness (2020).

“Timothy Mosely“. 23 August 2024. Books On Books Collection. See The Book of Tears (2014).

“Julien Nédélec“. 19 June 2025. Books On Books Collection. See Titrer (2012).

“Bruno Riboulot and Marjon Mudde“. 4 June 2023. Books On Books Collection. See ABC d’Air (2005).

“Jenny Smith“. 31 July 2017. Books On Books Collection. See Untitled (2006), Book of Beads (2008), and Little Black Book (2009).

“Carolyn Thompson“. 19 December 2023. Books On Books Collection. See The Eaten Heart (2013).

Books On Books – Jo Hamill

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Working with an edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses, Hamill systematically obliterated the words of Joyce but carefully retained those words positioned closest to the gutter – the technical term used to describe the central margin of a bound page. The retained fragments form two extended columns that continue for 933 pages. Notable here is how design and typographic terminology is so entrenched in bodily references. Header, footer, body-copy, the arm of a “K”, the crotch of a “Y”, the foot of a “T”, the ear of a “G”, the shoulder of an “R” and so on. As is the architectural scaffolding of Joyce’s schema which underpins the structure of Ulysses, kidney, genitals, heart, lungs, oesophagus, Brain, Blood, Ear. etc. Lawrence Weiner refers to language as material for construction, the act of deletion in Gutter Words exposes the architectural scaffolding that holds words in place. Voids are physical spaces to be read and words become unanchored, set adrift in an uncertain space. The architectural qualities of this physical space will be exposed, Gutter Words will be devoid of the accoutrements associated with a “book” such as cover, boards, end papers, dust jacket and will retain only the innards, an unprotected text block.–Publisher’s website

Gutter Words (2019)

A close-up view of the edge of a thick, white book with a textured spine. The book is partially open, resting on a brown surface, with two wooden hands on top.

Gutter Words (2019)
Jo Hamill
Softcover, exposed spine. H197 x W128 x D60 mm. 956 pages. Acquired from Gill Partington, 20 June 2023.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.

Artists’ books can run the risk of being a “one-trick pony” or a toddler’s newly learned knock-knock joke. Once seen, the trick succumbs rapidly to the law of diminishing returns. A dozen times heard, the joke verges on parental abuse. Conceptualist Simon Popper’s 2006 alphabetized version of James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) falls into that camp, albeit a stunning one. There may be some ongoing amusement in perceiving the shift from letter to letter and the subsequent alteration of the visual pattern, or in spotting the singular invented words and considering the alphabetization as a comment on James Joyce’s play with language, or in contemplating it in comparison with similar efforts. Like Mikko Kuorinki’s 2012 alphabetized version of Foucault The Order of Things (1970) that cheekily challenges Michel Foucault’s theory of how we perceive social order. Or the alpha and omega of Tauba Auerbach’s BbeehHilloTy or the Alphabetized Bible (2006); well maybe not the alpha, since Silvio Lorusso and Rory Macbeth got there first with theirs in 1997, nor the omega, since Peter Harkins followed up with his 2013 Well-Sorted Version (WSV), algorithmically generated. Apparently, one-up-manship is inevitable. Even Gutter Words has its gatecrasher: John Morgan’s Usylessly (2021) with a pair of essays, not just one. But once the joke is “got”, how rewarding is it to return to it again and again. Is there more to it?

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Books On Books

Curated by Robert Bolick

Book Arts

Books On Books Collection – Robbin Ami Silverberg

Morning Prayer II (2000-04)

La durée réelle: Make this cut first (2024-25)

Further Reading

Books On Books Collection – Clifton Meador

Acheiropoieta or Not Made by Hands and Concerning Archeiropoieta (2020)

Cotton Curtain (2018)

VOC (2022)

Further Reading

Books On Books Collection – Anne Lydiat

Further Reading

Books On Books Collection – Ricky Jay

The Magic Magic Book (1994)

Further Reading

Books On Books Collection – Timothy Mosely (II)

ep’s (2018)

Books On Books Collection – Sarah J. Colman

4 p. and 33mm (2013)

Semiotics of the Studio (2015)

Further Reading

Books On Books Collection – Philip Zimmermann (II)

Serpents (2025)

Accelerated Entropy (2024)

In the Desert (2024)

Further Reading and Viewing

Bookmarking Book Art – The Wittockiana, Museum of Book Arts and Bookbinding in Brussels

a minima

(20 March 2026 – 27 September 2026)

Books On Books Collection – Inscription: The Journal of Material Text, Issue 6 (Tears)

Inscription: The Journal of Material Text, Issue 6 (2026)

Further Reading

Books On Books – Jo Hamill

Gutter Words (2019)