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 – 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 – 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.”

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 Collection – Felipe Ehrenberg

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Codex Aeroscriptus Ehrenbergensis (1990)

Cover of a book titled 'Codex AEROSCRIPTUS EHRENBERGENSIS' with a minimalist design and faded text.

Codex Aeroscriptus Ehrenbergensis: A Visual Score of Iconotropisms (1990)
Felipe Ehrenberg
Casebound stiff cover, fly leaves around bifolios (fore-edge folded folios). H420 x W295 mm. 20 pages (10 bifolios, 9 with prints, 1 for title page and copyright page).Edition of 500. Acquired from Monograph Werks, 17 January 2024.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.

In his introduction, Felipe Ehrenberg variously recommends that we read Codex Aeroscriptus Ehrenbergensis “like a detective novel” for its “various clues that you may unravel the wondrous and dramatic events surrounding the life of this artist, another witness to the end of a century” or “as a musical score, perhaps to be composed by someone wishing to recreate the background music of our daily histories” or a “formulation of hieroglyphs”. The book’s subtitle succinctly rolls up these metaphors: “a visual score of iconotropisms”.

Stephen Perkins calls it “a mini-retrospective of his explorations in this medium” — stencils.

This work came out of a residency Ehrenberg completed at Atlanta’s Nexus Press. The images for the works came from what he called his Visual Information Bank which was a box with all sorts of ephemera that he would dip into for images for his stencils. In contrast to the frenetic energy of the stencils, the inside of the publication has a bucolic and calm feeling that is mirrored in the original stencil work Ehrenberg created across the front pages of each book. (Perkins, 2024)

The accordion, concertina, or leporello structure adopted by so many 20th and 21st century book artists has its Aztec analogue called a screenfold format. Ellen Baird and Cristián Roa-de-la-Carrera included Codex Aeroscriptus Ehrenbergensis in the Newberry Library’s 2006-07 exhibition “The Aztecs and the Making of Colonial Mexico”.

… Aztec heritage has become a vital component of Mexican and Mexican-American identity, influencing the work of many contemporary writers, artists, and scholars. The inherent flexibility of traditional indigenous creativity facilitates combination with contemporary artistic practices. Traditional screenfold books are layered with contemporary collage and print techniques, and indigenous images are juxtaposed with colonial scenes and pop icons. Contemporary Mexican and Mexican-American artists use traditional Aztec images and techniques to explore both contemporary life and Mexican cultural heritage. The screenfold format is an emblem of ancient Mesoamerican culture, and has become charged with historical and political meaning. Contemporary artists combine this format with humorous and provocative imagery to explore the cultural and political dynamics of preconquest identity, the colonization of Mexico and current relations between Mexico, Europe, and the United States. (Baird and Roa-de-la-Carrera, 2006)

Ehrenberg’s title is dipped in sarcasm. Most of the barely surviving screenfold Mesoamerican works reside in Anglo-European institutions under names like Codex Borbonicus at the Bibliothèque de l’Assemblée Nationale in Paris, Codex Borgianus at the Vatican, and Codex Mictlan at the Bodleian Libraries in Oxford. Ehrenberg’s modern version reflects their pictorial style and even the layout of their repetitive serialized images. But in doing so, his images speak to the continuing impact of colonialism.

An ancient illustration depicting a ceremony, featuring a figure with a staff, a person in ceremonial attire, and a skeletal figure performing a ritual at a temple-like structure, along with various abstract symbols on the lower border.

Codex Mictlan, Oxford, Bodleian Library MS. Laud Misc. 678.

An open book featuring vibrant illustrations, including colorful roosters, stylized skeletons, and various artistic elements in bold colors and graphics.

A vibrant two-page spread featuring colorful illustrations, including stylized skulls, a figure in a hat, and graphic elements like text and a helicopter. The design incorporates a mix of patterns and colors, emphasizing themes of emotion and popular culture.

Still, Ehrenberg’s book art went beyond any reductive anti-colonial message. His “Visual Information Bank”, as he called it, held a wealth of contemporary cultural iconography. Its main sections included:

The Crashed Car Department
Sports’ Frozen Moments Department
Men in Suits & Ties Department
Police File Photo Department
Jet Set Department
Women: Dream & Desire Department
Masked Wrestlers Department
Motel Room Drawings Department
The Rubber Stamp Division

And he drew on this — especially from the televisual world — to create his glyphic stencils and rubber stamps.

The leporello edition of Codex Aeroscriptus Ehrenbergensis is rare, but fortunately the wrap-back bound edition shown in this entry is a little less so. The wrap-back format is a traditional Chinese/Japanese book format. Takako Saito, who joined Ehrenberg at Beau Geste Press in 1973, may have been an influence in this regard, but as she left in 1975, an influence from others at Nexus in Atlanta, GA, where Ehrenberg completed this work, seems more likely.

A close-up view of an artistic piece featuring several abstract shapes in bright blue and purple against a dark background with splashes of white.

Open book page featuring text in Spanish, with a pink abstract illustration. The page discusses themes related to art, techniques, and the artist's intentions.

The double-sided leporello edition of Codex Aeroscriptus Ehrenbergensis is not a folded continuous sheet. Viewable on Stephen Perkins’ site, it appears to have been formed from the codex edition’s double-page spreads glued together at the fore edge. Ehrenberg’s residency at Atlanta’s Nexus Press would have overlapped with Clifton Meador’s presence, and Meador’s works frequently use the wrap-back format.

Books On Books Collection – Lu Jingren

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Locus: Identified by the History (2016)

Locus: Identified by the History (2016)
Lu Jingren and Fang Xiaofeng
Softcover, sewn, open spine. H170 x W170 x D45 mm. 566 pages. Acquired from Liu Xing Bookseller, 9 May 2026.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.

历史的”场 (Locus: Identified by the History) (2016)
方晓风 (Fang Xiaofeng) and 呂敬人 (Lu Jingren)
Beijing Shi: Zhongguo jian zhu gong ye chu ban she.

Co-authored by architecture scholar Fang Xiaofeng and book designer Lu Jingren, Locus: Identified by the History (2016) springs from the Book – Architecture Project (书 – 筑 / Shu – Zhu Project), conceived by Lu Jingren, Fumihiko Maki (Japan), and Yi Ki-Ung (South Korea). The project initiated a multi-year series of exhibitions/forums called “Book – Architecture: Dialogues Between Architects and Book Designers” (2011-19) across all three countries. Locus was published on the occasion of the second exhibition/forum in 2016.

Locus pursues two overlapping lines of thought. The first and primary one rests on Lu’s design philosophy that a book is a built environment, a habitat for text and images to be engaged by readers and all five of their senses. Its layout, pacing, structure, and their interconnectedness with each other and the book’s materials mirror the architect’s design of rooms, hallways, stairs, windows, doors, thresholds, and their interconnectedness with each other and their materials. Likewise as habitats, they each have exteriors, are designed to occupy a locus in time and space, and relate to a world outside. In Lu’s philosophy, the design mechanics involve four pillars: binding + layout + editorial + information visualization. Successful execution results in an immersive spatial object (habitat) that triggers the reader’s visual, tactile, auditory, olfactory, and gustatory systems simultaneously.

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Books On Books Collection – Karen Kunc

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While Stéphane Mallarmé and his Un Coup de Dés may be the front runner among contenders for the title of literary patron saint of the artist’s book, Jorge Luis Borges and Italo Calvino appear in a tie for a distant but respectable second. Each have inspired some striking works. In her series Ten Thousand Things, Karen Kunc has boosted both Borges’ and Calvino’s chances and nudged Calvino’s with an additional homage in leporello format.

A collection of artistic books titled 'Ten Thousand Things' displayed in various colorful covers and opened pages, showcasing unique designs and patterns.

A stack of colorful booklets arranged neatly, displaying various covers with visible titles and volume numbers, resting on a dark surface.

Ten Thousand Things series (2012-13)
Karen Kunc
Images courtesy of the artist.

The series title of Ten Thousand Things springs from Chapter 42 of the Tao Te Ching:

The Tao begot one.
One begot two.
Two begot three.
And three begot the ten thousand things.
The ten thousand things carry yin and embrace yang.
They achieve harmony by combining these forces.

The series consists of 74 books in two sizes as the monoprints were made in two sizes of papers. The papers varied. Most of the works are on Torinoko, a Japanese paper that Kunc found to work well with waterbased Akua Intaglio inks. Some are on Arches 88 paper, a waterleaf she found also very absorbent for the Akua inks. Many of the prints have some handcoloring with ink or liquid acrylic. A few prints as well as all of the covers were made on Japanese Nishinouchi paper, a kozo fiber paper, which she has used extensively for her large woodcut prints. Printing is from collagraph plates on an etching press, with hand coloring and waxing afterwards.

Kunc chose excerpts from the works of five poets/authors and responded to each with several different monoprints not as illustrations of the text but as evocations prompted and to prompt. In addition to Borges and Calvino, she selected from Guillaume Apollinaire, Annie Dillard, and Marge Piercy. Kunc handset the metal type and letterpress printed several sheets of each text on different papers for variety with the monoprints. In each book, the text-bearing sheet folds around the sheet that bears two monoprints, one on each side.

The Tate Museum remarks that “The beauty of monoprinting lies in its spontaneity and its allowance for combinations of printmaking, painting and drawing media.” Kunc’s series extends that allowance to combinations with the elements of the book.

Ten Thousand Things, No. 51 (2012)

Cover of a book titled 'TEN Thousand THINGS,' Volume No. 51, featuring a textured background with orange and gray patterns.

Ten Thousand Things, No. 51 (2012)
Karen Kunc
Single-signature booklet containing a recto and verso monoprint created by pressure printing, pochoir, and mixed media, with letterpress text. H205 x W110 mm. [8] pages. From a set of 75. Acquired from the artist, 9 February 2026.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.

From Borges’ 1945 short story “The Aleph“, No. 51 in Kunc’s Ten Thousand Things series extracts four descriptions of the object or phenomenon Borges the narrator sees in the basement of his intolerable acquaintance Carlos Argentino Daneri:

I saw a small iridescent sphere of almost unbearable brilliance[;]
a sphere whose center is everywhere and circumference is nowhere;
convex equatorial deserts and each one of their grains of sand;
that secret and conjectured object whose name is common to all men but which no man has looked upon — the unimaginable universe.

An open book displaying a textured page with orange and gray lines on one side and a blank page with the text 'I saw....' on the other.

With a deft touch, Kunc has selected and slightly altered the more abstract of Borges’ long Whitmanic observations (in the first, she inserts an ellipsis and substitutes a semicolon for a full stop; for the second and third, the order of appearance is changed). Borges prefaces his catalogue of what he sees with a caveat about the inadequacy of words to depict the concept of multum in parvo [“much in little”]:

All language is a set of symbols whose use among its speakers assumes a shared past. How, then, can I translate into words the limitless Aleph, which my floundering mind can scarcely encompass? Mystics, faced with the same problem, fall back on symbols: to signify the godhead, one Persian speaks of a bird that somehow is all birds; Alanus de Insulis, of a sphere whose center is everywhere and circumference is nowhere; Ezekiel, of a four-faced angel who at one and the same time moves east and west, north and south. (Not in vain do I recall these inconceivable analogies; they bear some relation to the Aleph.) Perhaps the gods might grant me a similar metaphor, but then this account would become contaminated by literature, by fiction. Really, what I want to do is impossible, for any listing of an endless series is doomed to be infinitesimal. In that single gigantic instant I saw millions of acts both delightful and awful; not one of them occupied the same point in space, without overlapping or transparency. What my eyes beheld was simultaneous, but what I shall now write down will be successive, because language is successive.

In light of the snide literary sniping and rivalry that forms the background to “The Aleph”, Borges may be forgiven for omitting William Blake’s spectacular translation of “the limitless Aleph”:

To see a World in a Grain of Sand,/ And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,/ Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand,/ And Eternity in an hour. (Auguries of Innocence, 1803).

It might have brought Borges’ descriptive and narrative enterprise to an harrumphing halt. We would then not have had this particular instance of Karen Kunc’s taking up the challenge of rendering in an artist’s book Borges’ verbal description of the Aleph. What image could resonate with or reflect his words and reflect the impossibility he describes? How might the arrangement of pages enhance/diminish it? How might the act of turning a page reflect or obscure it?

The vibrant circle of deep blue is only two dimensional, but perhaps the abstractions behind the dark convex grid suggest the three dimensionality of the story’s sphere. Perhaps the more brilliant but smaller blue circle beside the larger one conveys the multum in parvo concept in the style of medieval narration differentiating multiple points in time with images of different size in the same plane. Perhaps the full-page bleed of the image even suggests that paradoxically the image extends from the page yet encompasses the page. Likewise might the sheet’s fold that truncates the circle and the dark and light grids imply continuity coexisting with discontinuity? Does the dark blue grid that curves over the orange and burnt umber colors imply the “convex equatorial deserts”?

Open book page featuring colorful abstract artwork alongside text describing a sphere of brilliance and its attributes.

Turning from that half view of the monoprint, we have the full view of the monoprint on the other side of the sheet. An angular and checkered blue background hovers over two ellipsoid figures in an orange foreground. Is the background network with its numerous small red dots a version of Indra’s net, that cosmological metaphor of an infinite net with a jewel at each juncture reflecting and being reflected by every other? The dark ellipsoid seems to quiver surrounded by crosshatching. Is it in motion toward the upright orange ellipsoid? Is this a moment in time and space?

Abstract artwork featuring geometric shapes, including oval and elliptical forms, with a blend of colors such as orange, yellow, blue, and purple, along with various lines and dots.

The other half of the monoprint with the dark blue circle comes into view with the last double page spread. If we could see all at once the monoprint with the dark blue circle, the juxtaposition of spheres and ellipses would stand out more.

An open book page featuring colorful abstract art with a grid pattern on the left side and a quote by Jorge Luis Borges about 'the unimaginable universe' on the right.

The white stars behind the grid stand out a bit more, and the small bright circles seem more clearly positioned on curving white orbital tracks. Is it an allusion to planetary and constellatory movement, bring a universe within this small book? Without photographic manipulation, we have to open our minds to imagine it. As Carlos replies when Borges worries that it will be too dark in the cellar to see the Aleph, ““Truth cannot penetrate a closed mind. If all places in the universe are in the Aleph, then all stars, all lamps, all sources of light are in it, too.”

Of course, this photographic manipulation is a cheat and overlooks that Kunc has combined the half-views of one side of the monoprint with the full view on the other side to reflect the challenge of embodying a simultaneous phenomenon with successive phenomena.

Open book displaying textured artwork on the cover, featuring abstract patterns in gray, orange, and yellow, along with text detailing the author's name and publication information.

Ten Thousand Things, No. 64 (2012)

Cover of a booklet titled 'TEN Thousand THINGS', Volume No. 64, featuring abstract circular patterns and a blue spine.

Ten Thousand Things, No. 64 (2012)
Karen Kunc
Single-signature booklet containing a recto and verso monoprint created by pressure printing, pochoir, and mixed media, and a letterpress text on various papers.H250 x W125 mm. [8] pages. From a set of 75. Acquired from the artist, 9 February 2026.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.

Of the 74 books in the Ten Thousand Things series, 11 of them pay homage to Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities (1972/74). The book’s premise is that Kublai Khan sent Marco Polo out into the empire to visit the Khan’s cities and return with close descriptions. In nine parts, each prefaced and closed with a philosophical dialogue between the Khan and Polo, the traveller describes fifty-five cities — all of them imaginary. While most works of homage to Invisible Cities select one or more of these fictitious 55 cities on which to focus, Kunc chooses more general text from the preface to Part 9. This is the text used in all 11 of the works of homage to Calvino:

…. (there is) an ATLAS in which are gathered the maps of all the cities:

THOSE whose walls rest on solid foundations, THOSE which fell in ruins and were swallowed up by the sand, THOSE that will exist one day and in whose place now only hares’ holes gape.

In colored miniatures the atlas depicts inhabited places of unusual form: an OASIS hidden in a fold of the desert from which only palm crests peer out is surely Nefta; a castle amid quicksands and cows grazing in meadows salted by the TIDES can only suggest Mont-Saint-Michel;

and a PALACE that instead of rising within a city’s walls contains within its own walls a city that can only be Urbino.

With certain words appearing in all caps in a lighter weight and lighter color than the surrounding text, the excerpts have a different texture from those in No. 51. The all caps words rise above or fall below the line of type.

A textured book cover featuring a circular pattern in warm colors on the left and a light green page with text on the right.

As with No. 51, only one side of the double-sided monoprint is viewable as a whole; the other side is viewable in halves. In No. 64’s first half-view, the shapes and colors have a submerged quality that echoes the now sinking or subsiding type of “THOSE”, “OASIS”, and “TIDES”:

A page from a book featuring abstract artwork with various circular shapes and colors, accompanied by a poetic text discussing themes of foundations, ruins, and unusual landscapes.

As the most prominent feature of the full-view monoprint, perhaps the two rectangular sail-like shapes recall the Chinese emperor and Venetian traveler. Or perhaps they allude to the remnants of a tower poking above the sands. The ellipsoidal shapes might be the “hares’ holes” mentioned above. The seemingly non-allusive flurry of white dots across the spread behave strangely. They lie in the background in the upper two thirds of the spread but then shift into the foreground in the lower third. The four bright blue dots may have migrated from the first half-view, but the trio of red dots are new participants. The presence of both contributes to an urge to flip back and forth between the first half-view and this full view.

Abstract artwork featuring colorful shapes and patterns on a textured background with dotted details.

The second half-view faces text that again displays all caps letters that sink below the line: “PALACE”, but more notably, the palace does not sit within a city but a city sits within the palace, “a city that can only be Urbino”. So, a real city within a fictive palace.

An artistic page featuring colorful abstract patterns alongside text from Italo Calvino's 'Invisible Cities' describing a palace that contains a city within its walls.

We can perform the photographic cheat to bring the two halves of the monoprint together, but as with No. 51, we overlook the deliberate hiding of the whole within the halves — like the paradoxical fictive palace that holds a real city (Urbino).

A closed booklet featuring artistic designs in earthy tones with circles and swirls in the background, and text describing an experimental monoprint and letterpress series by Karen Kunc, published by Blue Heron Press.

Type Cities (2018)

A book titled 'TYPE CITIES' with a pink label on a textured gray cover.

Type Cities (2018)
Karen Kunc
Leporello. H190 x W114 mm closed, extends to 1346 mm. [12] panels. Edition of 8, of which this is #2. Acquired from the artist, 25 March 2026.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.

Like most other homages to Invisible Cities, Karen Kunc’s Type Cities (2018) focuses on one of the fictitious cities; in this case, Aglaura. As with Ten Thousand Things, she uses an excerpt:

The city that they speak of has much of what is needed to exist whereas the city that exists on the site, exists less.

That is cryptic. Just as the paradoxical characterizes the general cities in No.64, so it is for the particular city of Aglaura here:

So if I wished to describe Aglaura to you, sticking to what I personally saw and experienced, I should have to tell you that it is a colorless city, without character, planted there at random. But this would not be true either: at certain hours, in certain places along the street, you see opening before you the hint of something unmistakable, rare, perhaps magnificent; you would like to say what it is, but everything previously said of Aglaura imprisons your words and obliges you to repeat them than say. Therefore, the inhabitants still believe they live in an Aglaura which grows only with the name Aglaura and they do not notice the Aglaura that grows on the ground.

For Ten Thousand Things, the single-fold double-sided monoprint provided Kunc a surprisingly flexible tool with which to capture the paradoxical in two very different texts. This time she chooses the accordion structure. Also, as the title Type Cities suggests, she chooses type as an additional tool to capture what Marco Polo describes as Aglaura’s “enduring assortment of qualities”. Across the twelve panels of the leporello, Kunc lays out the text of her chosen excerpt in multiple faces and fonts:

An artistic fold-out book with layered translucent pages, featuring text and abstract designs in blue, black, and purple. The text reads: 'THE city that THEY speak of has much of what.' The background is a light blue texture with circular cutouts.

Also across the twelve panels, the color change of black dots to purple, violet, and then yellow echoes the shift from the colorless city to something else “at certain hours, in certain places along the street”.

Artistic folded paper display with abstract designs and colorful shapes, featuring text fragments including 'is needed', 'exist', and 'EXISTS LESS'.

The “much of what is needed to exist” manifests at the bottom edge as wood type letters in dark blue floating along a river (?), then as Ss, 2s, and $s floating over a pond (?), and then yields to the less of zeroes scattered over a grid. The contrast of much and less even extends vertically to the handmade paper with its messily torn upper edge opposed to its neatly trimmed lower edge. It also extends horizontally to the paper as its tint shifts gradually from a deep blue to a light gray. These photographs do not do justice to the painted and stamped elements or texture of Type Cities.

A folded artist book with abstract designs and text on blue textured pages, featuring phrases about existence and cities.

Books On Books Collection – Abra Ancliffe (II)

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This entry is preceded by “Abra Ancliffe (I)“, which describes the Personal Libraries Library (Winter 2009-10 to Spring/Summer 2021) and The Secret Astronomy of Tristram Shandy (2015).

The constellatory asterisks in The Secret Astronomy of Tristram Shandy also evoke those flowers that our Personal Libraries Library (PLL) Artist/Librarian “picks” from the PLL and, later, Oleg Polunin’s Flowers of Europe: A Field Guide (1969) to include in the periodic issues of ephemera. Perhaps this confluence of stars and flowers created a predisposition in our Artist/Librarian that drew her to Johannes Kepler’s Astronomia Nova (1609). Unlike Sterne’s novel, which was part of Calvino’s personal library, Astronomia Nova lies outside the five personal collections. Of course, since Maria Mitchell was an astronomer, the works in her personal library refer to Kepler, and similarly, Robert Smithson had multiple books about astronomy, even Arthur Koestler’s Watershed: A Biography of Johannes Kepler. Still, Kepler’s “New Astronomy, Based upon Causes, or Celestial Physics, Treated by Means of Commentaries on the Motions of the Star Mars, from the Observations of Tycho Brahe, Gent.“, to give it its full and translated name, appears in Ancliffe’s heavens and garden like a new galaxy or specimen.

Astronomia Nova provided and further refined the mathematical and observational proofs of the Copernican planetary model of heliocentrism first laid out in De revolutionibus orbium coelestium [On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres] (1543). A little over 400 years later, our Ancliffe noticed in Kepler’s watershed publication something previously unobserved, something peculiarly geocentric about its heliocentric model.

An open historical astronomy book page displaying diagrams of circular orbits with annotations, including references to Copernicus, Ptolemy, and Tycho Brahe.

Astronomia nova (1609) Johannes Kepler. Bodleian Libraries.

Astronomia Nova‘s anonymous woodcut artist had ornamented Kepler’s astronomical diagrams and calculations with flowers.

A Field Guide to “A Field Guide to the Flowers of ‘Astronomia nova‘” (2018)

A close-up of an open field guide book titled 'A Field Guide to the Flowers of Astronomia Nova' with blue spiral binding and a signature by the author, Abra Anchifé, dated 2018.

A Field Guide to “A Field Guide to the Flowers of ‘Astronomia nova‘” (2018)
Abra Ancliffe
Spiral bound book. H140 x W120 mm. [90] pages. Edition of 27, of which this is #24. Acquired from the artist, 7 February 2026.
Photos: Books On Books Collection. Permission to display images from the artist, otherwise © Abra Ancliffe.

There is no florilegium or guide to these woodcut flowers, but there they are, sprinkled throughout Johannes Kepler’s 650-page investigation of Mars’ orbit, tracked by the observations of his mentor Tycho Brahe, Emperor Rudolph II’s imperial astronomer.

On one level, Ancliffe’s spiral bound handbook is the field guide to these flowers. Its photos of flowers , harvested from Pulinin’s Flowers of Europe, offer candidates for the historical real-life counterparts to the ornamental woodcuts. The handbook’s title, however, indicates another level: that of “a field guide to ‘a field guide’ “. But of what could such a meta-guide consist? In Ancliffe’s case, it is the artist’s book, the work before us that addresses the fields of vision and perspectives embedded in Kepler’s work, the engraver’s woodcuts, and the book artist’s work itself. The first three opening spreads of A Field Guide to “A Field Guide to the Flowers of ‘Astronomia nova‘ ” stake out the environment of the “field guide to a field guide” as well as the zooming-in approach it takes.

An open notebook featuring an illustrated map of a city landscape with buildings, hills, and fields, showcasing historical architecture.

An open book with a map illustration on the left page and a title page on the right, featuring historical text and a blue spiral binding.

First three opening spreads: cityscape of Prague; map of Prague’s location and fragment of Astronomia Nova‘s title page; cropped page of AN showing ornamental flowers alongside cropped blown-up photo of the flower.

The field of vision hops from the cityscape of Prague to a geographical map, then to the cropped title page of Astronomia Nova, then to a detail of the Copernican model bracketed by ornamental flowers, and finally to a cropped blown-up image of one of those flowers from Polunin. The next two spreads that follow those first three underline the field guide’s zooming in across time and space.

A close-up image of a Nigella damascena flower on the left page, with accompanying handwritten text and an ornamental design on the right page of a spiral-bound notebook.

Open notebook featuring a decorative floral design on the left page and vibrant pink flowers printed on the right page, bound with blue spiral rings.

The fourth and fifth spreads: close-ups of the ornamental woodcut flowers and live photos; from the 17th century to the 21st.

Later spreads showing similar zoomed-in images highlight that we have actually hopped from the second century (Ptolemy) to the seventeenth (Tycho Brahe) to the twentieth (Polunin).

An open spiral-bound notebook featuring an illustration of a historical map with the text 'Ptolemai' on one side, and a close-up photo of a flower on the other.

Open notebook page featuring a photograph of a blue Centaurea cyanus flower on the left and decorative handwritten text on the right.

Zoomed-in images of woodcut flowers and live flowers; from Claudius Ptolemy (2d century) to Tycho Brahe (17th century) to Polunin (20th century).

Planetary diagrams, celestial maps, mathematical models, descriptive text, woodcuts and engravings are all at several representational removes from one another and from actual planetary movements over time. Likewise, the woodcutter’s ornaments had their corresponding actual flowers in the gardens and meadows of Prague. The closeness in appearance between the woodcuts and photos argues that Kepler’s artist was drawing and cutting from real-life observation. And yet the photos lie at historical and medial removes that question their correspondence. Like Kepler’s and Brahe’s mathematical and textual models of planetary movements, the artist’s book’s photos are speculative models of the flowers Kepler’s woodcut artist would have observed in Prague at the turn of the 17th century.

The field guide’s movement across media — engraving, printing, woodcut, photography, casebound book, and spiral bound book — is underscored by Ancliffe’s variation and sequencing of spreads. Just as we start to assume an alternating verso/recto rhythm of print/image then image/print, Ancliffe interrupts the flow with a double-page spread of print/print.

A pink poppy flower and unripe seed pods on the left page, next to a sketch of geometric lines and a floral illustration on the right page of a spiral-bound notebook.

Open book with text on pages, showing blue and red spiral binding, viewed from above.

There is also interruption within the interruption: the double-page spread of text is an English translation whereas so far the text has been in Latin. Is the translation’s appearance a reminder that the various media are means of translating the observed?

Other interruptions consist of image/image spreads followed by text/text spreads. The juxtaposition seems to suggest an abstract affinity of shapes, as if the side-by-side flowers hint at an abstract shape of the map spread, and the side-by-side maps hint at an abstract shape of the flower spread.

Open spiral-bound notebook with colorful images of flowers on pages, featuring purple and blue blossoms.

An open spiral-bound notebook displaying a historical map of a city, featuring fortifications and labeled structures. The map is in sepia tones, with a list of locations and names at the bottom.

If that seems an interpretive stretch, consider the following sequence that draws comparisons between flower photo and cityscape detail, between zoomed-in cityscape detail and flower photo, and between zoomed-in cityscape detail and ornamental woodcut detail.

A spiral-bound open book displaying two pages: the left features a close-up photograph of purple flowers, while the right displays an illustration of ancient ruins.

An open spiral-bound notebook featuring a black and white abstract design on the left page and a vibrant image of yellow flowers against a natural background on the right page.

Note the sequence — photo/engraving; engraving/photo; and engraving/woodcut — drawing attention to translation from medium to medium.

If we step back to take in the whole of the artist’s book and note the changing rhythms and punctuations across the spreads, it is hard not to conclude that this artist’s book as field guide is teaching us how to read the environment it has created.

A spiral-bound notebook featuring an artistic illustration of a historical cityscape with hills in the background and fields in the foreground.

An open notebook with a spiral binding, displaying an old illustrated map of a city, featuring buildings and a river.

Opening and closing landscape spreads.

Ancliffe’s next work in her astronomy series extends her aim of teaching us how to read her artist’s books.

4522,. + K (companion volumes, to be read concurrently) (2024)

Two spiral-bound notebooks resting on a wooden surface, one featuring a black and white illustration of a flower and the other with a similar design and text.

4522,. + K (companion volumes, to be read concurrently) (2024)
Abra Ancliffe
Two spiral bound books, one with black coil, one with white coil. H267 x W165 mm. [80] pages; [90] pages, including bibliography. Edition of 30, of which this is #10. Acquired from the artist, 7 February 2026.
Photos: Books On Books Collection. Permission to display images from the artist, otherwise © Abra Ancliffe.

The cryptic title of this dual-volume work signals that we have some detecting to perform in order to read it. In fact, we have to read the companion volumes concurrently to perform our detective work. More teaching us how to read. The volumes’ respective title pages shed some light on the cryptic titles, but only a little. As the first volume’s title page spells out the vertically arranged numerical title 4522,., we learn at least that it has its roots in Ancliffe’s Personal Libraries Library series.

A spiral-bound book page featuring a title and text discussing views and ways of reading ephemeral posters from the Personal Libraries Library from 2011 to 2023, along with a list of numbers.

The title page of the second volume presents the title K inside a shaded irregularly shaped rectangle extracted from a map of Prague (1650) by Matthaus Merian and Martin Zeiller (which we can track through the last entry in K‘s bibliography). The letter K comes from the key to that map, which tells us that it marks the Jewish quarter of the city. It’s a “nice-to-know” detail but not essential for appreciating how to read the second volume.

The title page tells us that K is “a represencing” or “a satellite to a satellite” or “an attendant to be read in concurrence”. We already know about the concurrence from the first volume’s title page. As for “satellite to a satellite”, we can see that K is a satellite to 4522,., which makes 4522,. a satellite to something. But to what? More on that in a minute. As for “a represencing”, the volumes’ covers (above) give us a hint. Notice how the irregular rectangle on K‘s cover re-presents or represences a snippet of the floral poster image shown on the cover of 4522,. That is the recurrent pattern between the two volumes:

An open spiral-bound book displaying images of various minerals and gemstones on the left page, with a blank right page featuring a cut-out revealing part of the left page.

From the poster image shown in 4522,. on the left, a snippet is taken and displayed within the map segment in K on the right.

Just with the covers and two title pages, we have detected two of the “Four viewings through … the ephemeral posters of the Personal Libraries Library (2011-2023)”:

The PLL posters viewed in 3/4 scale (as seen in 4522,.)
Snippets of the posters viewed through the map segment (as seen in K).

The third “viewing through” has a physical and literal form. In 4522,. a hole is punched in the recto pages where the poster images are displayed. Through that hole in one poster, the poster underneath can be viewed. In K, when a recto page turns t0 the left, its poster snippet reappears on the verso but in reverse as if we were looking through the other side of stained glass window.

An open spiral-bound book displaying a page with a black and white image of a tunnel, alongside a hand pointing towards the image.

With both volumes’ recto pages having been turned, we can see the punched hole on the verso of 4522,., a new poster image on its recto page, the mirror image of the three minerals from K‘s preceding recto page, and the new poster image’s snippet in K’s new recto page.

In this third “viewing through”, there is also a clue to what 4522,. is a satellite of. The small hole punched in each leaf of 4522,. seems to meander in its position from leaf to leaf. Actually it tracks a very specific shape: an analemma — a tilted, figure-8-like form. An analemma is the visual representation of the data recorded in ephemerides (tables of star positions at fixed times). In 1627, Kepler published his Rudolphine Tables, which became the new standard for accuracy of this data. If we were to point a camera skyward from a fixed location at the same angle and take multiple photos at the same time of day throughout the year, the sun’s position would form that figure across all the exposures. This is because the earth tilts on its axis as it orbits the sun and moves along an ellipse rather than a circle. So, the placement of punched holes in 4522,. embodies this projection of our orbit around the sun, and if we miss the point, the following near-to-last double-page spreads from 4522,. and K drive it home.

On the left, 4522,. shows the analemma diagram composed of the tiny views of the PLL posters’ images viewable through the holes in the book’s preceding pages. On the far right, K recapitulates the punched hole from 4522,. and wittily drives home the star/flower coordinates by positioning the hole over the center of the flower on the next spread, which doubles the wit with a black-and-white spread save for the strategically placed spot of yellow in the moon-gray center of the flower. The PLL posters’ images “light up” the recto pages of 4522,., and K reflects those images. In other words, K is the lunar satellite to 4522,., which is the terrestrial satellite orbiting the sun (the PLL project). These are the “two orbits” from the title page of 4522,.

Two open spiral-bound sketchbooks on a wooden surface. The left book contains a line of colorful dots arranged in a wavy pattern, while the right book has a rectangular colorful floral sticker placed on its page.

A blank spiral notebook on the left and a decorated spiral notebook featuring a floral design on the right, both displayed against a wooden surface.

The fourth “viewing through” comes into play with the Bibliography at the end of K. Although we had recourse to it to lead us to the map of Prague, a closer look reminds us of the PLL posters and the personal libraries from which they emerge.

A close-up of an open spiral-bound book displaying a list of minerals, their descriptions, and references related to geology, along with bibliographic entries for various texts associated with the Robert Smithson Personal Library.

So of course, the “five ways of reading” signaled on the title page of 4522,. refer to the five personal libraries from which the posters are composed.

In an uncanny case of serendipity, there happens to be a galaxy cluster identified as NGC 4522.

A vibrant image of a galaxy showcasing swirling clouds of stars and cosmic dust against a dark background.

A cosmic image showcasing a spiral galaxy with vibrant blue and pink star formations, surrounded by a dark expanse of space filled with distant stars.

NGC 4522. Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, S. Veilleux, J. Wang, J. Greene⁣.

Astronomia Nova Florilegia or A Strange Shallow Papery Cup or .888 inch (2025)

A hardcover book with a light blue-green cover featuring the title 'Astronomia Nova Florilegia or A Strange Shallow Papery Cup or .888 Inch' printed in black.

Astronomia Nova Florilegia or A Strange Shallow Papery Cup or .888 inch (2025)
Abra Ancliffe
Hardcover, casebound with light blue cloth over boards; violet and white endbands; printed doublures, and foil-stamped fleurons and ink-stamped title on covers and spine. H250 x W160 mm. [322] pages. Edition of 123, of which this is #6. Acquired from the artist, 7 February 2026.
Photos: Books On Books Collection. Permission to display images from the artist, otherwise © Abra Ancliffe.

This extraordinary part-autobiographical, part-biographical, part-bibliographical artist’s book brings Abra Ancliffe’s twin obsessions with astronomy and botany to their highest pitch of unity so far. Ancliffe has built it with an extended epistolary poem, collaged images from Polunin’s Flowers of Europe, and photos of the map of Prague (1650) by Merian and Zeiller, pages from Kepler’s Astronomia Nova (1609), and family memorabilia.

The poem addresses “Dear Dear Woodcutter”, the unknown artist who decorated Kepler’s orbital diagrams with flowers. Ancliffe’s observation of the flowers stands out when you consider that the still standard Collected Works (1938) omitted the flower images. Trying to identify the woodcutter, Ancliffe tracked down the sole reference to his existence and even visited William Donahue, Astronomia Nova‘s translator, in New Mexico to discuss the mystery. More impressively, she identified the woodcut flowers, their scientific names, and various common names, and their local habitats in and around Prague. From their unexplained presence, Ancliffe launches lyric observations on flowers (their colors, parts, and growth), astronomy, ink, paper, type, woodcutting, bookmaking, the idea of the book, and the interconnectedness of it all.

The book opens with Ancliffe’s first letter to “Dear Woodcutter”. It includes a facsimile double-page spread from Astronomia Nova , pages 28-29, showing where she first saw his woodcut flowers. From the start, Ancliffe signals how tightly woven she feels this autobiographical, biographical, bibliographical artist’s book will be. Instead of being numbered 2 and 3, her pages leading to the facsimile spread are numbered 26 and 27. So, at that moment of turning from “page 27” to page 28, the 21st century work strangely becomes part of the 17th century work as the book artist reaches back through time and craft. The letter’s tone blends fondness and fascination with matter-of-fact yet evocative observations about ink, printing methods, and the geology underlying lithography.

An open book showing a partially visible page with text on the right and a blank page on the left. A wooden hand puppet is holding the book. The text discusses memories related to astronomy and printing techniques.

An open historical book page featuring Latin text and a diagram illustrating celestial motions and planetary orbits.

The intensity of her reaction to the woodcutter’s flowers and her absorption in her subject and craft translates into an affinity with the woodcutter that has Ancliffe addressing him in the present. This is poetic license and invention. In the act of addressing him, she is addressing us, her readers/viewers. If we are in any doubt of this, the second letter concludes with at a pitch that eliminates it and leaves us with a clear assertion of what she intends:

I see you.
I see your book of flowers.
I am seeing you.
I am seeing you to others.
I am seeing your book of flowers to others.

An open book displaying a handwritten letter on the left page and printed text on the right page, accompanied by a wooden hand model resting on the edge.

After this introductory section, Ancliffe lays out a recurrent marker of the book’s structure: a facsimile spread followed by a page reproducing a selection of woodcut flowers. There are twelve such markers.

Open ancient book page with handwritten text in Latin, featuring diagrams related to astronomy, including a circular chart and illustrations of celestial movements.

An open book page titled 'MAY, PRAGUE, 1607' displaying illustrations and descriptions of various plants, including Peony, Snowdrop, Purple Crocus, Bindweed, and Wood Anemone. A wooden hand is holding the book.

After each of them, the poem continues, accompanied by brightly colored jigsaw-like cutouts from photos of flowers Ancliffe has matched to the woodcuts. In each section, a jigsaw puzzle piece appears, then another and so on until the section ends with a page of accumulated pieces. Below is the section that follows the marker above. The accumulation (or gathering) page brings together the five preceding pieces.

An open book with a poem displayed on the left page, accompanied by a colorful cut-out design on the right page featuring a flower and leaves.

An open book with blank pages, a wooden hand model holding the left side, and a cut-out illustration of greenery with repeated text 'in the morning' on the right page.

There are 12 gathering pages, and they are all brought together in a closing double-page display.

An open book with blank pages and a circular cutout revealing a collage of colorful flowers and plants, accompanied by a wooden mannequin hand holding the book.

An open book with blank pages and a wooden hand holding it, displaying cut-out shapes of colorful flowers on the right page.

Twelve “gathering pages”.

Open book pages featuring cut-out shapes of flowers and other floral images, with wooden hands holding the book.

The closing accumulation page, a gathering of gathering pages.

There are also four labelled subsections or interludes that appear out of the blue.

The first entitled “The Blue of the Page or How to fix Blue when Blue cannot be Fixed” addresses the color of the paper, ink, and flowers, what Ancliffe can see and cannot see but perceives (color of paper), knows (ink), imagines (flowers), metaphorizes, finds, and names.

Open book page with poetic text discussing the color blue and flowers, featuring artistic typography and interpretations of color.

The second entitled “The Shape of the Book or Ellipses or Ellipsis” draws metaphorical, etymological, and visual links between books and orbits (ellipses) and sewing holes (ellipsis).

An open book with blank pages and a diagram on the right page, showing gathered and nested pages in curved lines, along with text explaining the sewing holes.

The third interlude “Interlude or Worms and Wormholes” develops an extended metaphor of the book’s sewn edge as a sinuous gathering together of nature, type production, planetary charts, and seasonal movements. It also makes another extended metaphor of the book spine as the most interconnected point of organization and confusion, the orbital point closest to the sun, and the shapes of a shallow papery cup, sewn folds, and flowers.

The fourth interlude is “Violets and Pansies or I Think of You or Waysides” plays on Paul Klee’s observation that “A line is a dot that went for a walk”. In Ancliffe’s case the line begins with the dot of the etymology of “violet” that leads both to the Jupiter/Io myth and Ancliffe’s grandmother’s name, that links Io to the origin of the exclamation point, which Ancliffe appends to grandmother Violet and the flowers, that jumps to Derek Jarman’s etymological linking of the common names violet/pansy/heart’s ease to the French “pensée” and thus to “I think of you”, that leads to wild pensée (wild thought), which leads back to the dubious etymology of via leading to violet and thereby “wayside”, which leads to thinking of you (woodcutter) and the flowers found by the waysides.

Open book page with text about the origin of the word 'Violet', featuring wooden mannequin hands holding the book.

What links these subsections is their use of the elements of book production to support Ancliffe’s theme of interconnectedness. At the start of the book, she wonders whether the purpose of the woodcut flowers is that of bearing type, an insertion to prevent the weight of the press from breaking the finer woodcut lines of the orbits. Now, as the final gathering of gatherings approaches, she returns to that notion. Notice below how the layout of text and flowers on the left and the layout of the collage on the right mimic one another, which echoes Ancliffe’s observation

your flowers and Kepler’s orbits correlate.

They hold each other up,

bear the weight for one another so that one,

alone,

is not crushed.

An open book displaying a page with handwritten text addressed to 'Woodcutter' and numerous botanical illustrations scattered across the page. The illustrations are in black ink, set against a simple white background, while wooden mannequin hands are holding the book.

Open book displaying pages with intricate floral cut-outs and colorful floral imagery, alongside wooden hand props.

But for Ancliffe, a mutual bearing up is not the whole story of the interconnectedness she is pursuing in Astronomia Nova Florilegia or A Strange Shallow Papery Cup or .888 inch. For her, interconnectedness (correlation) is historical, metaphorical, etymological, rhetorical, seasonal, geographical, typographical, material, and personal. She sees in the woodcutter’s Prague flowers a florilegium (“you hid a book within a book!”) and a purpose — “I am seeing your book of flowers to others” — for which she chooses the medium of the artist’s book. Because this medium is so frequently recursive or self-reflexive, it is well-suited to a book hidden within a book. Like a planetary system, an artist’s book often has multiple orbits and multiple points of orbit. As noted in the interludes, any element of “the book” and its production can play a role — punctuation, words and wordplay, ink and its color, type and typesetting, images and carving, paper, sewing holes, thread, and so on.

In a final honor to Dear Woodcutter and personalizing capstone, Ancliffe adds two appendixes: “the first, Appendix or A Book within a Book or .918 inch”, and the second, “K or a Represencing or Studying an Engraving of Prague in Topographia Bohemiae, Moraviae et Silesiae, 1650″.

An open book page with the title 'APPENDIX OR A BOOK WITHIN A BOOK OR .918 INCH' printed in an elegant font, accompanied by wooden articulated hands holding the book.

An open book with wooden mannequin hands holding the pages, displaying the title 'K or A Representing or Studying an Engraving of Prague in Topographia Bohemiae, Moravia et Silesiae, 1650' on the right page.

In the first appendix, Ancliffe introduces the map of Prague, familiar from the two earlier artist’s books and then points us to K, the Jewish quarter, by filling it with a thumbnail flower. This is her book within a book: 37 flowers laid within the Jewish quarter of Prague 1650. Their color re-presences the absence surrounding the K in the map.

In the second appendix, Ancliffe begins with the materiality of type and setting it — how it’s made, how it feels, what it looks like — in particular for the letter K and her maternal grandmother’s married last name set in type. Again, it is an element of the book that provides the metaphor that pulls “what connects” into the orbit of Ancliffe’s artist’s book. Absence evokes presence; presence evokes absence. The absence around the carved upside down and reversed metallic strokes defines K as much as does the ink transferred from them. Likewise the presence of her grandfather Victor’s and grandmother Ruth’s metal and messy tools evokes their absence, and it is their impression on the artist that defines their presence in her,

A red toolbox with the name 'Ruth' and other markings, placed open on a book's pages with wooden hands visibly holding the book.

A close-up view of wooden-handled wood chisels arranged on a page of an open book, with hands partially visible holding the book. The chisels have visible markings and varying shapes.

which brings us to the autobiographical closing statement framed by Dear Woodcutter’s flowers.

An open book with blank pages on the left and a decorative poem on the right, framed by a border, with wooden mannequin hands on both sides.

A collection of five wood chisels displayed on an open book page, with wooden handles and metal blades. The book's background is dark, enhancing the visibility of the tools.

An open red toolbox filled with paint tubes on a page of a book, held by wooden hands.

Abra Ancliffe has created a body of works that, as Brian Davis puts it, “not only exploit the material and expressive possibilities of the book as object, they function as physical sites for compiling and organizing heterogeneous collections of textual artifacts for narrative and other expressive purposes”. As aesthetic objects, they demand more than a glance in an exhibition or flick-through at a book fair. They richly repay the greater attention.

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

Cotton Curtain (2018)

VOC (2022)

Further Reading

The Magic Magic Book (1994)

Further Reading

4 p. and 33mm (2013)

Semiotics of the Studio (2015)

Further Reading

Serpents (2025)

Accelerated Entropy (2024)

In the Desert (2024)

Further Reading and Viewing

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

Further Reading

Gutter Words (2019)

Codex Aeroscriptus Ehrenbergensis (1990)

Further Reading

Locus: Identified by the History (2016)

Ten Thousand Things, No. 51 (2012)

Ten Thousand Things, No. 64 (2012)

Type Cities (2018)

Further Reading

Works of homage to Jorge Luis Borges

Works of homage to Italo Calvino

A Field Guide to “A Field Guide to the Flowers of ‘Astronomia nova‘” (2018)

4522,. + K (companion volumes, to be read concurrently) (2024)

Astronomia Nova Florilegia or A Strange Shallow Papery Cup or .888 inch (2025)

Further Reading