Breaking Waves (2023)
Emmy van Eijk
Sculptural book. 140 x 140 x 40 mm (closed). Unique work. Acquired from Papertrail Handmade Books, 22 January 2024.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.
Breaking Waves spills over at least three categories of bookmaking: the bound blank book, designer bookbinding and sculpture. It would take a bold owner, however, to use the work in its first category. Fortunately that invitation quickly yields to another.
Continue reading
Water, Calling (2021)
Camden Richards & Deborah Sibony
Felt-covered, modified dragon-scale bound artists’ book, accompanied by audio equipment in custom box. Box: 262 x 262 x D170 mm. Book: H155 x W775 mm (closed). 110 pages. Edition of 15, of which this is #1. Acquired from the artists, 5 October 2022. Photos: Books On Books Collection. Displayed with artists’ permission.
Colophon
“Water, Calling is a collaborative artist book which explores the cyclical and omnipresent relationship of water and the self, inviting the reader to reflect upon water as more than a commodity, but rather as life giving: spirit, flesh and soul. Because water is evidence of all who came before us, it is a foretelling of all who will be; through it we are in conversation with our ancestors, our descendants, and with earth herself. Water, Calling traces these existential threads through waterscapes of text, image and sound, extending an invitation to enter more fully into a dialogue composed of acts requiring active listening, contemplative reading and deep seeing with the hope of inspiring sacred reciprocity.”
Ambulo Ergo Sum: Nature As Experience in Artists’ Books (2015)
Anne Moeglin-Delcroix and Richard Sadleir, trans.
Case bound, printed paper over board, with green endbands and matching doublures. H225 x W155 mm. 96 pages. Acquired from Book Depository, 21 August 2019.
Photo: Books On Books Collection.
Lettered Typefaces and Alphabets by Clotilde Olyff (2000)
Jan Middendorp and Clotilde Olyff
Spiral-bound softcover of 78 pages and measuring H235 x W215 mm with a 28-page booklet measuring H165 x W115 mm bound in. Acquired from Klondyke Books, Almere, NL, 28 November 2023.
Photos: Books On Books Collection
This is the rare first edition as published by the late Jan Middendorp through his Druk Editions. It bears all the hallmarks of his eye for design — the black coated wired binding, the heavy embossed card cover, the use of color to underscore the text’s theme, the embedded booklet — all nevertheless centering and providing a platform for the art and design of Clotilde Olyff.
Continue reading
Handscapes (2016)
Margaret (Molly) Coy & Claire Bolton
Casebound, hand sewn and bound with doublures and two ribbon bookmarks. H260 x W310 x D30. 80 folios. Edition of 12, of which this is #9. Acquired from the artists, 19 October 2023.
Photos: Books On Books Collection. Displayed with artists’ permission.
Co-founder of The Alembic Press with David Bolton, Claire Bolton is an independent historian of printing and type as well as an aficionado of handmade paper. She recently donated works in shifu (a spun and woven paper textile) to the Bodleian. Although she disclaims classification as a book artist, her works in the Books On Books Collection — especially her collaboration with Molly Coy called Handscapes (2016) — argue with her persuasively.
A Little Black Book (1995)
Claire Bolton
Miniature, exposed-spine, stab-bound with red cotton thread to hard boards. H73 x W60 mm. 64 pages. Edition of 100, of which this is #4. Acquired from Oak Knoll Books, 11 October 2023.
Photos: Books On Books Collection. Displayed with artist’s permission.
Richard J. Hoffman (1912-1989) was a fine press printer and taught print and design at California State University, Los Angeles. His interests in typography, miniature books and the alphabet are represented by two works in the Books On Books Collection: “Don’t Nobody Care about Zeds” (1987) and Otto Ege’s The Story of the Alphabet (1988).
Both books scratch the collection’s “alphabet itch”. The first provides the added satisfaction of complementing the children’s books that champion the alphabet’s last letter: Jon Agee’s Z Goes Home (2006), Alethea Kontis & Bob Kolar’s AlphaOops: The Day Z Went First (2012), Sean Lamb & Mike Perry’s Z Goes First (2018) and Lou Kuenzler & Julia Woolf’s Not Yet Zebra! . The second adds an alphabet history to the miniature abecedaries as well as a more than usually intricate design.
“Don’t Nobody Care about Zeds”
A Modest Book About an Oft-overlooked Character of the Alphabet Prepared for the Pleasure of Zamoranans* (1987)
Richard J. Hoffman
Hardcover, casebound. Cloth and paper cover with colored endbands and printed doublures. H160 x W120 mm. 176 pages. Edition of 200. Acquired from Scott Emerson Books, 5 September 2023.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.
Winter (2019)
Ianna Andréadis
Softbound with a waxed thread loop. H210 x W150 mm. 48 pages. Acquired from Happy Babies, 30 July 2023.
Photos: Books On Books Collection. Displayed with artist’s permission.
The language of the book is one we learn well before we learn to read. It has many rules and parts. One part is the single page, and one of its rules is to turn it. Another of its rules is that the page behind may affect the page before. Another part of book language is the double-page spread. One of its rules is that facing pages may affect one another and that the space between them might disappear. As with any native language, we absorb its rules and parts and use them without thinking about them. Ianna Andréadis’ Winter revels in the language of the book and invites us to page through a winter wood and confusing thicket to begin learning again what we absorbed so long ago.
Like our earliest children’s books, Winter‘s only word is its title. Inviting touch, its front cover reproduces the main image of the title page but with debossing, and the book paper that follows is heavy and translucent.
With a turn of the title page, the bird is behind us, and the branches and trunks obscured by the title page’s “winter fog” loom large in black with the woods beyond appearing through the fog continued with the translucent paper.
As we move further into the woods, we look down on a bush or small tree weighted with snow whose trunk and branches sink into the snow beneath. Having passed it, we find a stand of four saplings and the one furthest from us also sunk in snow.
But now look up. The tangle of black branches and the winter fog barely hide the broken limbs of the tree just behind.
Several more pages of thicket and fog come before we reach the center of the book. There the imposition imposes its mechanics. The two facing pages both bear black ink, and the viewer may wonder whether these are birchtree trunks or black trunks with footsteps and branches or clumps of tree fall in the snow-covered ground between them.
Whatever that view is, the shift in inking according to the imposition envelops us in a winter fog on the following double-page spread.
Andréadis and her imposition, however, will lead us out of the fog and thicket, and the “lightening sky” over the next several pages encourages us to look up and find another bird perched above.
After several more pages and perhaps too tired to keep looking up, our eyes turn back to the tree trunks and branches sunk in snow, until at the end, we can finally look back up, turn around and see the clear fork of a trunk behind which the wood has disappeared again in winter fog.
And if at the end, prompted by the feel of the back cover and perhaps childhood memories of first books to press the covers flat, we’ll find we have come full circle. The next-to-last page’s forking tree trunk now appears debossed on the back cover matched to its other half and the bird on the front cover. Let’s read it again!
Andréadis’ Winter is now scarce, but through the link behind the title, you might be able to locate an institution with it near you. To enjoy more of the artist’s work, several of her illustrations of others’ books are available in libraries and the used-book market. One such book is Le papillon et la lumière by Patrick Chamoiseau, which deserves publication in translation not only for its charming story but for greater access to Andréadis’ artwork.
For another means of re-experiencing the first encounter with the language of the book, try Bruno Munari’s I Prelibri, first published in 1980 and still available in a second edition from Corraini.
Andréadis, Ianna. 2019. Winter. Tokyo: One Stroke.
Beckett, Sandra L. 2013. Crossover Picturebooks: A Genre for All Ages. London: Routledge.
Chamoiseau, Patrick. 201). Le papillon et la lumière. Ill. Ianna Andréadis. Paris: P. Rey.
Munari, Bruno. 2015. I prelibri = prebooks = vorbücher = prelivres. Second ed. Milan: Corraini.
Out of Breath (2019)
Jacobus Oudyn
Hardboard slipcase covered in textured paper, housing stab-bound book with waxed paper cover, attached page lifter. Slipcase: Box: H345 x W232 x D50 mm. Book: H300 x W202 mm. 34 pages. Unique. Also acquired, Artist’s Proof: H205 x W165 mm. Both from the artist, 1 June 2023.
Photos: Books On Books Collection. Displayed with permission of the artist.
In turning the thirty-four pages of this artist’s book, your fingers, eyes and ears pick up a rhythm: a labored inward and crackling outward breath, a catching and losing grasp of air, an alternating wet, dry, wet wheezing. The effects come from the material (sounds and touch that the slippery, thin and delicate rice paper gives against the wrinkled carbon paper that continues to shed its carbon), from the technique of alternating positive and negative prints, and from the ticklish action of picking up the pages with the card lifter. It takes a long time to turn these pages.
The artist’s note accompanying the work describes it as being “for all our friends and relations who have been victims of Mesothelioma and other ‘industrial’ lung disorders like Black Lung”. Indeed, the double-page spreads’ bilateral symmetry and their blackness, grayness and whiteness recall chest X-rays. The process by which Oudyn achieves this is worth remarking.
In correspondence with Books On Books, the artist notes that the process emerged from much chance and circumstance. It began with rubbings made against charred trees after a bush fire near Tewantin in 2018. Those results prompted childhood memories of the kind of carbon paper he knew as a child. Wanting to explore its use, he found that it was no longer stocked by stationers in the region, no doubt because computers, printers and photocopiers had made it superfluous. An online search yielded some boxes of very fine thin A4 sheets of bluish black and purer black carbon paper from China. Around the same time, he had been experimenting with momigami using various papers, mainly rice paper and mulberry but also cartridge and craft paper. While making books with the carbon paper and momigami results, he had reason to iron some sheets flatter, which yielded a variety of carbon prints on the rice paper. Different temperatures, durations and pressures as well as other papers yielded a range of prints on paper but also beautiful positives on the fine carbon paper itself. Experimenting with different orders in the steps, rewrinkling before or after ironing, and further grading and sorting the papers, Oudyn gained some control over the finished result. Then came the ideas that led to Out of Breath and the following works.
Opening Dark Windows (2020)
Jacobus Oudyn
Slipcase. Japanese stab binding, endpapers and a small card page lifter attached by thread. H220 x W300 mm. 20 folios. Unique. Acquired from the artist, 1 June 2023.
Photos: Books On Books Collection. Displayed with permission of the artist.
Opening Dark Windows has a variety of tactile sensations similar to those in Out of Breath. Both have covers generating an unusual sensation — a waxen flexible texture in Out of Breath, a dry rough stiff texture in Opening Dark Windows. Both alternate different weights of papers. Of the 20 folios in Opening Dark Windows, 10 are carbon tissue paper, 10 are cotton Ingres (108 gsm), and all show the experimentation described above. This work, however, also displays Oudyn’s characteristic use of multiple media and collage — black acrylic paint, white wax crayon, pva glue, graphite, inks and found text. Oudyn also adds further tactility with torn and cut flaps with their pull tabs. All of this is in service to an idea: an exploration of fading memory and the retrieval of material long thought forgotten, both of which are made interactive by the flaps (the physical “dark windows”) in the carbon tissue that reveal the collaged text, signs, fractions and drawings sometimes glued to or made on the underside of the tissue, sometimes on the underlying sheet of Ingres.
Texture and weight alternating from one layer to the next, textures juxtaposed as flaps peel away, truncated text expanding and changing as the page turns — this is mindscape as surreal scrapbook.
Flattening the Curve (2021)
Jacobus Oudyn
Slipcase. Japanese stab binding.H210 x W300 mm. 24 folios. Unique. Acquired from the artist, 1 June 2023.
Photos: Books On Books Collection. Displayed with permission of the artist.
Like Out of Breath and Opening Dark Windows, Flattening the Curve (2021) uses the “swag” of black papers Oudyn had created. Although it is also a work of multiple media — the papers themselves, graphite and inks — the focus of Flattening the Curve rests more on a sort of narrative or documentary line showing how language changed as the Covid 19 pandemic progressed. A specific Covid language evolved as daily progress reports from political leaders and medical experts and interviews in the media became the focus of everyday life for two years. As the words on the page change reflecting their use for the purpose of authority and confidence, the seemingly fixed geographical boundaries in red break and shift. Even the height and width of the leaves shift.
M.L.A. (2021)
Jacobus Oudyn
Softcover pamphlet-stitched, textured flyleaves. 18 sheets Chinese carbon paper, 18 sheets Chinese rice paper. Found text. H125 x W110 mm. 36 pages. Unique. Acquired from the artist, 1 June 2023.
Photos: Books On Books Collection. Displayed with permission of the artist.
Obviously from the works above, Oudyn deploys his set of tools, techniques and material imaginatively, but for this satiric portrait of a flip-flopping Member of the Legislative Assembly in Australia, the subject himself seems to have selected unwittingly the overprinting from carbon paper onto rice paper. Every turn presents a reversal.
Even beneath the reversals, his previous faces to the world accumulate and peek out slightly askew from “today’s” view until at the end you can hardly tell what view would be next. To which the M.L.A would reply, does reply, “Yes, why not?”
Points of Reference (2022)
Jacobus Oudyn
Box covered in illustrated paper. Three small books, each with five double-sided panels. Box: 115 x115 mm. Each book, closed: 103 x 103 mm; open: H260 x W 210 mm. 10 panels each book. Unique. Acquired from the artist, 1 June 2023.
Photos: Books On Books Collection. Displayed with artist’s permission.
Points of Reference recalls Oudyn’s earlier ‘16 Century Map‘ (2012) where the artist juxtaposed an old European map (showing Mesopotamia and the Euphrates, the Northern hemisphere’s cradle of civilization) with an Australian map of the Kakadu National Park, which covers ancient locations that evoke the concept of Tjukurpa, by which Australia’s Anangu refer to the creation period. The later work raises the earlier one’s implicit critique of European colonialism — “if we map it, we own it” — to a more all-embracing level.
A paper-covered box holds three small identically shaped, double-sided folding panel books. Each has two square panels and three triangular panels. When fully opened, each book takes the shape of a directional arrow.
One book has an image from Tycho Brahe’s Stella Nova 1572 on one side and, on the other side, an imaginary space map of commercial and abandoned space junk around the Southern Cross.
The second book has a planimetric map on one side and, on the other, a map of the same area entirely painted over predominantly in a muted orange and yellow, with some brown and gray, and black-ink silhouettes of birds in flight and native Australian markings in white and black.
Similar to the second, the third book has a partially obscured cadastral map with plots of property on one side and, on the other side, a map of the same area entirely painted over in gray, with some rose accents and, again, black-ink silhouettes of birds in flight and native Australian markings in white and black.
The triangular panels in the second and third books are numbered 1 to 3 on both sides, signifying that the same areas are mapped on both sides. Also, both of these books have faint collagraphed snippets of found text on the overpainted sides. Uniquely, the third book has gameboard-like text on both sides. On one side, the text reads,”ONE WAY”, “WHERE ARE YOU?” and “WE WERE HERE”; on the other, it reads “ONE-WAY”, “ARE YOU HERE?”, “WE WERE HERE”, “ONE WAY – GO BACK” and “- GO BACK”.
Along with their punning on the work’s title, the pointer-shaped open books’ re-arrangeability and their gameboard text suggest a playful invitation to consider how we imagine, mythologize, redefine and map what seems to us to be empty space challenging our place in it.
Facing Again (2023)
Jacobus Oudyn
Card cover, found-text title pasted on front cover. Pamphlet stitched, 10 portraits made of found text, collage and mixed media. H102 x W147 mm. Unique. Acquired from the artist, 1 June 2023.
Photos: Books On Books Collection. Displayed with permission of the artist.
Something of a cross between the satire of R. Crumb and Spitting Image and the rawness of Lucien Freud and Francis Bacon, each of these ten portraits fills its half of an 80 gsm gray pastel paper folio. So, naturally, they loom larger than life in the near-miniature trim size. While the portrait in M.L.A. has a real-life subject of its satire, these faces in Facing Again are fictional, more general and reflective of “mental” issues afflicting 21st century first world societies. Common to most of the portraits, fractions appear as content in the mouths or in the minds of the portrayed — or almost as if they are brushstrokes conveying a characteristic. They imply a sense of psychological, social and political fractionation and division that have featured increasingly in the first three decades of the 21st century.
In the first portrait, above, a set of fractions seems to issue from the character’s forehead like a thought bubble, but this bubble is shard-shaped and could just as well be impaling the character’s forehead with fractions. In either case, they have to do with what “she knew” — the “what she knows” that inflames her face and contorts her nose and mouth into a snarl.
Although not a fraction, the eighth portrait’s reference below to the 9/11 event of 2001 and the text — “really got to be diligent” — evoke an identifiable instance of fractionation and division. This character is more physically distorted than the first. Its jaw dislocated, its teeth inverted, its eyes askew, the face looks submerged in a brown pool of 9/11 aftermath. Divisions on a global scale begat violence, which reinforced fear and division, which begat more violence and fear. If it were only that simple.
These portraits are images of confusion and uncertainty until the last, who seems able to weep only with one eye for “something else”.
“Jacobus Oudyn (I)“. 17 January 2021. Books On Books Collection.
A Bookbinder’s ABC (2003)
Christopher Hicks, Leaning Chimney Press Editions
Soft cover (buff card, illustrated paper jacket glued to spine, sewn block). H200 x W150 mm. 34 pages. Edition of 75. Acquired from Barter Books, 18 October 2023.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.
Although Glaister’s Encyclopedia of the Book is the canonical dictionary for book terminology, A Bookbinder’s ABC provides 26 humorous visual reminders.
An Arabian stallion in a decorative onsie for recalling the description of fleurons and other devices derived from Islamic patterns.
What else would a binder call a children’s orchestra?
A fox flummoxed by a maze is certainly “foxed”. This one is also likely puzzled by the holes carried over from “Wormholes” on the previous page. Barking dogs springing from a book cover might be a helpful mnemonic for the name of the wide soft edges or flaps for Bible covers devised by the 19th century London bookseller Yapp.
The work’s own binding has simple but interesting features. The front and back covers in buff card are glued to the first and last sewn gatherings, respectively, and the sewn gatherings are glued in between and sewn together. The blue paper jacket’s spine is glued to the spines of the gatherings and its fore edges fold over the fore edges of the buff card. Curious but not as self referential as the features of two nearby birds of a feather from Andrew Morrison’s Two Wood Press.
Detail of uncut top edges and gluing of gatherings and spine.
From Morrison’s Provenance (2018), showing an actual wire-stitched gathering and then an illustration of the mechanism; from Morrison’s Two Wood Press A-Z (2003), showing showing an embossed page illustrating E for Embossing. Photos: Books On Books Collection.
But what would a self-referential binding for A Bookbinder’s ABC look like — especially one that might carry on the punnery of the contents? Presumably because they are closer to the words, entries in letterpress abecedaries such as Morrison’s Two Wood Press A-Z (2003) and Kevin M. Steele’s The Movable Book of Letterforms (2009) have an easier time of the visually self-referential.
From Steele’s A Movable Book of Letterforms, showing the anatomical term for the red areas of the L & R (a leg lift?); from Morrison’s Two Wood Press A-Z, showing x’s definition of its height.
Closer still to the words are the typographical punsters such as Marie Dern and William Caslon’s Typographic ABC (1991), Nicolas McDowall and A Bodoni Charade (1995) or Sharon Werner & Sharon Forss and Alphabeasties and Other Amazing Types (2009).
From Dern’s William Caslon’s Typographic ABC, McDowall’s A Bodoni Charade and Werner & Forss’ Alphabeasties and Other Amazing Types.
Perhaps Pat Sweet’s miniature The Book Book (2010) comes closest on self-referentiality in a work about binding. For the puns, we will have to wait for another bookbinder to take a stab at it.
From Sweet’s The History of Bo Press (2021).
“Abecedaries I (in progress)“. Books On Books Collection.
“Alphabets Alive!“. 19 July 2023. Books On Books.
“David Clifford“. 15 September 2021. Books On Books Collection.
“Marie Dern“. 8 March 2023. Books On Books Collection.
“Nicolas McDowall“. 10 December 2022. Books On Books Collection.
“Andrew Morrison“. 15 September 2021. Books On Books Collection.
“Kevin M. Steele“. 18 July 2023. Books On Books Collection.
“Pat Sweet“. 18 January 2023. Books On Books Collection.
“Sharon Werner & Sharon Forss“. 20 December 2022. Books On Books Collection.
Frost, Gary. 1996. Teaching set of historical bookbindings. Utopia, Tex: Gary Frost, Dry Frio Bindery.
Hanmer, Karen. 2013. Biblio Tech. Glenview, IL: Karen Hanmer Book Arts.
Books On Books 