Books On Books Collection – Lu Jingren, Amanda Degener, and Peng Wu

Handmade Path (2021)

Handmade Path (2021)
Lu Jingren, Amanda Degener, and Peng Wu
Black-inked card wrapper with magnetic closure. Handbound, handsewn, handmade paper cover book. H285 x W220 x D40 mm. 268pages. Edition of 350, of which this is #152. Acquired from Amanda Degener, 5 December 2022.
Photos: Books On Books.

Handmade Path presents 57 artists of paper and book who responded to 6 questions circulated by the editors. The editors asked the artists to provide handwritten replies to the questions as well as images of both their work and of their hands.

How did you begin your practice?
Why do you still make paper / books?
What is the difference for you reading on digital device or in a book?
In what way do you understand the 5 senses of paper / book: vision, touch, hearing, smelling, tasting?
Share with us some moments; eitherbreakthroughs or break downs in your work?
What is your next dream project?

Not all of the respondents replied in handwriting, but many sent their replies on material that reflected their work. The late Richard Flavin’s contribution arrived on gampi paper. Becky Beamer inked her reply on a gray handmade sheet. Radha Pandey’s came on indigo tinted handmade paper.

An open book featuring two pages: the left page displays an artistic collage made from handmade paper with textured elements, while the right page contains handwritten notes and a quote attributed to Richard Flavin about his experience with traditional Japanese woodblock printmaking and the importance of paper quality.

Richard Flavin

Becky Beamer

Radha Pandey

Jack Mader photographed these contributions in ways that render them visually haptic. It places that fourth question — “In what way do you understand the 5 senses of paper / book: vision, touch, hearing, smelling, tasting?” — at the core of the book. You’d swear you can feel the velvet texture of Mary Heebner’s 11 pages. Or the roughness of Helmut Becker’s colored handmade sheets or of Su Jin Kim’s white sculptural responses. The request for images of the artists’ hands naturally added to this sensory effect. There’s the glutinous wetness of pulp between the fingers of Jean Michel Letellier and Helen Hiebert and the imagined smell of the ink on George Roberts’ hands.

An open book page featuring artistic content, including text and illustrations. The left side presents a colorful illustration of a red and orange figure with text, while the right side includes handwritten notes and additional text in multiple languages. The page also features images of prayer flags and a collage by Mary Heebner, along with a brief bio.

An open book displaying handwritten notes on the left and right pages, with a wooden hand sculpture holding the left page. The text discusses the differences between writing on various media and the experience of reading a physical book versus a digital device.

Mary Heebner

An open book displaying handwritten notes on textured paper, highlighted with colorful pages. The left page contains notes related to nature and communication, while the right page features reflections on trees and their interactions.

Helmut Becker

A page from an art book featuring an image of a large textured piece resembling traditional clothing made of paper, alongside a portrait of a woman gazing upwards. Text about the artist Kim Su Jin and her work is included.

Open book spread featuring a textured page with a brownish pattern on the left and a circular page with printed text in black and white on the right, surrounded by wood.

Kim Su Jin

Hands mixing and kneading soft, fibrous material on a flat surface.

Two hands submerged in a box of white, fluffy substance, possibly foam or soft material, with one hand actively manipulating it.

Left: Jean Michel Letellier’s hands. Right: Helen Hiebert’s hands.

Close-up of two hands with visible dirt and wear, one wearing a gold ring.

George Roberts’ hands.

Throughout the book are truncated pages that act almost like bookmarks. Only midway through do we learn that they bear scanned images of handmade paper from Amanda Degener and Cave Paper. Degener provides an index describing the handmade papers, which oddly appears at page 142. Not only does it function as an index, it delivers information expected in a colophon. It even describes the paper used for the book’s cover, endpapers, and the clamshell tray. But nevermind, it’s all part of diving into the artists’ process and practice.

Page displaying various handmade paper descriptions including details on materials, processes, and page references.

Quite appropriately this midway index appears just after the entry for Nakagaki Nabuo, whose response to the opening question “How did you begin your practice?” comes in the form of an autobiographical handmade artist’s book. In the pages presenting his book, we see the artist, his hands at work on the book, and Mader’s precise photography of the book and its airmail envelope, followed by the bookmark-like stub with its image of Cave Paper’s Layered Indigo Day paper.

An open book with a unique design, featuring a tree illustration and colorful splashes on one page, alongside a portrait of artist Nakagaki Nobuo. The page includes text about his journey in book design and a quote discussing the importance of sensory experiences in books.

Nakagaki Nabuo and his hands at work.

An open book displaying colorful sketches and handwritten notes that reflect personal thoughts related to the passage of time and the significance of books. The sketches include trees, mountains, and abstract shapes, with accompanying text indicating different ages.

Nakagaki’s My Life Journey

An open book displaying a watercolor illustration of a tree on the left page, accompanied by handwritten text titled 'My Life Journey' and a letter addressed with postage stamps on the right page, along with descriptions of various papers.

Verso: Nakagaki’s answer to question 6: “What is your next dream project?” Recto: “Handmade Paper Descriptions” index/colophon.

In their preface, the editors write:

Although reading is a private activity we are not alone; we are cooperating with the book, bringing it into ourselves. Reading is not only about transplanting ourselves to the beyond, but we modify ourselves to see the world differently. Our vision or purpose for Handmade Path is for you to participate in this collaboration.

Just holding Handmade Path and constantly feeling its Alphabet Dao cover, navigating its foldouts alternating Chinese with English according to the contributor, being tempted to lift a contributor’s sheet of paper from the photos, hearing the snap and creak of sewn pages turning, and absorbing the contributors’ testaments, we cannot help but be drawn into participating with the book. In doing so, we learn that, as Paulette Myers-Rich puts it, “Paper is not a substrate — it is story” (p. 197).

Books On Books Collection – Helen M. Brunner

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Primer: Ritual Elements (Book One) (1982)

An artistic cover of a book titled 'Primer: Ritual Elements' by Helen M. Barger, featuring ancient script designs and abstract shapes.

Primer: Ritual Elements (Book One) (1982)
Helen M. Brunner
Softcover, pamphlet-stitched. H239 x W155 mm. 22 pages. Binding adapted from a design by Barbara Press, developed under the instruction of Hedi Kyle. Edition of 300. Acquired from JP Antiquarian Books, 14 February 2024.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.

Primer is an unusually made booklet. Stitched with black cotton thread over three signatures, its two outer signatures are of white wove Curtis rag paper, the inner signature is of parchment or a translucent paper, and four 5-panel thumbnail accordions in translucent paper are glued to the beginning of the last outer signature. More unusual is that the booklet’s edges appear burnt into unevenness, yet there is no odor of ash. The edges of the sewing holes also appear burnt, one page has a scorch mark in its center, and even the edges of the collaged items appear to have been burnt before being photographed. The breadth of collaged items — from cave markings to cuneiform to Rosetta Stone to film strips or slides — is not unusual given the title; you would expect a primer on ritual elements to address a prehistoric to historic range of petroglyphs, pictographs, symbols, letters, photographs, etc. But most unusual — and perhaps the point of the work — is that the legible text undermines the aim suggested by the title. The script on the back cover makes the subversion plainest.

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Books On Books Collection – Laure Catugier

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A Never-Ending Stone (2025)

A wrapped book titled 'A Never-Ending Stone' by Laure Catognet, published in 2025, displayed on a black background.

A Never-Ending Stone (2025)
Laure Catugier
Open spine, dos-à-dos with grey bookbinding board. 210 x H260 x 210 mm. 104 pages. Edition of 250. Acquired from einBuch.haus, 3 December 2025.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.

A Never-Ending Stone is Laure Catugier’s first monographic catalog. Her skill with collage, alignment, shadows, materials, and the book format transform it into an artist’s book very much driven by her fascination with architecture and especially the architectural theories and practice of Oskar and Zofia Hansen. The Hansens eclectically embraced “human-scale” architecture, “environment art”, and what they called the “open form” structure, using space and time as its key elements. The Hansens also proposed that the architect should not be the all-knowing expert but should partner with clients as co-authors of their space, respecting how their interior and outside activities and relations with one another defined them and their space. Though somewhat a forerunner to User-Centered Design, Open Form radically aimed at structures that would evolve with interaction with the user and, as they unfolded, also align with nature.

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Books On Books Collection – Anne-Catherine Fallen

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The Lively Dance (1983)

A vertical view of a grey booklet titled 'THE LIVELY DANCE' secured with a thin bamboo stick.

The Lively Dance (1983)
Anne-Catherine Fallen
Handbound book, sewn; endflaps secured at fore edge with bamboo twig to create wedge-shaped book. Laid flat, H223 x W157 mm; wedge fore edge, W75 mm. [18] pages. Edition of 200. Acquired from Stand 132, Zurich. 18 January 2026.
Photos: Books On Books Collection. Displayed with the artists permission.

The Lively Dance is an elaborate and simple artist’s book. It consists of an eleven-line poem arranged across ten of eighteen pages displaying a stand of bamboo. Four pleated sheets of translucent paper, also displaying the stand of bamboo, overlap and bind those ten pages at the fore edge. Here is the book’s opening double-page spread with the translucent overlay first in place and then pulled back to reveal the poem’s invitation: “Come join the solemn dance”.

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Books On Books Collection – Kara Walker

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Freedom: A fable: A curious interpretation of the wit of a negress in troubled times: with illustrations (1997)

Solid maroon hardcover book lying flat on a wooden surface.

A close-up view of the spine of a thick, red-covered book with embossed lettering.

An open book page featuring the title 'Freedom' by Kara Elizabeth Walker, with the subtitle 'A Curious Interpretation of the Wit of a Negress in Troubled Times' and presented by The Peter Norton Family. The design includes elegant typography with borders.

Freedom: A fable: A curious interpretation of the wit of a negress in troubled times: with illustrations (1997)
Kara Walker
Casebound, leather over boards, with plain doublures. H238 x W210 x D20 mm. [28] pages. Edition of 4000, published by the Peter Norton Christmas Project. Acquired from Los Angeles Modern Auction, 3 September 2025.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.

The book as medium has played a minor adjunct role in Kara Walker’s art. Freedom: A fable … (1997) is one of the few exceptions. Its paper engineering lifts Walker’s signature silhouettes off the page physically, and the pop-up’s association with children’s books fits well with Walker’s uneasy blend of humor, horror, the individual and the stereotype. It is also the first of her three-dimensional works, which emerged more frequently around 2007-09 and rose to the monuments of Fons Americanus (2019) and Unmanned Drone (2025).

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Books On Books – Marlene MacCallum (III)

2025/12/072026/02/03Books On BooksLeave a comment

Marlene MacCallum often applies unusual folds in her works. They appear in sleep walk (2024) and The Shadow Quartet (2018-25). With the two works below, however, — as with Chicago Octet (2014) — the fold becomes central to the whole work. Any other structural presentation would not deliver the precise fusion of image, text, and material to deliver the metaphor embodied by the work.

Send (2020)

Send (2020)
Marlene MacCallum and Shani Mootoo
A double-sided archival digital pigment print on paper, folded and pamphlet bound in an envelope enclosure. Images, design, printing and binding by Marlene MacCallum, poem by Shani Mootoo. Dimension: 10 × 25.4 cm (closed) and 47.5 × 10 cm (expanded). #11. Acquired from Marlene MacCallum, 26 October 2022.
Photo of the work: Books On Books Collection.

Author’s statement: Send is a correspondence piece; a conversation between my images and structural concept and Shani Mootoo’s poem “Send All Possible Answers – We Have Questions To Match”. Shani Mootoo, writer and artist, gave me the gift of this poem to use in a piece as I saw fit, and together we send this letter to the world.

Opening envelope; inside of envelope.

First opening and unfolding.

Fully open view of poem.

Fully open view of image.

Rise (2020)

Rise (2020)
Marlene MacCallum and Deborah Root
Slipcase enclosure with passe-partout showing title. Double-sided folio in miura fold between two boards. Printed paper over boards. Slipcase H135 x W97 mm. Double-sided folio H133 x W93 mm (closed), W483 × H633 mm (open). Acquired from Marlene MacCallum, 26 October 2022.
Photos of the work: Books On Books Collection.

Artists’ statement: Rise is a collaborative artwork by Marlene MacCallum and Deborah Root. This piece grew out of discussions about our shared fascination with the implications and meanings of the fold. The images and poem evolved through a call and response process, sharing them back and forth. The miura fold structure was selected early on for its structural strength and the way it allowed us to take a seemingly small object that expanded quite surprisingly to reveal a large field of imagery and poetry.

The fold is named for its inventor, Japanese astrophysicist Kōryō Miura.

Books On Books Collection – Lucas Blalock

2025/10/272025/12/24Books On Books1 Comment

Making Memeries (2016)

Making Memeries (2016)
Lucas Blalock
Board book consisting of nine 3mm thick card leaves with 8 double-page large colour photos, all of which interact with a down-loadable app. H330 x W210 x D28 mm. [18] pages. Edition of 500. Acquired from David Bunnett Books, 31 July 2023.
Photos of the work: Books On Books Collection.

How do we respond to an artwork of collage or assemblage that is missing a piece — assuming that we can tell ? And if all of the elements are ephemera, does it matter to our appreciation of it? Do we keep returning in annoyance to the gap — like a tongue to a missing tooth? Do we give up on it — like the purchaser of a secondhand jigsaw puzzle missing a piece or two? Or do we sigh and suppose appreciatively that the disappearance of an element of ephemera from a collage or assemblage of ephemera proves the artwork’s point?

Lucas Blalock is an artist of augmented realities. With the right device and app pointed at his artwork, we should be able to see images floating and moving over its surface or seemingly in the surface among its images or transforming them. According to the back cover, we can download this app from the iTunes App Store to interact with the book’s images. The app, however, was removed from the App Store in July 2023. Using the WayBack Machine, we can find the publisher’s announcement of the Making Memeries installation with Blalock in the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall:

The London-based curatorial project Self Publish, Be Happy presents a programme of events that explore the blurring boundaries surrounding on/offline existence and distribution of photographs. The event, titled Making Memeries, will take place at Tate Modern during this year’s Offprint London art book fair from 20-22 May.

Artist Lucas Blalock has created an installation for the middle of the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall that functions as a staging area for workshops and performances. The installation consists of a set of eight movable panels that display a new suite of photographs by Blalock. The elements of the installation, conceived of specifically for this project, can be further activated via this app, Making Memeries.

The audience will be able to immerse themselves in, and interact with the work through the app, which uses your camera to produce a digitally augmented reality. Blalock’s work has long been interested in the cohabitation of the worldly and the virtual behind the photographic surface, and this project has allowed the artist to picture this cohabitation on both sides of that plane. Blalock has collaborated with REIFY, the augmented reality (AR) creative studio, to build an experience that blurs traditional boundaries and challenges one’s expectations of viewership.

Photos from old website of Self Publish, Be Happy. Accessed 26 October 2025.

Among the performances facilitated by the installation was Anouk Kruithof’s Connection, which also contributed to the aim of blurring the boundaries of the physical and digital.

Photos from Connection, installation by Anouk Kruithof. Accessed 26 October 2025.

But without the app or memory of the installation, we have a gap like that missing tooth. We can bridge the gap somewhat with online links and the book’s collaged imagery of mixed media and photographs to recognize that Making Memeries is also about how we perceive surfaces and what lies beneath — and what might come between. Consider the earplugs alongside the telephone below. Then there’s the pair of spectacles in the shape of fingers that would cover the wearer’s eyes. Now look back to the cover, and we find the view from behind those finger-spectacles.

Photo of the work: Books On Books Collection.

Or consider the images of the model of the epidermis with which the book opens and closes. ortunately, we have a YouTube link and Olga Yatskevich’s review to let us know that the “augmented reality radically changes the experience, making the image active rather than static – the app brings rounded depth to the model, shows blood running through the vessels, and allows us to explore the space around the object, its sides and the top”.

First and last double-page spreads. Photos: Books On Books Collection.

There’s something childlike, playful but serious conveyed in all this. Physically Making Memeries presents itself as an oversized children’s board book (or perhaps a board book for undersized adults). The use of the board book to make this cross-over can also be found in other artists’ books — Colleen (Ellis) Comerford’s ABCing and Phil Zimmermann’s Sonorensis, for example.

Fore edge of Making Memeries.

What the board book only partially conveys with the Connection link in hand, so to speak, is the intent expressed on the back cover and in the Tate’s announcement:

Making Memeries is set in a time when everyone has become a lifestyle photographer. It is still your life but the image production is decidedly public; and in that case temporary, verging on fleeting, because these public channels have so many content providers and, along with our attention spans, are in a perpetual state of refresh. [back cover]

Before the advent of the Internet the act of taking a photo was often intended to make memories; to store and preserve our past in still, printed images. In today’s digital age the act of taking photos can be enough for the photograph-taker. The act is exhausted by the process. This can be seen in the way a mobile phone camera offers immediate satisfaction — producing a file that may never be looked at again. Today a photo has a different claim to time, being much more in the “now” than in the “this has been” of its 19th and 20th century pre-internet forbearers. We, in turn, live in a culture of the perpetual present, in a meme-driven world where photos can effortlessly be shared, but where they most often disappear into digital oblivion. [Tate Modern announcement]

It feels ironic that Making Memeries‘s “missing tooth” is digital. The same year of Blalock’s installation at the Tate, Pokémon Go arrived, and people began wandering into traffic to capture Pokémon figures that their cameras projected onto the streets around them. Nine years later, the company owning the app has sold for $3.5 billion, and the world’s richest country is governed by meme. Is art miming life, or life miming art?

Books On Books Collection – Marlene MacCallum and The Shadow Quartet*

2025/08/302026/04/15Books On BooksLeave a comment

Two artist's books titled 'Shadow Canto One: Still Life' and 'Still Life', featuring unique textured covers with a blend of greens and a window-like design.

Marlene MacCallum achieves distinctive results by painting with photography and sculpting with book structure in her artist’s books. Her painting with photography has involved not only collage work but pinhole cameras, digital cameras, digital layering and masking as well as a variety of transfer processes — digital and analogue photogravure, lithography, digital pigment printing, and digital inkjet printing. Sculpting with book structure mainly includes varying the binding as in the accordion with fold-out of Obvert (1997), the tunnel book structure of Do Not Enter (1998), the gatefold of Domestic Arcana (1999), the tile format fold-outs of pink story (2004-05), the accordion of Quadrifid (2009), the dos-à-dos of Glaze: Reveal and Veiled (2013), and the Miura fold of Rise (2020). It also includes altering books as in Withdrawn (2010) and varying the substrate as in the lace paper, Moriki, double matte Mylar, Lanaquarelle, and embossed leather of Townsite House (2006) and the etched copperplate and Tyvek of Trompe l’Oreille (2011).

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Books On Books Collection – Zhang Xiaodong*

2025/08/072026/05/03Books On Books1 Comment

Diamond Sutra in 32 zhuan (seal) fonts (2017)
Zhang Xiaodong
Scroll in dragon scale binding. 152 x 382 x 160 mm. Edition of 300, of which this #197. Acquired from Sin Sin Fine Arts (Hong Kong), 31 October 2019. Photos: Books On Books Collection.

In 1900, in China’s Dunhuang province, the Diamond Sutra (868 CE), the world’s earliest complete and dated printed book, was discovered in a cave along with 40,000 scrolls. One of those other scrolls — Or.8210/S.6349 — was possibly just as important for the book arts as the Diamond Sutra was for the history of printing. Like the Diamond Sutra, Or.8210/S.6349 resides in the British Library and is “the only known example of whirlwind binding in the Stein collection of the British Library” (Chinnery). The structure is also known as dragon scale binding, although distinctions between the two have been debated (Song). It came into use in the late Tang dynasty (618-907 CE) then fell away in the face of the easier to handle butterfly and wrapped-back bindings. Besides Or.8210/S.6349, there are few surviving examples of original whirlwind or dragon scale bindings.

Chinnery, 2007.

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Books On Books Collection – Barbara Hocker

2025/08/052026/01/30Books On Books2 Comments

Watercourse I (2022)

Watercourse I (2022)
Barbara Hocker
Scroll in variant dragon scale binding. L152 cm (variable) x W12 cm. 64 panels. Unique. Acquired from the artist, 10 February 2024.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.

Works evocative of water often invoke a sense of meditative stillness, but Barbara Hocker’s Watercourse I prompts a sense of meditative activity. You can’t stop moving it about. Or if you’re not moving it, you find yourself moving around it to contemplate it. It is the layering of watercolor, sumi ink, photographic prints with archival inks on washi paper, and the ancient Chinese method of bookbinding called dragon scale (sometimes called “whirlwind” or “fish scale” binding) that achieves this. Traditionally, the binding method involves a long scroll of paper to which successively shorter folios are attached at one end, often secured with a bamboo rod. Hocker has modified this structure by attaching folios of the same size with hinges to the underlying long scroll at intervals allowing one folio to overlap the next and so on. In each case, the effect of the overlapping folios creates the appearance of dragon scales.

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Books On Books

Curated by Robert Bolick

Photography/Images

Books On Books Collection – Lu Jingren, Amanda Degener, and Peng Wu

Handmade Path (2021)

Further Reading & Viewing

Books On Books Collection – Helen M. Brunner

Primer: Ritual Elements (Book One) (1982)

Books On Books Collection – Laure Catugier

A Never-Ending Stone (2025)

Books On Books Collection – Anne-Catherine Fallen

The Lively Dance (1983)

Books On Books Collection – Kara Walker

Freedom: A fable: A curious interpretation of the wit of a negress in troubled times: with illustrations (1997)

Books On Books – Marlene MacCallum (III)

Send (2020)

Rise (2020)

Further Reading

Books On Books Collection – Lucas Blalock

Making Memeries (2016)

Further Reading

Books On Books Collection – Marlene MacCallum and The Shadow Quartet*

Books On Books Collection – Zhang Xiaodong*

Books On Books Collection – Barbara Hocker

Watercourse I (2022)