Typography

Books On Books Collection – Caren Florance

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L OO P (2019)

A closed book with a black cover featuring minimal text and a gold spine, resting on a black surface.
A black art book with textured pages and minimalist white markings on the cover, partially opened to reveal a golden inner page.

L OO P (2019)
Caren Florance
Handset letterpress and mixed media on Stonehenge Black, Chinese papers and found maps. Hand-stitched Z-fold dos-à-dos booklet. H193 x W143 mm. [48] pages. Edition of 16, of which this is #13. Acquired from the artist, 1 December 2025.
Photos: Books On Books Collection. Displayed with artist’s permission.

L OO P is one to compare with Jack Oudyn’s Opening Dark Windows (2020) and Tim Mosely’s Grasping the Nettle (2020). All three of these Australian book artists create works responding to climate change. L OO P is also one to contrast with Barbara Beisinghoff’s Tau blau / Dew Blue (2013). Both thrust forward their works’ tactility, but while Beisinghoff’s offers the fond hope of natural and artistic renewal as it plays off H.C. Andersen’s fairy tale Hørren /The Flax, Florance’s embeds shards of John Bennett’s bird poem Overwintering in a back-to-back loop of despair over climate change.

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Books On Books Collection – Jean-Pierre Hébert, Harry and Sandra Liddell Reese

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In Visible Cities (2012)

A closed book with a matte gray cover, featuring small colorful dots in red, pink, and orange scattered on the front.
Opened box with an orange interior on the left and a textured black cover with colorful dots on the right.
An open book with a yellow-orange interior and a pink border, displaying small blue dots on the pages.

In Visible Cities (2012)
Jean-Pierre Hébert, Harry and Sandra Liddell Reese
Custom-made box enclosing sewn board binding with cloth spine, treated abaca/cotton paper with painted inlays, pastedowns with drawings, valley-fold folios of Niyodo Natural paper printed on Epson Stylus Pro 4800. Box: H442 x W290 mm. Book: H424 x W276 mm. [46] pages. Edition of 73, of which this is #48. Acquired from the Reeses, 9 February 2026.
Photos: Books On Books Collection. Displayed with permission of Claire Hébert and the Reeses.

More than a few artists have been drawn to Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities (1972/74). Its attraction is not hard to understand. Calvino supposes a series of conversations between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan about cities across the Khan’s empire that he has not visited but Marco Polo has and which he describes for the Khan. The premise, however, is paradoxical: the fifty-five cities Marco Polo describes do not exist. Calvino’s sensuous and surrealistic prose and combinatorial arrangement of the conversations and descriptions create a book that is simultaneously inwardly and outwardly reflective. Simple but complex. Realistic but fantastical. Concrete but conceptual. A work ripe for homage and inspiration.

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Books On Books Collection – Claude Lothier

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Quant au Livre (2011)

A stack of colorful paper sheets in assorted shades, neatly arranged within a green folder.

Quant au Livre (2011)
Claude Lothier
Slipcase around five cased and glued softcover booklets. Slipcase: H110 x W158 x D25 mm. AEIO TTNTN: H108 x W157 mm. Niv ula: H157 x W108 mm. C’est difficile: H108 x W157 mm. TUBED/NIF: H108 x W157 mm. U: H108 x W157 mm. [28] pages each except for TUBED/NIF, which has [20], and U, which has [24]. Edition of 200. Acquired from Biblio-Net, 16 October 2025.
Photos: Books On Books Collection

In English, the phrase quant au livre would be “as for the book” or “concerning the book”. What is lost in translation is the phrase’s association with Stéphane Mallarmé’s volume of essays Divagations (1897) in which one section was entitled Quant au Livre. It included the essay “Le Livre, Instrument Spirituel”, which delivered the proclamation “tout, au monde, existe pour aboutir à un livre” (“everything in the world exists to end up in a book”). It was the proclamation scholars seized on to give artists’ books their metaphysical underpinning. If it swallows up everything in the world, What is a book? Many book artists have simply bypassed the discussion and jumped in with works of art that challenge how we read, how we make sense of a book, how we make sense of what a book is. Claude Lothier is one of those book artists.

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Books On Books Collection – Susan Johanknecht

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Fugal (2025)

A close-up of a musical score with handwritten notes and lines, featuring the title 'fugal' and the name 'Susan Johanknecht' printed on the right.

Fugal (2025)
Susan Johanknecht , Claire Van Vliet, and Andrew Miller-Brown
Vertical double-sided accordion book bound in “Landscape with Cows In It” structure designed by Claire Van Vliet, cover in calendered Barcham Green India Office, interior in handmade Japanese Kozo Natural fixed to Monadnock Dulcet; slipcase of handmade paper. Slipcase: H123 x W248 x D22 mm. Book: H120 x W240 x D18 mm. [6] double-sided panels. Edition of 100, of which this is #8. Acquired from Susan Johanknecht, 26 September 2025.
Photos: Books On Books Collection

In the hands of multiple readers, this collaboration among Susan Johanknecht’s Gefn Press, Claire Van Vliet’s Janus Press, and Andrew Miller-Brown’s Plowboy Press becomes the “book as performance” and “book as musical score”. Fugal is an artwork that works best with several simultaneous readers/voices/viewers.

A fugue generally has a “subject” (or main theme), an “exposition” in which voices or instruments each play out the subject, then an “episode” (or connecting passages) that builds on the previous material, then further alternating “entries” in which the subject is heard in related keys until a final entry that returns to the opening key. The subject of Fugal is the generative process of vocal changes due to aging. The phrases of the poem have been drawn from an unidentified speech and language textbook.

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Books On Books Collection – Hans Witte

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ABC of Advertising (2024)

Cover of the book 'ABC of Advertising' by Hans Witte, featuring vibrant collages of colors and typography, highlighting the title and the author's name.

ABC of Advertising (2024)
Hans Witte
Casebound, cloth spine and paper over boards, sewn to doublures. H150 x W105 mm. [40] pages. Acquired from Redfoxpress, 2024.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.

The ABC of Advertising is No. 205 in the RedFoxPress “c’est mon dada” series. The series name comes from the French expression meaning “it’s my thing”. Dada is also a colloquial child’s expression for “horsie” or “hobbyhorse”. So, of course, the French adopted it as the name for one of the avant garde movement of the early 20th century. Although you might think from The ABC of Advertising that wood type and letter press are Hans Witte’s “hobbyhorse”, it’s clear from his artist’s books, children’s books, and book object installations that he has a herd of them.

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Books On Books Collection – Helen Siegl

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Herball , The Dialogues of Creatures Moralised (1979)

Herball from The Dialogues of Creatures Moralised Applicable and edifying to every merry and jocund matter, and right profitable to the governance of men. [Ascribed to Nicolaus Pergamenus and Mayno de’ Mayneri. First printed in Latin by Gerard Leeu in Gouda in 1480 & in English in 1535.] (1979)
Helen Siegl
Hardcover in mustard colored cloth with a paper label to the spine; with 11 woodcut illustrations hand-colored by Helen Siegl. HxW mm. [24] pages. Edition of 150, of which this is #56. Acquired from Black Swan Books, 20 July 2024.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.

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Books On Books Collection – Chaucer’s ABC

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ABC by Geoffrey Chaucer (1934)

ABC by Geoffrey Chaucer (1934)
[Eleanor] Joyce Francis
Chapbook, softcover sewn. H250 x W170 mm. 16 pages. Edition of 500? Acquired from Antiquariaat Fokas Holthuis, 30 April 2021.
Photos: Emilia Osztafi.*

Chaucer’s ABC (ca. 1369) is an intriguing early work in the history of abecedaries. There are alphabet poems in the Hebrew Bible, but according to the artists’ book collector and scholar Nyr Indictor, this Chaucer lyric seems to be the earliest surviving English “ABC poem” of known authorship. Possibly on commission from Blanche, Duchess of Lancaster, Chaucer cribbed and translated a lyric embedded in Guillaume de Deguilleville’s La pelerinage de vie humaine [“Pilgrimage of Human Life”] (ca. 1330).

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Books On Books Collection – Kurt Schwitters

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Die Scheuche Märchen (1925/1965)

Die Scheuche Märchen (1925, 1965) [The Scare-Crow Fairy Tale]
Kurt Schwitters, Kate Steinitz and Theo van Doesberg. English translation by Robert Haas (enclosed, loose).
Miniature reprint of the 1925 edition. H123 x W154 mm. 12 pages. Acquired from Plain Tales Books, 12 July 2023.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.

The Schwitters-Steinitz Collection held at the National Gallery of Art Library identifies this work as a miniature reprint published in 1965 by Stockholm’s Gallery Samlaaren, owned by Agnes Widlund. The original, measuring H250 x W210 and also in red and blue on light brown paper, was published by Kurt Schwitters, Kate Steinitz and Theo van Doesberg under the imprint APOSS, which is a nonsense word, derived from “A for Active; P for Paradox; OS for Oppose Sentiment; and S for Sensitive” (Paley, p. 267). There have been several other editions, but this one is particularly satisfying for its inclusion of the loose typewritten translation by Robert Haas, who also translated Steinitz’s memoir/biography of Schwitters.

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Books On Books Collection – Jana Sim

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Both but Between (2021)

Both but Between (2021)
Jana Sim
Cloth-covered boards, exposed binding. H149 x W114 5.8 mm. 17 handmade paper leaves; 16 OHP film leaves. Edition of 27, of which this is #14. Acquired from Vamp&Tramp, 15 July 2022.
Photos: Jana Sim (above) and Books On Books Collection (below). Displayed with artist’s permission.

Both but between is a bilingual abecedary. If punning in a foreign language indicates successful mastery of a non-native tongue, punning in that language and doing so materially with an artist’s book must indicate an altogether higher level and higher kind of mastery. Jana Sim demonstrates such mastery with an extraordinary use of letterpress printing and laser printing to underscore the “both but between” metaphor of her bicultural experience in this bilingual abecedary.

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Books On Books Collection – Warren Lehrer

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A Life in Books: The Rise and Fall of Bleu Mobley (2013)

A Life in Books: The Rise and Fall of Bleu Mobley. An Illuminated Novel Written & Designed by Warren Lehrer (2013)
Warren Lehrer
Casebound, illustrated paper over boards with illustrated doublures. H254 x W198 x D28 mm. 300 pages. Acquired from Amazon, 3 March 2015.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.

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