Books On Books Collection – Leonard Brett

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A Surrealist Alphabet (2014)

To stand out and secure a place among the several other surrealist abecedaries and alphabet books out there — such as those by Jim Avignon & Anja Lutz, Roman Cieślewicz, Jason D’Aquino, Lisa Haines, Lynn Hatzius, Peter Hutchinson, Peter Malutzki, Clément Meriguet, Paul Noble, Judy Pelikan, Rose Sanderson, Zazie Sazonoff, Paul Thurlby and Ludwig Zeller — takes considerable talent and effort. Leonard Brett’s A Surrealist Alphabet displays just that.

Per the artist’s statement, an interest in the aesthetics of script as visual symbol led him to the Louvre and British Museum for studies of ancient scripts — Sumerian, Egyptian, and Chinese — and to Bali, Egypt and Istanbul for inspection of contemporary scripts and sources of inspiration. Juxtaposition of that with images and text alluding to baseball teams (the Blue Jays and Orioles ), celebrities (Elvis and Marilyn Monroe), Renaissance painters (Raphael and Pisanello among others), movies and TV shows (Casablanca and X-Men) and much more leads to one of the densest and most frenetic of alphabet artists’ books in the Books On Books Collection.

Each letter receives two double-page spreads. The first is a diptych, consisting of a black-and-white etching forming a composite letter across from a color image that may come from a watercolor or a host of other media; the second, a poem and another color image (again varying as to media) playing off the poem. The etchings and original color artwork were in an exhibition sponsored by the Sunshine Coast Arts Council in Sechelt BC, Canada,1-26 March 2017. According to the exhibition’s description, “The drawings in the book were used as a reference to produce the engravings shown in this exhibition. The engravings are done in the traditional manner using a burin to cut the plate, there is no acid used. They are inked and printed the same way as an etching on damp rag paper.”

The color treatments of A and Z suffice to show how the artworks in exhibition complemented and differed from the book. Just these letters’ two double-page spreads, however, come nowhere near the effect of unrelenting variety and creativity delivered by the volume as a whole.

Displayed in exhibition

Displayed in exhibition

Books On Books Collection – Kitty Maryatt and Scripps College Students

2023/08/012025/03/22Books On BooksLeave a comment

Arch (2010)

Arch (2010)
Kitty Maryatt, Jenny Karin Morrill, Ali Standish, Alycia Lang, Jennifer Wineke, Mandesha Marcus, Catherine Wang, Kathryn Hunt, Ilse Wogau, Jennifer Cohen and Winnie Ding
Acrylic slipcase, leporello formed of self-covering booklets sewn together. Slipcase: H410 x W110 x D50. Leporello: H400 x W 90 mm (closed). 64 pages. Unnumbered copy from edition of 109. Acquired from Bromer Booksellers, 7 December 2022.
Photos: Books On Books Collection

Nôtre-Dame de Paris (1831), Archdeacon Claude Frollo points to the book in his hand and then to the cathedral and says, “This will kill that”. It is ironic that Hugo’s book (popularly known now by its English title The Hunchback of Nôtre-Dame) was written in large part to save the then-decaying cathedral (post-Revolution, it served as a warehouse), and it succeeded. It is also ironic that, while the fictional character’s metaphor has a point about the book’s permanence of replicability outlasting the building’s permanence of stone, it misses the collaborative foundations of both.

Arch (2010), created by ten students at Scripps College under the direction of Kitty Maryatt, reminds us that the creation of a book — even a work of book art — is a collaborative effort. All the students involved in the design, planning and production were women, a happenstance serendipitously blessed ahead of time by a Los Angeles Times article celebrating women architects. Drawing on that article and Maya Lin’s Boundaries (2000) as well as other research, the students agreed on a mission statement for the work: “Architecture, like books, is a deliberate balancing act between stability and motion, interior and exterior, aesthetic values and practicalities. Books, like buildings, are fundamentally inhabited spaces. They are incomplete without human interaction.”

Clever structural use of paper with a stone-like appearance, paired with apt choices of text matched with equally judicious choices in typography, evoke the similarities between books and buildings. Each architect/bookmaker’s contribution is a self-covering booklet in leporello format. Of different heights, the booklets are sewn together to create a tiered tower to be housed in an acrylic slipcase.

The first booklet, open below, incorporates Maryatt’s introduction, entitled “Blueprint”, all of which appears in the work’s entry in the publication Sixty over Thirty: Bibliography of Books Printed Since 1986 at the Scripps College Press (2016). The entry is reproduced in full further below.

The next booklet lists the sources of architectural inspiration, and as the lattice door on the list’s facing page turns, two sets of stairs, cutouts in contrasting colors, ascend on the verso page to the text that begins at the top of the recto page and ends at the foot of descending stairs on the next double-panel spread. Like Maya Lin, Maryatt’s students built their works by learning to think with their hands. The reader, too, has to think with the hands to experience fully this booklet and those that follow. The whole work conjures up the titles of Juhani Pallasmaa’s books — The Thinking Hand and The Embodied Image. Readers of this online entry will have to expand the images below, enjoy the words and imagine their way through with the title of another of his books — The Eyes of the Skin.

Books On Books Collection – Erwin Huebner

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Erwin Huebner is a professor at the University of Manitoba engaged in research and teaching cell and developmental biology. He is also a book artist and miniaturist. Following his work, the Books On Books Collection has started small and hopes to grow into his larger works. At both ends of the spectrum, Huebner’s themes resonate with the integration of art and science, a recurrent focus of the collection (see Further Reading below).

Alphabeta Concertina Majuscule (2015)

Alphabeta Concertina (2015)
Erwin Huebner (with permission of Ron King)
Miniature double-sided leporello. H 1.5 x W 1.0 x D 0.75 in. Edition of 4. Acquired from Erwin Huebner, 20 January 2023.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.

The geometry and invention of Ron King’s work must have appealed to a kindred spirit in Erwin Huebner. The classificatory nature of the alphabet must also have spoken to Huebner’s inner Linnaeus. As 2023 is the 270th anniversary of Linnaeus’ Species Plantarum, which introduced his classification system, it is an auspicious moment for Huebner’s miniature versions of King’s alphabet concertinas to join the Books On Books Collection and be included works in the Bodleian exhibition “Alphabets Alive!” (19 July 2023 to 24 January 2024, Weston Library, Oxford).

alphabet concertina miniscule (2022)

alphabet concertina miniscule (2022)
Erwin Huebner (with permission of Ron King)
Miniature double-sided leporello. H 1.5 x W 1.0 x D 0.75 in. Acquired from Erwin Huebner, 20 January 2023.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.

Both the majuscule and miniscule concertinas are double-sided with half the alphabet on one side and half on the other just as King designed from the first with The White Alphabet and the majuscule concertina in 1984 and subsequently 2007 with the miniscule.

Micrographia Revisited (2017)

Micrographia Revisited: A Triptych (2017)
Erwin Huebner
Box with 3 Coptic-bound volumes, each H 2.625 x W 1.875 x variable depth. Edition of 3. Acquired from Erwin Huebner, 20 January 2023.
Photos: Courtesy of the artist.

Despite Francesco Stelluti’s Melissographia (1625), Robert Hooke’s Micrographia: Or Some Physiological Descriptions of Minute Bodies Made by Magnifying Glasses with Observations and Inquiries Thereupon (1665) was long thought to be the first publication with illustrations drawn from observation with a microscope. Given Huebner’s scientific and artistic careers, it would seem impossible for him to resist paying homage to this work. Indeed, in his larger artist’s books, he has incorporated entire microscopes, but here, he exploits the technological advances of photography and electron microscopy and joins them with the craft of bookbinding to produce just as wondrous a work. Using Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM), Huebner has created images of the same or similar objects to those Robert Hooke observed in the 1600’s. One of the volumes in the triptych presents these photographic results, and the other two present a reprint of Micrographia.

The coptic binding to black walnut covers, the wooden case covered in marbled paper and the subtitle create a suitable medieval/Renaissance air for this homage.

Living in a village near Oxford and having access to the Bodleian Libraries, I took Micrographia Revisited on a pilgrimage to compare it with a copy of the original not far from Hooke’s alma mater Wadham College.

Among the many outstanding features of Huebner’s homage is his use and placement of fold-outs to capture the larger plates in Hooke’s original, all of which were placed in an appendix and some of which were also printed as fold-outs. In the juxtapositions below, note how Huebner has placed Hooke’s illustration of his equipment at the end of the Preface.

Sitting atop the double-page spread showing the end of the Preface and page 1 of Hooke’s original is Micrographia Revisited, open to Huebner’s fold-out of Hooke’s illustration of his equipment. Hooke’s same fold-out illustration from the appendix is juxtaposed below with Huebner’s.

Hooke’s first two objects under the microscope Hooke are the point of a needle (described on pages 1-3) and the edge of a razor (described on pages 4-5). Huebner transforms Hooke’s single-page plate illustrating what he describes into a double-page spread between pages 2 and 3 of Micrographia Revisited.

Juxtaposing Huebner’s double-page presentation of Hooke’s drawings of a needle point and edge a razor with Hooke’s single-page presentation.

Hooke’s large fold-out of his flea may display the most impressive drawing in the book. The description appears on page 210, and the fold-out is in the appendix. Huebner’s double-fold fold-out of the illustration falls between pages 210 and 211.

The flea from Micrographia juxtaposed with that from Micrographia Revisited.

But most impressive of all is Huebner’s SEM image of a flea and its testament to Hooke’s powers of observation and skills as a draughtsman.

In the spirit of “standing on the shouders of giants”.

Alphabets Alive! – ABCs in Miniature

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If ever the dictum “Less is more” applied, it applies here — with miniaturized tongue in cheek, of course. [Links in the captions will take you to more images and details.]

Nancy Trottier, The Alphabet Effect (2013). Compare this example of the meander fold with Claire Van Vliet’s below and Lisa McGarry’s in The ABCs of Form & Structure.

Peter & Donna Thomas, Alphabet People (1989). Even in miniature, B is for Body.

Picture ABC (place and date of creation unknown). And C is for Color.

Rebecca Bingham, Defining the Rainbow (2018). And still more Color.

These two miniatures — Albrecht Dürer’s Directions for the Construction of the Text or Quadrate Letters (1993) and Fra Luca de Pacioli’s The Divine Alphabet (1993) — were produced by Tabula Rasa Press for a three-volume set, including Ben Shahn’s The Alphabet of Creation (1954). Although the miniature edition of Shahn remains elusive, the original edition can be seen here.

Mark Van Stone, The Evolution of the Medieval Decorated Letter (1985) In the spirit of medieval illuminators, Van Stone has imitated the hand of twenty-three of what he calls the “semi-precious jewels” of “‘minor’ illumination that usually receives little attention in the Art-History books”.

Carol DuBosch, Embossed Alphabet Gallery (2019).* This gallery structure combines elements of the flag-book and leporello to create a freestanding sculptural book to be read “in the round” — although in the Bodleian exhibition it was fixed in a wall case that allowed 180º view.

Claire Van Vliet, Tumbling Blocks for Pris and Bruce (1996).* A meander-fold book hinged to keep the cube unfolding, refolding and unfolding as it falls from hand to hand.

Carol Cunningham, Alphabet Alfresco (1985). One of several gems created by the founder of the Miniature Book Society (1983).

William Cheney, ABC for Tiny Schools ( 1975). Along with “A was an archer”, the “A was an apple pie” was among the earliest themes for secular alphabet books.

Alphabet Salmagundi (1988) and Golden Alphabet (1986) demonstrate the breadth of Rebecca Bingham’s interest in various periods and techniques of calligraphy.

Another Tabula Rasa Press production, Arthur Maquarie, The Uffizi ABC: a facsimile reproduction in miniature (1992)

Pat Sweet’s wit led her to fill the ancient Egyptians’ previously unperceived need for an alphabet book with Hieroglyphs (2009).

David Clifford and Heavenly Monkey teamed up to produce this intricately bound miniature, Letterpress Printing ABC (2004).

June Sidwell, Lady Letters (1986). Another production by Rebecca Bingham, which also led to a miniature nod to another alphabetist — Erté.

Nicolas McDowall, A Bodoni Charade (1995). Don’t let delight in the verbal/visual punnery distract you from wondering at the skill with type and letterpress needed to pull this off.

Erwin Huebner and Ron King, Alphabeta Concertina Majuscule (2015) and alphabeta concertina miniscule (2022). Miniaturist and microbiologist, Huebner obtained Ron King’s permission to reproduce King’s two signature pop-up alphabets with extraordinary results.

Juniper Von Phitzer, An Alphabet Coloring Book by Theodore Menten (1997). Lloyd L. Neilson compiled the name of his Juniper Von Phitzer Press from the names of his three cats. Theodore Menten had produced a coloring book called The Illuminated Alphabet in 1971 for Dover Publications. Obviously Juniper Von Phitzer could not fail to pounce.

Online Exhibition Bonus!

Many of the ABC books in the collection use the accordion, concertina or leporello structure, but none but Maria G. Pisano’s XYZ (2002) combine fine beaten abaca in two colors and the watermark technique to achieve their effect.

Return to List of Displays in Alphabets Alive!

Alphabets Alive! – Calligraphy and Design

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Artists use knives, thread, wood, handmade paper, wire and other tools to execute their beautiful writing. Some create their designs with straight edge and compass – or with punch, matrix, mould and molten metal – or with the computer and even artificial intelligence.

Anne Bertier, Dessine-moi une lettre (2004)

Giovanni Francesco Cresci, Il perfetto scrittore (c. 1570) Johnson P 170

Bruce Rogers, Champ rosé (1933)

Steven Ferlauto and Jeffrey Morin, The Sacred Abecedarium (2000)

Francesca Lohmann, An Alphabetical Accumulation (2017)

Felice Feliciano, Alphabetum Romanum: The Letterforms of Felice Feliciano (2010)

Fra Luca Pacioli, De divina proportione (Venice, 1509) Arch. B d.24 (2)

Yevhen Berdnikov, Paper Cut Alphabet (2023)

Online Exhibition Bonus!

Cathryn Miller’s L is for Lettering (2011) is a brilliant example of the book artist’s rite of passage: make an alphabet book, but make it new.

Tauba Auerbach has made the alphabet her life’s work. How to Spell the Alphabet (2007) uses the title of one of her best-known works. A work of ink and pencil on paper (2005), it begins “EY BEE CEE DEE” and was featured in MoMA’s “Ecstatic Alphabet” exhibition (2012). Her artistic playfulness makes the letters of the alphabet self-referential and ecstatic (“to stand outside themselves”). Another route to this is what she calls “letter worship” as demonstrated in this homage to another artist of the letter: Paulus Franck.

Thanks to the editors Joseph Kiermeier-Debre and Fritz Franz Vogel, we have this facsimile edition of Paulus Franck’s Schatzkammer, Allerhand Versalien Lateinisch vnnd Teutsch (1601/1995), a “treasury of all manner of German and Latin ornamental letters. The editors neatly use the margins of their book to add to the historical context. On the verso page, they have the geometrically controlled design of Albrecht Durer (1525), and on the recto, the exuberance of John Seddon (1695).

Another lifelong devotee of the alphabet is Annie Cicale. Her Patterned Alphabet (2013) is an extended dance of contrasts and complements with printing, paper and patterns.

Not quite an alphabet book but clearly a children’s book and artist’s book at play with the alphabet is Kurt Schwitters’ Die Scheuche (1925/1965), which might send you flying over to the display with Roberto de Vicq de Cumptich, Bembo’s Zoo: An Animal ABC Book under Alphabets Alive! — Animals.

Kurt Schwitters, Die Scheuche [The Scarecrow] (1925/1965)

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Alphabets Alive! – Alphabets All Around

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Where do letters go when they’re not making words? Book artists know that they hide everywhere – often in plain sight – in landscapes, roadworks and signs, tree branches, rocks, flags, and even in a cup of coffee. [Links in the captions will take you to more images and details.]

Stephen T. Johnson Alphabet City (1995)

Lisa McGuirk, If Rocks Could Sing (2011)

Elliott Kaufman, Alphabet Everywhere (2012)

Roberto Beretta, The Quick Brown Fox Jumps Over the Lazy Dog (2008)

Ornan Rotem, A Typographic Abecedarium (2015)

Marion Bataille, Vues/Lues (2008)

Online Exhibition Bonus!

Ellen Sollod, Outdoor Types : An Urban Alphabet Source (2019)

Jan Middendorp and Clotilde Olyff , Lettered Typefaces and Alphabets by Clotilde Olyff (2000)

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Alphabets Alive! – Animals

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Animal alphabet books hum with imagination and wit. Animals, birds, fish, insects, even dinosaurs, decorate and transform letters, or might be created from the letters themselves. Sometimes, the animals come in disguise, or hide, only to pop out and surprise you. Perhaps the alphabet’s pictographic origin explains this animal obsession. The letter ‘A’ comes from the word ‘aleph’ meaning cow or ox, and its early letterform resembled an ox’s head and horns. [Links in the captions will take you to more images and details.]

E.N. Ellis, An Alphabet (1985).* The letters Q and X always present challenges in finding suitably named animals. Ellis’s solution with X is as elegant as her engraving.

C.B. Falls, ABC Book (1923). Almost a quarter century after William Nicholson’s successful A Square Book of Animals, Falls applied his successful poster designing to this larger format.

Leslie Haines, Animal Abecedary: A One-of-a-Kind Alphabet Book (2018).* A strong revival of the surrealist collage.

Enid Marx, Marco’s Animal Alphabet (2000). Bringing together the talents of the engraver (Enid “Marco” Marx), “pochoir-ist” (Peter Allen) and letterpress printer (Graham Moss), this large-scale portfolio treads the boundary of fine press and artist’s book.

[Alphabet Leporello of dressed animals] (Paris, c. 1851) Opie T 407. The Books On Books Collection’s concentration on alphabet books falls primarily over the 20th and 21st centuries and extends the pre-1950s focus of the Opie Collection of children’s books. Together, the two collections offer a broad and deep source for exploring the links between artists’ books and children’s alphabet books as well as studying topics such as children’s literature and literacy.

Christiane Pieper & Anushka Ravishankar, Alphabets Are Amazing Animals (2003).* Alliteration is almost as frequent a feature of alphabet books as animal association.

Alan James Robinson and Suzanne Moore, A Fowl Alphabet (1986).* A superb collaboration between an engraver (Robinson) and calligrapher (Moore).

John Norris Wood, An Alphabet of Toads & Frogs (2002).* Sometimes past art abroad catches up with present American fauna of political celebrity.

Online Exhibition Bonus!

Marie Angel, An Animated Alphabet (1996); Angel’s Alphabet (1986) of exotic surprises in a more traditional alphabet book; and more surprises behind tabs in a leporello. Marie Angel’s Exotic Alphabet (1992).

Leonard Baskin, Hosie’s Alphabet (1972). Son Hosie and father Leonard unite their rites of passage: learning the alphabet and creating an artist’s alphabet book.

Michele Durkson Clise, Animal Alphabet: Folding Screen (1992) wrongfoots the reader with animal images that do not align with the expected alphabet letter or the letters of the first words in the leporello’s rhyming couplets. If the image does at least align with a word in the couplet (e.g., “whale”), that word’s first letter does not align with the alphabet letter expected for that panel.

Brian D. Cohen & Holiday Eames, The Bird Book (2013). Cohen’s engravings are finer in detail than most.

In Abstract Alphabet: A Book of Animals (2001), Paul Cox turns the alphabet on its evolutionary head. The letter A started out with the pictogram of an ox’s head and then developed into the abstract shape we associate with the sound /a/. Here, we have to work back from 26 different abstract shapes (each assigned to a letter on a fold-out flap) to figure out the name of the animal being spelled. The reversal conjures up the challenge that letters, objects and phonics present to children, and in their resemblance to a Hans Arp painting, the shapes challenge the reader to a renewed connection with art.

Roberto de Vicq de Cumptich, Bembo’s Zoo: An Animal ABC Book (2000). Where Sharon Forss and Sarah Werner use several type faces to shape their animals, De Vicq de Cumptich restricts his to Bembo.

David L. Kulhavy & Charles D. Jones, A Forest Insect Alphabet (2013). Extraordinary woodcuts by Jones, worth comparing with Cohen, Grieshaber, Marx and Robinson.

Metropolitan Museum of Art, Animalphabet (1996). Curators’ puns and wordplay with favorites from the Met.

William Nicholson, A Square Book of Animals (1900). Nicholson followed his successful An Alphabet with this book, but it was Scolar Press in 1979 that redesigned and re-originated it in this well-chosen leporello format.

Carton Moore Park, An Alphabet of Animals (1899). Unusual for its grisaille technique and restriction of color to the cloth cover.

Rose Sanderson, An Unusual Animal Alphabet (2021)

Carol Schwarztott, ABC of Birds (2020). A curious mix of traditions: Cornell box, stamp art, leporello, miniature and pocket pages.

Borje Svensson and James Diaz, Animals (1982). Alphabet block meets tunnel book.

Sharon Werner & Sharon Forss, Alphabeasties (2009). Twenty-six lessons in typography and typographic artistry.

Christopher Wormell, An Alphabet of Animals (1990). A brilliant revival and extension of the lettering and pictorial style found in Fall and Nicholson.

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Books On Books Collection – Nancy Anderson Trottier

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The Alphabet Effect (2013)

The Alphabet Effect (2013)
Nancy Anderson Trottier
Double-sided meander fold. 630 x 630 mm. 24 panels. Edition of 15. Acquired from Bromer Booksellers, 2 August 2022.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.

This miniature reproduces a larger unique artist’s book created by Nancy Anderson Trottier. Bound in marbled boards with ribbon ties, the small book’s text concerning art and philosophy meanders among stamped signs and symbols and calligraphed letters of the alphabet printed on both sides of a single sheet cut and following the meander fold structure. When the “pages” are unfolded and rearranged into the single sheet fully extended, the alphabet effect appears. To squeeze 26 letters into 24 panels, the letters e and f are paired on one panel, as are k and l on another.

Books On Books Collection – Lloyd L. Neilson

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An Alphabet Coloring Book by Theodore Menten (1997)

An Alphabet Coloring Book by Theodore Menten (1997)
Juniper Von Phitzer
Miniature leporello. Closed: H64 x W52 mm. 8 pages. Limited edition. Acquired from Book Lair, 30 October 2022.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.

Lloyd L. Neilson, founder of Juniper Von Phitzer Press, compiled its name from those of his three cats, a sure sign of his sense of humor. This one signals that, like the cats, its humor was patient on the hunt. Theodore Menten had produced a coloring book called The Illuminated Alphabet in 1971 for Dover Publications. After a quarter century, Juniper Von Phitzer could not fail to pounce, capture and deposit the ultimate trophy: a miniature alphabet coloring book with a faux crayon. It was a limited edition, but individual copies could be distinguished by the color of the plastic crayon. The Books On Books Collection is proud to have this particular copy with its red crayon honoring the tradition of rubrication in medieval manuscripts.

The archives of Juniper Von Phitzer Press reside at Indiana University, several universities and institutions hold copies of its numerous alphabet miniatures, and Neilson’s dedication to the craft (and his cats) was honored with a miniature gilt-stamped bibliography from the equally humorously named Opuscula Press [opuscula = small or minor literary or musical works].

Albuquerque: Opuscala Press, 1999. 149pp. One of 75 copies. A playful and reflective bibliography, s...

Juniper Von Phitzer Press: A Bibliography (1999)
Robert F. Orr Hanson

Books On Books Collection – Ornan Rotem

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A Typographic Abecedarium (2015)

A Typographic Abecedarium (2015)
Ornan Rotem
Perfect bound in a softcover case. H174 x W176 mm. 136 pages 1 poster (64 x 48 cm, folded to 16 x 16 cm). Acquired from Devils in the Detail Ltd, 14 March 2023.
Photos of the book: Books On Books Collection. Displayed with permission of the artist.

Ornan Rotem calls his book a “photo-typographic essay … a meditation … [e]xploring the relationship between typography and the visual world around us ….” As shown in the double-page spread below, his meditation is shaped across a four dimensional views of the letterform: the four-dimensional, three-dimensional, two-dimensional and the one-dimensional. At the end of the essay, there are 26 miniature essays that will send the reader back to enjoy each letter’s four dimensional entries again.

Everywhere you look you can see an E smiling at you (just saying it induces a smile). In 1969, Georges Perec, whose own name has four Es, tried exorcising the E by writing an esoteric 300-page novel, La disparition, without ever using one. I wonder how he would have felt had he come across this E — which was shot in Paris — when he was writing the novel. ¶ If you want to endow letters with character, then I suppose E would be the lively sort, hence the printed form comes from a 1948 cover of LIFE magazine.

Much is packed into these miniature essays. Naturally for an artist’s book celebrating type, there are the necessary self-referential typographic puns in the one above: character and sort. In all, there is the evidence of the long, multi-place, multi-source contemplative gestation of the work. In the example above, the allusion to Perec’s novel leads to the 1969 photo in Paris (or was it vice versa?). The typographic puns lead to a search for an E from a LIFE cover (again, or was it vice versa?). This circular connectedness over time, text and image highlights the self-referentiality of the genre of the artist’s book.

While the dense allusiveness might suggest that this is a work limited to an adult audience, A Typographic Abecedarium does find favor with a younger audience — no doubt because it speaks to the phenomenon of seeing letters everywhere and in multiple dimensions.

Physical Poetry Alphabet (2018)

Physical Poetry Alphabet (2018)
Douglas & Françoise Kirkland and designed by Ornan Rotem
Casebound, illustrated paper over boards. Acquired from Sylph Editions, 18 March 2023. Photos: Screenshots displayed with permission of the publisher.

Physical Poetry Alphabet (2018) is a curious work. The Thames & Hudson-style production values combined with the knowledgeable essay in it by Ornan Rotem makes one think of Andrew Robinson’s The Story of Writing, an actual Thames & Hudson book. While the acrobatics of Erika Lemay echo the longstanding tradition of modeling the letters with the human body, followed by Erté, Vítězslav Nezval, Anthon Beeke and Rowland Scherman and so ingeniously summarized by Lisa Merkin, Lemay’s elaborate costumes and the scene design echo the traditions of Hollywood, Las Vegas and the fashion industry, which is not surprising given the involvement of Douglas Kirkland, portrait photographer to the stars. A Typographic Abecedarium strikes its singular target of “photo-typographic essay”. Having too many targets, Physical Poetry Alphabet perhaps misses its several bull’s eyes, but to follow along with its mixed metaphors, it undeniably delivers a shop full of eye candy.

Books On Books

Curated by Robert Bolick

Book Art

Books On Books Collection – Leonard Brett

A Surrealist Alphabet (2014)

Further Reading

Books On Books Collection – Kitty Maryatt and Scripps College Students

Arch (2010)

Further Reading

Books On Books Collection – Erwin Huebner

Alphabeta Concertina Majuscule (2015)

alphabet concertina miniscule (2022)

Micrographia Revisited (2017)

Further Reading

Alphabets Alive! – ABCs in Miniature

Online Exhibition Bonus!

Return to List of Displays in Alphabets Alive!

Alphabets Alive! – Calligraphy and Design

Online Exhibition Bonus!

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Alphabets Alive! – Alphabets All Around

Online Exhibition Bonus!

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Alphabets Alive! – Animals

Online Exhibition Bonus!

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Books On Books Collection – Nancy Anderson Trottier

The Alphabet Effect (2013)

Further Reading

Books On Books Collection – Lloyd L. Neilson

An Alphabet Coloring Book by Theodore Menten (1997)

Further Reading

Books On Books Collection – Ornan Rotem

A Typographic Abecedarium (2015)

Physical Poetry Alphabet (2018)

Further Reading