ABC of Birds (2020) Carol Schwartzott Cabinet of curiosity housing a miniature book in paste paper slipcase; double-sided leporello of transparent vellum pockets holding collaged cards. Book measures 2 x 3 x 1.5 inches. 28 pocket pages (collages, title page and colophon). Book in edition of 25, of which this is #13. “Cabinet of Curiosity” is one of five. Acquired from Vamp & Tramp, 4 January 2022. Photos: Books On Books Collection. Displayed with artist’s permission.
The cabinet of curosity recalls Joseph Cornell’s box constructions, and while the cards’ collages may extend that influence, they differ from it sufficiently in intensity of color (having been scanned for printing and “touched up” with pencils or over colored), incorporation of an abecedary and use of an unusual variant on the leporello to distinguish the work as Schwartzott’s. She writes:
The collages themselves were done as original art, each 4 x 6″ centered on a larger sheet of Rives BFK. There are 26 of these. All are reduced to miniature format, and a graphic letter in an interesting font completes the image. Each of these little cards can be removed from the book.
The trimmed edges of the cards give them the appearance of oversized postage stamps, appropriate for the album-style binding and their removability for philatelic-like examination.
Alphabet Bird Collection (2009) Shelli Ogilvy Dustjacket, casebound paper over board, sewn, single-color doublures. H215 x W215 mm. 56 unnumbered pages. Acquired from Hay-on-Wye Booksellers, 16 December 2022. Photos: Books on Books Collection. Displayed with permission of the artist.
In Alphabet Bird Collection, each double-page spread features the letter of the alphabet, a bird representing it, a couplet followed by prose to describe the bird’s distinctive behavior and habitat, and, beneath, a musical staff with an attempt to represent a sample of each bird’s song or call. Unifying each double-page spread is its own full-bleed background color. The primary distinguishing feature of this abecedary, however, is Shelli Ogilvy’s artwork — original paintings of each bird. Ogilvy works primarily with acrylic on canvas or paper, sometimes combining mediums of chalk, ink, and spray paint into her work.
Instead of concluding with XYZ as with other abecedaries, this entry concludes with a favorite bird.
For another instance of magpie obsession, see Nick Wonham’s The Charm of Magpies (2018).
L’Alphabet Zinzin (2011) Zazie Sazonoff Casebound, paper over board. H370 x W280 mm. 52 unnumbered pages. Acquired from Amazon, 31 January 2022. Photos: Books On Books Collection. Displayed with permission of Nathalie Sazonoff.
Zazie Sazonoff describes herself as a metteur en scène d’objets. Like mise en scène, it is an expression that is difficult to translate. It is easier to point at her works and say, “There, that’s what a metteur en scène d’objets does”. With its arrangement of toys from the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s on the verso page, L’Alphabet Zinzin presents uppercase, lowercase and lowercase cursive letters on the recto pages and a variety of words beginning with the relevant letter. Zinzin means crazy or zany. As part of France’s National Education’s literature reference list for cycle 1, L’Alphabet Zinzin‘s zaniness must engage the imaginations of its young audience.
“Zany” was a frequent fallback for the letter Z in English abecedaries of the 18th and 19th centuries, but this is a whole zany alphabet that should engage the imaginations of an older audience, too. There seems to be something more going on: Flick the pages back and forth quickly and you might think you are catching the objects moving into place. Are there activities or untold stories behind the scenes?
On Sazonoff’s website, you can find under Projets two works that suggest influences from Man Ray, Luis Buñuel and film noir: Rêve: livre animé and Têtes à queue: roman graphique, but the titles and recurrence of paper pop-ups show the continued grounding of her art in the book form. Petites Curiosités, under the section Art, suggest the influence of Joseph Cornell, perhaps the founding genius of the mise-en-scène in assemblage of found objects. With these works as context, L’Alphabet Zinzin teeters on the cusp of becoming an artist’s book. It certainly compares favorably with Peter Blake’s ABC (2009) and Leslie Haines’ Animal Abecedary(2018).
26 Voices / January Interlude (2020) Karl Kempton Sewn booklet. H190 x W177 mm. 28 pages. Edition of 60 unnumbered. Acquired from Derek Beaulieu, 4 January 2021. Photos of the work: Books On Books Collection. Displayed with permission of the artist.
Derek Beaulieu deserves a vote of thanks for bringing this work back into print, even if for a limited edition. 26 Voices / January Interlude first appeared under the title Rune 2: 26 voices/ january interlude as number 10 in Robert Caldwell’s Typewriter series, published by Bird in the Bush Press (1980). In the Acknowledgements, Kempton writes that the series “was composed in January, 1978 in 28 days. After the letter K the flow stopped until a dream of L’s form arrived unblocking the flow”.
The series of patterns, each made from an upper case letter of the alphabet typed over and over, range in appearance — some like Amish quilts, some like Byzantine rugs, some like Celtic knots, but like snowflakes, no two alike. Given how some pairs of letters are mirror images of each other (bd, pq) or inverse (bp, dq), you would expect some close affinity in their two patterns, but no. No pairs of those patterns look at all alike. You would also be mistaken to expect a pattern to reflect the letter that constitutes it. Instead, you find one pattern resembling the letter X, but it is made of letter U’s. There are naturally some similarities between patterns at the broadest level — E and N, L and M or R and S — but these have little to do with the letters themselves, and the similarity recedes as details come to the fore or falls into the background with illusory three dimensionality. The shapes are not rune like, but individually and sequentially, they have the associative dream-like qualities of runes.
A close up
Double-page spread B&C
B close up
C close up
Center double-page spread N&O
Double-page spread X&Y
X close up
Y close up
Z close up
Actual runes appear in the following work, similarly in black and white and with similarly illusory three dimensionality. Not technically in the Books On Books Collection, playground (2013-14) can be found online. Surprisingly, it has not been in print.
playground (2013-14)
playground (2013-14) karl kempton Online, 78 pages (screens). Accessed 7 August 2022. Screenshots reproduced with permission.
What an opportunity for collaborators to join with Kempton to produce playground in different editions varying in color (black and white, red and white, green and white, blue and white, etc.), in paper (handmade, watercolor, washi, high gloss, matte, etc.) and in binding (accordion, stab binding, case bound, scroll, etc.). Perhaps such an extravaganza is not in keeping with Kempton’s style and approach over the years, but this playground is such an invitation to play.
Games and sports are depicted together with letters and punctuation marks on platforms made of the musical staff or stave, all of which offer Kempton multiple means of metaphor. FIrst, inked martial arts figures break a K of karate boards. Then, a baseball player bats the dot of a lowercase i into the air. A basketball player jumps and aims at a basket formed of a half note. A golfer chips toward a half-note hole flagged with a pennant bearing the treble clef G. A boxer punches the bowl of a large P.
The images become more worked as the book proceeds. A weightlifter atop a lowercase e lifts a set of weights composed of the umlaut above the e, and the shadow of the image is cast across the stave lines behind the letter. Shadows of gymnasts appear behind an uppercase G, lowercase o and lowercase i.
Animation sequences occur, such as the platform diver leaping from the body of a lowercase i and creating an exclamation-point splash in a pool formed by a circle that widens across the stave as the diver submerges.
Around the same time of playground‘s inception, this combination of letters and musical notation found expression among other artists: for example, Jim Avignon & Anja Lutz in Neoangin: Das musikalische ABC (2014) and Bernard Heidsieck in Abécédaire n° 6 clef de sol : été 2007 (2015). Metaphorically linking textual expression, if not individual letters of the alphabet, with musical scores goes back at least as far as Stéphane Mallarmé’s Un Coup de Dés Jamais N’Abolira le Hasard (1897) and carries forward into explicit linkage by Michalis Pichler (2009) and Rainier Lericolais (2009) in their works of homage to Un Coup de Dés.
To return to Kempton’s playground, an interlude occurs to associate the alphabet with magnetism, then breaks off to return to the games motif, this time in the form of winter sports. The musical notation motif is still there, but Kempton modifies it with a piano keyboard at both ends of the stave and with manicules fingering the keyboards at both ends while articulating a variation on sign language. Musically and metaphorically, matters become more complex with the introduction of two pairs of staves, pyramids of squares and circles and one manicule using the lowercase i to bring back the magnetism interlude.
From here on, additional motifs are developed, and words and phrases appear: a physics experiment punningly labeled “period piece”, a night game lit by inverted question and exclamation marks, and juxtaposed opposites (“covered/uncovered” and “sunrise/sunset”).
All these motifs, textual and visual puns, and images seem concerned with the development of symbols for interpreting the world and communicating that interpretation. With the appearance on black background of an exclamation mark with an open book inside its point, then a pair of rectangles each suspended by the sentence “volumes lines speak / lines speak volumes”, an animated sequence begins an extended narrative drawing everything together.
After the descending hand squeezes out the yin yang symbol onto the stave from the image of an open book, Kempton joins this theme of interconnected opposite forces with the development of language, which is where the runes come in, held in an unclosed fist. Eventually the book concludes with an open pair of hands, centered on reversed-out stave/keyboards and holding a point of light radiant against the blackness.
The Charm of Magpies (2018) Nick Wonham Casebound, cloth spine and paper over boards with specially printed flyleaves from Roger Grech at his Papercut Bindery. H370 x W260 mm. 27 pages unnumbered. Edition of 160 copies, of which this is #98. Acquired from Incline Press, 1 August 2022. Photos: Books On Books Collection.
A long admiration for magpies has always threatened to crowd the Books On Books Collection beyond this beautiful work from Nick Wonham and Incline Press and the relief sculpture in paper by Calvin Nichols below. But one pair of works will have to be enough for joy.
Iridescence(2016) Calvin Nicholls Acquired from the artist, 1 September 2016. Photo: Courtesy of the artist.
On the Incline Press website, Graham Moss and his team write:
Collective nouns … A parliament of magpies has to be a favourite, especially if you’ve heard a group of them cackling together in the Springtime. But we prefer the alternative, a charm of magpies, which certainly suits this poem better. It is one version of a folk rhyme which has many local variants, all superstitiously foretelling the future through random occurrence.…
Magpies are often known a thugs in the garden, stealing eggs and chasing off their more delicate rivals. As printers, though, we have a fondness for them because of their “ink on paper” plumage and their latin name pica pica, which recalls the printshop unit of measure.
Left to right: Joseph Crawhall (1884), William Nicholson (1898), C.B. Falls (1930) and Christopher Wormell (1995).
As Moss and team point out on their site, the Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes does not include the magpies among the counting rhymes, which is odd with so many versions to be had. Birdspot, formerly British Bird Lovers, favors Nick Wonham’s chosen version. For magpies interested in shiny trivia, the site also provides a link to a BBC television program whose theme song was based on the magpie rhyme. It was “composed and played by the Spencer Davis Group under the alias The Murgatroyd Band, just after Steve Winwood had left to join the supergroup Blind Faith with Eric Clapton, Ginger Baker, and Ric Grech”.
And to note just one touch of Nick Wonham’s subtlety, here is the page before the colophon. In all the other images, the magpies are roosting. This one in flight is also the only one in black and white. A brilliant “The End”.
Postscript: In correspondence, the artist has provided further insight on influences and his handling of color:
A note on the colour – the biggest influence on this was Rigby Graham, whose work Graham Moss introduced me to through the Old Stile Press book Kippers and Sawdust. Graham had just printed my first book, which had black and white linocuts, and was trying to inspire me to try colour. It worked; I was blown away by the majestic woodcuts and aspired to create books in a similar vein. Rigby liked an unusually coloured sky, he also liked to position his illustrations through the book so that the colours of prints on adjacent pages contrasted with each other to create dynamism and visual interest, something I have attempted in my book. Correspondence with Books On Books Collection, 9 September 2022.
Wonham also adopts and owns a compositional feature from Rigby Graham’s Kippers and Sawdust: the juxtaposition of the mechanical and the natural. His ownership is particularly apparent in his setting for the rhyme’s seventh verse.
UN COUP DE DÉS JAMAIS N’ABOLIRA LE HASARD — ESPACE (2012)
UN COUP DE DÉS JAMAIS N’ABOLIRA LE HASARD — ESPACE (2012) Richard Nash Hand-cut concertina with inkjet printed turn-in cover. Closed: H286 x W204 mm; Open: W 11.2m. Unique. Acquired from the artist for donation to the Bodleian Library, 2 April 2022. Photos: Courtesy of Richard Nash; Books On Books Collection. Permission to display from the artist.
Credit goes to Rafaella della Olga’s Constellation (2009) for being the first homage to Un Coup de Dés to remind us that constellations appear against the blackness of space, not the whiteness of paper. But the first to apply this reminder in 180gsm Jet Black Canford paper to a double homage to Mallarmé’s poem and Marcel Broodthaers‘ version is Richard Nash’s Un Coup de Dés Jamais N’Abolira le Hasard — Espace(2012).
The preface
The opening pages
COMME SI … COMME SI spread
Additional photos courtesy of Richard Nash.
On the flyleaf, Nash has added his own verse entitled “Espace”, which set in Didot Regular is equally a typographic and poetic . Espace has a monumentality to it that encourages imagining it at a larger scale in different material; for example, a sculpture of cut steel painted black, installed along a seaside strand and backlit at night. In that evocative physical characteristic, Nash’s homage evokes the oracular and vatic tone of
RIEN / N’AURA EU LIEU / QUE LE LIEU / EXCEPTÉ / PEUT-ÊTRE / UNE CONSTELLATION (“Nothing will have taken place but the place except perhaps a constellation”)
and
Toute pensée émet un Coup de Dés (“All thought emits a throw of the dice”).
On Innards (2015)
On Innards (2015) Amanda Couch, Mindy Lee, Andrew Hladky and Richard Nash Limited edition publication individually stamped and numbered, digitally printed and cut, folded, bound and finished by hand. H260 x W205 mm, 200 pages of various intersecting formats and custom binding. Limited edition of 200, of which this is #74. Acquired from Richard Nash, 2 April 2022. Photos: Courtesy of Richard Nash; Books On Books Collection. Permission to display from Richard Nash.
On Innards began as a multidisciplinary project to explore how the way we think of guts and digestion has changed, how that might drive the creative process, and how it affects our sense of self. Book art and the human body (interior and exterior) are no strangers. Carolee Schneemann’s Parts of a Body House Book (1972/2020), Ron King’s Turn Over Darling (1994) and Matisse’s Model (1996), Joyce Cutler Shaw’s The Anatomy Lesson: Unveiling the Fasciculus Medicinae (2004) and Casey Gardner’s Body of Inquiry: A Triptych Opening to a Corporeal Codex (2011) among others come to mind. On Innards introduces a very different level of intimacy though — one not for the squeamish or scatologically averse.
Artists Amanda Couch, Mindy Lee and Andrew Hladky initiated the the project and presented initial results in a panel held at the interdisciplinary conference “Body Horror” in Athens, in 2013. Subsequently, Richard Nash joined the project to curate an exhibition and event in 2014, which included text by Carlo Comanducci, Giskin Day, Dr. Simon Gabe, Nathaniel Storey, and Jamie Sutcliffe; performance by Kerry Gallagher; and illustration by Jenny Pengilly. Drawing together the output and record of the project, Nash created this hybrid research journal and artists’ book, launched at the Whitechapel London Art Book Fair in 2015.
Like Espace, this work displays Nash’s sculptural approach to text, graphics, ideas and the book as raw material for an artistic creation. The bookwork interweaves, concertinas, folds out, pops up, gate-folds, roll-folds and unwinds. Used to reveal reflections on the project, recalled events, artefacts, images, and stories from the conference, these various “book innards” become an embodiment of digestion. It also somewhat resembles an expandable file folder, its contents secured by a long looping slip-knotted red thread sewn through a heavy card spine pasted to red endpapers that are pasted to brown cover papers. Despite the resemblance to a landscape portfolio, the contents proceed in portrait codex fashion with the tabbed half-title “page” below. The half-title, however, is the first panel of a double-sided accordion that extends from that tabbed half-title page all the way to the last (also tabbed) page of the book (also below). When the half-title turns, it reveals a description of the contents (also below) printed on the double-sided accordion.
Landscape view of the spine and external thread binding.
Portfolio view of endpaper and half-title page. Note the glimpse in the center of the spine’s interior.
Left: The verso page or panel gives a description of the contents of the double-sided accordion. Right: last panel of the double-sided accordion.
The valleys of the double-sided accordion hold the various other parts of the book, some of which are secured in their valleys by the red thread’s looping over and down their centers, and some of which are secured by being folded around or over the thread-secured parts. The dimensions of those parts vary, and other parts lie loose. This can lead to the guts of the book spilling out, surely not an accident! Nor is it necessarily a bad thing, for reading the other side of the accordion requires removing all of the contents from the binding.
The first interleaved artefacts and images come from Amanda Couch and Mindy Lee. Couch’s first item is a passe-partout construction displaying at the start “Organ-Offal Caecum Andouillette” (2015) and at the end “Organ-Offal Stomach-Tripe” (2015). The passe-partouts combine black-and-white photos of anatomical engravings with color photos of the gut (see above), and between them is a photo of an annotated recipe for beginner’s tripe or chitterlings. Her second item (see below) is a pamphlet entitled “Reflection on Digestion: The Mouth” (2013), recounting and illustrating a presentation/performance/tasting of a serving of tongue that Couch gave during the “Body Horror” conference.
Lee’s contributions appear (also below) on the larger pages embraced by and interleaved with Couch’s two items. The images display photographs of works entitled Better Out than In: Venus VI, IV & X (2012) and Splatter Platter (2009). In Better Out, Lee’s “canvasses” are paper plates, but the perspective from which Venus is perceived suggests the underside of a closed, soiled toilet seat.
Couch’s “Reflection on Digestion” pamphlet interleaved with photos of Lee’s Better Out than In series.
Detail from photo of Lee’s Splatter-Platter; enclosing page from Couch’s annotated and illustrated recipe for tripe.
Andrew Hladky’s contributions are prints of three-dimensional works made of oil and bamboo sticks on wood panels ranging from 3 inches to 10 inches in depth. To capture this, On Innards delivers the print of It ain’t us yet its in us. Its looking out thru our eye hoals (2015) as a pop-up box (see below), and the prints of Well, This is Goodbye (2007-15) and The Clearing (2011-14) are cut and folded such that they spill out well beyond the trim size of the portfolio (also below).
Hladky’s It ain’t us yet its in us. Its looking out thru our eye hoals (original work 12 x 18 x 10 inches). The other side of this box also bears a print of a detail view of the work.
Haldky’s Well, This is Goodbye (original work 8.5 x 10.5 x 3 inches)
Hladky’s The Clearing unfolded (original work 61.5 x 43.5 x 6.5 inches), with Giskin Day’s “End Notes” interleaved.
As mentioned, some works are loose inserts, but some of the loose inserts are folded over a panel of the core double-sided accordion. Nash uses that structural feature to emphasize one of the hallmarks of book art: self-reflexivity. Below, straddling a mountain fold in the core double-sided accordion is another double-sided accordion. On one side, there is a photo of Couch’s Entrail Troyen (2014), a three-dimensional tube knitted from leftover cured saucisson sec shredded into ribbon-like thread. The title is derived from the French sausage Andouillette de Troyes, which harks back to the pamphlet “Reflection on Digestion: The Mouth” (2013) and its andouillette and chitterlings.
In case the reader misses the connection to the earlier item, the other side of this double-sided accordion presents a condensed photo of Couch’s nine-meter long accordion book entitled Reflection on Digestion (2012), a continuous line of handwriting looping back and coiling like the villi of intestines (see the cover of On Innards), relief printed from photo polymer plates on 410 gsm white Somerset satin paper. Couch uses this work in her reading performances of the same name. (Did I mention self-reflexivity?)
Loose double-sided accordion fold item displaying Couch’s Entrail Troyen on one side and Reflection on Digestion on the other.
Continued commentary on and illustration of this addition to the Books On Books Collection would be to regurgitate the whole work, which is certainly the opposite direction the work takes and which would be unfair to the work’s artists and contributors. After all, On Innards is a limited edition, and as many copies as possible should be ingested by as many institutions possible that are intent on improving their clientele’s digestion of book art.
Signature page concluding the “bibliographical” brochure summarizing the project, sponsors, conference, Blyth Gallery event and the artists’ book in hand, providing its colophon and listing sources and works displayed; penultimate page of the core double-sided accordion.
The New Manifesto of the NewLights Press (third iteration) (2017)
The New Manifesto of the NewLights Press (third iteration) (2017) Aaron Cohick Booklet, saddle-stapled, risograph, letterpress/collagraph, and hand painting. H165.1 x W139.7 mm (closed), 20 pages. #000611, unlimited, iterative edition. Acquired from New Lights Press, 11 December 2020. Photos: Books On Books Collection. Displayed with permission of the artist.
The New Manifesto of the NewLights Press (third iteration) has multiple starting points. Even in its first iteration, we have
The book is a dangerously unstable object, always between, continuously opening. It is interstitial, occupying many planes at once.
Digital technology has killed the book, finally.
The book is an impossible thing — comprised entirely of edges and full of holes. It moves. It happens in between.
Readers move through authors and books. Books move through readers and authors. Authors move through books and readers. They exist between each other’s pages. They only exist in between.
The form of the book, the history of the book, and the processes involved in its production provide a foundation for rethinking and re-evaluating the dominant discourse(s) of contemporary art.
The book … exemplifies a model that expands beyond form and content…. It is a field, whose axis points [form, content, production and reception] are always held in tension. In this model a piece or practice is a “zone of activity.”
Moreover, there are ten refinements on these starting points, touching on Julia Kristeva’s “intertextuality”, Roland Barthes’ “death of the author”, Michel Foucault’s “death of the book” and much more in the same vein. Each iteration even has diagram and footnotes, underscoring the academic nature of the starting points.
By its third iteration, The New Manifesto‘s words been further refined as a combination of announcement, exposition, lyric and prayer. It soars beyond literary theories and finds birds of a closer feather among Ulises Carrión and Michalis Pichler.
The book is a dangerously unstable object // It is a series of edges // Once clustered and knotted // Now open and spreading // Now cutting and bending // Mostly // The book betrays // Mostly // The book howls // The book falls apart in the face of our anguish // In the face of our quiet // In the silence of our slipping // Mostly // It will also always be something else // That we did not // Can not yet // See // The book is a remarkable technology // It is a shimmering substance // It is a noise of the hands and thought // The book is perhaps now a dead thing // In the hands of the dead // So be it // We never mattered much anyway // Beyond our capacity to consume // Our capacity to labor // We are fuel // So be it // We remain in the dark // With these books // The original autonomous window technology that is us looking through // At // In // Against // With care // The book returns our labor to us //
If a new edition of Publishing Manifestos is ever issued, Cohick’s hortatory words should be considered. The words, however, cannot be considered alone. Over the three iterations, The New Manifesto — the only one in the collection and, therefore, the only one tangible for the visitor — has “participated more & more in the world of visual art”. Cohick’s use of the collagraphic technique increases. It adds painterliness to the booklets as well as a sense of depth and spatial play within the page, across the gutter and from recto to verso pages. In a series of online essays for the College Book Art Association, Cohick confirms the pleasure and intent here:
Collagraph is a well-known technique and is usually taught as part of introductory letterpress courses. It has an immediacy and fidelity that is very exciting—you can stick a leaf or other flat object to a block, print it, and get a decent image of that object. Unfortunately it usually stops there. Those flat objects are hard to push beyond that initial single-color print. Linoleum, photopolymer, wood and metal type, and to some extent woodcut are all made to be “neutral” printing surfaces—flat and smooth. Trying to get collagraph to be flat and smooth begs the question: why use collagraph at all? In collagraph the material that makes the plate is not neutral—the material is exactly the point. That embrace of material and its many, varied effects and marks is what moves collagraph closer to the direct markmaking of drawing/painting. It makes all of those “unacceptable” (or abject?) marks readily available. Relief collagraph printed with letterpress equipment can be a method of painting or drawing in multiple, with control as good as—if not better than, but also different from—the hand. “You’re doing it all wrong (Part 2)“
From the first iteration of the manifesto, black & white details of Jan Van Eyck’s The Arnolfini Marriage appear and are manipulated on the cover and throughout. Although they recede in the second iteration, they move strikingly to the fore in the third. Constantly alongside the Arnolfini details has been the ampersand, enlarged, reversed, in different colors, and present — almost ornamentally — within the text line. The increased visuality of the third iteration announces itself on the booklet’s cover and inside with the grainy enlarged detail of the mirror from The Arnolfini Marriage. What do the Arnolfini details signify? Although Van Eyck’s original itself is straightforwardly representational, its meanings are not always any clearer than that of its use in Cohick’s collage. With his slices of black (“a series of edges”) obscuring the image of the groom, perhaps Cohick is compounding obscurities to present “something else // That we did not // Can not yet // See”.
And what about the large overlapping ampersands in red and gray, systematically reversed and alternating in color? Are they emphasizing the “and so on and so on” of tradition in Cohick’s painterly printing technique? Are they alluding to the joining of hands in the marriage? Are they alluding to, and performing, a marriage of the book and visual art? On a verso page in the manifesto’s first iteration, he writes, “The form of the book, the history of the book, and the processes involved in its production provide a foundation for rethinking and re-evaluating the dominant discourse(s) of contemporary art.” On the facing recto page, the Arnolfini bride in reverse from the original extends her hand to a reversed ampersand.
In perhaps the most important enhancement of the third iteration’s visuality, Cohick’s full-blown typographic redesign of the alphabet occupies the visual foreground, middle ground and background. It is as if Cohick sets out to demonstrate Mallarmé’s proposition that the book is the “total expansion of the letter”. The first iteration’s completely legible Palatino, Arial and Placard Condensed typefaces used in the text line have yielded to what Cohick calls a “dislegible” font, which he often reverses, lays out as occasional “running sides” rather than “running heads”, and subjects increasingly to collagraphic layering. In his “You’re doing it all wrong” series, Cohick explains:
If “legible” and “illegible” are binary opposites, then the term “dislegible” is about looking at the space between those two poles. Dislegibility displaces, dislocates, deforms, and/or disrupts the process of reading, with the ultimate goal of making that process of reading (dis)legible to the reader. The dislegible can be read, but it resists closure or certainty. “You’re doing it all wrong (Part 1)“
Also contributing to dislegibility is the reversal of images, the ampersand and letters. More than that, the reversal reminds us of what is involved in letterpress production — the inked relief surface and its reversed image or letter to be transferred to paper. Always in tension with form, content and reception, production makes up the open field from which the artist’s book emerges. The third iteration exudes production’s physicality. A black saturated endleaf bleeds over onto a stark white sheet that faces a stamped title page, intensifying a feel of mechanical working. Letterforms behave as so much raw material — as if they were oil, acrylic, brick or mortar — to be re-seen from different angles, noted for more than one function and their text read for more than one meaning.
According to Cohick, “For art to thrive, form and content must be in a dynamic relationship… It must contain enough disruptions, ambiguities, and peculiarities to resist the deadly state of stable signification.” The iterations of The New Manifesto enact that statement.
Alphabet One: A Submanifesto of the NewLights Press (2017)
Alphabet One: A Submanifesto of the NewLights Press (2017) Aaron Cohick Booklet, center-stapled. Letterpress printed from woven collagraph blocks on newsprint. H165 x W140 mm, 28 pages. Acquired from the artist, 11 December 2020. Edition of 250, unnumbered. Photos: Books On Books Collection, displayed with permission of the artist.
Alphabet One, “companion book to the third iteration of The New Manifesto of the NewLights Press”, presents Cohick’s “complete ‘noise’ alphabet, in order, in condensed and full form”. In The New Manifesto, Cohick has described the book as “a noise of the hands and thought”. Well then, being a book, Alphabet One demonstrates that the manifesto is the alphabet, and the alphabet is the manifesto, and “woven collagraph blocks” could hardly be less “a noise of hands and thought”. Lest those inferences seem strained, continue reading the passage Cohick reproduces from The New Manifesto immediately after the reference to the “complete ‘noise’ alphabet”:
This is not a utopian program // This is not an alphabet for saving the world // Such a thing is a dangerous lie // This is one possibility // Not a tool // But a movement-between // An object-between // A growing // Changing thing // Meant to do just that // It is about attention and its revitalization // It is about structure and our being in it //
A, B, C, D. Photos: Books On Books Collection.
W, X, Y, Z. Photos: Books On Books Collection.
It cannot be an accident that the “noise” alphabet’s letterforms arise from varyingly shaded bricks: rose, gray, reddish gray and reddish black. To left and right of each letter, the rose color dominates. A reddish gray bar tops and tails each letter. The color gray forms the “strokes” of each letter. Reddish black fills the counters. Extracting the signal from the noise of the alphabet or books does not come easily. This is intentional. Just as The New Manifesto says,
With these books // The original autonomous window technology that is us looking through // At // In // Against // With care //The book returns our labor to us //
Days Open Air (2016)
Days Open Air(2016) Aaron Cohick Booklet, center-stapled, H203 x W152, 12 pages. Edition of 100, of which this is #40. Acquired from the artist, 11 December 2020. Photos: Books On Books Collection, displayed with artist’s permission.
Days Open Air is one of those books returning our labor to us that The New Manifesto announces. Cohick call it “an artists’ book/poem thing … an experiment: with our new Risograph, with the alphabet, with writing, with random numbers, and with noise.” Letterforms stretch. Words run sideways, they break in the middle across lines, even across pages.
Look-See (REAED) (2014)
Look-See (REAED) (2014) Aaron Cohick Print. H300 x W456 mm. Photos: Books On Books Collection, displayed with artist’s permission.
More evocative of barcode stripes than bricks, the letterform strokes in this poem-print-poster stretch even more than in Days Open Air. Printed on a Vandercook 219 from vinyl and gesso collagraph blocks, the letterforms challenge us to “look” and “see”. An angle at the top right, two angles midway on the right and two counters condensed to small squares suffice to define the first letter — R. The letters E and A are more efficient, requiring only the placement of two counters each. Note how the textural effect of the gesso and letterpress printed collagraph on chipboard joins The New Manifesto‘s celebration of the physicality and noise of production.
In Cohick’s world, the book and art make, and should be perceived as, a “strange” continuity. His vision and embrace of the collagraph suggest a 21st century version of William Blake. He names his nearer contemporaries as Ken Campbell, Walter Hamady, Amos P. Kennedy, Jr., Karen Kunc, Emily McVarish, Dieter Roth and Nancy Spero. In the Books On Books Collection, those far and near can also be found in Eleonora Cumer, Raffaella della Olga and Geofroy Tory.
Alphabet (1970) Timothy Epps and Christopher Evans Booklet. 250 x 250 mm, 16 pages. Acquired from Antiquariaat Frans Melk, 23 November 2020. Photos: Books On Books Collection.
This is the alphabet that inspired Raffaella della Olga’s LINE UP (2020), also in this collection. At the UK’s National Physical Laboratory, Epps and Evans created their alphabet in 1969 in response to the challenge to overcome machine-readable typefaces’ human-unreadability. Perhaps because it was the second of three responses to Wim Crouwel‘s New Alphabet (1967), published in the Kwadraatblad/Quadrat-prints series, the Dutch graphic designer and series editor, Pieter Brattinga, snatched it up for publication in his series of experiments in printing ranging over the fields of graphic design, the plastic arts, literature, architecture and music. This particular issue was designed by John Stegmeijer at Total Design.
While the bright blue (above left) stands out strikingly against the black background, the booklet appropriately makes the human eye strain to see the letters darkly printed against the black. Would a scanner pick them up? Does the similar elusive effect created by debossed printing in della Olga’s collaboration with Three Star Press allude to this as well? What would that ingenuity create if applied to Crouwel’s New Alphabet or to Gerard Unger‘s A Counter-Proposal (the first response to Crouwel’s booklet) or Anthon Beeke‘s Alphabet (the third and strangest response — letters composed of naked women)?
Univers Revolved: A Three-Dimensional Alphabet (2004)
Univers Revolved: A Three-Dimensional Alphabet (2004) Ji Lee Sewn paper on board hardback. H338 x W238 mm, 64 unnumbered pages. Acquired from Unoriginal Sins, 12 December 2020. Photos: Books On Books Collection.
In his extended essay on Stéphane Mallarmé’s Un Coup de Dés Jamais N’Abolira le Hasard, Eric Zboya celebrates Ji Lee’s 3D typeface by rendering the entire poem in that face. The discovery of that essay led to the acquisition of Zboya’s artist book, which led to the acquisition of Ji Lee’s scarce volume Univers Revolved: A Three-Dimensional Alphabet (2004). Lee’s book resonates with several other works in the Books On Books Collection. Compare it, for example, with Johann David Steingruber’s alphabet book Architectonisches Alphabeth (1773/1973), Paul Noble’s alphabet book Nobson Newtown (1998) and Sammy Engramer’s three-dimensional rendition of Mallarmé’s poem.
This double-page spread displays the manipulation of the alphabet’s first four letters around their axes at two different angles to render their 3D shapes.
These two double-page spreads show the complete alphabet and punctuation marks at two different angles, which provide a key with which to begin reading text spelled out in the book.
Lee teases his reader by composing sentences with different sized letters. “Reading is Fun!” is one of the easier to decipher.
I tried to “define the book” when I designed (one of my books) Cover to Cover hoping that the “reader” would have a multi-sensory experience of the nature of what she/he held in her/his hands. (from The Book: 101 Definitions)
Cover to Cover (1975)
Cover to Cover (1975) Michael Snow Cloth on board, sewn and casebound. H230 x W180 mm. 310 unnumbered pages. Published by Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. Unnumbered edition of 300. Acquired from Mast Books, 10 December 2020. Photos of the work: Books On Books Collection.
After a long search since first sight of it in 2016 at Washington, D.C.’s now defunct Corcoran Gallery library, the original hardback edition of Michael Snow’s Cover to Cover (1975) finally joins the Books On Books Collection. Thanks to Philip Zimmermann, more readers/viewers have the chance to experience Cover to Cover — if only through the screen — than the original’s 300 copies and Primary Information’s 1000 facsimile paperback copies will allow.
Amaranth Borsuk describes the work and experience of it in The Book(2018), as do Martha Langford in Michael Snow (2014), Marian Macken in Binding Spaces (2017) and Zimmermann in his comments for the exhibition “Book Show: Fifty Years of Photographic Books, 1968–2018” (for all, see links below). Like Chinese Whispers by Telfer Stokes and Helen Douglas and Theme and Permutation by Marlene MacCallum, Michael Snow’s Cover to Cover evokes an urge to articulate what is going, how the bookwork is re-imagining visual narrative, how it is making us look, and how it makes us think about our interaction with our environs and the structure of the book.
The already existing commentary about Cover to Cover sets a high hurdle for worthwhile additional words. One thing going on in the book, though, seems to have gone unremarked. Some critics have asserted that, other than its title on the spine, the book has no text. There is text, however. It occurs within what I would call the preliminaries, and they show us how to read the book.
On the front cover, we see a door from the inside. Then, on its pastedown endpaper, the author outside the door with his back to us.
Front cover; pastedown end paper and page “1”.
On turning the “inside door” (page “1” of the preliminaries), we see in small type a copyright assertion and the Library of Congress catalogue number appearing vertically along the gutter of pages “2-3” (a tiny clue as to what is going on).
Pages “2-3”
Over pages “4” through “14” from the same alternating viewpoints, the author reaches for the door handle, the door is seen opening from the inside, and the artist is seen walking through the door (from the outside) and into the room (from the inside). But who is recording these views?
Pages “10-11”, “12-13”, “14-15”
Over pages “16” through “24”, two photographers appear. Facing us, they are bent over their cameras — the one outside, clean shaven and wearing a short-sleeved shirt, is behind the author, and the one inside, bearded and wearing shorts, is in front of the author. As the author moves out of the frame, we see that the photographer inside is holding a piece of paper in his right hand. All of this occurs through the same alternating viewpoints. At page “21”, the corner of that paper descends into the frame of the inside photographer’s view of the outside photographer, and after the next switch in viewpoint that confirms what the inside photographer is doing, we see a completely white page “23”, presumably the blank sheet that is blocking the inside photographer’s camera aperture. Page “24” is the outside photographer’s view of the inside photographer whose face and camera are blocked by the piece of paper.
Pages “16-17”, pages “20-21” and pages “24-25”
After the sequence above, something stranger still happens: on the left, a photo of the inside photographer holding the blank paper in front of his face appears. We can tell it is a photo by the tip of the thumb holding it (look in the gutter) between pages “26 and 27”. It is the developed photo the outside photographer just took of the inside photographer with his face and camera hidden by the sheet of paper. The image on page “27” is the reverse of that photograph. We can tell by the fingers on the right holding it.
Pages “26-27”
We are looking at images of images. But on pages “30-31”, whose fingers are holding the image of images?
Pages “30-31”
From there on, we see images of this piece of paper being manipulated by one pair of hands. The thumbs appear on the verso (the view from the outside photographer’s perspective), the fingers on the recto (the view seen by the inside photographer). By page “34”, it has been flipped upside down (the inside photographer is standing on his head), and on page “35”, we see a close up of the blank reverse side of the paper being held between the two photographers. By page “37”, we can see the blank side of the photo paper being fed into a manual typewriter. The pair of hands feeding the paper into the typewriter cannot belong to one of the photographers. Who is the typist — the author?
Pages “34-35” and pages “36-37”
For both pages “42” and “43”, the perspective is that of a typist advancing the photo paper and typing the title page of the book. On both pages, we can see the ribbon holder in the same position. As it progresses, more and more of the outside photographer’s camera appears above the typed page. Page “45” presents itself as the full text of the book’s title page, curling away from the typist and revealing the inside photographer on the other side of the typewriter. Page “46” shows the upside-down view of the title page as it moves toward the inside photographer and reveals the outside photographer on the other side of the typewriter. Not only are we seeing images of images, we are witnessing the making of the book’s preliminaries.
Pages “42-43”, “44-45”, and “46-47”.
From page “48” through page “54”, the photographers alternate views of blank paper advancing through the typewriter. By pages “55” and “56”, the typewriter has moved out of the frame. Look carefully at page “56”, however, and you can see the impression of the typewriter’s rubber holders on the paper. As a book’s preliminaries come to a close, there is often a blank verso page before the start of the book. If Cover to Cover is following that tradition, page “56” is that blank page at the end of the preliminaries, and page “57”, showing a record player, is the start of the book.
Pages “56-57”.
Zimmermann notes that, at somewhere near the book’s midpoint, the images turn upside down, and that readers who then happen to “flip the book over and start paging from the back soon realize that they are looking at images of images produced by the two-sided system, and indeed the very book that they are holding in their hands”. He notes this as another mind-bender added to the puzzlement of the two-sided system with which the book begins. Yet the long set of preliminaries foretold us that the upside-downness, back-to-frontness and self-reflexivity of images of images were on their way. Without doubt, Cover to Cover is an iconic work of book art.
Further Reading
Afterimage (1970). No. 11, 1982/83. On the occasion of an exhibition of his films at Canada House in London, an entire issue on Snow’s work.
… Cover to Cover is the result of another distanced use of self in the course of art-making. Snow is subject/participant as he and his actions are observed and analyzed by two 35 mm cameras… simulataneously recording front and back, the images then placed recto-verso on the page… Snow is subject observed in the book at the same time that he is also choosing and making decisions about images. Cover to Cover in 360 pages, [sic] becomes a full circle — front door to back door or the reverse. The book is designed so that it can be read front to back and in such a way that one is forced to turn it around at its centre in order to carry on. Regina Cornwell in Snow Seen and “Posting Snow”, Luzern catalogue.
But as the scene “progresses,” an action is not completed within the spread, but loops back in the next one, so that the minimal “progress” extracted from reading left to right is systematically stalled each time a page is turned, and the verso page recapitulates the photographic event printed on the recto side from the opposite angle. This is the disorienting part: to be denied “progress” as one turns the page seems oddly like flashback, which it patently is not; it might be called “extreme simultaneity.” Two versions of the same thing (two sides of the story) are happening at the same time. Zimmerman.
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