On Such a Full Sea (2013) Chang-rae Lee Jacket and slipcase design Helen Yentus Book in slipcase. H23o x W150 mm; slipcase only, W110 mm. 368 pages. Edition of 500, of which this is #178. Acquired 1 October 2018. Photo: Riverhead Books and AIGA.
Riverhead art director Helen Yentus and members of the MakerBot team designed this slipcase for Lee’s novel. An edition of 500, made with the MakerBot® Replicator® 2 Desktop 3D Printer with MakerBot PLA filament, a bioplastic made of corn and fabricated by MakerBot in Brooklyn, New York, appeared in 2013 just before the trade edition in 2014.
Marlene MacCallum’s latest artist’s books remind me of Claude Monet’s two series of paintings of the Rouen Cathedral’s façade and a field of haystacks. The series were influenced by Japanese ukiyo-e prints (“pictures of the floating world”). Rather than changing vantage points on Mt. Fuji, Monet used one perspective on one façade and sought to capture the instants of light and atmosphere on its surface at several different hours of the day. He rendered his vision of them with thick layers of paint, brushstrokes, and colors. MacCallum, too, has chosen a fixed-viewpoint: in her case, of Lake Ontario. She, too, follows different hours and, also, different seasons as Monet did with his haystacks. She, however, renders her vision with an intricate verbal-visual dance of metaphor, book structure, registration, photographic filters, print technique and paper.
William Kiesel, founder of Ouroboros Press, has an insightful essay with impressive examples of the “fold out” device here. Among the examples are
Manly P. Hall’s The Secret Teachings of All Age and Codex Rosicrucis
Elias Ashmole’s Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum
Zoroaster’s Telescope: The Key to the great divinatory Kabbala of the Magi
Napoleon’s Book of Fate
Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim’s De Occulta Philosophia
Semiphoras et Shemhamphoras Solomon Regis
E. A. Budge’s The Book of the Dead
Don’t let the occultism of the examples put you off. After all, the earliest forays into movable books occurred in alchemical and Kabbalistic tomes. As Kiesel, also a book maker, points out:
Opening a folding plate causes an interruption in the reading process. It offers the reader an opportunity to think about what was read while contemplating the materials on the printed sheet. Again alchemy and mysticism share this meditative approach, a kind of inner reading read through the visual language of the birds or abecedarium.
From the screenshot of one of his productions above, you may be able to make out the book’s author: Count Michael Maier, whose more famous emblem book Atalanta Fugiens Daniel E. Kelm transformed into the Möbius version Neo Emblemata Nova.
The Paris-based publishers Les Trois Ourses announced that Katsumi Komagata died on 29 March 2024. Although the Bologna Children’s Book Fair responded quickly with a memorial on 8 April, it is strange that no significant obituary has yet appeared for such a major figure in the book arts, children’s books and artists’ books. Fortunately there is extensive biographical information on the site of his publishing firm One Stroke.
Piece of Mind (2022), one of his last limited edition works, becomes all the more treasured.
Piece of Mind (2022) Katsumi Komagata Casebound, card around perfect bound block of lighter card stock. H300 x W196 mm. [30] pages. Edition of 100, of which this #67. Acquired from One Stroke, 7 August 2023. Photos: Books On Books Collection.
Ebb and Flow (2023) Jane Cradock-Watson Concertina book with cloth hard bound covers. H155 x W27 mm (closed), W680 mm (open). 64 panels. Edition of 20. Acquired from the artist, 21 January 2024. Photos: Books On Books Collection. Displayed with artist’s permission.
An exploration, both visually and physically, the ‘edge’ of the sea where it meets the land, with its continuous ebb and flow of the breaking waves, rhythmically rolling back and forth onto the sand. (Artist’s description)
With the binding and her photography in Ebb and Flow, Jane Cradock-Watson has sculpted and painted the sea’s edge. Four digital photographs printed on Zerkal paper have been spliced together between two cloth-covered boards. The flexibility and extent of the concertinaed paper create an undulating structure that turns seascape stills into mesmerising cinema.
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).
Die Scheuche Märchen(1925, 1965) [The Scare-Crow Fairy Tale] Kurt Schwitters,Kate Steinitzand 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.
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.
Summer Day | Winter Night (1994) Ruth Fine Papered slipcase with title printed on spine, enclosing a double-sided leporello. Slipcase, H190 x W110 x D20 mm; Leporello (extended), H185 x W1888 mm. [16] panels per side. Edition of 150, of which this is #56. Acquired from Weinrich Books, 12 June 2024. Photos: Books On Books Collection. Displayed with permission of the artist.
Books On Books 