Books On Books Collection – Thomas Stauss

Magic Metamorphosis (2025)

Three books are arranged on a wooden surface. The book on the left has a plain leather cover, the center book titled 'Magic MetaMorphoSis' features a colorful illustration of a lizard, and the right book is a pink cover with the same title and an intricate black and white image on the bottom.

Magic Metamorphosis : The Secrets of a Rare Italian Picture Album Revealed (2025)
Thomas Stauss
Slipcased two volumes. Slipcase: H375 x W230 x D53 mm. Both vols: H362 x W225 mm. Facsimile: [336] pages. Explanatory vol: 256 pages. Published by LIBRUM Publishers and Editors (Basel, Switzerland). Acquired from Amazon, 2 September 2026.
Photos: Books On Books Collection. See end of entry for credits to photographs in Magic Metamorphosis.

Collectors who can describe their collections and their searches without prompting yawns or worse are almost as rare as unicorn horns. Thomas Stauss knows how to tell a story. With his background in acquiring antique games and magicians’ apparatus, he was well equipped to recognize what the oddly organized portfolio volume presented to him in a Parisian book shop was meant to be — a “blow book”, a trick book that at first appears to be completely blank but then, with a magical breath blown over it, displays a set of themed images that, with another breath blown, changes into yet another set, and then another, and so on. But whoever commissioned these sets of watercolors in the 1600s had not had the finishing touches made before the sets were bound in a single volume. With a familiar and unassuming style, Stauss turns his discovery and its transformation into a page-turning read that is as magical as any blow book.

An open book with an illustrated map on the left page and text on the right page. The map depicts buildings and gardens, including the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris, while the text discusses a scientific research project related to a significant find in Paris.

Until now, Ricky Jay’s Magic Magic Book (1994) could be considered the definitive work on this book structure and conjuror’s apparatus that arose in the wake of Gutenberg’s printing press. Thomas Stauss’s study now takes center stage and assumes that leading role. Perhaps his training in hydrology and geology — as well as his collector’s focus — instilled the curiosity and patience to accomplish this. Also he has been studying the history of science for over 25 years and, somewhere along the way, acquired the skills in bibliographical science necessary for this project. Stauss wears his scholarship lightly though. Discovery, fact, explanation, and conjecture proceed with fine balance and an engaging pace.

After the prologue recounting his discovery of Disegni Antichi Bizzarri [“Bizarre antique drawings”] Stauss’s first chapter introduces the history, nomenclature, structure, and working of the blow book. Its various methods of construction are clearly described and shown by diagram and photography, and the production team should be lauded for the quality and positioning of images with the explanatory text. No better description of how a performer worked the audience with a blow book has occurred since the mid-17th-century picaresque novel by Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen, and Stauss uses it to conclude the chapter.

An open book with a detailed illustration on the left page depicting a historical scene with several people and a man presenting an image, and text on the right page introducing Chapter 1 of the book.

An open book displaying illustrated pages, featuring a figure wearing armor alongside two dark, horned creatures with fiery hair.

An illustrated engraving from the second complete edition of Grimmelhausen's works, depicting a ragged beggar named Springinsfeld playing a musical instrument. He is surrounded by various musical instruments and magical props, including cups, balls, and a triangular magic padlock. — From *Magical Metamorphosis*, p. 29.

The second chapter delves into the history of Disegni Antichi Bizzarri itself and provides details on its collation, pagination, binding, geographical origins, dating, and provenance. The photography of the portfolio volume by Stauss and the Basel University Library is stunning.

Open book page featuring a detailed illustration of fish on the left side and text about Italian picture albums on the right.

An open book displaying an illustration of fantastical creatures amid flames, with a dragon-like figure coiling, a bird-like creature, and a humanoid figure interacting with a large, mythical beast.

In the third chapter, Stauss rewards us with the results of his research into the pictorial motifs not only of Disegni Antichi Bizzarri but also of blow books pre-1670 up to 1870. Stauss provides visually convincing links of influence on the artist of Disegni Antichi Bizzarri from Hans Memling, Conrad Gessner, Ulisse Aldrovandi, Jan Jonston, Jacob de Gheyn II, Giovanni Battista Crescenzi, Giovanna Garzoni, Octavianus Monfort, Jean-Baptiste Monnoyer, Nicolas Robert, Guillaume Toulouze, and the album called Raccolta di disegni di animali (Modena, c. 1650).

An open book displaying Chapter 3 titled 'The Visual Worlds,' featuring a detailed illustration of men in historical attire pointing towards an array of marine and terrestrial creatures above a wooden bookshelf.

A table displaying various categories related to historical works, including headings for women, men, soldiers, birds, jugglers, devils, animals, and more, with various illustrations and notes.

The fourth chapter presents the history of blow books from 1550 through 1870 in greater detail and extensive illustration.

Adding to the definitive nature of Magic Metamorphosis, the fifth chapter delivers the surprise of over two hundred reproductions of the watercolor drawings from the oldest known blow book: Libro dei Diavolo (late 16th century), which resides in the New York Public Library. The images are accompanied by the entirety of Louise George Clubb’s essay that, similarly to Stauss’s rescue of Disegni Antichi Bizzarri, established the true nature of this work that had been misidentified for nearly half a century as a sampler of a commedia dell’arte troupe’s wares and repertoire.

A two-page spread featuring a chapter title about the oldest known blow book, accompanied by an artistic illustration of a mythical creature with horns and smoke rising from its hands on the left page.

A colorful illustration from a book showing five figures in traditional attire, holding hands and dancing in a line on a grassy area.

Stauss’s final chapter brings the blow book into the 21st century and his readers to the brink of enjoying his transformation of his discovered album into a facsimile working blow book. Although graciously giving ace-conjuror Ricky Jay the last word in the chapter, Stauss introduces his readers to the blow book’s possible transformation into an object of higher art.

A black-and-white illustration of a donkey with human features, wearing a coat, sitting at a piano and reading sheet music, alongside text from an epilogue discussing new perspectives on a topic.

A page of a book featuring an orange background with text entries on one side and an illustration of a monkey on the bottom left.

Stauss notes that art historian Nancy Princenthal looked at Jay’s The Magic Magic Book and wrote in 1996 of the blow book from an art historical perspective, but he notes it only in passing. Princenthal was dismissive of any kinship between the blow book and book art:

The magic book has only an incidental kinship to elaborately structured bookworks built around accordion folds and gatefolds, cutouts and pop-up elements, whether historical or contemporary (as in the recent work of Scott McCarney, Clifton Meador, Margot Lovejoy, or Carol Barton). — Princenthal, p. 186.

Stauss underplays his alert observation of two 21st century blow books that are works that Princenthal’s roll-call of book artists would appreciate. The first is Horst Antes’ Flickbuch (2000); the second, Julie Chen’s & Keri Miki-Lani Schroeder’s Book of Hours (2021). Both of these works — as well as Jay’s two-volume set and the other serious contemporary blow book Stauss mentions, Ernst Strouhal’s Gespräch mit einem Esel (2019) — are in the Books On Books Collection. As with all of the other chapters, the photography illustrating these works is superb. They will entice institutional and individual collectors of artists’ books.

A side view of a closed book with a textured brown cover and a white spine featuring alternating striped patterns.

Including the spread of blank pages, there are eight transformations. Their printing order is 1) the spread of blank pages, 2) demons, 3) pike men and musketeers, 4) land animals, 5) birds and insects, 6) sea creatures, 7) fruit and vegetables, and 8) bouquets of flowers. Their order in performance would depend on the performer’s patter like that of Simplicius or Hopalong from the picaresque novel by Grimmelshausen, which Stauss excerpts in chapters two and four of the explanatory volume. Most likely, the performer would flip through the book showing only blank pages; then after blowing on the book, the performer might display spread after spread of bouquets of flowers; or with another magical breath, a variety of sea creatures.

A historical illustration depicting two male soldiers wearing ornate armor and vibrant clothing, each holding a spear. They stand on rocky terrain with greenery in the background.

Two men in historical costumes, each holding a firearm, standing amidst greenery. The man on the left wears a green outfit with a feathered hat and a belt, while the man on the right is dressed in blue and red, with a more relaxed posture.

Collections that specialize in art history and book history will be drawn by both the explanatory and facsimile volumes in this definitive work. Hopefully, book artists will find their way to it for inspiration toward many more magical metamorphoses.

Credits for Photographs in Magic Metamorphosis:

The page numbers given below refer to the pagination in Stauss’s Magic Metamorphosis:

[8]: Turgo map of Paris (1739): akg-images (AKG3090703).

[14]: From Huber, Volker & Antes, Horst. 2003 (p. 8). Fresh Breath on the Blow Book. Humble (Texas).

29: akg-images (AKG 573051)

60: University Library Basel (UBH HA II 2 Folio).

[100]: Houghton Library, Harvard University,
Cambridge, Massachusetts (MS Typ 530, p. 276)

116: Baden State Library, Karlsruhe (KK 408).

138, 158–159: New York Public Library (Spencer Collection MS. 180).

[216]: Zurich University of the Arts (9900-102).

Photographs from the original album Disegni Antichi Bizzarri: University Library, Basel (Switzerland)

Books On Books Collection – Ricky Jay

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The Magic Magic Book (1994)

The Magic Magic Book : An Inquiry into the Venerable History & Operation of the Oldest Trick Conjuring Volumes, Designated ‘Blow Books’ … (1994)
Ricky Jay et al.
Blue silk clamshell box decorated with red and silver metallic playing card motif, housing two softcover casebound and sewn volumes. Box: H270 x W217 x D43 mm. Books: H254 x W206 mm. 106 and 80 pages, respectively. Edition of 300 copies, of which this is #208. Acquired at Swann Auctions, 22 April 2025.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.

Ricky Jay’s The Magic Magic Book explains and presents a structure well suited to the artist’s book but one rarely used. The structure is called the “blow book”. Most of us know the apparatus from childhood birthday parties as the “magic coloring book” in which the clown or magician flips through a book of blank figures to be colored, calls on the birthday boy or girl to blow on the closed book, and then reopens it to show all of the pictures colored in. Hard-to-see tabs or alternating page widths enable the performer to produce the effect. Until Jay’s production with the Whitney Museum Library, there had never been an extended serious study of the blow book by scholars of magic, iconography, children’s literature, or the history of the book.

The Magic Magic Book ‘s two softcover volumes are housed in a blue silk clamshell box whose front cover displays the optical illusion of a house of cards. The card motif reflects both the blow book structure’s use in trick decks of cards and Jay’s reputation in the 90s as “perhaps the most gifted sleight of hand artist alive” (Singer, 1993). The first volume gives an illustrated essay on the history of the blow book. The second volume (a blow book itself and in a dos-à-dos structure) features illustrations by contemporary American artists Vija Celmins, Jane Hammond, Glenn Ligon, Philip Taaffe, and William Wegman as well as painted devils and harlequins, letterpress alphabets, figures in silhouette, and instructions (in four languages) for operating the blow book. After one flick through the book showing blank spreads, the next flick yields a dance of eight harlequins.

Two figures dressed in colorful harlequin costumes are depicted on an open page. The figure on the left is reaching forward, holding a piece of paper, while the figure on the right stands with a stick, looking upwards, showcasing their vibrant attire.

Illustration of two figures dressed in colorful patchwork outfits, one striking a pose with a stick while the other gestures, set against a plain background.

The next flick turns the harlequins into alphabets.

A two-page spread featuring a creative and artistic representation of the alphabet with illustrated letters on the left and a bold typographic layout in red and black on the right.

Stylized alphabet letters in ornate designs on two pages, with left side featuring decorative black and white letters and right side showcasing elegant red cursive letters.

The next flick transforms the alphabets into fire-breathing, fire-farting devils (the images courtesy of Thomas Stauss to Jay).

Illustration of a humanoid figure with animal features, displaying fiery hair and tail, set against a blank background.

An illustrated figure of a mythical creature with horns and flames, depicted in a dynamic pose. The creature has a human-like body with a dark color and reddish hair-like flames around its head.

With the next flick, we get the English, then French, then German, and finally Spanish instructions for operating the book.

An open book titled 'To Operate The Magic Magic Book' featuring instructions on how to use it, with decorative borders and printed text visible on both pages.

Open pages of a book titled 'Pour Faire Marcher Le Livre de Magie Magique,' featuring text written in French, surrounded by decorative borders.

And with the last flick, Philip Taaffe’s fern-like, starburst abstractions appear, gradually shrinking and ordering themselves into columns of four and rows of five. When the dos-à-dos is turned, Taaffe’s series returns (again last in the sequence of flicks) but in reversed order, the columns and rows dispersing into other patterns and increasing in size.

An open book displaying vibrant starburst patterns in various colors including black, green, and red against a light background.

An open book displaying a page with intricate geometric patterns of starburst shapes in various colors, including green, black, and red on a cream background.

The blow book offers artists a tool that can shape meaning, metaphor, and perspective. It can elicit performance by the reader to enact ideas, narrative, and structural effects. Its close association with the rise of the printing press, affordable paper, and binding capabilities recommend the blow book to book artists intent on demonstrably tying their works to the history of the book. The hard-to-see tabs or alternating page widths that enable the performer to produce the blow book’s effects offer a means of enhancing the materiality of the artist’s book. Its mechanics offer the chance to use flip (or flick) book’s animating effects, which have appealed to numerous book artists. Its twist on those effects lends it to juggling the layout of text and image in a non-traditional manner. Its mechanics can also enhance binding structures like the dos-à-dos, a structure also borrowed for magic tricks. Its reliance on manipulating a book’s fore edge offers the chance to emphasize both form and tactility, a characteristic theme of artists’ books. The two volumes of The Magic Magic Book itself incorporate “watercolors, woodcuts, etchings, hand-colored engravings, lithography (black-and-white and colored), mimeograph, drawings, decals, stencils, photo-offset — even leaves from other books” (“Prologue”, p.2) — surely another enticement to book artists to explore the form.

In the Books On Books Collection, Julie Chen and Keri Miki-Lani Schroeder’s Book of Hours (2021) and Horst Antes’ Flickbuch (2000) are the only two artists’ books that exploit the blow book structure. As examples, they show the form’s scope for artists to work their individual magic and demonstrate the blow book’s magical transformations that make us query the nature of “the book”.

Books On Books Collection – Norman Clayton

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Deconstruction and Reconstruction of the Book (1990)

Cover of a book titled 'ETYM OLOG ICON' featuring embossed letters on a textured black background.

Deconstruction and Reconstruction of the Book (1990)
Norman Clayton
Softcover, exposed spine, hand sewn. H250 x W205 mm. [50] pages, including 4-page foldout. Edition of 200, of which this is #90. Acquired from the artist, 23 June 2026.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.

As a student at the Rhode Island School of Design, Norman Clayton journeyed back to the beginning of printed books in the western world with a Nikon FE2 and 55mm macro lens. He captured those elements that, during the age of incunabula (printed books before 1500), typesetters and printers-cum-editors were reshaping from manuscripts into what would become the received structure of the book. More satisfying, he poured those photos and the craft he was learning at RISD into an artist’s book. It is hand sewn over linen reinforcing tapes so that the booklet lies flat to offer up the images celebrating the title page, table of contents, illustrated capitals, illustrations and text, and printers’ marks — all drawn from thirty-six works in the Annmary Brown Memorial Library at Brown University in Providence, RI.

A spread of a book featuring a plain left page labeled 'Title Page' and a right page with intricate, stylized calligraphy dated 1896.

An open book page featuring a title 'Tractatus in modo' at the top, with an intricate woodcut illustration depicting a figure surrounded by nature, trees, and a distant figure, accompanied by faint handwritten notes on the lower left corner.

Title pages.

An open book page featuring text in a historic typeface, listing various terms and chapters related to anatomy or natural history.

Table of Contents.

An open book page featuring decorative calligraphy and illustrations. The left page has a detailed initial letter and text in a Gothic script, while the right page displays a large ornate letter embellished with floral designs.

Illustrated Capital.

An open book displaying a vintage illustration of a figure with long hair and a robe standing in a frame, on the opposite page is a simple text labeled 'Illustration and Text'.

A spread showcasing a page with Gothic-style text on the left and six circular illustrations on the right, depicting various symbols and letters.

Illustration and Text.

An open book displaying a page with the title 'Printer's Mark' and an illustration of a circular design featuring the letter 'B' and geometric shapes.

Printer’s Mark. (Benedictus Hectoris)

There are plenty of full color illustrated histories of the history of the book available, but Clayton’s black and white photographs, choice of font (Stempel Garamond Roman) and paper (Warren Lustro Cream), and neatly executed exposed-spine binding deliver a satisfying artist’s book with a sense of the texture and material of history.

Close-up view of a textured bookcover with raised lettering and exposed binding, set on a wooden surface.

Clayton’s introduction to his fold-out index elicits a smile and a wish that he had also captured a colophon or two. Perhaps there’s a revised edition project looking for an intern or future book artist.

Page displaying the front cover, title page, and table of contents of historical texts with publication details and illustrations.

Page showing illustrations of historical texts and their details including titles, authors, publication places, and dates.

Illustration and text page showcasing various historical works and their details, including titles, authors, and publication information.

Open book displaying embossed text, including the words 'MENT', 'ETYM', 'EL IN', 'OLOG', and 'ICON', on a dark background.

Isidore of Seville. Etymologiae (1473). Strasbourg: Johann Mentelin.

Bookmarking Book Art – John Eric Broaddus

2026/01/312026/09/23Books On Books1 Comment

John Eric Broaddus (1943 1990) was perhaps one of the most inventive and creative artists to approach the book form. He was a prominent figure in the New York City art scene in the 1970s and 1980s, creating books before the book form even had a suggestion of acceptance in the art world. He also created one-of-a-kind costumes that he wore out on the streets of New York and in iconic places like Studio 54. He was vibrant, outlandish, and did much to contribute to the world of artistic interplay in New York City of that time. His inspired life was cut short by AIDS in 1990. but his legacy lives on in the work he left behind, a muse in itself for book artists even twenty years later.” Visual AIDS

Since first seeing references to and images of John Broaddus’ artist’s books in 2012, I have watched for opportunities to add his work to the Books On Books Collection. So many of his artist’s books were unique works and already in institutional collections or private hands, it would be a long watch. In late 2025, this appeared: “Achingly scarce work from a major figure in the early book arts movement. Minimal shelf/edge wear, else tight, bright, and unmarred. Shape book (human hand), grey painted boards, black ink lettering, cut paper forms.”

Handbook (1980)

Handbook (1980)
John Eric Broaddus
Hand-shaped boards over hand-shaped painted and cut pages, nailed tape hinge. Variable: H123 x W205 mm. [10] pages. Limited edition, unknown quantity. Acquired from Lux Mentis, 3 December 2025.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.

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Books On Books Collection – The Horn-book

2025/11/122026/04/15Books On BooksLeave a comment

This is a “back-dated update” of sorts to Alphabets Alive!, Ashley Rose Thayer, and Andrew White Tuer.

First, the back-dating. This comes from the delightfully annoying or annoyingly delightful belated discovery of Erik Kwakkel’s 2015 entry on the history of the horn-book “Book on a Stick” in Medievalbooks. Delightful and annoying to find the truly earliest appearance of a horn-book right under my nose in the Bodleian Libraries but too late to include it in the Alphabets Alive! exhibition at the Bodleian in 2023.

Oxford, Bodleian Library, Canon. Misc. 476 (14th century).

Vita gloriossime virginis Mariae atque venerabilis matris filii dei vivi veri et unici (unidentified work).Italian manuscript, Venice.
Oxford, Bodleian Library, Canon. Misc. 476 (14th century). Folio 047v.

Detail

Andrew White Tuer’s History of the Horn-Book (1897) came close with its dating of the horn-book’s first appearance as 1450, but as Kwakkel writes:

The image shows Christ being brought to school by his mother. He is bringing his “textbook” to class: a hornbook, which dangles from his wrist by a string, just like many of the later specimens did … Quite intriguingly, we are shown a real medieval snapshot of how children carried their hornbook to and at school. More importantly, it shows that the hornbook was indeed a medieval invention….While no actual hornbooks appear to survive from the medieval period, these visual representations show that educating young children was also the driving force behind the production of hornbooks in the age before print.

And for the updating, here is Ashley Thayer’s Mechanical Horn-book (2025) just arrived in the Books On Books Collection.

Mechanical Horn-book (2025)
Ashley Rose Thayer
Horn-book. On stand: H192 x W160 mm. Off stand: H192 x W115 mm. Unique. Acquired from the artist, 17 October 2025.
Photos: Courtesy of the artist. Books On Books Collection.

The paddle is made of pine wood, the gears of vellum-covered bookboard, the spinning “arm” of authentic cow horn, and the wrist loop of embroidery thread by a medieval finger loop braiding technique. On dark grey-blue Khadi paper, Thayer has painted a border of the moon, a berried floral garland, and a wyvern, the heraldic emblem associated with Wessex, the Anglo-Saxon kingdom from which Alfred the Great emerged in the 9th century. On the reverse, a cross of cut red leather with five inserts of calligraphed vellum alluding to Christ’s five wounds reflects the horn-book tradition of combining religion with learning the alphabet. It also makes this horn-book reflective of Alfred’s Anglo-Saxon and Christian background.

The pointer, called an aestel in Old English, is made from poplar wood, an antique button, and antique bone. Its inclusion isn’t simply functional. Appearing alongside the Wessex wyvern, it points to that famous aestel on display at the Ashmolean in Oxford: the Alfred Jewel.

The Alfred Jewel, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.
Photo taken from the front by Geni CC BY-SA 4.0. Photo taken from the side by Richard M Buck CC BY SA 3.0.

If there’s ever an Alphabets Alive! redivivus, Erik Kwakkel and Ashley Thayer have provided the pointers to the other treasures in Oxford that should be included.

Books On Books Collection – Vico’s Spiral: Half Century of Artists’ Books

2025/03/122025/08/07Books On BooksLeave a comment

Vico’s Spiral: Half Century of Artists’ Books (2024)
Robbin Ami Silberberg and Carole Naggar, editors
Paperback. H210 x W150 mm. 256 pages. Acquired from Center for the Book Arts, 7 March 2025.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.

With Vico’s Spiral, Robbin Ami Silverberg, Carole Naggar, and Kinohi Nishikawa have made a significant contribution to how we can better appreciate artists’ books. The publication accompanied the exhibition by the same name celebrating the 50th anniversary of New York’s Center of Book Arts from 26 September through 14 December 2024.

The exhibition’s curators — Silverberg and Naggar — chose their organizing metaphor well. The 16th century philosopher Giambattista Vico proposed that history did not proceed in a straight line but instead spiraled, with patterns of events recurring with near similarity in different periods and even different regions. Naggar writes, As in Vico’s Spiral, artists’ books disregard linear chronology and geographies. Based on recurrent concepts and forms, they “meet” in vastly different time-spaces.

To prove the aptness of Vico’s model of history for book art, the curators paired art works from different times and places. For example, New York-born Warren Lehrer’s French Fries (1984) is paired with Israeli-born Uriel Cidor’s Greetings from America (2018).

Lehrer’s satiric take on “what is America” aims to visualize the text of a ten-part play set in a DREAM QUEEN restaurant with its “core of regulars: four faithful customers, three employees and one mobile juke-box on wheels”. He calls it a “psycho-acoustic” translation in which “each character is typecast into a distinct color and typographic arrangement”. On the pages, “an array of images and marks accompany the text, evoking an appropriate ambiance, and further serving to chart the cacophony of shifting internal projections that make up the characters’ collective consciousness”.

If the satiric target of French Fries isn’t clear, consider the A assembled on the double-page spread by the text’s layout and the stars-bars-and-stripes.

Cidor’s abecedary is populated with words that are the artist’s answers to the question “what is America?”. Each letter of the Hebrew alphabet appears on a recto page, and a word beginning with that letter is worked into an abstract image on the facing verso page. At a further level of abstraction, all the letters are formed with Cidor’s stylized Hebrew font Octavk’tav.

From right to left, the Octavk’tav version letter ayin (ע‎) is for shem’at ha’omes (שְׁעַת הַעוֹמֶס) or “rush hour”. The words’ letters sprawl in brown across an intersection gridlocked with ayins.

As Lehrer does in French Fries, Cidor uses the arbitrary abstraction of letters and page order along with not-so-arbitrary typographical layout and words in translation (for example, Resh for the Hebrew for Rocknroll and Ronald Reagan, Tsade for Extra large Cheezburger with fries and a soda) to capture his satirical target: the big Aleph (New York and America).

Above or beside each work displayed, a vertical time scale showing the exhibition’s span (1964-2024) was repeated on the walls. A red pin designated the nearby item’s year of publication, and a red thread ran from pin to pin around the room. Along with the spiral of tables displaying past exhibition catalogues, this fluctuating red line evoked Vico’s Spiral for visitors.

“Vico’s Spiral” at the Center for Book Arts, New York. Photo: Daniel Wang.

“Vico’s Spiral” at the Center for Book Arts, New York. Photo: Daniel Wang.

The exhibition’s catalogue emulates some of this design across pages 17-120, and what can be seen more clearly is how the curators daisy-chain their pairs with the headings used on the exhibition walls. Below are the two pairs that follow Lehrer, whose heading is “Challenging typography … to comment on America”, and Cid0r, whose heading is “Using American culture … to transform letterforms”. Foxcroft’s Square Route picks up the chain …

Pages 66-69. Photos: Books On Books Collection.

Pages 70-73. Photos: Books On Books Collection.

Kinohi Nishikawa’s essay “Strange Loops” brings a related metaphor to the party. He begins with another anniversary: the 2oth anniversary edition of Douglas R. Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach: The Eternal Golden Braid (1979/1999).

At the heart of GEB, as devoted readers call it, is an exploration of how selfhood emerges from repeating patterns of cognition that mirror repeating patterns of the natural world, only for the cognitive patterns to turn inward and mirror themselves. GEB’s thesis is derived from Austrian mathematician Kurt Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, which contends, “All consistent axiomatic formulations of number theory include undecidable propositions.” Gödel’s theorem defines the constitutive externality of any set and, in so doing, identifies the minimal gap within a system for self-awareness to emerge. Crucially, Hofstadter does not limit his account of selfhood to the operation of cognitive processes. The metaphor of strange loops suggests how patterns that fold on themselves are perceived, felt, and, indeed, experienced by an embodied being. (p. 175)

Nishikawa’s immediate task in Vico’s Spiral is to survey the CBA’s previous half century of exhibitions, and he uses the strange loops metaphor to understand the CBA through the “set” of its exhibitions. All well and good, it is a brilliantly written and insightful essay. But if only he had also been asked to apply the metaphor to the set of artists’ books in the CBA’s archive or the set selected by Silberberg and Naggar!

In The Century of Artists’ Books, Johanna Drucker highlighted the self-interrogatory nature of the artist’s book as its defining characteristic. The application of these metaphors of Vico’s Spiral and strange loops to the history of artists’ books adds a new sense to that. The self-interrogatory nature of the artist’s book is a pattern recurring similarly but differently across time and space in those works of art created by artists who play with the book whether as material object as a whole or in its parts, as vehicle, as site of performance, as a tool-made and tool-making technology, or as concept. As each of those aspects yield fresh artists’ books with differences, we have new opportunities to perceive, feel, and experience an artwork’s pursuit of its self, the artists’ pursuit of their selves and our pursuit of our selves.

Nishikawa comes tantalizingly close to applying the strange loops metaphor to the domain of artists’ books when he writes, “Book arts is about discovering the self at the edge (fold, seam, spine) of insight and creation” and, when he writes, “… the essential question of selfhood isn’t What? or Why? but How? How do these patterns work, how do I know myself better through them?”

Indeed, “how?” is the question to be brought to each artist’s book. How do I encounter this artwork? How is it manifesting its patterns? And then to bring ourselves full circle back to Vico’s Spiral, How are those patterns manifest in other works in other times and other places?

Nishikawa’s approach to the CBA’s catalogues also offers a baton that we can hope others will carry forward. The CBA’s exhibitions provided not only a way into understanding the CBA itself but one into researching the world of artists’ books. Aware of this opportunity, Silberberg concludes the volume with a listing of artists’ books exhibitions from around the world. Who will grasp this baton next in the race along Vico’s Spiral?

Bookmarking Book Art – Ouroboros Press

2024/08/312024/11/08Books On BooksLeave a comment

“Folding Plates in Esoteric Literature”

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.

Bookmarking Book Art – Movables Now and Then

2024/08/312026/05/22Books On Books1 Comment

In July this year, a video was posted as if in response to the conclusion of Kyle Olmon’s “Movable Book Artists” in Parenthesis 31 (2020):

There is little in the way of scholarship and criticism in regard to pop-up and movable books. Part of this is the stigma of being represented as a commercial novelty product or kiddie book by twentieth-century publishers. The explosion of artists’ books in the 1970’s gave rise to a subset of book artists that moved beyond the standard textblock to explore the book form in ways that surpassed commercial novelty publishing efforts. To date there is no consensus within the community on the classification of the types of book formats or even the terminology used when describing pop-up and movable elements in a work. Hopefully this will change when articles about pop-up artists’ books appear with more frequency and more scholarship is undertaken.

The Newberry Library’s Curator of Rare Books and Manuscripts Suzanne Karr Schmidt gave the Book Club of Washington a reprise of her 2023 exhibition “Pop-Up Books through the Ages”:

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Books On Books Collection – Chaucer’s ABC

2024/08/022024/11/08Books On Books1 Comment

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 – Tiphaine Samoyault

2023/07/102024/12/01Books On BooksLeave a comment

Alphabetical Order (1998)

Alphabetical Order: How the Alphabet Began (1998)
Tiphaine Samoyault
Casebound, illustrated glossy paper over boards, decorated doublures. H270 x W195 mm. 32 unnumbered pages. Acquired from World of Books, 15 August 2022.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.

Tiphaine Samoyault had the extraordinary experience of growing up in residence at the Château de Fontainebleau, where her father Jean-Pierre Samoyault was the conservator and where, almost a century and a half before, Jacques-Joseph Champollion-Figeac was the librarian.

Alphabetical Order is a translation. Its original title — Le Monde des pictogrammes (Paris: Circonflexe, 1996) — better reflects the well-illustrated character of the book. The images, the hand lettering, the ghost-printed background and handling of color are constant reminders of the pictographic roots of most alphabets and writing systems. The final section — Artists and Alphabets — punctuates those reminders. In fact, the book’s endpapers act as quotation marks around the point.

Books On Books

Curated by Robert Bolick

History of the Book

Books On Books Collection – Thomas Stauss

Magic Metamorphosis (2025)

Further Reading and Viewing

Credits for Photographs in Magic Metamorphosis:

Books On Books Collection – Ricky Jay

The Magic Magic Book (1994)

Further Reading

Books On Books Collection – Norman Clayton

Deconstruction and Reconstruction of the Book (1990)

Further Reading

Bookmarking Book Art – John Eric Broaddus

Handbook (1980)

Books On Books Collection – The Horn-book

Further Reading

Books On Books Collection – Vico’s Spiral: Half Century of Artists’ Books

Further Reading

Bookmarking Book Art – Ouroboros Press

“Folding Plates in Esoteric Literature”

Further Reading

Bookmarking Book Art – Movables Now and Then

Books On Books Collection – Chaucer’s ABC

ABC by Geoffrey Chaucer (1934)

Books On Books Collection – Tiphaine Samoyault

Alphabetical Order (1998)

Further Reading