The Phoenician Alphabet (2022)
Nayla Romanos Iliya (art), Rose Issa, Susan Babaie and Peter Murray (text)
Casebound laminated cover. H205 x W185 mm. 108 pages. Acquired from Les presses du réel, 2 February 2023.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.
Lessons from the South (1986)
Susan E. King
Modified flag book. Closed: H270 x W172 mm; Open: W670 mm. 20 pages. Acquired from Rickaro Books BA PBFA, 22 September 2023.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.
Lessons from the South presents a masterful weaving together of material, structure, technique and image with Susan King’s reminiscences and social observations of her birth state Kentucky. For King, growing up white and female in the South in the second half of the 20th century engendered a sense of otherness and rebellion. As with some white southerners, it led to mild acts of rebellion — sitting too far back in the bus, sitting next to black students in typing class, or finally leaving for other regions of the US. With the 21st century’s rise of the “Karen”, repression of voting rights and reproductive rights, and resurgence of white supremacy, can we afford to dismiss the expression of conscience as “mild”? Any expression of conscience is something. Lessons from the South is an artful expression of fondness, humor, closeness and distance — a sense of being ill at ease with a Southern heritage we all seem unable to escape — that should be revisited not only for the sake of its art but as encouragement to conscience.
Continue reading
Penguin’s 2007 series “Great Loves” is a twenty-book set of short paperbacks with selections from the usual suspects (D. H. Lawrence) and the unusual (Søren Kierkegaard). The selection of eleven tales from Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron provides Carolyn Thompson with the opportunity to create a work of altered book art enjoyable on several levels.
The unaltered cover promises one thing. Its “under-the-cover” title page delivers another.
The Eaten Heart (2013)
Carolyn Thompson
Altered perfect bound paperback. H180 x W111 mm. 124 pages. Edition of 3, of which this is #2. Acquired from Eagle Gallery, 7 October 2023.
Photos: Books On Books Collection. Displayed with artist’s permission.
Thompson’s chosen technique of removing text with a scalpel enacts one of the paradoxical meanings of the revealed tell-tale title it presents: the scalpel has eaten away all the text on this title page except for the text chosen as the title. Boccaccio’s text is there but not there, and the “under-the-cover ” title nods toward his missing content. Leaving only words referring to the body, Thompson’s work of book art celebrates the raunchy “under the covers” innuendo in Boccaccio’s text.
The transparent tape that holds the body of cut pages together (just detectable in the image of the title page above) can be removed and the pages turned (carefully!). Below is page 11 “in motion”.
The sequence of pages 116 to 119 below shows that, while the verso pages do not play a role in the work, the movement of words on the recto side away from those that follow them, revealing the blank sheet at the end, invites musing about their possible relationship as well as marvelling at the artist’s delicate patience applied to the indelicate.
Later on, using the 50 books in the Penguin Modern Box Set (2018), Thompson created text pieces, drawings, embroideries, prints and additional altered books in the spirit of The Eaten Heart. The Laurence Sterne Trust exhibited the full set of works at Shandy Hall, York, in 2019. Eagle Gallery hosted them again in London in February 2020, and the same year, After Capote: When Truman met Marlon, her altered version of Truman Capote’s The Duke and His Domain in the series, won the Minnesota Center for Book Arts Prize People’s Book Art Award.
The more wide-ranging but more consolidating work that follows demonstrates Thompson’s indefatigable originality and insatiableness as a re-purposing artist.
The Beast in Me (2021)
Carolyn Thompson
Print. 130 x 130 cm. Acquired from Information as Material, October 2021.
Photos: Books On Books Collection. Displayed with artist’s permission.
Although The Beast in Me has a previous iteration from 2014, this one commissioned for the second issue of Inscription: The Journal of Material Text (the “holes issue”) expands to over 500 snippets of text beginning with ‘I’ from eight different novels. Its manner of doing so makes The Beast in Me simultaneously centrifugal and centripetal in its effect — perhaps more emblematic of Inscription‘s coverage in its “holes issue” than the impressive work chosen for the covers.
Here is Thompson’s description of the commissioned work:
The statements (over five hundred of them) are presented one after another in a circular narrative with no natural beginning or ending and can therefore be read from any point. When removed from their original context, they become ham-fisted stabs at self-revelation and blurted snapshots of confession. They contradict one another, and the narrator. The piece explores the power struggle within all of us, where different aspects of our personalities vie for dominance over one another at any given moment, while others yearn for internal balance. The narrative, whilst light and frivolous in places, descends into a sinister and uncontrollable rant in others.
If we accept the print’s invitation as we would a book’s invitation to read — to engage in narrative — we find that human identity’s ever precarious balance — between inward and outward forces, its introverted and extroverted elements, the being apart and the being a part of, and integration vs disintegration — is captured sharply. A blank center, a void or hole — there but not there — defined by fragments simultaneously flying outward and pressing inward.
“Unfolding Origins – Ryedale Residency“. 2022. Chrysalis Arts Development.
De Sanctis, Olivia. 2023. “Poetic Space of Intimacy and Movement: Re-Imagining the White Space of the Page in the Erasure Poetry of Carolyn Thompson, Sonja Johanson, and Lisa Huffaker“. Pivot (Voyages: Traversing the White Space). 10: 1: 60-75.
Hampton, Michael. December 2020. “Carolyn Thompson: ‘Post Moderns’” in The Penguin Collector. No. 95. Ed. James Mackay. London: Penguin.
Morris, Sim0n, and Ashton, Sean. 2 January 2020. “Carolyn Thompson’s ‘Post Moderns’ Art Exhibition“. Leeds School of Arts Blog.
Partington, Gill, and Smyth, Adam, eds. 2021. Inscription: The Journal of Material Text. No 2.
Winter (2019)
Ianna Andréadis
Softbound with a waxed thread loop. H210 x W150 mm. 48 pages. Acquired from Happy Babies, 30 July 2023.
Photos: Books On Books Collection. Displayed with artist’s permission.
The language of the book is one we learn well before we learn to read. It has many rules and parts. One part is the single page, and one of its rules is to turn it. Another of its rules is that the page behind may affect the page before. Another part of book language is the double-page spread. One of its rules is that facing pages may affect one another and that the space between them might disappear. As with any native language, we absorb its rules and parts and use them without thinking about them. Ianna Andréadis’ Winter revels in the language of the book and invites us to page through a winter wood and confusing thicket to begin learning again what we absorbed so long ago.
Like our earliest children’s books, Winter‘s only word is its title. Inviting touch, its front cover reproduces the main image of the title page but with debossing, and the book paper that follows is heavy and translucent.
With a turn of the title page, the bird is behind us, and the branches and trunks obscured by the title page’s “winter fog” loom large in black with the woods beyond appearing through the fog continued with the translucent paper.
As we move further into the woods, we look down on a bush or small tree weighted with snow whose trunk and branches sink into the snow beneath. Having passed it, we find a stand of four saplings and the one furthest from us also sunk in snow.
But now look up. The tangle of black branches and the winter fog barely hide the broken limbs of the tree just behind.
Several more pages of thicket and fog come before we reach the center of the book. There the imposition imposes its mechanics. The two facing pages both bear black ink, and the viewer may wonder whether these are birchtree trunks or black trunks with footsteps and branches or clumps of tree fall in the snow-covered ground between them.
Whatever that view is, the shift in inking according to the imposition envelops us in a winter fog on the following double-page spread.
Andréadis and her imposition, however, will lead us out of the fog and thicket, and the “lightening sky” over the next several pages encourages us to look up and find another bird perched above.
After several more pages and perhaps too tired to keep looking up, our eyes turn back to the tree trunks and branches sunk in snow, until at the end, we can finally look back up, turn around and see the clear fork of a trunk behind which the wood has disappeared again in winter fog.
And if at the end, prompted by the feel of the back cover and perhaps childhood memories of first books to press the covers flat, we’ll find we have come full circle. The next-to-last page’s forking tree trunk now appears debossed on the back cover matched to its other half and the bird on the front cover. Let’s read it again!
Andréadis’ Winter is now scarce, but through the link behind the title, you might be able to locate an institution with it near you. To enjoy more of the artist’s work, several of her illustrations of others’ books are available in libraries and the used-book market. One such book is Le papillon et la lumière by Patrick Chamoiseau, which deserves publication in translation not only for its charming story but for greater access to Andréadis’ artwork.
For another means of re-experiencing the first encounter with the language of the book, try Bruno Munari’s I Prelibri, first published in 1980 and still available in a second edition from Corraini.
Andréadis, Ianna. 2019. Winter. Tokyo: One Stroke.
Beckett, Sandra L. 2013. Crossover Picturebooks: A Genre for All Ages. London: Routledge.
Chamoiseau, Patrick. 201). Le papillon et la lumière. Ill. Ianna Andréadis. Paris: P. Rey.
Munari, Bruno. 2015. I prelibri = prebooks = vorbücher = prelivres. Second ed. Milan: Corraini.
A Apple Pie (2005)
Gennady Spirin
Casebound, laminated paper over boards, pastedown with matching endpapers, sewn. 275 x 275 mm. 32 pages. Acquired from Bud Plant & Hutchison Books, 13 March 2023.
Photos: Books On Books Collection. Displayed with permission of the artist.
“Never judge a book by its cover” does not mean “ignore the clues and promises there”. A laminated cover and lay-flat binding are not uncommon among children’s books. Nor is the spreading of an illustration across the back and front covers. What is unusual about Gennady Spirin’s A Apple Pie is how it uses them to offer clues and promises of the lesson this book offers beyond the lesson of the alphabet. It promises a lesson about perspective and the canvas of the book.
Look at how the back and front covers play with landscape perspective and the notion of the book as frame and canvas. The head of the spine interrupts the landscape to join the narrow orange frame that demarcates the edges of the landscape. All the same, the landscape’s hill of apples in the foreground overlaps the spine to descend into the landscape’s midground on the back cover, which deepens into a background of at least five levels like a medieval or Renaissance painting.
Another technique of perspective from those traditions is to place in the background things we know are large and in the foreground what we know is smaller. A temple or mansion behind, a mother and child or pie up front. These objects and figures often perform temporal double duty as in The Flight into Egypt, where the tiny workers misdirect the mass of Herod’s soldiers in the background while the Holy family looms large resting in the foreground. In Spirin’s illustration, the past apple-picking appears in the distance, and the resulting pie is near.
Rest on the Flight into Egypt (1518-20)
Joachim Patinir
Copyright ©Museo Nacional del Prado
Spirin slyly multiplies this trick with his apple pie in the foreground with its tiny characters dancing around it. Yes, this book is going to replay the traditional celebration of the apple pie alphabet, but pay attention to relative sizes. The pie is monumental, larger even than the three-dimensional letter A that sits atop and casts its shadow over the banner of calligraphy, so watch for how the trick of shadows draws attention to perspective, to the roman vs calligraphic letters and to the surfaces on which the letters and tricks of perspective play out.
The very first double-page spread delivers on the cover’s clues and promises.
The oversized carved A serves as an arch to provide an example of a word beginning with A and casts its shadow over the oversized pie and cutting board that a team of elf-sized bakers has borne under it to the applause of mother and children who are mid-sized between the pie and bakers. The A is so oversized that its apex disappears from the image area. Bringing further attention to the image area and deepening its dimensionality, Spirin “cuts” the surface on which it is drawn and curls the cut section against the arm of the A.
In the world of letters, size matters — in the form of the upper and lower cases.
Further drawing attention to the art of illustrating the alphabet, not only does Spirin hand-draw examples of their forms in print and calligraphy, he leaves the guidelines for the base and x-height in place, eliminating them after (or before?) using them as the measure for the base and crust of a miniature pie in the margin. In a sense, the process of lettering has also become the canvas for A Apple Pie.
This process is displayed for every letter. Most also have a small apple vignette in the lower left or lower right corner.
As with the ants surrounding the apple, most of these vignettes serve up images that begin with the letters of their pages (for example, O for owl and P for pig) and are trimmed to re-emphasize the pages’ image space with which Spirin plays.
Letters other than A have images that cross the divide of pages. When they do, Spirin’s historical influences ranging from the medieval to the Renaissance to the Victorians stand out even more. His play with figures, color, perspective and shadow in the letter J pages recall Brueghel, Bosch, Patinir and, of course, Kate Greenaway.
Detail from Children’s Games (1560), Jan Brueghel, Kunsthistoriches Museum Wien
Detail from Garden of Earthly Delights (1490-1500), Hieronymus Bosch, Museo del Prado
A Apple Pie (c. 1886), Kate Greenaway, Internet Archive
The tradition of the “apple pie” mnemonic reaches almost as far back as the artistic ones. As noted on Spirin’s copyright page and confirmed in Peter Hunt’s International Companion, alphabet primers based on the mnemonic must have been well known prior to 1671 when the English cleric John Eachard referred to it. Compiled from the Bodleian Libraries’ record of “apple pie” items in the Opie Collection and from preparation for the exhibition Alphabets Alive!, here is a starting list for the industrious apple-picking artist interested in confecting an extension to the tradition. (Suggested additions to the menu are welcome in the Comments.) Scholarly baker’s apprentices should also start with the dissertation of the appropriately named A. Robin Hoffman (now at the Art Institute of Chicago); see Further Reading below.
British Library (formerly British Museum)
1764. Tom thumb’s play-book : to teach children their letters as soon as they can speak. London. Contains “A Apple Pie” as well as “A was an Archer“.
1791. The tragical death of a apple-pye : who was cut in pieces and eat by twenty five gentlemen : with whom all little people ought to be very well acquainted. London: J. Evans. Internet Archive.
1800-12. The Tragical Death of a Apple-Pye, Who Was Cut in Pieces and Eat by Twenty Five Gentlemen with
Whom All Little People Ought to Be Well Acquainted. London: Printed for John Evans, 42, Long-lane, West-Smithfield. Folded sheet, as issued. 9.5 x 5.9 cm. Opie N 589.
1808. The History of the Apple Pie. Written by Z. London: John Harris and Son. Opie C 1152. Also viewable here.
1815. The History of Master Watkins : To Which Is Added, The Tragical Death of an Apple-Pie. Chelmsford: Marsden, printer. Opie N 887.
1820. Hone, W. & Cruikshank, G. The Political “A Apple Pie” … by the Author of “The House that Jack Built”. Sixth ed. London: Printed for the Author; sold by J. Johnston. Johnson e.1111.
1820, ca. The History of an Apple-Pie. Written by Z. London: Harris and Son. 17.3 x 10.5 cm. Opie N 582.
1827. The History of A Apple Pie. Written by Z. London: Orlando Hodgson.
1835-57. Marks’ History of an Apple Pie. King Pippin’s Alphabet for Good Children. London: J. Marks.
17 x 10.2 cm. Opie N 588. Also view here.
1836. Bouncing B. The History of an Apple Pie. William Darton and Son.
1837-45. The History of an Apple Pie. London: Darton & Clark. 16 x 10.5 cm. Opie N 583.
1841. The tragical death of an apple pie : who was cut to pieces and eaten by twenty-five gentlemen with whom all little people ought to be acquainted. Printed by J. Paul & Co. London: 2 & 3 Monmouth-court. View here.
1843-49. The History of an Apple Pie; with Ditties for the Nursery, by Dame Dearlove’s Ditties. London: Grant and Griffith. 17.9 x 10.8 cm. Colophon of S & J. Bentley, Wilson, and Fley, Bangor House, Shoe Lane. Opie N 584.
1851-74. The Apple-Pie Alphabet. London: John and Charles Mozley, 6 Paternoster Row. 13.1 x 8.2 cm. Colophon of Henry Mozley and Sons, Derby. This title number 26 in the publisher’s series of penny chapbooks. Opie N 580. See also Opie N 581.
1856-65. The History of an Apple Pie. Written by Z. London: Griffith and Farran. 17.6 x 11.5 cm. Reissue as a rag book of the 1820 edition published by J. Harris. Wrappers have the colophon of H.W. Hutchings, 63, Snow Hill, London. Opie N 585. See also Opie N 586 for larger version (18 x 19.8 cm). From the library of Roland Knaster.
1860, ca. The History of an Apple Pie. London: J. Bysh, 157 & 158 Albany Road, Old Kent Road. 13.6 x 10.7 cm. Opie N 587.
1860, not after. The Apple Pie. London: Darton & Co., 58 Holborn Hill. 25 x 17 cm. Darton’s Indestructible Elementary Children’s Books. Inscription dated 8 February 1860. Opie N 2. Also view here.
1861, not before. The History of A, Apple Pie. London: Dean & Son, Printers, Lithographers, and Book and Print
Publishers, 11, Ludgate Hill. 25 x 16.5 cm. (Dean’s Untearable Cloth Children’s Coloured Toy Books). Opie N 4.
1865, ca. A. Apple Pie. London: Frederick Warne & Co. 26.8 x 22.6 cm. Aunt Louisa’s London Toy Books. Colophon of Kronheim & Co. Opie N 1.
1865-89. The History of A Apple Pie. London: George Routledge & Sons. 31 x 25.2 cm. Rear wrapper has colophon of the lithographer L. van Leer & Co, Holland and 62 Ludgate Hill Opie N 5. Also see Pussy’s Picture Book. Opie N 1017.
1874. Routledge’s nursery album for children. London: George Routledge and Sons. A.
1886, ca. Kate Greenaway. A Apple Pie. London: George Routledge and Sons. Opie N 18. Also view here and here.
1890, ca. E.A. Cooke. The Story of A Apple Pie. London: R. E. King & Co.
1899. A.B.C. of the Apple Pie. Printed on linen. New York: McLouglin Bros. Viewable here.
19__, ca. A Apple Pie. An Alphabet from Modelled Designs by Mrs. Wm. Harbutt. Pen and Ink Drawings by Noel C. Harbutt A.R.C.A. London: Dean & Son, Ltd; Bathampton: W. Harbutt. Plasticine Works & Studio. 25.4 x 18.8 cm. Opie N 3.
1966. The Tragical Death of A. Apple Pie Who Was Cut in Pieces, and Eaten by Twenty-Six Little Villains.
[Whitstable, Kent: Ben Sands at his Shoestring Press]. Leporello. 11.5 x 13.4 cm. #185/225 copies. Gift of Roland Knaster. Opie N 590.
From the Bodleian Librairies’ copy of The Tragical Death … (1966)
Ben Sands
Photo: Books On Books.
1974. William Stobbs. A is an Apple Pie. London: The Bodley Head.
1986. Tracey Campbell Pearson. A Was an Apple Pie. London: Bodley Head.
1987. Gavin Bishop. A Apple Pie. Oxford University Press.
2011. Alison Murray. Apple Pie ABC. London: Orchard Books.
“Alphabets Alive!“. 19 July 2023. Books On Books.
Hoffman, A. Robin. 2012. “‘Doubtful Characters’: Alphabet Books and Battles over Literacy in Nineteenth-Century British Print Culture“. Diss. University of Pittsburgh.
Hunt, Peter. 2004. International Companion Encyclopedia of Children’s Literature. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, p. 179.
Webb, Poul. 2017~ . “Alphabet Books — Parts 1-8” on Art & Artists. Google has designated this site “A Blog of Note”, well deserved for its historical breadth in examples, clarity of images and insight.
P is for Pterodactyl: The Worst Alphabet Book Ever (2018)
Raj Haldar, Chris Carpenter & Maria Tina Beddia
Hardback, illustrated paper on boards, dustjacket. H222 x W286 mm. 40 pages. Purchased from Amazon, 17 August 2021.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.
If a posthumous revision of Eric Partridge’s Comic Alphabets were possible, this one would have to be included. But why did it take so long for the oddball abecedary and the oddities of spelling to meet in “The Worst Alphabet Book Ever“? Or maybe the 19th century spelling reformer Alexander J. Ellis compiled a still-to-be-discovered abecedary displaying a carp above the word ghoti.
Apropos of carp, though: the entry for bdellium is irritating on two scores. First, it is not the only word dumb enough to begin with “b”; there is also bdellatomy and bdellometer. Second, while true that the tree producing the gum resin bdellium is native to the East Indies and Africa, there are words other than dumb ending in a silent /b/ that the authors might have chosen to underscore their point. But they didn’t and fell into the sticky colonial trap illustrated (somewhat more obviously) below.
From Abc En Relief (1955)
Jo Zagula and Marguerite Thiebold
Photo: Books On Books Collection.
“Abecedaries I (in progress)“. Books On Books Collection.
“Alphabets Alive! – Adventures“. 19 July 2023. Books On Books Collection.
Ellis, Alexander John. 1848. A Plea for Phonetic Spelling. 2d ed. London: F. Pitman.
Partridge, Eric, and Michael Foreman. 1961. Comic Alphabets : Their Origin Development Nature. London: Routledge & Paul.
Harris, Chris and Dan Santat. 2020. The Alphabet’s Alphabet .First ed. New York: Little Brown and Company.
Jason D’Aquino’s Circus ABC (2010)
Jason D’Aquino
Hardcover, cloth spine, printed paper over boards. H158 x W 158 mm. 56 pages. Acquired from Amazon, 24 September 2022.
Photos: Books On Books Collection
At the intersection of alphabet books and artists’ books, surrealists and neo-surrealists come sailing, unicycling, swimming, stilt-walking and crossbreeding. Jason D’Aquino distinguishes his contribution with a circus theme and miniaturist’s hand, although his publisher Simply Read Books expands it to 158 mm square (6 x 6 inches).
The illustrations are more R. Crumb than Max Ernst, and the letters themselves hark back to Jean Midolle’s Écritures Ánciennes D’après Des Manuscrits & Les Meillers Ouvrages (1834). But in concept and execution, Jason D’Aquino’s Circus ABC is original. The fineness of D’Aquino’s drawings fascinates the eye.
Jean Midolle, Alphabet Composée 1832. From Luc Devroye’s Type Design, Typography, Typefaces and Fonts, last updated 18 May 2023. Accessed 26 May 2023.
D’Aquino’s book is also eclectic in its abecedary approach. Above, where the illustration for the letter C offers several things beginning with that letter, those for A and B do not play the “find the object” game, although they do have their jokes. The mermaid’s is an optical illusion.The barker’s joke is that he is D’Aquino’s self-portrait. And with the letter Z below, for which nothing shown begins with the letter Z, the visual puzzle lies in figuring out what the crown, martini and cigarette have to do with the anatomical swap-out between the goldfish and chimp — and why the image so strongly echoes that for letter A.
Surrealism has roots in the art of Hieronymus Bosch as well as in the fantastical alphabets of Jean Midolle and his medieval predecessors. Not surprising then that elements of D’Aquino’s world can be found in the Garden of Earthly Delights and the Kennicott Bible. Other surrealist alphabets from the Books On Books Collection are listed below.
Above: Detail from Hieronymus Bosch, The Garden of Early Delights (1490-1510). Below: Hebrew Bible (Former Prophets with Targum and various commentaries), Bodleian Library MS. Kennicott 5, 446v.
“Abecedaries I (in progress)“. Books On Books Collection.
“Jim Avignon & Anja Lutz“. 29 October 2022. Books On Books Collection.
“Leonard Brett“. 8 August 2023. Books On Books Collection.
“Roman Cieślewicz“. Books On Books Collection. In progress.
“Leslie Haines“. 4 November 2022. Books On Books Collection.
“Lynn Hatzius“. 2 December 2022. Books On Books Collection.
“Peter Hutchinson“. Books On Books Collection. In progress.
“Peter Malutzki“. Books On Books Collection. In progress.
“Clément Meriguet“. 13 November 2021. Books On Books Collection.
“Paul Noble“. 20 April 2021. Books On Books Collection.
“Judy Pelikan“. 2 June 2023. Books On Books Collection.
“Rose Sanderson“. 30 May 2023. Books On Books Collection.
“Pat Sweet“. 18 January 2023. Books On Books Collection.
“Ludwig Zeller“. 24 March 2020. Books On Books Collection.
Druker, Elina, and Kümmerling-Meibauer, Bettina. 2015. Children’s Literature and the Avant-Garde. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company. Especially Philip Nel’s “Surrealism for Children”, pp. 267-83.
Van Huijstee, Pieter, and NTR. 2016. Interactive Documentary, Jheronimus Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights. Amsterdam: Pieter van Huystee Film, NTR. Accessed 26 May 2023.
Out of Breath (2019)
Jacobus Oudyn
Hardboard slipcase covered in textured paper, housing stab-bound book with waxed paper cover, attached page lifter. Slipcase: Box: H345 x W232 x D50 mm. Book: H300 x W202 mm. 34 pages. Unique. Also acquired, Artist’s Proof: H205 x W165 mm. Both from the artist, 1 June 2023.
Photos: Books On Books Collection. Displayed with permission of the artist.
In turning the thirty-four pages of this artist’s book, your fingers, eyes and ears pick up a rhythm: a labored inward and crackling outward breath, a catching and losing grasp of air, an alternating wet, dry, wet wheezing. The effects come from the material (sounds and touch that the slippery, thin and delicate rice paper gives against the wrinkled carbon paper that continues to shed its carbon), from the technique of alternating positive and negative prints, and from the ticklish action of picking up the pages with the card lifter. It takes a long time to turn these pages.
The artist’s note accompanying the work describes it as being “for all our friends and relations who have been victims of Mesothelioma and other ‘industrial’ lung disorders like Black Lung”. Indeed, the double-page spreads’ bilateral symmetry and their blackness, grayness and whiteness recall chest X-rays. The process by which Oudyn achieves this is worth remarking.
In correspondence with Books On Books, the artist notes that the process emerged from much chance and circumstance. It began with rubbings made against charred trees after a bush fire near Tewantin in 2018. Those results prompted childhood memories of the kind of carbon paper he knew as a child. Wanting to explore its use, he found that it was no longer stocked by stationers in the region, no doubt because computers, printers and photocopiers had made it superfluous. An online search yielded some boxes of very fine thin A4 sheets of bluish black and purer black carbon paper from China. Around the same time, he had been experimenting with momigami using various papers, mainly rice paper and mulberry but also cartridge and craft paper. While making books with the carbon paper and momigami results, he had reason to iron some sheets flatter, which yielded a variety of carbon prints on the rice paper. Different temperatures, durations and pressures as well as other papers yielded a range of prints on paper but also beautiful positives on the fine carbon paper itself. Experimenting with different orders in the steps, rewrinkling before or after ironing, and further grading and sorting the papers, Oudyn gained some control over the finished result. Then came the ideas that led to Out of Breath and the following works.
Opening Dark Windows (2020)
Jacobus Oudyn
Slipcase. Japanese stab binding, endpapers and a small card page lifter attached by thread. H220 x W300 mm. 20 folios. Unique. Acquired from the artist, 1 June 2023.
Photos: Books On Books Collection. Displayed with permission of the artist.
Opening Dark Windows has a variety of tactile sensations similar to those in Out of Breath. Both have covers generating an unusual sensation — a waxen flexible texture in Out of Breath, a dry rough stiff texture in Opening Dark Windows. Both alternate different weights of papers. Of the 20 folios in Opening Dark Windows, 10 are carbon tissue paper, 10 are cotton Ingres (108 gsm), and all show the experimentation described above. This work, however, also displays Oudyn’s characteristic use of multiple media and collage — black acrylic paint, white wax crayon, pva glue, graphite, inks and found text. Oudyn also adds further tactility with torn and cut flaps with their pull tabs. All of this is in service to an idea: an exploration of fading memory and the retrieval of material long thought forgotten, both of which are made interactive by the flaps (the physical “dark windows”) in the carbon tissue that reveal the collaged text, signs, fractions and drawings sometimes glued to or made on the underside of the tissue, sometimes on the underlying sheet of Ingres.
Texture and weight alternating from one layer to the next, textures juxtaposed as flaps peel away, truncated text expanding and changing as the page turns — this is mindscape as surreal scrapbook.
Flattening the Curve (2021)
Jacobus Oudyn
Slipcase. Japanese stab binding.H210 x W300 mm. 24 folios. Unique. Acquired from the artist, 1 June 2023.
Photos: Books On Books Collection. Displayed with permission of the artist.
Like Out of Breath and Opening Dark Windows, Flattening the Curve (2021) uses the “swag” of black papers Oudyn had created. Although it is also a work of multiple media — the papers themselves, graphite and inks — the focus of Flattening the Curve rests more on a sort of narrative or documentary line showing how language changed as the Covid 19 pandemic progressed. A specific Covid language evolved as daily progress reports from political leaders and medical experts and interviews in the media became the focus of everyday life for two years. As the words on the page change reflecting their use for the purpose of authority and confidence, the seemingly fixed geographical boundaries in red break and shift. Even the height and width of the leaves shift.
M.L.A. (2021)
Jacobus Oudyn
Softcover pamphlet-stitched, textured flyleaves. 18 sheets Chinese carbon paper, 18 sheets Chinese rice paper. Found text. H125 x W110 mm. 36 pages. Unique. Acquired from the artist, 1 June 2023.
Photos: Books On Books Collection. Displayed with permission of the artist.
Obviously from the works above, Oudyn deploys his set of tools, techniques and material imaginatively, but for this satiric portrait of a flip-flopping Member of the Legislative Assembly in Australia, the subject himself seems to have selected unwittingly the overprinting from carbon paper onto rice paper. Every turn presents a reversal.
Even beneath the reversals, his previous faces to the world accumulate and peek out slightly askew from “today’s” view until at the end you can hardly tell what view would be next. To which the M.L.A would reply, does reply, “Yes, why not?”
Points of Reference (2022)
Jacobus Oudyn
Box covered in illustrated paper. Three small books, each with five double-sided panels. Box: 115 x115 mm. Each book, closed: 103 x 103 mm; open: H260 x W 210 mm. 10 panels each book. Unique. Acquired from the artist, 1 June 2023.
Photos: Books On Books Collection. Displayed with artist’s permission.
Points of Reference recalls Oudyn’s earlier ‘16 Century Map‘ (2012) where the artist juxtaposed an old European map (showing Mesopotamia and the Euphrates, the Northern hemisphere’s cradle of civilization) with an Australian map of the Kakadu National Park, which covers ancient locations that evoke the concept of Tjukurpa, by which Australia’s Anangu refer to the creation period. The later work raises the earlier one’s implicit critique of European colonialism — “if we map it, we own it” — to a more all-embracing level.
A paper-covered box holds three small identically shaped, double-sided folding panel books. Each has two square panels and three triangular panels. When fully opened, each book takes the shape of a directional arrow.
One book has an image from Tycho Brahe’s Stella Nova 1572 on one side and, on the other side, an imaginary space map of commercial and abandoned space junk around the Southern Cross.
The second book has a planimetric map on one side and, on the other, a map of the same area entirely painted over predominantly in a muted orange and yellow, with some brown and gray, and black-ink silhouettes of birds in flight and native Australian markings in white and black.
Similar to the second, the third book has a partially obscured cadastral map with plots of property on one side and, on the other side, a map of the same area entirely painted over in gray, with some rose accents and, again, black-ink silhouettes of birds in flight and native Australian markings in white and black.
The triangular panels in the second and third books are numbered 1 to 3 on both sides, signifying that the same areas are mapped on both sides. Also, both of these books have faint collagraphed snippets of found text on the overpainted sides. Uniquely, the third book has gameboard-like text on both sides. On one side, the text reads,”ONE WAY”, “WHERE ARE YOU?” and “WE WERE HERE”; on the other, it reads “ONE-WAY”, “ARE YOU HERE?”, “WE WERE HERE”, “ONE WAY – GO BACK” and “- GO BACK”.
Along with their punning on the work’s title, the pointer-shaped open books’ re-arrangeability and their gameboard text suggest a playful invitation to consider how we imagine, mythologize, redefine and map what seems to us to be empty space challenging our place in it.
Facing Again (2023)
Jacobus Oudyn
Card cover, found-text title pasted on front cover. Pamphlet stitched, 10 portraits made of found text, collage and mixed media. H102 x W147 mm. Unique. Acquired from the artist, 1 June 2023.
Photos: Books On Books Collection. Displayed with permission of the artist.
Something of a cross between the satire of R. Crumb and Spitting Image and the rawness of Lucien Freud and Francis Bacon, each of these ten portraits fills its half of an 80 gsm gray pastel paper folio. So, naturally, they loom larger than life in the near-miniature trim size. While the portrait in M.L.A. has a real-life subject of its satire, these faces in Facing Again are fictional, more general and reflective of “mental” issues afflicting 21st century first world societies. Common to most of the portraits, fractions appear as content in the mouths or in the minds of the portrayed — or almost as if they are brushstrokes conveying a characteristic. They imply a sense of psychological, social and political fractionation and division that have featured increasingly in the first three decades of the 21st century.
In the first portrait, above, a set of fractions seems to issue from the character’s forehead like a thought bubble, but this bubble is shard-shaped and could just as well be impaling the character’s forehead with fractions. In either case, they have to do with what “she knew” — the “what she knows” that inflames her face and contorts her nose and mouth into a snarl.
Although not a fraction, the eighth portrait’s reference below to the 9/11 event of 2001 and the text — “really got to be diligent” — evoke an identifiable instance of fractionation and division. This character is more physically distorted than the first. Its jaw dislocated, its teeth inverted, its eyes askew, the face looks submerged in a brown pool of 9/11 aftermath. Divisions on a global scale begat violence, which reinforced fear and division, which begat more violence and fear. If it were only that simple.
These portraits are images of confusion and uncertainty until the last, who seems able to weep only with one eye for “something else”.
“Jacobus Oudyn (I)“. 17 January 2021. Books On Books Collection.
Pantographia, Containing accurate Copies of all the known Alphabets in the World (1799/2022)
Edmund Fry
Casebound in Italian Fedrigoni Imitlin, sewn book block, black endpapers. H215 x W140 mm. Acquired from Black Letter Press, 1 April 2022.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.
For the Enlightenment, everything that existed was meant to be in an encyclopedia. For Dr. Edmund Fry, scholar, typographer and owner of The Polyglot Foundry, this notion (and the spur of profit) led to his Pantographia (1799). Extraordinarily, Fry made the matrix for each of the roughly 5,000 characters for the 405 alphabet specimens, then handcast each — a monumental sixteen-year accomplishment in craftsmanship. Quite a type sampler for a printer specializing in foreign languages.
Fry was also driven by the importance of the subject: the origin of speech, its being made visible and the varieties of doing so. “The art of drawing ideas into vision, or of exhibiting the conceptions of the mind, by legible characters, may justly be deemed the noblest and most beneficial invention of which human ingenuity can boast — an invention which has contributed, more than all the others, to the improvement of mankind.” (xviii)
Fry is even handed in presenting the arguments and evidence for and against the two possible origins of speech he identifies — divine gift or human invention. He is unequivocal though “that all languages … that have been conveyed in alphabetical characters, have been those of people connected ultimately or immediately with the Hebrews, to whom we are indebted for the earliest specimens of the communication of ideas by writing” and “that there was but one truly original language, from which all others are derivations variously modified”. (xxxviii, xliii)
Plenty has been written about Fry’s accomplishment. Johanna Drucker has explored it in her Alphabetic Labyrinth and more recent Inventing the Alphabet. Even more recently, Hunter Dukes, editor of The Public Domain Review, posted a brief celebration, citing Drucker. Jan Düsterhöft, a German academic now affiliated with the Georg Eckert Institute, provides the publisher’s preface to the Black Letter Press edition shown above. All three identify the two features of Pantographia that echo two other works in the Books On Books Collection: Sam Winston’s One & Everything (2023) and Claire Jeanine Satin’s The Hebrew Alphabet Expressing the Celestial Constellations (2017).
Original at Mansfield College Library, Oxford University
Even in 1799 several of the alphabets displayed by Fry represented extinct languages. Today the Endangered Alphabets Project initiated by Tim Brookes aims rescue languages and their alphabets from that fate. Brookes’ project inspired Sam Winston’s story. More forcibly than Drucker and Dukes, Düsterhöft identifies the imperialist and Western perspective in Fry’s endeavor. Winston’s fable is populated with “story characters”, drawn as various sized and colored blobs, each filled with its distinguishing alphabet. Some are filled with hieroglyphic dogs (presumably for Egyptian shaggy-dog stories), others with Greek, Cherokee and so on. The one story that decides it is the “One and Only story” is filled with the English (Latin or Roman) alphabet and proceeds to eat up all the others.
In Pantographia, Chaldean, one of the extinct languages, is a special case, not because Fry includes 20 variant specimens (Greek has 39) but because it is reportedly celestial. The first of Fry’s cited sources for this alphabet is Jacques Gaffarel (1601–1681), a French scholar and astrologer. A bit of digging reveals the source to be more precisely a woodcut from a 1650 translation of Gaffarel’s Curiositez inouyes sur la sculpture talismanique des Persans, horoscope des Patriarches et lecture des estoiles (1629).
From Pantographia (2022)
Unheard-of Curiosities : Concerning the Talismanical Sculpture of the Persians, the Horoscope of the Patriarkes, and the Reading of the Stars (1650)
Jacques Gaffarel
In addition to its astrological character, Gaffarel’s work sits in the traditions of gematria, the Kabbalah and alchemy, which Johanna Drucker has thoroughly explored in Alphabetical Labyrinth (1999) and Inventing the Alphabet (2022). Among the earlier contributors to these traditions is Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa. Like his mentor Johannes Trithemius, Agrippa was a polymath, occultist and theologian as well as physician, legal scholar and soldier. The Latinized Hebrew letters and their corresponding characters in the celestial alphabet seen below come from Agrippa’s De occulta philosophia (1533), which is more legible than Gaffarel’s above.
Henrici Cornelii Agrippae ab Nettesheym à consiliis & archiuis inditiarii sacrae Caesareae maiestatis De occulta philosophia libri tres (1533)
Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim
Black Letter Press issued this edition in 2022. As indicated in the caption at the head of this entry, considerable attention to materials was given, including blind debossing and hotfoil printing on the front and spine. The edition is not a photographic facsimile; rather it has been scanned and phototypeset. Scanning in lieu of resetting does not eliminate errors, even if the scan is reviewed carefully. Aside from occurrences of “mod” instead of “most”, “mall” instead of “shall”, and “2ist” instead of “first”, though, the most unusual variation from the original is the deliberate movement of openings on the verso to openings on the recto and, in the specimen section, the reversal of all verso and recto pages. On his verso pages, Fry placed the specimen, and on the recto pages, he placed comments, explanations and sources. For Black Letter Press, the reverse seems to have made more sense. Below are comparisons of pages from the original (left) and the Black Letter Press edition (right).
Left: 1799 original. Right: Black Letter Press facsimile.
Most uncaught scanning errors leap out, so despite the niggling worry about accuracy, the greater legibility and probable accessibility of the 2022 edition is welcome for explorers of alphabets and alphabet-related works. For the Books On Books Collection, its enhancement of the pleasure in Winston’s and Satin’s works and others such as Golnar Adili’s BaaBaa Aab Dad, Islam Aly’s 26 Letters and Ben Shahn’s The Alphabet of Creation (1954), it is more than welcome.
Another 25 images of Fry’s original edition can be found here, courtesy of The Letterform Archive.
“Abecedaries I (in progress)“. Books On Books Collection.
Drucker Johanna. 1999. The Alphabetic Labyrinth : The Letters in History and Imagination. London: Thames & Hudson.
Drucker Johanna. 2022. Inventing the Alphabet : The Origins of Letters from Antiquity to the Present. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Not just another in the long line of histories of the alphabet, rather it explores “Who knew what when about the alphabet?” How did the way they knew it affect how they imagined its identity and origin? For Drucker, Pantographia marks an endpoint and transition. These printed compendia of alphabetic scripts began in 1518 with Johannes Trithemius. Initially spurred by interest in the occult as well as exotic and ancient scripts and a search for the “original” alphabet, compendia gradually became more secular but still eclectic. By 1799, Fry ‘s was an exception by still including the Celestial Alphabet and citing sources in trackable ways. Simultaneously an investment in imagination and a significant step forward for scholarship.
Dukes, Hunter. 10 October 2023. “Pantographia: A Specimen Book of All the Alphabets Known on Earth (1799)“. Public Domain Review. Dukes, editor of the Review, celebrates Pantographia‘s iconic presence in the public domain. In his celebrating, Dukes also notes the presence of the Celestial Alphabet in Pantographia and Drucker’s singling out Fry for taking the antiquarian compendium of alphabets to the earliest stage of specialized, professional research. He also surrounds Fry’s effort with other interesting direct and indirect contexts: the discovery of the Rosetta stone in the same year as Pantographia’s publication and the extinction of several of the languages that Fry’s alphabet represents.
Düsterhöft, Jan. 2022. “Foreword”. In Fry, Edmund. 1799. Pantographia, Containing accurate Copies of all the known Alphabets in the World. Turin, Ialy: Black Letter Press. A German academic now affiliated with the Georg Eckert Institute, Düsterhöft also raises the point about extinction and relates it to the West’s imperial colonial perspective, which Fry displays in his omissions and dismissal of the Chinese mind’s intellectual and rational capacity “as evidenced” by the lack of an alphabet. Düsterhöft also identifies Gaffarel’s source for the celestial alphabet: Guillaume Postel ‘s Linguarum Duodecim Characteribus Differentium Alphabetum Introductio [An Introduction to the Alphabetic Characters of Twelve Different Languages] (1538). Postel (1510 – 1581) was a polyglot French linguist, astronomer, Christian Cabalist, and diplomat.
From Postel, Linguarum
A Bookbinder’s ABC (2003)
Christopher Hicks, Leaning Chimney Press Editions
Soft cover (buff card, illustrated paper jacket glued to spine, sewn block). H200 x W150 mm. 34 pages. Edition of 75. Acquired from Barter Books, 18 October 2023.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.
Although Glaister’s Encyclopedia of the Book is the canonical dictionary for book terminology, A Bookbinder’s ABC provides 26 humorous visual reminders.
An Arabian stallion in a decorative onsie for recalling the description of fleurons and other devices derived from Islamic patterns.
What else would a binder call a children’s orchestra?
A fox flummoxed by a maze is certainly “foxed”. This one is also likely puzzled by the holes carried over from “Wormholes” on the previous page. Barking dogs springing from a book cover might be a helpful mnemonic for the name of the wide soft edges or flaps for Bible covers devised by the 19th century London bookseller Yapp.
The work’s own binding has simple but interesting features. The front and back covers in buff card are glued to the first and last sewn gatherings, respectively, and the sewn gatherings are glued in between and sewn together. The blue paper jacket’s spine is glued to the spines of the gatherings and its fore edges fold over the fore edges of the buff card. Curious but not as self referential as the features of two nearby birds of a feather from Andrew Morrison’s Two Wood Press.
Detail of uncut top edges and gluing of gatherings and spine.
From Morrison’s Provenance (2018), showing an actual wire-stitched gathering and then an illustration of the mechanism; from Morrison’s Two Wood Press A-Z (2003), showing showing an embossed page illustrating E for Embossing. Photos: Books On Books Collection.
But what would a self-referential binding for A Bookbinder’s ABC look like — especially one that might carry on the punnery of the contents? Presumably because they are closer to the words, entries in letterpress abecedaries such as Morrison’s Two Wood Press A-Z (2003) and Kevin M. Steele’s The Movable Book of Letterforms (2009) have an easier time of the visually self-referential.
From Steele’s A Movable Book of Letterforms, showing the anatomical term for the red areas of the L & R (a leg lift?); from Morrison’s Two Wood Press A-Z, showing x’s definition of its height.
Closer still to the words are the typographical punsters such as Marie Dern and William Caslon’s Typographic ABC (1991), Nicolas McDowall and A Bodoni Charade (1995) or Sharon Werner & Sharon Forss and Alphabeasties and Other Amazing Types (2009).
From Dern’s William Caslon’s Typographic ABC, McDowall’s A Bodoni Charade and Werner & Forss’ Alphabeasties and Other Amazing Types.
Perhaps Pat Sweet’s miniature The Book Book (2010) comes closest on self-referentiality in a work about binding. For the puns, we will have to wait for another bookbinder to take a stab at it.
From Sweet’s The History of Bo Press (2021).
“Abecedaries I (in progress)“. Books On Books Collection.
“Alphabets Alive!“. 19 July 2023. Books On Books.
“David Clifford“. 15 September 2021. Books On Books Collection.
“Marie Dern“. 8 March 2023. Books On Books Collection.
“Nicolas McDowall“. 10 December 2022. Books On Books Collection.
“Andrew Morrison“. 15 September 2021. Books On Books Collection.
“Kevin M. Steele“. 18 July 2023. Books On Books Collection.
“Pat Sweet“. 18 January 2023. Books On Books Collection.
“Sharon Werner & Sharon Forss“. 20 December 2022. Books On Books Collection.
Frost, Gary. 1996. Teaching set of historical bookbindings. Utopia, Tex: Gary Frost, Dry Frio Bindery.
Hanmer, Karen. 2013. Biblio Tech. Glenview, IL: Karen Hanmer Book Arts.
Books On Books 