Books On Books Collection – Camden Richards & Deborah Sibony

Water, Calling (2021)

Water, Calling (2021)
Camden Richards & Deborah Sibony
Felt-covered, modified dragon-scale bound artists’ book, accompanied by audio equipment in custom box. Box: 262 x 262 x D170 mm. Book: H155 x W775 mm (closed). 110 pages. Edition of 15, of which this is #1. Acquired from the artists, 5 October 2022. Photos: Books On Books Collection. Displayed with artists’ permission.

Colophon
“Water, Calling is a collaborative artist book which explores the cyclical and omnipresent relationship of water and the self, inviting the reader to reflect upon water as more than a commodity, but rather as life giving: spirit, flesh and soul. Because water is evidence of all who came before us, it is a foretelling of all who will be; through it we are in conversation with our ancestors, our descendants, and with earth herself. Water, Calling traces these existential threads through waterscapes of text, image and sound, extending an invitation to enter more fully into a dialogue composed of acts requiring active listening, contemplative reading and deep seeing with the hope of inspiring sacred reciprocity.”

The initial attraction of Water, Calling was its modified “dragon-scale” binding (Chinese: longlin zhuang 龍鱗裝). Its lasting attraction has been how the binding and the structure within it join with the text, images, textures and sound to create this work of art so evocative of the element water.

Water, Calling‘s dragon-scale binding is a modified form of the method used with Chinese manuscripts in the 8th century CE and in the oldest printed book known — the Diamond Sūtra, dating back to 868 CE and found in the caves near Dunhuang, China in 1900. In the original structure, sheets of paper of different widths overlap one another with the narrowest on top and the widest on the bottom. They are aligned and attached along the left or right edge, and from the attached edge, the overlapping stack of leaves rolls into a scroll. Below are images from various sources (Drège, Song, and Chinnery).

Drège. Figure unnumbered (p. 197) and Plate XXIV (p. 205).

Song. Fig. 2 Diagrams of whirlwind bindings (top) ‘concertina’ xuanfeng zhuang (旋風裝) and (bottom) ‘dragon scale’ longlin zhuang (龍鱗裝).

Historically the dragon scale seems to occupy a transitional stage between scroll and codex, and the latter seems to inspire most of the modifications of the dragon scale in Water, Calling. Its dragon-scale-like overlapping occurs within each of seventeen codex-like signatures and across them. There is, however, no single widest sheet. The dragon-scale’s characteristic curling, outlying edge occurs due to a staggered fold of one leaf in each signature. The first signature, below with its the first page and edge of its third page showing, is a single-fold leaf that anchors the book block to the long felt cover. As the first signature’s last page is turned to the left, it pulls all of the next sixteen signatures with it. Viewed from the edge in the third image below, the staggered and overlapping signatures mimic waves of water (see the third image below).

A distinctive modification of the binding is the inclusion of a narrow-cut sheet of Gmund Transparent in the second signature that interleaves with the third signature. The dry facts printed on the transparency interrupt the flow of the text debossed at the end of the first signature and beginning of the second. Each of the remaining pairs of signatures has a narrow-cut linking sheet of dry facts making up one stream of text interweaving with the more lyrical text and water patterns debossed on the Rives BFK paper.

Set in the cursive Magdallena, the debossed text reads “through water we are in conversation, | with our ancestors, with our elders, our unborn descendants, our future — with earth herself.”

All eight of the translucent sheets can seen from this sideways rear view of the seventeen signatures. So the dry, however impressive, facts on the translucent sheets make up one stream of text interwoven with the more lyrical text and water patterns debossed on the Rives BFK paper.

A sideways view of the back of all seventeen signatures shows all eight of the translucent sheets.

Within each of the seventeen signatures, there is a double-page spread of artwork: a series of cyanotype prints of original photographs, image transfers sourced from historical maps, and watercolor art.

With the third double-page spread, a third stream of text and a material element of interweaving occurs. Richards introduces a more personal set of observations typeset in New Caledonian on a sheet of Sekishu paper attached to the lefthand edge of an underlying spread of artwork. Nothing quite like this appears in other works of dragon-scale binding. The presence of those Sekishu sheets requires some care in turning the pages, unscrolling and scrolling the work. This modification of the dragon-scale binding heightens its delicacy and slows down the process of reading, looking and reacting, which reinforces the artists’ words.

There are thirteen of these Sekishu sheets in total, leaving two double-page spreads at the beginning and two at the end uncovered. This is not by accident. Structurally it reflects the ouroboros nature of the debossed text on the Rives BFK: it ends as it began.

The width of the opened work and way the reader must almost embrace it to open it reflect the breadth of the artists’ meditation on various bodies of water—wild and managed, urban and rural. The interwoven leaves and text reinforce the makers’ (and water’s) call to “pay attention” and reconnect.

Other examples of dragon-scale binding in the Books On Books Collection include works by Barbara Hocker, Nif Hodgson, Rutherford Witthus and Zhang Xiaodong. It seems no accident that Hocker and Hodgson adopt the dragon-scale binding to evoke the element of water. But other artists in the collection who aim to evoke the element choose another structure that, like dragon scale, seems to be a transition from scroll to codex: the accordion fold or leporello and its variant the window-panel flag book. Among the leporellos are Helen Douglas’ Follow the River (2015-17), and for an example of the variant, there is Cathryn Miller’s Westron Wynde (2016). Of course, the codex is not antithetical to the theme. The sense of water pours from the “Coast & Dunes” and “Banks & Brooks” sections of Margaret (Molly) Coy & Claire Bolton’s Handscapes (2016) and Bodil Rosenberg’s Vandstand (2019), though the size, shape and texture of the latter may have more in common with the sculptural and equally evocative I think that the root of the wind is water (2016) by Susan Lowdermilk and Breaking Waves (2023) by Emmy van Eijk. Still, even in this century, the scroll continues to offer an effective conduit whether in paper or pixels as Helen Douglas’ The Pond at Deuchar (2011, 2013) demonstrates.

Of all these works, Water, Calling engages multimedia the most in its invocation and evocation of the element of water. Its environmental soundscape, created by Anne Hege with a hand-built, analog looping tape machine, consists of water recordings, instrumentals and vocal incantations. To listen to excerpts from the soundtrack, click here, or to listen to the full soundtrack, click here (password required; request access here).

The Space Between (2018)

The Space Between (2018)
Camden Richards & Deborah Sibony
Casebound with cloth-covered spine between bonderized steel covers in a cloth-covered custom box. Box: H216 x W305 x D24 mm; Book: H197 x W284 x D10 mm. 50 pages. Edition of 13, of which this is #11. Acquired from the artists, 5 October 2022.
Photos: Books On Books Collection. Displayed with artists’ permission.

An earlier collaboration between Richards and Sibony, The Space Between is based on ten original monotypes printed by Sibony at Studio 1509 on a Takach press and digitally reproduced for the book by Coast Litho on Grafix matte drafting film. The work’s text is set in Mark Simonson’s Goldenbook; its typographic layout, die-cuts and letterpress printing is by Richards at Liminal Press + Bindery on Somerset Book paper with a Vandercook 4 proofing press; and its handmade paper embedded with local Bay Area plant fibers comes from Pam DeLuco of Shotwell Paper Mill. The Space Between is bound in bonderized steel covers and housed in a custom box by John DeMerritt.

The ten monotypes were inspired by the gradual removal of the eastern span of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge after its partial collapse in 1989. About that inspiration, Sibony writes:

On the day of the Loma Prieta earthquake (October 17, 1989) I had just begun commuting from San Francisco to work at Fantasy Records in Berkeley. Thus began my long-term relationship with the Bay Bridge. The quake caused the collapse of a 50-foot section of the upper deck and led to the death of a 23-year-old woman. I was fortunate not to be driving home on the bridge at the time of the earthquake, when I could easily have been returning to San Francisco. I spent that night in Berkeley with a friend since the bridge was closed to all traffic, and would remain so for several weeks.

Twenty-four years later, on September 3, 2013, a wondrous, white, single-span was set to replace the damaged eastern section of the bridge. On the day before the eastern span was closed forever and the dismantling began, I drove across that compromised structure for the last time. As I shot video from the car, a feeling struck me on a gut level: it was the start of a new era for the geography and landscape of the Bay Area — and the beginning of the end for an iconic structure that would soon cease to exist.

From then on I took photos with my iPhone whenever I drove across the new eastern span, adjacent to the closed cantilevered section, documenting its gradual deconstruction until it finally disappeared. Using a special transfer process I incorporated those images into a series of monotypes that are reproduced in The Space Between.

Sibony’s monotypes are fragments that illustrate moments of a vanishing and a metamorphosis of wood, concrete, and steel. In The Space Between, Richards uses letterpress printing, translucent substrate and die-cuts to pair Sibony’s images with text inspired by a poem by Charles Koppelman and thereby reimagines the two-dimensional monotype form into a three-dimensional book form. As the reader turns the pages, the images simultaneously build upon one another and retreat from one another, mimicking the moments of transition and creating a sense of meaning that emerges from spaces in between.

The Space Between is made with both machined and organic materials — from sheet metal covers to drafting film to handmade paper embedded with plant fibers — materials that ground it squarely in space and time as both a human and natural byproduct. The result is a physical and metaphorical exploration (and experience) of thresholds between those we physically create, those nature creates for us, and the space in between where we exist. Given the name of Richard’s enterprise — the Liminal Press — this work must hold a signal position for the publisher.

In its object and the theme it finds in the object, The Space Between resonates not only with the architecture-inspired works of book art in the Books On Books Collection but also those inspired by typography. See below.

Books On Books Collection – Anne Moeglin-Delcroix

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Ambulo Ergo Sum: Nature As Experience in Artists’ Books (2015)

Ambulo Ergo Sum: Nature As Experience in Artists’ Books (2015)
Anne Moeglin-Delcroix and Richard Sadleir, trans.
Case bound, printed paper over board, with green endbands and matching doublures. H225 x W155 mm. 96 pages. Acquired from Book Depository, 21 August 2019.
Photo: Books On Books Collection.

For her extended essay, Anne Moeglin-Delcroix selected six works by Hamish Fulton, seven by Richard Long and five by herman de vries to demonstrate “three ways of coming closer to the experience of nature unfiltered by the artistic tradition” of “landscape as an artistic genre” (pp. 5, 30).

As she puts it:

The analysis of some artists’ books … should make it possible to show how the emphasis has been progressively placed no longer on landscape but on the search for the best means, differing according to the various artists, of rendering an experience in the strongest sense of the word: a lived experience of the world, a personal practice, that is to say, a deliberate way of being in the world rather than before it. The walking body is the touchstone of this, because walking compels one to supersede the limits of a purely visual of nature to become the experience of the whole artist, with his body, in nature. (p. 6)

Along the way, Moeglin-Delcroix distinguishes between the walk being art itself (performance), the walk being a form of art (protocol driven) and the walk as being “simply one of the most favourable conditions for expanding perception and thereby consciousness and knowledge” (p. 28). In Fulton, she finds that the act of collecting and listing takes the place of the traditional landscape point of view, although views at a physical or temporal distance are present (p. 8). In Long, she finds that the act of collecting and listing is governed by protocol, an inventorying by purpose not mere encounter, and the “view of the close at hand” replaces the distant landscape view (pp. 19-20). But it is in devries she finds that the distant and the close, the whole and the fragment are complementaries that yield ambulo ergo sum (“I walk therefore I am”) (p. 28).

de vries is the most transcendental of the three. For de vries, in Moeglin-Delcroix’s words, “Art does not represent nature because nature is art itself” (p. 25), which leads to boxes or portfolios of loose items collected from nature that the reader has to contemplate as such and reconstruct the totality from which they were drawn (as in his catalogue incomplète), or to details from nature so close up that they can only have been collected by being in nature not by merely observing it (as in les très riches heures de herman de vries) (p. 29).

As philosophical as all this may be, the conceptual is not very far from craft in these artists’ works or Moeglin-Delcroix’s appreciation of them. But craft may be the thin end of the wedge that re-asserts a boundary between art and nature.

Consider Handscapes by Molly Coy and Claire Bolton. It, too, has been formed by walks, collecting, sampling, listing and related activities noted by Moeglin-Delcroix about Fulton, Long and de vries. It has the distant and up-close perspectives of Fulton and Long, respectively. It has de vries’ embedding of samples from nature. Albeit in landscape format, Handscapes is also a deviation from the tradition of landscape art. Consider also The Pond at Deuchar by Helen Douglas. It, too, has been formed similarly. It has the up-close perspectives of Long and de vries that replaces that of the traditional landscape, and it further deviates from that tradition by paradoxically calling on a structure associated with Oriental landscapes — the scroll. When contemplating these two works so different from those of Fulton, Long and de vries, are they any the less examples of “nature as experience in artists’ books”?

Yet, in Handscapes and The Pond at Deuchar, there is a presence of craft that draws the reader/viewer at some points closer to the nature experienced by the artists and at other points closer to the material nature of the artworks. As elements of craft, do plant-printed images or Chinese paper draw us closer to nature or push us further away in these artworks? Is it possible that paradoxically they do both?

Books On Books Collection – Clotilde Olyff

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Lettered Typefaces and Alphabets by Clotilde Olyff (2000)

Lettered Typefaces and Alphabets by Clotilde Olyff (2000)
Jan Middendorp and Clotilde Olyff
Spiral-bound softcover of 78 pages and measuring H235 x W215 mm with a 28-page booklet measuring H165 x W115 mm bound in. Acquired from Klondyke Books, Almere, NL, 28 November 2023.
Photos: Books On Books Collection

This is the rare first edition as published by the late Jan Middendorp through his Druk Editions. It bears all the hallmarks of his eye for design — the black coated wired binding, the heavy embossed card cover, the use of color to underscore the text’s theme, the embedded booklet — all nevertheless centering and providing a platform for the art and design of Clotilde Olyff.

Perhaps mostly noted for her pebble alphabet, Olyff should be noted for her Munari-like focus on the relation of the basic forms of circle, triangle and square to the shapes of letters and numbers and her ability to express that in sculpture, book art and games as well as type. Her works, as Middendorp writes in the preface, “are the result of investigations into the essence of the letter, into the mechanisms and conventions that guide our perception”.

In addition to being remembered for his own typographic design and publications, Middendorp is owed a debt of gratitude for collaborating with Clotilde Olyff to document her work.

Books On Books Collection – Klaus Peter Dencker

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Dero Abecedarius! (2001)

Dero Abecedarius! (2001)
Klaus Peter Dencker
Loose folios in heavy card box, title on card pasted on front box cover. H298 x W210 mm. 34 folios. Inkjet on BFK Rives 210 gram. Edition of 50, of which this is #30. Acquired from Red Fox Press, 3 January 2023.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.

Visual poems in an ABC sequence and inspired by the Statue of Liberty. Klaus Peter Dencker belongs in the vast company of notable visual poets and “alphabet-etishists”, too many to list here, but within the Books On Books Collection, there are Jim Avignon & Anja Lutz, Jim Clinefelter, Martín Gubbins, Bernard Heidsieck, Karl Kempton and Sam Winston, all of whom offer fruitful comparisons.

Detail from B folio

Artist’s statement: I started the work on “Dero Abecedarius” in the mid of July 2001. The work should have two principles of order: the sequence of the pages should follow the normal ABC, and the basic theme should be the Statue of Liberty which I am collecting since many years. This subject is a public-relation one in many variations, so that I could work on the idea of freedom especially with these partly absurd copies of our consumer society, to question it poetically and theoretically.

There exist three structures: 1. A-C, D-F, G-I, J-L, M, N-R, S-U, V-Z; 2. A-C, D-F, G-I, J-L, M, N-R, S-T, U-Y, Z; 3. A-C, D-F, G-I, J-L, M, N-P, O-R, S-T, V-Y, Z on four levels: black/poetic, green/poetry, blue/ABC, red/autobiographically.

Within this work are personal experiences of many visits to the USA and the absurd idea, that a letter has its own meaning/importance. The ABC as an own sign-world and as an example for the dealing with seeming/apparent unliberties and so called rules. I work on the sequences usually by making first all collages on the pages, then the text-elements and finally a follow-up of a few corrections in the existing collages. The work should have had 28 pages and was done for an exhibition in the Buch- und Schriftmuseum Museum of the Deutsche Bibliothek Leipzig with the opening on the 8th of November 2001. On the 11th of September all collages on the pages were done and also some pages with text-elements. Looking back that particular day over my work I noticed some elements which I can`t explain: I saw some disturbing connections. So on pages F, M, O and Z. I added after the 11th of September some new elements only in the existing collages of page R and Y, and I added the last two pages after Z. So that now the work has 32 pages as a consequence of 11 September and was finished on the 21st of October 2001.

Although Dencker refers to 32 pages, there are 34. They consist of 1 cover, 1 English preface (typeset), 1 German preface (handwritten), 26 letter folios, 1 entitled Noch zwei fündstucke (“Two more findings”), 2 modified collages of R and Y, 1 entitled “Art sheet”, 1 colophon.

Redfoxpress (founded by Francis Van Maele) is one of the more active and important publishers and distributors of artists’ books in the post-Fluxus tradition since 2000 to the present.

Books On Books Collection – Margaret (Molly) Coy & Claire Bolton

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Handscapes (2016)

Handscapes (2016)
Margaret (Molly) Coy & Claire Bolton
Casebound, hand sewn and bound with doublures and two ribbon bookmarks. H260 x W310 x D30. 80 folios. Edition of 12, of which this is #9. Acquired from the artists, 19 October 2023.
Photos: Books On Books Collection. Displayed with artists’ permission.

Like its title Handscapes, one half of the inspiration for this work of book art comes from the tools and material in the artists’ hands; the other, from Western Australia’s varied southwestern landscapes that the artists walked. Even its table of contents signals this dual inspiration with a single large wood type ampersand joining up each of the five section titles. The way the colors of ink move from dark to light and back across coasts & dunes, heath & ridge, thicket & forest, banks & brooks, caves & cliffs promises a rich journey for the eye. The shift from textured flyleaf to the Somerset paper of the contents promises the same for the hand.

Hand-crafted from a variety of papers and printed using collagraph, etching, linocut, leaf prints, metal and wood type (both printed and blind embossed) and illustrated with watercolor, pencil and tinted wax, the sheets in landscape profile deliver on the offer made by the table of contents. The same textured paper used to open and close the book takes on different colors when it is used to open and close each of the sections. Perhaps it’s something to do with the change of colors from recto to verso, but somehow the feel of that leathery, elephant-hide-like paper seems to vary from section to section — sometimes rough, gritty, bristly or slick, sometimes warm or cool.

Each section’s opening recto page (above) relies on the text laid out like a concrete poem and playing with a blind debossed image to signal the landscape to follow, while completely different papers (below) give real shifts of touch in keeping with each change in landscape.

Clockwise: A foamy white cotton paper from “Coasts & Dunes”; a linen wove from “Heath & ridge”; several fibrous papers from “Thicket & Forest”; a vegetal paper from “Banks & Brooks”; and a loose weave so porous it mimics pumice from “Caves & Cliffs”.

Within each section, the pages also play off one another in ways that reflect the section’s landscape. Look at this sequence from “Coast & Dunes”. First comes a watercolor and acrylics with the colors of Sea Spurge (Euphorbia paralias) and Tucker Bush or Coastal Pigface (Carpobrotus virescens) and a painted, blind debossed print of Sea Spurge on the right — all in the foreground. In the distance, tide and strand meet.

When the painted page turns, the strandline shows through the reverse and carries over into the torn edge of the white cotton paper on the right. Is that edge the crest of a white sand dune with a dark blue ocean in the background? Or is it the crest of a breaker crashing down the recto page?

When the torn-leaf is turned to the left, it does become a dune over which the debossed Sea Spurge now peeks, and we are looking beyond the dune’s crest into a cloudy white sky. The revealed dark blue recto page becomes something else altogether. The figurative has been abstracted. The debossed and gold-ink lines are the traces of the tideline and the dune crest.

Several pages later on in the section, this is confirmed when the other half of the dark blue sheet appears with new tracery labeled “tidelines” and “shifting dunes” in black ink and initiates a new sequence ending with another painting that looks at the earlier scene from a new perspective.

This magic as the recto page turns to verso is performed in many different ways. From “Thicket & Forest”, strips of paper woven into a sheet present one image on the recto and another on the verso.

From “Coasts & Dunes” again, the simple turning of a passe partout and other cutouts transform the images preceding and those previously framed or masked. The blue and brown pattern in the square of marbled paper (suminagashi from the Awagami factory in Japan) evokes tidelines and strandlines while the layers on the right suggest fish, eels or seaweed rippling under dark green water. When the first layer from the right (the passe partout) turns left, the suminagashi sample becomes a framed print, and the image on the right grows into a larger expanse of green water. When the next layer (the fish or grass cutouts) turns, the green water is replaced with blue, the cutouts become whitecaps or porpoises breaking the surface, and, on the right, the letters tumble in a wash from left to right.

Moving through Handscapes is like a walk through an open-air gallery. You see the art with your ears as well your eyes and hands. Some Australian composer should offer to be the artists’ Moussorgsky to this exhibition. Anne Moeglin-Delcroix’s Ambulo Ergo Sum (2015), however, makes a more interesting foil for appreciating Handscapes than Moussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition.

Addressing several works by three other celebrants of nature — Hamish Fulton, Richard Long and herman de vries — Moeglin-Delcroix concludes her essay neatly:

The three artists studied here through some of their books offer three ways of coming closer to the experience of nature unfiltered by the artistic tradition: nature as experienced, felt. In this process of deconditioning, walking plays a vital role: it enables them to overcome the limitations of a visual and cultural experience, involving the whole body in contact with nature itself. The artists examined here replace the “point of view” presupposed by all landscape and the conventions of artistic representation with the more neutral and more objective approaches of the collection and the inventory, as if seeking to efface themselves before nature itself. That these approaches are governed by protocols, though summary, or reintroduce the mediation of an explicit or implicit method is not inconsistent with the quest for a more immediate relationship with nature. It is that, like automatism among the Surrealists or (a reference much more familiar to these artists) emptiness in Buddhism, the immediacy or evidence lost requires, in order to be regained, self-discipline, even an asceticism of subjectivity: discipline and asceticism are visible in how their books are constructed. P. 30.

From their title onwards, Coy and Bolton are very much filtering nature through their art. Nature does not seem any less experienced or felt. It is experienced and felt through the variety of their art. And vice versa: nature filters their art. As Coy describes it in her correspondence. “We started every individual section by (sitting, walking, talking) immersing ourselves in a specific environ, taking photos and collecting plants, then back to my studio and the project’s visual diary.”

For Handscapes, collection and inventory as an approach apply as much to the Coy’s and Bolton’s conventions, tools, techniques and materials of artistic representation as they do to nature itself. They throw their art into nature, and nature into their art. Look at the vegetal detritus in the papers. Look at the leaf prints. Look at the play with perspective — from the landscape point of view to the underfoot point of view. There’s little self-effacement before nature here. As the page-turning magic demonstrates, there’s a profusion of perspectives, colors, shapes, textures and techniques — as if to celebrate the profusion of nature.

Dried specimen of Sea Spurge (Euphorbia paralis) used for Handscapes. Photo: Courtesy of Molly Coy.

This is not to place Fulton, Long, de vries, Coy and Bolton in some sort of hierarchy. Rather it is to draw attention to differences in quests to express a relationship with nature and art. And to appreciate how Coy’s and Bolton’s approach is visible in how their book is constructed.

Books On Books Collection – Claire Bolton

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Co-founder of The Alembic Press with David Bolton, Claire Bolton is an independent historian of printing and type as well as an aficionado of handmade paper. She recently donated works in shifu (a spun and woven paper textile) to the Bodleian. Although she disclaims classification as a book artist, her works in the Books On Books Collection — especially her collaboration with Molly Coy called Handscapes (2016) — argue with her persuasively.

A Little Black Book (1995)

A Little Black Book (1995)
Claire Bolton
Miniature, open-spine, stab-bound with red cotton thread to hard boards. H73 x W60 mm. 64 pages. Edition of 100, of which this is #4. Acquired from Oak Knoll Books, 11 October 2023.
Photos: Books On Books Collection. Displayed with artist’s permission.

Like most book artists, Bolton cannot resist puns when titling a work. Groans must yield to smiles as these pages of selected samples demonstrate her premise that the pre- and post-Gutenberg letters called Black Letter had illegibility as their “chief characteristic”.

While several other Alembic Press productions follow the mode of printer’s sampler and so might support Bolton’s disclaimer, those celebrating her interest in paper undercut it.

From Seed to Sheet (1997)

From Seed to Sheet (1997)
Claire Bolton
Miniature, triangular accordion fold in beige cloth boards with button sewn to front and thread for tie-around closure. 70 x 70 x 98 mm. 18 pages. Edition of 80, of which this is #19. Acquired from The Old Mill Bookshop, 7 January 2024.
Photos: Books On Books Collection. Displayed with artist’s permission.

In multiple and larger formats, Peter and Patricia Gentenaar-Torleys’ first seven books of the Rijswijk Paper Biennial (1996-2008) present a significant variety of samples of handmade paper. In miniature, Bolton’s From Seed to Paper presents the raw material of papermaking as well alongside a sample of the result. Like Bolton, the Gentenaar-Torleys do not see themselves as book artists, but the expressive design and structuring of their books say otherwise. And so, too, does the design and structure of this small work for Claire Bolton.

Perhaps she was thinking of small seed packets when she came up with the book’s design.

Perhaps she was thinking of rows of planted seeds and their blossoming out.

Perhaps she was thinking of the tilting back-and-forth motions of carding or shaking the water from pulp.

Whatever she was thinking, it transmitted through her hands into this satisfying object that opens, turns and closes to evoke its subject as well as tell it.

from the Bodleian Libraries
Isis Papyrus (1990)

Isis Papyrus (1990)
Claire Bolton
Photos: Books On Books. Displayed with artist’s permission.

A slightly larger work than From Seed to Sheet, this one nevertheless required several pairs of hands to create. Oxford University Botanic Gardens’ botanist Timothy Walker’s hands were needed to supply the plant cuttings, and papermaker Maureen Richardson’s were needed to transform Bolton’s leftover cuttings into handmade paper.

With Maureen Richardson’s sample, Bolton’s book presents visually and tactilely the clear distinction between the layered nature of papyrus sheets on which ancient scribes drew and wrote their hieroglyphics and that of handmade paper created from pulp.

For anyone prowling for examples with which to explore artists’ books, the artistry 0f paper and how they relate, Bolton’s A Little Black Book, From Seed to Paper and Handscapes (with Molly Coy) — as well as the works by others below — are warmly recommended.

Books On Books Collection – Susan Lowdermilk

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I think that the root of the wind is water (2016)

I think that the root of the wind is water (2016)
Susan Lowdermilk
Hardback with open spine, Asahi cloth over board, debossed front cover with fitted, pastedown artwork, around folded structure with cut-outs, pop-ups and pastedowns. H236 x W182 x D20 mm. 14 pages. Edition of 30, of which this is #24. Acquired from the Abecedarian Gallery, 5 October 2023.
Photos: Books On Books Collection. Displayed with the artist’s permission.

Some book art illustrates a poem. Some converses with it. And some, like this one by Susan Lowdermilk, enact the poem.

I think that the Root of the Wind is Water—
It would not sound so deep
Were it a Firmamental Product—
Airs no Oceans keep—
Mediterranean intonations—
To a Current’s Ear—
There is a maritime conviction
In the Atmosphere—

#1302, Emily Dickinson. 1960. Complete poems [1st ed.]. T. H. Johnson (ed.). New Y0rk: Little Brown.

As she frequently does, Dickinson announces her core metaphor in the poem’s first line and goes on to develop and confirm or justify it in the lines that follow. As book artist, Lowdermilk has a slight advantage over the poet in being able to use the binding and printing to express herself even before the first line arrives. Before that first breath of air is taken, the Asahi book cloth’s color and the pressure print blue-gray pattern, which peeks from the exposed spine, is embedded on the front cover and flows over the doublure, evoke water, the sea and the maritime.

With the pop-up that follows, breathing the air above the page, Lowdermilk even manages to steal a march on the first half of the poet’s “Root of the Wind” metaphor. As the airy engineering is done with the paper printed with the watery pattern, enhanced by a reflective sheet of acetate beneath, it physically performs Dickinson’s entwining of wind and water. All that before and as the poem’s first two lines appear — and it just gets better with every turn of the page.

Because the blue-gray pattern plays so significant a role in this work, I asked the artist how the pressure print process works, especially in yielding the tonality of pattern.

I learned the pressure print technique at the Minneapolis Center for Book Arts while I was on a residency there in 2015. It is more akin to a rubbing that is created using light pressure on the letterpress than a relief print from something like wood or linoleum. Here is a brief description and a video. A plate in the bed of a cylinder press is inked. A low profile image (like paper cutouts for example) is placed onto the cylinder with the paper on top. The light pressure of the press touches the paper on top of the low profile image, giving a soft impression (like a rubbing) on the paper.The ink never touches the plate itself, just the plate’s pressure through the paper. If the pressure is too much, then the non image areas of the paper get printed. So, ink layer, thickness of the image plate, thickness of the paper, and height of the inked base plate have to be just right. … I used sheets of sticky backed mailing labels for my plates. As I layered them the highest points got the most pressure and were darkest, the two lower levels of the image plates had less pressure and therefore lighter. … I like the pressure print process for this project because the softness of the images really suited the mood and feeling of the poem for me. (Correspondence, 14 January 2024)

Lowdermilk and Dickinson are at one as they move from the first two lines of the poem to the next two. Dickinson has split the sentence into two lines and knows that, after a line break, the reader’s eye swims back to the beginning of the previous line to fish out the sense of the sentence: “It would not sound so deep/ Were it a Firmamental Product”. After the line break and page turn, Lowdermilk gives us a water spout — “a Firmamental Product” — and knows that pop ups always bring out the child in the reader — turning the pages back and forth to see the action again and again — so back we go for the fun and the sense. Lowdermilk’s waterspout also puns on top of Dickinson’s pun on “Airs”; the waterspout, too, is an air the ocean won’t keep.

The shoal of fish leaping off the page is Lowdermilk’s addition, prompted no doubt by Dickinson’s “Oceans”, “Mediterranean intonations” and “maritime conviction”, although the shapes of the fish seem a bit ear-like, echoing the “Current’s Ear”.

With the next turn, the images of currents, waterspouts and fish give way to that of seaweed that undulates from the bottom of the finely horizontally sliced page, placing Dickinson’s “Root of the Wind” in the deep.

As those narrow maritime strips bend up and to the left into the atmosphere above the page, they reveal and enact Dickinson’s final lines.

There are many fine illustrated books and artists’ books that pay homage to Emily Dickinson. Many of the latter achieve that inversion of ekphrasis so frequent in book art where the visual or sculptural work of art responds to and re-presents the poem. The best of them achieve a oneness. Susan Lowdermilk’s does just that.

Books On Books Collection – Richard J. Hoffman

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Richard J. Hoffman (1912-1989) was a fine press printer and taught print and design at California State University, Los Angeles. His interests in typography, miniature books and the alphabet are represented by two works in the Books On Books Collection: “Don’t Nobody Care about Zeds” (1987) and Otto Ege’s The Story of the Alphabet (1988).

Both books scratch the collection’s “alphabet itch”. The first provides the added satisfaction of complementing the children’s books that champion the alphabet’s last letter: Jon Agee’s Z Goes Home (2006), Alethea Kontis & Bob Kolar’s AlphaOops: The Day Z Went First (2012), Sean Lamb & Mike Perry’s Z Goes First (2018) and Lou Kuenzler & Julia Woolf’s Not Yet Zebra! . The second adds an alphabet history to the miniature abecedaries as well as a more than usually intricate design.

“Don’t Nobody Care about Zeds” (1987)

“Don’t Nobody Care about Zeds”
A Modest Book About an Oft-overlooked Character of the Alphabet Prepared for the Pleasure of Zamoranans* (1987)
Richard J. Hoffman
Hardcover, casebound. Cloth and paper cover with colored endbands and printed doublures. H160 x W120 mm. 176 pages. Edition of 200. Acquired from Scott Emerson Books, 5 September 2023.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.

Hoffman’s introduction, which explains the book’s title and final image, also touches the collection’s expatriate funny bone.

‘Zeds is what the English folk call the magnificent twenty-sixth character of our alphabet. This I learned while shopping at Covent Gardens in London some years ago. There I happened upon a flea market where from a pair of old wood type cases, an ‘uckster was peddling electrotyped initial letters. With a blob of sealing wax, he assured me, I could personalize my correspondence by stamping my initial in the soft wax. When I asked he had any Zs, he looked at me questioningly, then he beamed as I picked one up, very brightly responded that he still had some unsold, and then solemnly observed, “Don’t nobody care about Zeds.”‘

For those who consider the ampersand to be the alphabet’s twenty-seventh character, Hoffman’s book may remind them of Jan Tschichold’s A Brief History of the Ampersand (1957) or ~Zeug/Velvetyne Type Foundry’s Et & ampersands : une récolte internationale = a contemporary collection (2017), but those two come nowhere near Hoffman’s embellishments with fleurons and ornaments to highlight his extended sampler.

The Story of the Alphabet (1988)

The Story of the Alphabet
Its Evolution and Development… Embellished Typographically with Printer’s Flowers Arranged by Richard J. Hoffman (1988)
Otto F. Ege** and Richard J. Hoffman
Hardback, casebound in gray cloth over boards, endbands, printed doublures. H70 x W74 mm. 82 pages. Edition of 250. Acquired from Bromer Booksellers, 1 November 2023.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.

Color and embellishment in Hoffman’s The Story of the Alphabet perform an informative as well as decorative function. The cover cloth’s red, green, gray and blue are decoratively echoed on the title page and later are used in the color-organization of fleurons and ornaments described in the “Printer’s Note”. Little wonder that the book received a Distinguished Book Award from the Miniature Book Society in 1988.

“The first eight, printed in blue ink, show the Garamond units”

“The second group … use[s] the Granjon Arabesque …. These are printed in green ink.”

“The final group … feature[s] a typographic unit designed by Bruce Rogers…. These, because of their heavy weight, are printed in gray ink….”

*”Zamoranans” refer to the members of the Zamorano Club of Los Angeles, named after Augustin Zamorano, who brought the first printing press to California in 1834.

**”Otto F. Ege” serves another purpose for the collection. Without the artistic justification atributable to some book artists, Ege was a notorious biblioclast. Thinking to make them more widely available, he broke apart numerous illuminated manuscripts to create portfolios of samples. Fortunately he was not comprehensive in his efforts, and a large number of intact works made it into Yale’s Beinecke Library (see below).

Books On Books Collection – Nayla Romanos Iliya

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The Phoenician Alphabet (2022)

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.

Herodotus first put forward the historical account that Cadmos, a prince from Byblos in today’s Lebanon, brought the Phoenician alphabet to the Greeks in ancient times (anywhere from the 12th to 8th century BCE according to scholars of the 20th and 21st centuries CE). The myth and story of Cadmos — his pursuit of his sister Europa kidnapped by Zeus, his founding the city of Thebes and his delivering the alphabet — are entertainingly recounted in the children’s book There’s a Monster in the Alphabet (2002) by James Rumford. The relative settling on the Semitic origins of Cadmos and the Phoenician alphabet is well covered in Johanna Drucker’s Inventing the Alphabet (2022).

Lebanon’s being the ancient source of this civilizing invention and the site today of ever-present conflict and ever-elusive peace is a challenging irony. Architect and artist Romanos Iliya meets that challenge with works like “On the Other Side of Time” (a soaring public sculpture in Beirut), Flower Power (forms made of concrete, steel and shell casings and splinters), 1001 Lights (an interactive sculpture of light, cubes and Arabic calligraphy) and the Phoenician Alphabet (public sculptures inspired by those shapes that Cadmos brought to capture the sounds of language). The monograph displays these works and more, including the limited edition series called Small Characters that she made for the National Museum of Beirut and the AUB Archaeology Museum.

Small Characters (2014) displayed in The Phoenician Alphabet.

Just as Ron King’s ABC Paperweights have done for the Latin alphabet, Romanos Iliya’s Phoenician letters suggest rather than replicate.

ABC Paperweights [nd]
Ron King
Resin sculptures on painted wooden board Acquired from the artist, 24 July 2021.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.

Alef, Beth and Gimel from the series Small Characters (2014)
Nayla Romanos Iliya
Sculptures in resin. 130 x 130 mm, variable height.Edition of 100 each, of which these are #26, #16 and #25, respectively. Acquired from the artist, 13 October 2023.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.

These three letters from the Small Characters series arrived too late to be included in the exhibition Alphabets Alive! at the Bodleian in Oxford. Had they arrived in time, however, they might have thrown the exhibition off track. The Alphabets Alive! exhibition began with a focus on artists’ books and the alphabet. A few non-print and non-book works slipped into the cabinets. But so resonant and evocative are these representations of the Phoenician alphabet that they would have — and have — led to a search for other sculptural works. Imagine the completely different and monumental display needed to accommodate these 26 artists alongside Romanos Iliya and King. Enjoy the links.

Hazem el Mestikawy

Dominault Evelyne

Emily Floyd

Glagolitic Alphabet Trail

Thierry Gouttenègre

Ebon Heath

Eric Ho & Kostika Spaho

Takanobu Igarashi

Collene Karcher

Marianne Larsen

Catherine Lesueur

Paco Torres Monsó

Claes Oldenburg

Jaume Plensa

Azza al Qubaisi

Peyton Scott Russell

Nicola Yeoman

Books On Books Collection – Susan E. King

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Lessons from the South (1986)

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.

Start with the cover above. In that light, at that angle, the corrugated plastic front and back covers of Lessons from the South resemble those backdoors in the South with frosted louvres that covered a screen and could be cranked open to let in cool air while the screen kept out insects. But the elbow crank was almost always cranky — particularly if the louvres had been closed tightly over a long period. Sure enough, it is a bit difficult to open this book.

A top-down view of the modified flag book structure.

As Johanna Drucker points out in The Century of Artists’ Books, the interior’s heavy translucent sheets attached to the spine “hold a hard fold, the crease of their edges functioning as a rigid element” that fights the reader’s access to the interior pages.

Even when the front cover is turned codex style, the binding and interior stiffness nudge you instead to pull and slide the front cover to the left, revealing the five sections of the book overlapping one another in a sideways continuation of the louvre motif.

Each section’s opening page carries a pair of quotations. The first pair comes from a billboard (or postcard), a bumper sticker, a joke, a common expression and a movie. The second pair in the lower right corners comes from the 19th century leaflet The Language of the Fan, produced by Duvelleroy, a fan maker in Paris, France, which complements the book’s opening billboard image “Greetings from Paris, KY”. After the italic book title that opens the first section, the section titles of the following four sections are parts of the phrase “A MID SUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM” and seem to be rubbings from an engraving.

The image under ” A MID” is the entrance to Bonaventure Cemetery in Savannah, Georgia . The second shows a tobacco field being inspected by a woman dressed all in white, including a large sun bonnet. The third is a night-time scene of a train crossing the High Bridge over the Kentucky River. The fourth — a photo of a Corinthian-columned university building — resembles a plantation frontage providing a visual complement to the text printed above it: “Frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn” (Rhett Butler, Gone with the Wind, the movie). “Coloring” the work as a recollection of growing up in the South, all of the images appear to have been scribbled over with a child’s crayon, as if they had been in a grandparent’s keepsake album. In keeping with that echo is the following anecdote.

At an annual camp meeting, King’s grandmother and her friends are rocking away on the front porch and discussing “whether or not, and how much they would cry at one another’s funerals”. King sadly notes the reality of her grandmother’s last wish — “to be buried in a wine red dress” — being denied and that “as the pictures of the open casket show, she was allowed to pass from this world to the next in something more subdued and suitable”. Those photos are not in the book, just that reference. Nothing so macabre finds its way into Lessons from the South. But between that anecdote and the photo of the plantation-style building, a discomfiting list of words and phrases runs down the accordion spine’s cutout tab to which the anecdote page is attached: “Black Magic / Blackface / Black Humor / Black Belt / Black Mammy / Blackberry / Blackball / Black Sheep / Black Widow / Black Boy”. The list juxtaposed with the anecdote about her grandmother’s “open casket” might suggest prescience of the first episode of the documentary Eyes on the Prize, which aired on 21 January 1987 and revived the memory of Emmett Till’s open-casket photo.

The absence of anything that shocking in Lessons from the South underscores King’s observation: “As far as I can see, the glory of the Ole South is held close to the heart through its relics rather than its reality”. The dashing chivalry of Confederate generals, the white columns, clinging vines and that bittersweet nostalgia the South “doesn’t deserve” seem to block out the reality of that other open casket. The final words of Lessons from the South — “In this effort to remember our past and re-invent ourselves” — seem a rueful fan flutter toward a reality with which King does not confront us. What would a more daring and intense work look like? Can a white Southerner — any white person for that matter — create an autobiographical artist’s book that authentically addresses racism’s realities? Dr. Lisa Whittington’s comments seven years ago during the controversy over Dana Schutz’s painting Open Casket offer some hope:

I don’t think it is wrong for a white person to paint Black subject matter. Art is a form of communication. Art gets people talking. Art documents mindsets and thought processes. But it has to be done responsibly, especially in this era of time. … racism is not a pretty or an easy topic to talk about let alone to paint a picture about it. It’s just not. But it is necessary because artwork can spark conversations that need to be had.

Coincidentally, seven years ago, Susan King returned to Kentucky, something she thought she “would never do” — a Grapes of Wrath in reverse as she puts it. On the journey home, she stopped in Memphis, Tennessee and visited the Civil Rights Museum, which incorporates both the façade of the Lorraine Motel where Dr. Martin Luther King was shot and James Earl Ray’s boarding house room from across the street. On her Paradise Press site’s blog, King recalls:

A woman stood on the other side of the street protesting the museum. I walked over to talk to her. She thinks black kids shouldn’t be taught their history. It is too painful. She wants the museum moved and low income housing built. In her world, we somehow can’t have both.

For most baby boomers and those from an earlier generation, a walk through the museum is a painful reminder of the history of racism in this country. Much of that history we saw unfold as youngsters. Almost too much to bear.

Thirty-eight years on, Lessons from the South remains an outstanding work of book art. It encourages the fusion of craft and engineering with art that followed on from the democratic multiples in book art to challenge the anatomy of the book. Thirty-eight years on, it piques the male conscience and white conscience differently than it did at any intervening point. It encourages more works to do even more — more than almost bear it — to bear witness.

Books On Books

Curated by Robert Bolick

Books On Books Collection – Camden Richards & Deborah Sibony

Water, Calling (2021)

The Space Between (2018)

Further Reading

Books On Books Collection – Anne Moeglin-Delcroix

Ambulo Ergo Sum: Nature As Experience in Artists’ Books (2015)

Further Reading

Books On Books Collection – Clotilde Olyff

Lettered Typefaces and Alphabets by Clotilde Olyff (2000)

Further Reading

Books On Books Collection – Klaus Peter Dencker

Dero Abecedarius! (2001)

Further Reading

Books On Books Collection – Margaret (Molly) Coy & Claire Bolton

Handscapes (2016)

Further Reading

Books On Books Collection – Claire Bolton

A Little Black Book (1995)

From Seed to Sheet (1997)

from the Bodleian Libraries
Isis Papyrus (1990)

Further Reading

Books On Books Collection – Susan Lowdermilk

I think that the root of the wind is water (2016)

Further Reading and Viewing

Books On Books Collection – Richard J. Hoffman

“Don’t Nobody Care about Zeds” (1987)

The Story of the Alphabet (1988)

Further Reading

Books On Books Collection – Nayla Romanos Iliya

The Phoenician Alphabet (2022)

Further Reading

Books On Books Collection – Susan E. King

Lessons from the South (1986)

Further Reading

Water, Calling (2021)

The Space Between (2018)

Further Reading

Ambulo Ergo Sum: Nature As Experience in Artists’ Books (2015)

Further Reading

Lettered Typefaces and Alphabets by Clotilde Olyff (2000)

Further Reading

Dero Abecedarius! (2001)

Further Reading

Handscapes (2016)

Further Reading

A Little Black Book (1995)

From Seed to Sheet (1997)

from the Bodleian Libraries Isis Papyrus (1990)

Further Reading

I think that the root of the wind is water (2016)

Further Reading and Viewing

“Don’t Nobody Care about Zeds” (1987)

The Story of the Alphabet (1988)

Further Reading

The Phoenician Alphabet (2022)

Further Reading

Lessons from the South (1986)

Further Reading

from the Bodleian Libraries
Isis Papyrus (1990)