Books On Books Collection – Andrew White Tuer

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History of the Horn-Book (1897)

History of the Horn-Book (1897)
Andrew White Tuer
Casebound, sewn. H260 x W210 x D50 mm. 510 pages: 18 preliminary, 4 unnumbered leaves of plates (1 double, 2 foldout) and 300 illustrations. Acquired from Patrick Pollak, Antiquarian & Rare Books, 15 October 2021.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.

Andrew White Tuer is the Herman Melville of the horn-book. Like Melville, Tuer had many interests. Just as the sea proved an abiding theme for Melville that drew all his interests together into Moby-Dick, so proved publishing and printing for Tuer. Within his abiding theme, Tuer’s white whale was the horn-book, and his pursuit yielded the History of the Horn-Book. Although Moby-Dick first appeared in three volumes and History of the Horn-Book appeared in two, Tuer out-Melvilles Melville in other ways. His monument outweighs Melville’s by 79 pages. Where Melville takes 14 pages to lay out “Etymologies & Extracts” on the whale, Tuer requires 20 pages of anecdotal citations to document the “Christ-cross-row” as the original name of the horn-book. Admittedly Melville traces his subject back to Genesis, albeit with some stretching, but Tuer traces the earliest record “of a real horn-book with horn and not a mere alphabetical table” back to an equally important date in the history of printing and publishing: 1450.

For 125 years, Tuer’s History of the Horn-Book has remained the standard work on this artifact for teaching children the alphabet.

This single volume is the first trade edition of History of the Horn-Book, following a special edition in 1896 of two volumes containing seven reproductions of horn-books and battledores distributed across two compartments or pockets placed at the front of the volumes. In the single-volume edition, the compartment moved to the back, and the number of facsimile horn-books fell to three: one of oak, one of card and one of horn. Like the two-volume edition, the single volume has gilt on its top edge; the fore-edge is deckled.

After the special edition, Tuer added a section to this trade edition to announce further discoveries, including the ivory horn-book. Tuer must have been fond of this compartment feature; it shows up again in his compendium of humorous anecdotes taken from his trade journal (the Paper & Printing Trades Journal) and entitled Quads for Authors Editors & Devils (1884). The rear compartment of Quads contains a miniature version of the book.

Trade edition compartment closed

Fold out with the three facsimile horn-books from the compartment

Tuer’s detail of research and analytical keenness go far to explain why History of the Horn-Book remains the standard work. If a trove of horn-books were to be discovered tomorrow, there would need to be extraordinary novelties in their composition, mechanics or material to warrant any attempt to displace this authority. Anyone making the attempt would require a foundation in printing history and practice that is hard to come by since the digital revolution. Consider Tuer’s knowledgeable comments on a silver horn-book alleged to have belonged to Queen Elizabeth I:

The history of horn-book is well in hand. As an educational device, it has been superseded by the battledore, building blocks, ABC books, television (Sesame Street), needlepoint samplers, wall hangings and rugs, toys and more toys and, of course, apps. But as an inspiration to book artists it still holds on. Among the book artists who have turned their hands, eyes and minds to the form are Helmut Andreas Paul (HAP) Grieshaber, Jan Paris, Daniel Essig, Kees Baart and his partners at Corps 8, and Karen Roehr.

With its horn-book images on the front and back covers and a five-page piece entitled analphabeten-bibel (“the illiterates’ bible”), HAP Grieshaber’s small work of concrete poetry underlines the draw of the alphabet for book artists.

Poesia Typographica (1962)
Helmut Andreas Paul (HAP) Grieshaber
Paperback, perfect bound Chinese-fold folios, black endpapers. HxW. Edition of 1000. Acquired from Print Arkive, 22 October 2022.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.

The white text on the clear acetate translates roughly as follows:

created around the turn of the century by a missionary named baedecker. thousands and thousands of these booklets were distributed among the illiterate peasantry of Russia. missionary baedecker put his 105 mm high and 75 mm wide booklet into old and young hands and said:

“this booklet contains the whole bible, the pure teaching of our jesus christ.”

the peasants saw in the black of the first page the darkness of their sinful hearts, their great guilt.

in the red of the next page, they united with the divine blood of christ. they followed the suffering steps of our lord. washed clean in the blood of his love, they won innocence:

the linen pasture of the third page, that is the purity that must be in the heart.

ready to enter into the mystery, to look into the sunshine of God’s face. to fall down in prayer, hearing the sound of the golden trumpets of heavenly bliss.

As the acetate page turns, the analphabetic Bible is revealed.

Although the horn-book by Jan Paris presents the usual uppercase and lowercase alphabets, the vowels and numbers as horn-books and battledores later came to do, it omits the Lord’s prayer, which these reading tools — early and late — preserved. In its place is a marbled green diamond shape hovering over a bird’s wing against a diffusely clouded background. Still though they may be, there is a tension between the abstract and natural things, contrarily positioned. The heavy abstraction floats or is falling. The thing that should be rising lies beneath, still and equally — although morbidly — detached. Letters, vowels and numbers, too, are certainly abstract. Until formed into words and concepts breathed into the air, they, too, lie still and detached on the horn-book’s surface.

Horn Book #2 (1983)
Jan Paris
Mixed media
Photo: Courtesy of the artist.

The horn-book form has become part of North Carolina artist Daniel Essig’s personal iconography. On his website, four variations can be found. The unique work below resides in Vanderbilt University’s Heard Library Special Collection. The range of materials and processes in Essig’s horn-book reflects the range of traditions, cultures and mythologies making up his eclectic iconography: miniature books, African bookbinding (contrasting with the horn-book), n’kisi nkondi (a Central African nail fetish), French literature (the unidentified collaged text), bird symbology, assemblage, carving, burning and painting. As totemic icon, Horn Book Fisher pushes the horn-book far beyond its primer function.

Horn Book Fisher (2008)
Daniel Essig
Carved and painted mahogany, burned cherry, mica, nails, handmade paper, found natural objects, 1800’s text papers, Ethiopian and Coptic bindings.
61 x 15 x 9 cm.
Photo: Courtesy of the artist.

Corps 8 was a Dutch collective of private presses formed by Dick Berendes (Typografiek), Kees Baart (‘t Schuurtje, now deceased), Gerard Post van der Molen (De Ammoniet), Sjaklien Euwals (De Overkant), Dirk Engelen (Clio Pers), Thijs Weststrate (Without Roof), Silvia Zwaaneveldt (De Baaierd) and Henk Francino (De Pers Achter de Muren). Under the auspices of a larger collective Drukwerk in de Marge, founded in 1975, they created Van Hornbook tot ABC-Prentenboek (“From Hornbook to ABC Picture Book”). It is an exquisitely produced, informative and witty collaboration. More about it can be found here.

Van Hornbook tot ABC-Prentenboek (2003)
Kees Baart, Dick Berendes, Henk Francino and Gerard Post van der Molen
Double-sided leporello between two pamphlet-sewn booklets and bound between two oversized wooden hornbooks, held in an open cardboard box. H295 x W150 x D 30 mm. First booklet, 18 unnumbered pages; second booklet 8 pages; 52 panels. Edition of 135. Acquired from Fokas Holthuis, 13 September 2022.
Photos: Books On Books Collection. Displayed with permission of the artists.

Karen Roehr’s Horn book for contemporary times is a miniature roughly the size of a small smartphone. Surely a Gen Z version with emoticons is not far behind on someone’s creative agenda.

Horn Book For Contemporary Times (2012)
K.E. Roehr
Laser-cut wood. H2 x W1.75 inches. Edition of 3. © K.E. Roehr.

Books On Books Collection – Peter Blake

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Peter Blake: Alphabets (2010)

Peter Blake: Alphabets (2010)
Peter Blake, Text by Mel Gooding
Slipcased, cloth and casebound hardback with endbands matching red cloth and yellow doublures. H310 x W255 mm. 224 pages. Edition of 600, of which this is #471. Acquired from The Plantagenet King, 3 November 2022.
Photos: Books on Books Collection. Displayed with permission of the artist.

Peter Blake has made the alphabet itself a subject of so many of his print series and exhibitions that Peter Blake: Alphabets and the exhibition associated with it stand as a retrospective. Naturally it showcases his style and signature techniques. It also showcases an outward and inward appraising wit that leads to humorous juxtapositions like the poster of “T for The Beatles” with the collage of “U for Unusual People”. But most of all it proves the variety and unity that a creativity-stimulating constraint like the alphabet can yield. With Blake’s wide-ranging uses of the alphabet, Mel Gooding’s commentary and the volume’s elegant design and production, Peter Blake: Alphabets serves as both example and reference for alphabet-related artists’ books.

Found objects and collages have long made natural allies. Peter Blake: Alphabets demonstrates that finding objects can also lead to a passion for collecting, and in Blake’s hands, a collector’s passion becomes not only the subject of art but part of the artistic process, a tool and a technique. The book even has a section entitled “Found Alphabets” that showcases his collection of widely varied alphabet posters and unifies them with unified scale.

It is Mel Gooding who points out this unified scale in his introduction to the section. As co-author with Julian Rothenstein of Alphabets Et Other Signs (1993), ABZ (2003) and A2z : Alphabet & Signs (2018), Gooding could not have been better suited for introducing this volume and for interviewing Blake for the earlier An Alphabet (2007), which Gooding references. After his introduction on the alphabet in general and Blake’s alphabets, the volume divides into two parts: “The Alphabets” and “Collections”. In the first part, there are seven sections; in the second, six. For each section, Gooding provides introductory comments.

Gooding’s critical insights often go beyond Blake’s art as in the section entitled “Horizontal Alphabets” when he reminds us to be aware of the possible implications of the artist’s horizontal all-at-once display of the alphabet. This section also provides the opportunity for the artist, editor and book designer to collaborate and shine. As the foldout below allows, Blake’s alphabetic arrangement of objects can be seen all at once, but as Gooding points out, the horizontal presentation becomes a discursive terrain, a carnival, a procession of sculpted objects with individual shape, color and style. The viewer can find real or imagined relationships between and among them, perhaps more easily than if they were presented in a page-turning codex format. But the contrast to which Gooding draws attention is with the vertical presentation of individual letters, as in Alphabet No. 10, where attention is drawn more to the categorizing and ordering nature of the alphabet.

Although the work above is a limited edition, Peter Blake’s ABC (2009) is widely available commercially, and Peter Blake: About Collage (2000) is well-represented in libraries. The latter has the advantage of exploring Blake’s collecting and its relation to the technique of collage in a context that includes Joseph Cornell and Tracy Emin.

Books On Books Collection – Warja Lavater

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Warja Lavater’s work first came to this collection’s attention through Jeffrey Abt and Buzz Spector. Entitled Jeu: livre en “papier modulé” (1980), the work had been included in an exhibition organized by Abt and, for which, Spector designed the catalogue: The Book Made Art: A Selection of Contemporary Artists’ Books, exhibited in the Joseph Regenstein Library, The University of Chicago, February through April 1986. No image of Lavater’s entry appeared in the catalogue, nor was an online image ever located. The description suggested that it was not a leporello, so later it came as a surprise that this was the form for which she was best known. Still, a vote of thanks to The Book Made Art for planting the artist’s name for future reference.

Three works in the Books On Books Collection represent Warja Lavater’s art: Le Petit Chaperon Rouge (1965), a tactile version of the same work (2008) and Spectacle (1990). The French publisher Adrien Maeght was Lavater’s most consistent champion, publishing several of her leporello works, including a now rare boxed set.

Le Petit Chaperon Rouge (1965)

Le Petit Chaperon Rouge (1965)
Warja Lavater
Accordion book in perspex slipcase.
Slipcase: H167 x W117 x D26 mm; Book: H160 x W113 x D20 mm, closed; W4.5 m, open. 40 panels.
Acquired from Patrick Wainwright Rare Books, 22 June 2022.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.

Abstract shapes stand in for the characters and settings in this retelling of Little Red Riding Hood’s journey through the forest to visit her grandmother. With the only text being that matching symbols to the cast of characters and settings, the tale is told wordlessly.

Knowing the story and having the cast to hand, the reader/viewer easily follows the shapes and colors into a new and artful experience of the folktale. But what if the shapes and colors cannot be seen?

Le Petit Chaperon Rouge (2008)

Le Petit Chaperon Rouge (2008)
Warja Lavater and Myriam Colin
Accordion book boxed in cloth-covered board box. Box: H190 x W130 x D75 mm; Book: H176 x W122 x D70 mm. closed;
W4.3 m, open. 40 panels. Acquired from Les Doigts Qui Rêvent, 30 October 2022.
Photos: Books On Books Collection. Displayed with permissions of Les Doigts Qui Rêvent.

Artist Myriam Colin and publisher Les Doigts Qui Rêvent (“Fingers that Dream”) addressed this question with print, Braille, cloths of different texture, leather, blind embossed shapes, plastic filaments and sewing.

Between the printed text and Braille-rendering for the cast of characters and settings, buttons of different cloths and different embossed shapes appear. In the opening scene, the red felt button for Little Red Riding Hood is of course smaller than the orange-brown broadcloth button for Mother, who stands before the raised rectangle for the house and looks over her daughter’s head at the forest of raised dots.

Later, the wolf’s belly becomes a large sewn pouch with the slit cut by the Hunter through which Grandma and Little Red Riding can be felt, ready to escape.

The brown leather button for the Hunter unites the felt Red Riding Hood, nubby-cloth Grandmother and broadcloth Mother in a clearing in the forest. A satisfactory conclusion for the sighted and visually impaired.

Spectacle (1990)

Spectacle: Pictoson Mural (1990)
Warja Lavater
H215 x W296 mm. 22 pages. Acquired from Antiquariat Übü, 3 August 2022.
Photos: Books On Books Collection. Displayed with permission of the publisher.

Spectacle is an origin story of shapes, signs, the sounds of language, their alphabetic representation and use to form words. It is similar to the tale in Il était une fois un alphabet (1951/2009) by Souza Desnoyer and Marcelle Marquet. In both, the separate worlds of vowels and consonants join to create the alphabet. In Il était une fois, the letters already exist, have anthropomorphic shapes and engage in familiar activities like voyages, feasts, dances and processions. The narrative has scenes and settings to carry it along. Spectacle‘s origin narrative, however, letters develop from a system of signs created/discovered by a wizard. An abstract shape himself, the wizard presides over the story’s unfolding across an abstract landscape. Even though Lavater maps a written version (in eight languages) of the tale to the panels, the pictorial narrative remains challenging.

Elliptical and shamanic, the written narrative itself is challenging. It may remind the reader of Italo Calvino’s Big Bang story “Sul far del giorno” (“At daybreak”) in his collection Le Cosmicomiche (1965) (“Cosmicomics“1968), to which Shirley Sharoff paid homage in OVI: objets volants identifiés dans le ciel d’Italo Calvino, a work contemporary with Lavater’s. The verticality of Lavater’s extraordinary leporello might also remind the viewer of Blaise Cendrars and Sonia Delaunay’s La Prose du Transsibérien et de la petite Jehanne de France (1913).

Somehow, though, despite its winged emblems of words, the eleventh panel with its regimented alphabet seems visually diminished, not quite the joyous spectacle promised by the text. For that, we would have to turn to William Joyce’s origin story The Numberlys (2014).

The Numberlys (2014)
William Joyce and Christina Ellis
Hardback, paper on board. H220 x W300 mm, 52 pages. Acquired from London Bridge Books, 15 April 2021.
Photos of the book: Books On Books Collection.

Books On Books Collection – Souza Desnoyer and Marcelle Marquet

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Il était une fois un alphabet (1951/2009)

Il était une fois un alphabet (1951/2009)
Souza Desnoyer and Marcelle Marquet
Casebound, doublures, sewn block, clear plastic envelope glued to inside back cover holding game cards. H216 x W270 mm. 40 pages. Acquired from Structure Verses Agency Books, 22 January 2022.
Photos: Books On Books Collection. Displayed with permission of the publisher.

Il était une fois presents the mutual discovery of the medieval/Renaissance country of Vowels and the isle of Consonants and their union over a banquet, evening gala and ball to form the alphabet. According to the reissuing publisher Éditions Chandeigne, Souza Desnoyer and Marcelle Marquet conceived of “Once upon a time there was an alphabet” in 1939. Its first self-published appearance as a spiral bound book of lithographs was in 1951. Not satisfied with this artistic means of conveying the letters to their readers, Desnoyer and Marquet called on their First World War experience of creating and sending games to the troops and added a board game or rather games for young and old at the back of Il était une fois.

The 1951 edition.

The 2009 edition.

In its reissue of the work, Éditions Chandeigne provides this biographical information about Desnoyer and Marquet and the insightful comment from a friend of Desnoyer:

L’amitié et le monde de l’art unissaient Marcelle Marquet (Boufarik 1892 – Paris 1984), écrivain et conteuse hors pair, et Souza Desnoyer (Georgette Anne Hanouche, dite Souza, Kiev 1901 – Perpignan 1988), illustratrice et miniaturiste, épouses respectives des peintres Albert Marquet et François Desnoyer. Comme l’affirme son amie Rose Fortassier, Souza Desnoyer semble « avoir été en quelque sorte programmée pour illustrer un alphabet. Cela à cause de sa vie et des voyages qui la firent polyglotte. De famille maternelle française, mais née à Kiev, berceau de la Russie, elle apprit à lire et écrire en caractères cyrilliques. Transplantée à l’âge de six ans en Bohême, elle y découvrit l’alphabet occidental à l’école primaire. Mais il est probable qu’elle eut aussi l’occasion de jeter les yeux sur les caractères gothiques allemands puisque la Bohême était encore autrichienne. Plus tard, quand elle fut installée en France à la suite de son mariage avec le peintre François Desnoyer, elle retrouva ses chers alphabets au cours de ses fréquents voyages en Angleterre, pays dont on sait qu’il a beaucoup fait pour la littérature destinée aux enfants ».

“Friendship and the world of art united Marcelle Marquet (Boufarik 1892 – Paris 1984), writer and storyteller, and Souza Desnoyer (Georgette Anne Hanouche, known as Souza, Kiev 1901 – Perpignan 1988), illustrator and miniaturist, wives of painters Albert Marquet and François Desnoyer respectively. As her friend Rose Fortassier says, Souza Desnoyer seems ‘to have been somehow programmed to illustrate an alphabet. This is because of her life and travels that make her polyglot. Of French mother tongue, but born in Kiev, the cradle of Russia, she learned to read and write in Cyrillic characters. At the age of six, she moved to Bohemia where she discovered the Western alphabet in elementary school. But it is likely that she also had the opportunity to see the German Gothic script since Bohemia was still Austrian. Later, when she was settled in France following her marriage to the painter François Desnoyer, she found her beloved alphabets during her frequent trips to England, a country that is known to have done much for children’s literature.‘” (Translation by DeepL).

Other adventures of letters “in character” can be found in Michael Chesworth’s Alphaboat (2006), Jon Agee’s Z Goes Home (2006), Althea Kontis & Bob Kolar’s AlphaOops: The Day Z Went First (2012) and Sean Lamb & Mike Perry’s Z Goes First (2018). The tradition of anthropomorphizing the letters of the alphabet goes back much further and across more than the French and English languages, but how fitting that Desnoyer’s illustrations came so close to the period of this example:

(Hebrew Bible with David Kimhi’s Sefer Mikhlol) MS. Kennicott 1 (1476). 447r. Oxford, Bodleian Library.
Photo: © Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford.

Books On Books Collection – Michael Chesworth

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Alphaboat (2002)

Alphabet stories with the letters themselves as characters date back at least to the books of the Hebrew Kabbalah. In the Books On Book Collection, Ben Shahn’s The Alphabet of Creation (1954) draws on that source to provide an example of an artist’s book for older children and adults. Three other works in the Collection that establish this “letters as characters” as a sort of genealogical narrative line linking artists’ books and children’s alphabet books together are Sonia Desnoyer & Marcelle Marquet’s Il était une fois un alphabet (1951/2009), Warja Lavater’s Spectacle (1990) and this one by Michael Chesworth.

Il était une fois un alphabet (“Once upon a time there was an alphabet“) presents the vowels’ voyage of discovery (and board game) to join the consonants to create the alphabet. Spectacle presents a complex abstract version of how vowels and consonants joined together to form the spectacle of the alphabet, words and writing. Chesworth enriches this genealogical line from Desnoyer and Shahn to Lavater with his own mastery of children’s book traditions. Among those traditions exemplified by Alphaboat are the rhyming narrative, wordplay with letter shapes and sounds as well as self-referential wordplay with genres and the material aspects of reading and writing.

One double-page spread nearly suffices to illustrate. After Alphaboat and its crew ride out a storm, we have a double-page spread of calm below. The uppercase officers, punningly named Admiral T and Captaincy, preside over the boat. The lowercase crew f and r admire the punctuation-shaped sunset. And the facing page zooms out with a map to illustrate the ship’s progress and play word games with the map genre (note the feature of “Tear Incognito”), writing implements (“Ball Point” and “Computer Keys”), real locations (“Pencilvania” and “Isle of Write”), typography (“Sands Serif” and “Pica Peak”) and other common geographical phrases (“Isthmus Beedaplace” and “Down Bydee Bay”).

One more double-page spread is needed to expand on the lowercase f’s comment “Dot’s beautiful”. Throughout the voyage, words and images combine with the crew’s expostulations to allude to grammar, punctuation, spelling, typography and alphabetical order. About the pages showing the crew’s arrival back home, any admirer of these traditions and puns would have to agree with f: “Dot’s beautiful”.

Books On Books Collection – Farah K. Behbehani

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The Conference of the Birds (2009)

The Conference of the Birds (2009)
Farah K. Behbehani and Farid ud-Din Attar.
Casebound cloth over boards, stamped in gold foil. H340. 166 pages (56 of them foldouts). Acquired from Saba Books, 5 June 2022.
Photos: Books On Books Collection. Displayed with permission of the artist.

The Conference of the Birds is a twelfth-century Sufi allegorical poem by Farid ud-Din Attar. A gathering of the world’s birds, each representing a different aspect of human nature, debate who should be king of all the birds. Led by the Hoopoe, they agree to seek the advice of the mythological being – the Simorgh. After an arduous and winnowing journey, thirty of them arrive at the home of the Simorgh to find a surprising answer.

Farah Behbehani has selected thirteen of Attar’s stories and interpreted them within a journey-like creation of her own in the calligraphic style called Jali Diwani. As with many enlightening journeys, the destination is the journey itself — learning to read Jali Diwani calligraphy and, thereby, celebrate the beauty of the tale and its telling.

A passage from the story starts each chapter, and an image of the bird whose story it is is rendered in Jali Diwali. A tasseled bookmark provides the key to following the stroke-by-stroke illustration of how to read a representative line from the Arabic version of the story (a literal English translation is provided).

This book’s features (56 foldouts, embossing, gold foil, die-cut pages and that unusual bookmark) place it outside the mainstream output of its traditional commercial publisher Thames & Hudson and is as close to being an artist’s book from such a source as could be imagined. It is certainly available only through rare book dealers and occasionally by auction.

Behbehani’s Conference of the Birds fits in the Books On Books Collection alongside Golnar Adili’s Baabaa Aab Daad (2020), Islam Aly’s 28 Letters (2013), Masoumeh Mohtadi’s Blindness (2020) and Rana Abou Rjeily’s Cultural Connectives. Disregard any implication that these works represent a single aesthetic. The artists hail from different countries and draw on different traditions. Yet each work reaches across the cultural divide between the Near East and the West. Reaching across does not mean eliminating the differences. Consider Behbehani’s work in relation to Brian Goggins ‘ Language of the Birds (2006-2008), a site-specific sculptural light installation for a public plaza in San Francisco; Anselm Kiefer’s Für Fulcanelli – die Sprache der Vögel (2013), a massive sculpture of leaden bird wings and books; and the delicate but weighty cages in Bird Language (2003) by Xu Bing.

If anything draws all of these works together, it is the chord that language and image strike across time and cultures.

Books On Books Collection – Rana Abou Rjeily

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Cultural Connectives تواصل الثقافات (2011)

Cultural Connectives = تواصل الثقافات / Cultural connectives = Tawaṣṣul al-thaqāfāt (2011)
Rana Abou Rjeily
Dustjacket/poster, casebound, decorative doublures, sewn, endbands. H235 x W195 mm. 112 pages. Acquired from Medimops, 23 November 2022.

Rana Abou Rjeily’s is not the only attempt to adapt Arabic to the printing press as Cecil Hourani and Mourad Boutros note in their preface, but their praise for the book is all the more notable for Boutros’ being the creator with Arlette Boutros of Basic Arabic, a widely accepted typeface alongside Nasri Khattar’s Unified Arabic. Still more notable, however, are the ways in which Rjeily’s design and writing weave together multiple aims. One aim, of course, is to introduce Mirsaal, the typeface designed by the author to adapt the calligraphic styles of the Arabic alphabet to the printing press and still be used for the Latin alphabet. Another is to teach the Arabic alphabet to non-native speakers. And still another is to bridge Arabic and Western cultures. The aims are interwoven not only because Rjeily uses the first as the means to the others but because she invests all three into the design of the book.

The dustjacket offers the most mechanical example of this investment. It unfolds into a poster display of the book’s epigraph from Gibran Khalil Gibran (set in Mirsaal, of course): “We shall never understand one another until we reduce the language to seven words”.

Mechanically more subtle than the dustjacket is Rjeily’s use of partial and full bleeds in the pages below — always in support of the meaning on the page. Using both vertical and horizontal bleeds, this double-page spread illustrates the Latin alphabet’s more vertical orientation compared to Arabic’s more horizontal orientation.

Rjeily keeps the material, haptic aspect of both Arabic and Latin close to hand with parallel pages like the following that highlight their alphabets’ differences but also assert the possibility of harmony through design. The same simple green and black color scheme, the same image of nib and mark, and the same angling of text on the page give a unified presentation of the difference in direction and angle of cuts for Arabic and Western nibs. Another physical aspect that Rjeily highlights is the ductus (the order and direction) of a pen strokes making up a letterform, which is arguably more important for Arabic because the flow of writing demands more pen movement.

Other bold, oversized spreads drive home some of the false cognate forms such as 0 and the number 5 written in Arabic-Indic numerals, or the letter V and the number 7 in Arabic-Indic numerals. Others, in an almost children’s book style, present the unique characteristic of an Arabic letterform’s changing shape depending on its initial, medial or final position in a word — or its appearance in isolation. While teaching these differences and features of Arabic is a fundamental aim, always the differences are laying the groundwork or demonstrating what Mirsaal must deal with to bridge a calligraphic system to a typographic system of writing.

The final section presents the Mirsaal typeface in its various fonts (sizes and weights) in the manner of a traditional type specimen, using the very appropriate words of John Henry Mason (1875-1951) in Arabic and English:

Type is like music in having its own beauty, and in being beautiful as an accompaniment and interpretation ; and typography can be used to express a state of the soul, like the other arts and crafts. But like them it is too often used mechanically, and so the full expressiveness of this medium is unrealized. If it is used according to a rule or recipe, it becomes dull and loses vividness. Type appears at first to be a rigid medium; but like other rigid media, it is plastic to the living spirit of a craftsman. — J.H. Mason

Cultural Connectives is the useful reference work Rjeily intends. In achieving its several aims, it also provides both an accomplished example of the book arts and a means of insight into other works in the Books On Books Collection, such as Golnar Adili’s Baabaa Aab Daad (2020), Islam Aly’s 28 Letters (2013), Farah K. Behbehani’s The Conference of the Birds (2009) and Masoumeh Mohtadi’s Blindness (2020).

Books On Books Collection – Francesco Dondina

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Caratteri Mobili
Un Sedicesimo (No. 3b, March-April 2008)

Caratteri Mobili
Un Sedicesimo (No. 3b, March-April 2008)
Francesco Dondina
Artist’s booklet, saddle-stitched. H235 x W165 mm. 16 pages. Acquired from Printed Matter, Inc., 23 September 2022.
Photos: Books On Books Collection. Displayed with artist’s permission.

Un Sedicesimo, meaning “one sixteenth” in Italian, is a bimonthly magazine issued by Edition Corraini featuring a different artist’s work in each issue. Instead of being a magazine about design or art, Un Sedicesimo is a “gallery on paper” with each issue being a work of design or art in 16 pages. This issue is a colorful alphabet book with letters designed to take on the function of furniture. As the artist points out on his website, the title plays with “the ambiguity of the Italian word mobile“, which can mean “movable” or “furniture”. So movable type inspires furniture or vice versa.

At last we have the furniture with which to furnish Johann David Steingruber‘s German palaces and Lanore Cady‘s US Victorian houses.

Books On Books Collection – Lanore Cady

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Houses & Letters (1977)

Houses & Letters: A Heritage in Architecture & Calligraphy (1977)
Lanore Cady
Casebound, one-eighth leather, cloth over boards, title gilt-stamped on front cover, doublures, sewn book block, endbands. H276 x W382 mm. 34 unnumbered leaves, printed on one side only. Acquired from Books of the Ages, 26 August 2022.
Photos: Books On Books Collection. Displayed with permission of the artist’s archive, Humboldt Arts Council, Morris Graves Museum of Art.

Architecture-inspired artists’ books and artists’ books inspired by alphabets make up two separate strands of the Books On Books Collection. Along with Sacred Space by Jeffrey Morin and Steven Ferlauto, Lanore Cady’s Houses & Letters is one of the rare works that weave them together, joining the beauty of form in architecture with the beauty of letterforms. With her calligraphy, verse and watercolors of Victorian structures of Humboldt County, California, Cady presents her audience with a history of the alphabet from the proto-Sinaitic to the Roman/Carolingian that ultimately argues for the historical preservation of the buildings depicted.

The house depicted with letter A is the “Graham House”. In notes at the end of the book, Cady provides this brief note about it:

Frank Graham came to Humboldt from the southeastern provinces of Canada and the Maine woods to become a giant in lumbering and other local industries. He was married to Martha Montgomery, direct descendant of the Lees of Virginia. Built at the end of Ninth Street in Arcata, California, in 1885, their house is one of the few landmarks that has remained unaltered since its construction. It boasts five different shingle shapes, hand-carved arches, embellished redwood burl and curly redwood.

The structure accompanying the letter Z is “Robert’s Barn”:

This “Humboldt-type barn,” over 100 years old, is typical of the barns on fine ranches in this dairying-ranching country. It is on the Mel-May Ranch (so named for Melvin and May Roberts), Bayside Road, Arcata. Years ago it was “moved back” 125 feet away from the road.

Books On Books Collection – Charles D. Jones & David Kulhavy

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A Forest Insect Alphabet (2013)

A Forest Insect Alphabet (2013)
Charles D. Jones & David L. Kulhavy
Casebound, textured cloth over boards, front cover with title stamped in metallic silver, doublures inked green on one side, sewn book block, CD-Rom shrink-wrapped to back cover. 260 x 260 mm. 60 unnumbered pages. Acquired from The Book Depository, 30 July 2022.
Photos: Books On Books Collection. Displayed with permission of Stephen F. Austin State University Press.

Curious that avian abecedaries outnumber the entomological. So do famous catalogues of bird art. Where is Audubon’s Bugs of America or Bewick’s A History of British Bugs? At least the Belgians can offer Becker & Méaulle’s Alphabet des Insectes (1883).

Becker, Léon and Méaulle, Fortuné Louis. 1883. Alphabet Des Insectes. Paris: J. Hetzel & Cie.

A Forest Insect Alphabet makes considerable progress in rectifying the situation. Although it is not primarily intended for humorously teaching the ABCs and reading like Alphabet des Insectes, it is an instructional reference and has its own different sense of whimsy. And although it is not in the realist tradition of Audubon or Bewick, it delivers fifty-one original woodcuts drawn and cut by Master Printer Charles D. Jones, twenty-three in black and white and twenty-eight with colors based on those of the named insect. What makes A Forest Insect Alphabet even more special is its scientific driving force — Stephen F. Austin University’s Professor David L. Kulhavy — who also delivers the elements of whimsy by conveying his entomological knowledge not only in prose but also quatrains and songs (even sung on the CD).

Well, that explains the smell when trying to pick up a ladybird rather than letting it crawl aboard a fingertip of its own accord.

Books On Books

Curated by Robert Bolick

Books On Books Collection – Andrew White Tuer

History of the Horn-Book (1897)

Further Reading

Books On Books Collection – Peter Blake

Peter Blake: Alphabets (2010)

Further Reading

Books On Books Collection – Warja Lavater

Le Petit Chaperon Rouge (1965)

Le Petit Chaperon Rouge (2008)

Spectacle (1990)

Further Reading

Books On Books Collection – Souza Desnoyer and Marcelle Marquet

Il était une fois un alphabet (1951/2009)

Further Reading

Books On Books Collection – Michael Chesworth

Alphaboat (2002)

Further Reading

Books On Books Collection – Farah K. Behbehani

The Conference of the Birds (2009)

Further Reading and Viewing

Books On Books Collection – Rana Abou Rjeily

Cultural Connectives تواصل الثقافات (2011)

Further Reading

Books On Books Collection – Francesco Dondina

Caratteri Mobili
Un Sedicesimo (No. 3b, March-April 2008)

Further Reading

Books On Books Collection – Lanore Cady

Houses & Letters (1977)

Further Reading

Books On Books Collection – Charles D. Jones & David Kulhavy

A Forest Insect Alphabet (2013)

Further Reading

History of the Horn-Book (1897)

Further Reading

Peter Blake: Alphabets (2010)

Further Reading

Le Petit Chaperon Rouge (1965)

Le Petit Chaperon Rouge (2008)

Spectacle (1990)

Further Reading

Il était une fois un alphabet (1951/2009)

Further Reading

Alphaboat (2002)

Further Reading

The Conference of the Birds (2009)

Further Reading and Viewing

Cultural Connectives تواصل الثقافات (2011)

Further Reading

Caratteri MobiliUn Sedicesimo (No. 3b, March-April 2008)

Further Reading

Houses & Letters (1977)

Further Reading

A Forest Insect Alphabet (2013)

Further Reading

Caratteri Mobili
Un Sedicesimo (No. 3b, March-April 2008)