Books On Books Collection – Jonathan Safran Foer

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Tree of Codes (2010)

Tree of Codes (2010)
Jonathan Safran Foer
Perfect bound paperback of die-cut pages. H220 x W135 mm. 284 pages. Acquired from Visual Editions, 30 January 2014.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.

The artist’s book “tradition” of excising words from the page goes back at least to Marcel Broodthaers’ and Mario Diacono’s renderings of Un Coup de Dés Jamais N’Abolira le Hasard by Stéphane Mallarmé. Jonathan Safran Foer’s Tree of Codes (2010) takes that tradition to the more complex plane that Tom Phillips reached with A Humument (1980-2016). In the hands of Foer and his publisher Visual Editions, the treatment becomes simultaneously more personal and mechanical. The more personal aspect is best expressed in Foer’s afterword (see below). The mechanical aspect is the use of die cutting for production and the reader’s use of a blank sheet to enable reading the text left over from Bruno Schulz’s The Street of Crocodiles (1934, trans. 1963) that forms the new narrative of Tree of Codes.

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Books On Books Collection – Hubert Kretschmer

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The material aspects of the book as well as its properties as a form of communication lies at the heart of many artists’ books. The same is true for magazines and newspapers and the artists who take them on as their palette and canvas. For finding examples of print works exploring the medium in its own right, Hubert Kretschmer’s exhibition catalogue Objekt Magazine Object (2018) provides a useful resource alongside his Artists Archive Publications in Munich and this entry on a similar exhibition in Vienna the same year — Publishing as an Artistic Toolbox.

Objekt Magazine Object (2018)

Objekt Magazine Object : Archive Artist Publications, Sammlung Hubert Kretschmer, München/Munich (2018) 
Rainer Resch, Jürgen O. Olbrich, Béatrice Hernad and Hubert Kretschmer.
Perfect bound paperback. H230 x W155 mm. [256] pages. Acquired from Hubert Kretschmer, 11 July 2019.
Photo: Books On Books Collection.

As well as an archivist, Kretschmer is also a prolific practitioner of zine and book art. Here are two equal opportunity examples.

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Books On Books Collection – Helen Yentus

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On Such a Full Sea (2013)

On Such a Full Sea Chang-rae Lee credit: Riverhead Books

On Such a Full Sea (2013)
Chang-rae Lee
Jacket and slipcase design
Helen Yentus
Book in slipcase. H23o x W150 mm; slipcase only, W110 mm. 368 pages. Edition of 500, of which this is #178. Acquired 1 October 2018.
Photo: Riverhead Books and AIGA.

Riverhead art director Helen Yentus and members of the MakerBot team designed this slipcase for Lee’s novel. An edition of 500, made with the MakerBot® Replicator® 2 Desktop 3D Printer with MakerBot PLA filament, a bioplastic made of corn and fabricated by MakerBot in Brooklyn, New York, appeared in 2013 just before the trade edition in 2014.

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Books On Books – Marlene MacCallum (II)

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Marlene MacCallum’s latest artist’s books remind me of Claude Monet’s two series of paintings of the Rouen Cathedral’s façade and a field of haystacks. The series were influenced by Japanese ukiyo-e prints (“pictures of the floating world”). Rather than changing vantage points on Mt. Fuji, Monet used one perspective on one façade and sought to capture the instants of light and atmosphere on its surface at several different hours of the day. He rendered his vision of them with thick layers of paint, brushstrokes, and colors. MacCallum, too, has chosen a fixed-viewpoint: in her case, of Lake Ontario. She, too, follows different hours and, also, different seasons as Monet did with his haystacks. She, however, renders her vision with an intricate verbal-visual dance of metaphor, book structure, registration, photographic filters, print technique and paper.

sleep walk (2023)

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Bookmarking Book Art – Ouroboros Press

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“Folding Plates in Esoteric Literature”

William Kiesel, founder of Ouroboros Press, has an insightful essay with impressive examples of the “fold out” device here. Among the examples are

  • Manly P. Hall’s The Secret Teachings of All Age and Codex Rosicrucis
  • Elias Ashmole’s Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum
  • Zoroaster’s Telescope: The Key to the great divinatory Kabbala of the Magi
  • Napoleon’s Book of Fate
  • Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim’s De Occulta Philosophia
  • Semiphoras et Shemhamphoras Solomon Regis
  • E. A. Budge’s The Book of the Dead

Don’t let the occultism of the examples put you off. After all, the earliest forays into movable books occurred in alchemical and Kabbalistic tomes. As Kiesel, also a book maker, points out:

Opening a folding plate causes an interruption in the reading process. It offers the reader an opportunity to think about what was read while contemplating the materials on the printed sheet. Again alchemy and mysticism share this meditative approach, a kind of inner reading read through the visual language of the birds or abecedarium.

From the screenshot of one of his productions above, you may be able to make out the book’s author: Count Michael Maier, whose more famous emblem book Atalanta Fugiens Daniel E. Kelm transformed into the Möbius version Neo Emblemata Nova.

Further Reading

“Alphabets Alive! – The ABCs of Form & Structure“. 19 July 2023. Books On Books Collection.

“Daniel E. Kelm“. 10 September 2019. Books On Books Collection.

Kiesel, William. [9 August 2020]. “Folding Plates in Esoteric Literature“.

Bookmarking Book Art – Movables Now and Then

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

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

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

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Books On Books Collection – Jessica Drenk

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Carving 9 (2021)

Carving 9 (2012)
Jessica Drenk
Altered book and wax. H203 x W152 x D38 mm. Unique. Acquired from the Seager Gray Gallery, 10 February 2019.
Photo: Courtesy of the gallery.

Once a book becomes another material from which art can be made, the rectangular block offers itself up to an unbounded variety of treatments. It can be folded into something else. Or macerated and squeezed out, or into, something else. Or shot, burnt, frozen, soaked, coated or buried and dug up. Or torn, shredded and reconstituted or scattered. Or carved with any number of implements into any number of shapes.

But that oblong of material just lying there and the techniques of altering it are not usually sufficient starting points for the artist. In Jessica Drenk’s case, a visit to a botanic garden’s “large greenhouse full of hundreds of different succulent species” provided the necessary catalyst. As she explained in an interview with Patron: “It blew me away to see so much slight variety within the same category of plant and this experience sent me down a path of experimenting with books in the studio; I wanted to see how many different shapes and objects I could make out of the one material.”

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Books On Books Collection – Chisato Tamabayashi (I)

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Plunge (2010)

Plunge (2010)
Chisato Tamabayashi
Casebound, cloth over boards. Pop-up book. H193 x W152 mm. [12] pages. Collinge & Clark, 6 August 2024.
Photos: Books On Books Collection. Displayed with permission from Chisato Tamabayashi.

“This book begins with a dive into the sea, down into the deep and back again, encountering various creatures on the way. The pages are designed to be held and angled in different ways so that the reader can explore the depths and the two sides of the sea’s surface.”–Artist’s statement

It is a pleasure to touch and turn the pages forming the surface and bed of the sea on which the pop-ups and movable elements rise, fall and move. The screen printing with TW graphics ink (pigment ink) enrich the book’s freshness and vibrancy. These photos and very brief video further below do little justice to Plunge and only hint at the sheer fun of manipulating it.

Pages: Simili Japon paper 225gsm. Pop-ups, hand cut by scalpel from Murano pastel paper 160gsm and Colorplan paper 175gsm.

As the double-page spread below shows, Tamabayashi thinks and crafts “in the round” to position his paper sculpture to suggest a sea turtle’s motion through the water.

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Books On Books Collection – Timothy Mosely

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…, the newly emerging form of the book qua book is simultaneously a visual book and a tactile book, wherein the meaning of the work is inextricably tied to both content and form as well as to the economic factors that surround the making and selling processes. In the most exciting work being done today, a text (idea) is interpreted, amplified, and sometimes even dictated, by structure, materials, and the act of publishing. At the extreme end, Tim Mosely in Brisbane, Australia is experimenting with a form that he calls the haptic book, in which shape, color, the sound of the turning page, and texture (touch) carry the significance we most often associate with a written text. Mosely intends us to read without words. His books are privately published, and the act of acquiring and learning how to read them includes personal contact with the artist. This is not the business-as-usual model at all! — Peter Koch, 2017, p. 22.

Grasping the Nettle (2020)

Grasping the Nettle (2020)
Tim Mosely
Slipcase holding title wrapper around three sewn booklets and one accordion structure. Slipcase, H238 x W158 x D23 mm; Title wrapper, H228 x W155 mm; Booklets and accordion closed, H225 x W154 mm; Accordion open, W616 mm. 14 pages per booklet. Variable edition of 8. Acquired from the artist, 17 January 2024.
Photos: Books On Books Collection. Displayed with permission of the artist.

Three booklets and accordion resting on the opened dustjacket.

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Books On Books Collection – Chris Ruston (II)

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On 25 June 2020, Chris Ruston read Hart Crane’s “At Melville’s Tomb” (1926). As the Covid pandemic swept over the UK and the world, Crane’s poem paced with her along the Thames Estuary at Southend-on-Sea, and the result was the four works below, now in the Books On Books Collection. The artist’s comments on the materials and techniques involved can be found here along with additional images of the works.

Often beneath the wave, wide from this ledge
The dice of drowned men’s bones he saw bequeath
An embassy. Their numbers as he watched,
Beat on the dusty shore and were obscured.

And wrecks passed without sound of bells,
The calyx of death’s bounty giving back
A scattered chapter, livid hieroglyph,
The portent wound in corridors of shells.

Then in the circuit calm of one vast coil,
Its lashings charmed and malice reconciled,
Frosted eyes there were that lifted altars;
And silent answers crept across the stars.

Compass, quadrant and sextant contrive
No farther tides … High in the azure steeps
Monody shall not wake the mariner.
This fabulous shadow only the sea keeps.

Hart Crane

Photo: © 2015 Janez Stare & Jure Pesko | All rights reserved


“Beneath the wave” (2020)

“Beneath the wave “: A response to “At Melville’s Tomb'” (Hart Crane) I  (2020)
Chris Ruston
Accordion book with slipcase. Monoprint using found material. Acrylic paint, Sumi Ink, Fabriano  Artistico paper, Metal Unryu Gold Paper, Tyvek, Greyboard. Slipcase: H155 x W112 x D30 mm. Accordion book: H149 x W105 x D25 mm (closed), W2515 mm (open). 24 panels. Unique. Acquired from the artist, 20 July 2022.
Photos: Books On Books Collection and courtesy of artist.

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