Books On Books Collection – Jacobus Oudyn (III)

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Restless (2020)
Jacobus Oudyn
Loose sheets from plastic comb bound notebook in a clamshell box covered in Japanese paper. Box: H240 x W170 x D40 mm. 60 pages. Unique. Acquired from the artist, 2 January 2024.
Photos: Books On Books Collection. Displayed with permission of Jacobus Oudyn.

Restless consists of a continuous drawing with graphite and collage across sixty loose sheets of 120gsm cartridge paper removed from a plastic comb bound notebook. Like Oudyn’s earlier work Out of Breath (2019), meant to represent the medical conditions of mesothelioma and black lung, Restless aims to evoke chronic restless leg syndrome.

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Books On Books Collection – Jane Cradock-Watson

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Ebb and Flow (2023)

Ebb and Flow (2023)
Jane Cradock-Watson
Concertina book with cloth hard bound covers. H155 x W27 mm (closed), W680 mm (open). 64 panels. Edition of 20. Acquired from the artist, 21 January 2024.
Photos: Books On Books Collection. Displayed with artist’s permission.

An exploration, both visually and physically, the ‘edge’ of the sea where it meets the land, with its continuous ebb and flow of the breaking waves, rhythmically rolling back and forth onto the sand. (Artist’s description)

With the binding and her photography in Ebb and Flow, Jane Cradock-Watson has sculpted and painted the sea’s edge. Four digital photographs printed on Zerkal paper have been spliced together between two cloth-covered boards. The flexibility and extent of the concertinaed paper create an undulating structure that turns seascape stills into mesmerising cinema.

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Books On Books Collection – Chaucer’s ABC

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ABC by Geoffrey Chaucer (1934)

ABC by Geoffrey Chaucer (1934)
[Eleanor] Joyce Francis
Chapbook, softcover sewn. H250 x W170 mm. 16 pages. Edition of 500? Acquired from Antiquariaat Fokas Holthuis, 30 April 2021.
Photos: Emilia Osztafi.*

Chaucer’s ABC (ca. 1369) is an intriguing early work in the history of abecedaries. There are alphabet poems in the Hebrew Bible, but according to the artists’ book collector and scholar Nyr Indictor, this Chaucer lyric seems to be the earliest surviving English “ABC poem” of known authorship. Possibly on commission from Blanche, Duchess of Lancaster, Chaucer cribbed and translated a lyric embedded in Guillaume de Deguilleville’s La pelerinage de vie humaine [“Pilgrimage of Human Life”] (ca. 1330).

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Books On Books Collection – Teo Eve

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The Ox House (2022)

The Ox House (2022)
Teo Eve
Perfect-bound paperback. H210 x W148 mm. 68 pages. Acquired from Penteract Press, 6 August 2022.
Photos: Emilia Osztafi.* Displayed with permission of the publisher.

A love letter to the letters of the alphabet, Teo Eve’s debut collection The Ox House contains an eclectic array of constraint-based poems, innovative forms, and concrete & visual works. At once homage to the intricate hieroglyphs used in Ancient Egypt & the beautifully illuminated capital forms of Medieval manuscripts, and an exploration into the possibilities of new ways of playing with letters’ shapes & sounds, The Ox House harks back to a time when words were magic, and language was new. — Publisher’s description.

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Books On Books Collection – Lily Markiewicz

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The Price of Words, Places to Remember 1−26 (1992)

The Price of Words, Places to Remember 1-26 (1992) 
Lily Markiewicz
Perfect bound paperback with deep cover flaps. H200 x W155 mm, 60 pages. Acquired from Bookworks, 11 July 2022.
Photos: Books On Books Collection and Emilia Osztafi*. Displayed with artist’s permission.

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Books On Books Collection – Karen Green

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Here/Gone (2008)

Here/Gone: An ABC Flip Book for Grown Ups (2008)
Karen Green
Perfect bound, invertible flipbook. 215 x 215 mm. [56] pages. Acquired from AbeBooks, 14 March 2019.
Photos: Emilia Osztafi*. Displayed with the author/artist’s permission.

here/gone is a story of two parts, the arrival of love and its departure. “Zipping and unzipping the alphabet in a narrative of love and unlove” as the Spineless Books website describes it, here/gone tells its story with mixed media paintings and minimal text across the right hand pages of its invertible flip book structure, each page’s text beginning with a letter of the alphabet. The flipping pages of here enact love’s zipping together two characters, the flipping pages of gone enact “unlove’s” unzipping them apart.

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Books On Books Collection – from Barbara J. Raheb’s collection

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Picture ABC (n.d.)

Picture ABC (No date, no artist)
Miniature bound leoporello. Closed: H19 xW13 mm. 26 panels. Acquired from Lorson’s Books, 5 December 2022.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.

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Books On Books Collection – Jan Voss

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In a video prepared for the Virtual Tokyo Art Book Fair in 2020, Jan Voss speaks of getting artists’ book viewers into a state of mind where they allow themselves to be surprised (9’14”). His artist’s book Detour (1989) does just that.

Detour (1989)

Detour 1989
Jan Voss
Open sleeve slipcase, softcover side-sewn and glued bifolios. 180 pages. Edition of 1000, of which this #568, signed and dated in pencil by the artist on the last page. Acquired from Antiquariat Uhlmann (Zürich, Switzerland), 10 April 2024.
Photos: Books On Books Collection. Displayed with the artist’s permission.

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Books On Books Collection – Ellen Lanyon

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Transformations I: 1973-74 (1977)

Transformations I: 1973-74 (1977)
Ellen Lanyon
Leporello with board covers. 174 x 115 mm. [24] pages. Acquired from Specific Object, February 2024.
© The Ellen Lanyon Estate, courtesy GRAY, Chicago/New York.
Photos: Books On Books Collection. Displayed with permission of artist’s estate.

Transformations is a book as drawing. Across 24 panels of this accordion-fold book, Ellen Lanyon develops a surreal graphical fantasia from a single image.

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Books On Books Collection – Kurt Schwitters

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Die Scheuche Märchen (1925/1965)

Die Scheuche Märchen (1925, 1965) [The Scare-Crow Fairy Tale]
Kurt Schwitters, Kate Steinitz and Theo van Doesberg. English translation by Robert Haas (enclosed, loose).
Miniature reprint of the 1925 edition. H123 x W154 mm. 12 pages. Acquired from Plain Tales Books, 12 July 2023.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.

The Schwitters-Steinitz Collection held at the National Gallery of Art Library identifies this work as a miniature reprint published in 1965 by Stockholm’s Gallery Samlaaren, owned by Agnes Widlund. The original, measuring H250 x W210 and also in red and blue on light brown paper, was published by Kurt Schwitters, Kate Steinitz and Theo van Doesberg under the imprint APOSS, which is a nonsense word, derived from “A for Active; P for Paradox; OS for Oppose Sentiment; and S for Sensitive” (Paley, p. 267). There have been several other editions, but this one is particularly satisfying for its inclusion of the loose typewritten translation by Robert Haas, who also translated Steinitz’s memoir/biography of Schwitters.

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