Lightweight (2015)

Lightweight (2015)
Ana Paula Cordeiro
Custom storage box with passepartout on cover with title printed on translucent paper with colored diagram beneath and sculptural element inside top. Three-part construction Limp Vellum binding on dyed parchment. Box: H215 x W224 x D47v & D53r. Book: H190 x W215 x D18 mm [90] pages. 88 + 2 half pages for colophon. Edition of 21 sets, copy bound on request. Acquired from the artist, 27 August 2025.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.

Dating back to the 13th century, the limp vellum binding for books involves a parchment or other flexible covering material that is the sole component of the cover. No stiff boards. It attaches to the textblock usually by sewing and without adhesive. According to the American Institute for Conservation, it was not merely a temporary solution until a more luxurious one with boards and ornamentation could be commissioned. Its presence in collections, its variety of formats, and its superior protection of works proven in the aftermath of the 1966 flooding of Florence, all suggest that, for a time, it was deliberately chosen for joining the artistic with the functional.

Ana Paula Cordeiro’s Lightweight is an artist’s book that pays elaborate homage to this distinctive form of binding. It weaves together metaphor, structure, material, and content in extraordinary ways.

Begin with the container, which offers a multitude of metaphors. On top of the cloth-covered box, a rectangular window has been cut. To look down through this window is to begin peering into the past. Beneath the translucent sheet bearing the title, a print motif appears whose mingling layers suggest the water, paper, ink, and silt that had to be sifted to save a Renaissance legacy of manuscripts, incunabula, and books from the Florence flood of 1966.

Left: passe-partout (window) on box top. Right: recurrent print motif appearing later in the book.

That strata of links running from blue to rust to gold becomes a recurrent print motif in the book, suggesting abstractly another metaphor: that of a continuum with endpoints playing off one another. As soon as you pick up the Canapetta cloth-covered box, the title itself — Lightweight — sets in motion a fresh instance of this continuum metaphor. Floating above the recurrent print motif, the title contrasts with the weight in your hands. As if to underscore this diametric contrast, the corners of the top and bottom of the box sit flush at the ends of one diagonal but gap at the other, easing the lifting of the weighted top from the box.

Inside, other decorative features offer further dual functionality. The sculptural element that provides the top’s weight also serves as a protective mould inside for the book and mirrors its dominant and recurrent physical feature: the creased shape slanting in parallel to the title slip tacked to the cover. Cordeiro refers to the creased shape as an “angled beam”.

For her, the angled beam distills the essence of the limp vellum structure and “supports” the variety of contemplation she pours into it. The angled beam puts forward the limp vellum structure as a historical link from binding’s past to its present. It stands for the binding structure’s durability, again linking past to present. Its linearity stands in for that continuum. It prompts thoughts of other continua along which one thing becomes another such as the line between night and day (twilight), between light and shadow, between one season and another. It evokes the continua between extremities, between the ordinary and the extraordinary, between mental acuity and dementia, and between life and death.

Following Emily Dickinson’s injunction — “Tell all the truth but tell it slant” — Cordeiro plants other angles in Lightweight. The ribbon tape that lies under the book is stiff, not soft and flexible, and it twists once and folds twice into an angular tool for lifting up the book. The trim of the book’s top and bottom edges slants. Creased into the covers, end sheets, and text block of this limp form, the angled beam is a physical constant echoing the metaphor of a continuum whose endpoints contrast and balance with one another.

Altogether there are seven gatherings in Lightweight. The “prelims” gathering provides the historical context underlying Cordeiro’s homage. Note the artist’s wish expressed in the envoi to this artist’s book in our hands: “May its message be its medium, may its artistry embrace eternity”. Here, Cordeiro introduces that self-reflexivity we expect in the best of artists’ books.

After the prelims gathering, the other six gatherings are labeled. In addition to bearing the creased angled beam, all six carry an “on-end outline” of it (see below). The five that are numbered, lettered, and labeled introduce themes reflecting different responses that relate to the continuum motif.

The Part 1, Section R gathering has announced cryptically that color will merge with form. How will this happen? As you turn the page, the opening text suggests how — along a continuum: “Continuum (measurement), anything that goes through a gradual transition from one condition, to a different condition, without any abrupt changes”.

The spread lays out this definition in a peculiar manner that seems to contradict the definition. On the verso page, the definition seems to run abruptly up against the seam, which bumps the words “abrupt changes” to the next line, while the recto page presents a truncation of those words: “rupt changes”. Hold that puzzle for a moment. So how can color and form be on a continuum? And will they merge gradually or abruptly? On the next spread, Cordeiro answers with the Sanskrit word rupa, which represents “color” and “form” and from which the section draws its label “R”.

un extremo se conoce bien por otro [one extreme knows well its other]

So, the merger is etymological. But at the same time, another spectrum comes into play: the color spectrum and the blue and red at its opposite ends. On the spectrum, of course, one gradually becomes the other, enacting the expression “un extremo se conoce bien por otro” [one extreme knows well its other]. If this seems a stretch, the next double-page spread reassures us that “continuum” has additional linguistic as well as mathematical roots.

Before the reassurance, however, we come back to the puzzle of “rupt changes”. Again, on the verso page above, the definition of “continuum” runs pell mell into the crease. To solve the puzzle, we have to look more closely at the structure of the Section R gathering. It consists of three oblong folios folded in half. On the reverse side of the center folio (what would be pages 5 and 8 of this gathering if the pages were numbered), the definition of “continuum” has been printed so that the fold splits the word “abrupt” between its syllables: “Continuum (measurement), anything that goes through a gradual transition from one condition, to a different condition, without any a | brupt changes.” In effect, the layout draws attention to our perception of breaks in continua.

View of “pages 5 and 8” separated by a detailed view of the break in the word “abrupt”.

If Section R has not prompted the reader to propose questions about the structure of the book or this book in particular, the Part 2, Section Q gathering provides a series of oblique questions very much focused on that but also on metaphorical matters. Again, what happens structurally in the gathering and on the surface of its pages presents puzzles and hints at solutions.

The geometrical images associated with the first question (“Do they hold surface tension like a soap bubble?”) seem to float or progress across the double-page spread, breaking up to punctuate the question. Reminding us of opposites and abrupt changes, the angular yellow overlapping squares and triangles puncture the text’s round verbal soap bubble. Before we can ask to what or whom does “they” refer, we are prompted by “Question:” to turn the page.

The next question (“Do they prowl like felines?”) prods at the unasked question: what or who are “they”? How is it that “they” are like prowling felines? Again, the images seem to progress across the spread, with the first image’s central diamond shape disappearing to leave the curvilinear second shape leaning over the printed question. Might these be diagrams of the limp vellum structure’s sewing holes and lacing? If so, has Cordeiro found another metaphor for limp vellum structures in the supple and sinuous strength of prowling felines? Do “they” refer to limp vellum structures?

The next question turns directly to a functional attribute of the book structure: turning pages. The yellow print gives an ambiguous view. The two-dimensional representation of the angled beam fluctuates between a mountain view and a valley view. Are we looking down on the splayed spine of a book or its gutter with pages splayed open? Either way, the print angles away from the physical angled beam, which sets up a metronomic pattern in the spread — the beam leaning to the right, then to the left, and again to the right — or a page turned to the right, then to the left, and back again to the right — or mountain fold, then valley fold, then mountain, then valley (the gutter), then mountain, then valley, then mountain until we come to the ambiguous two-dimensional print. Again, this is a continuum, and “they” seems to refer to limp vellum structures.

The next question enacts itself. To read the mirror-written script, we have to turn the page and look through its surface to the right-reading words: “Do they depend upon the turning of”. The question completes itself in a curious (again) metronomic motion. The syntax draws our eyes to “PAGES” on the right, while the oversized punctuation mark syntactically draws our eyes back to the left. The play between the reversed writing on a recto page, the right-reading script on the verso, the display type on the next recto, and oversized question mark on the adjacent verso provide self-reflexively an affirmative answer: Yes, limp vellum structures depend on the turning of pages.

Part 3 introduces rather more esoteric continua with which Cordeiro seeks to connect the genius of the limp vellum structure. The Section letters M, M and G are her reminders-to-self that this section excerpts passages from William James’ The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902): one on medical materialism (p.14) and another on genius (p.18).

Cordeiro brackets the excerpts with maze-like images constructed of mirrored forms across four different colors. So we have the continua of mind to matter and of genius to madness embedded in a continuum of color and form (color and form merging).

Note the 18o° turn of the beige image in the upper left to be mirrored by the magenta image in the lower right.

Part 4, labeled “Section L: Notes on Seasonal Fluctuations of Lightweight Discrepancies”, is the densest of the gatherings. Drawings, verse typeset in English and scribed in Portuguese, typographic arrangements, trimmed and segmented photographs, and linocut prints of a stone wall all find their way into Part 4.

Note how the colors of the tulip shapes echo the colors of the maze in Part 3.

The “Epilogue” tells us, “The handwritten text in Portuguese is a word play with the alliteration afforded by that language between the verb to see and the season summer, and translates roughly as: ‘summer shall see gone that which / by going is now new being. / seeing such an hour at birth is to / be seen alive.” Another continuum.

“a shadow aside / a step askew / escape afloat in shape of arrows”. The segmented photos of an Upper West Side building’s fire escape articulate with the angled beam shape to echo the text.

The text before the concluding “end-on” image in this gathering introduces another continuum: “(Life begins at the end of your comfort zone.)”

Part 5, Section Z is the wrap-up, conflating the end of the alphabet with the end of the day (twilight), but of course, twilight is also a point on the continuum of day into night.

Lusco-fusco = twilight.

At this point, the reader might register that a continuum whose extremities hang in the balance against one another and yet are still connected is also a description of metaphor itself. Two disparate terms are brought together to make a figure of speech. Cordeiro brings two disparate objects together — a softcover codex and the shape of an angled beam, a hard form of structural support — to shape her artist’s book. She materializes that metaphor, then uses it as a platform for textual, graphical, material, and structural metaphors that celebrate the limp vellum structure. It is a striking accomplishment that challenges readers to think with their hands as well as their minds.

Body of Evidence (2020)

Body of Evidence (2020)
Ana Paula Cordeiro
Artist’s book. Bound on meeting guards, covers in full leather lacunose panels with tree bark and mother-of-pearl onlays. H16 x W9 in, 30 pages. Somerset, Magnani and Zerkall papers with gampi and mulberry inclusions. Edition of 9; this copy commissioned by the Bodleian Library.
Photos: Books On Books Collection, with thanks to Alexandra Franklin, Jo Maddocks and Sarah Wheale of the Bodleian.

When I encounter works of book art, I often recall another collector’s comment — “you don’t collect these works to read them” — and shake my head. Every one of these works expects you to try — even the ones nailed shut, submerged, cast in concrete, burnt to calcification or otherwise hermetically sealed. At their end of the spectrum, those are challenging your expectation that a book is meant to be opened. At the other end are those that “mess with” nearly every material and metaphorical aspect of the book such that they challenge nearly every expectation you might have. Starting with its title and shape, Body of Evidence falls at this end of the spectrum.

From its folder or opened-envelope outline, you know that, if this is a murder mystery as the title implies, the shape, the gridded endpaper, spotted with drops of red and blue, the flimsy black liner and stiff sheets of the title and subtitle pages are telling you: read with caution, read with unease, read to detect. That the front cover falls away from the book block to show the inner spine to be lined with the same spotted grid as the endpaper tells you: look as you read.

Another urging to look and read is the faint and embossed stamp with not-so-faint red X’s indicating the source and type of evidence presented on the page or spread. The opening text relates a violent assault, but one that occurs in a dream. The X’s in the stamp designate the source as “Journal”, the type as “Note”, the language as “English”, but says nothing about the shaping of the text into a pen nib pointing to a square fleuron, or is it a dagger ending in a drop of blood? The next body of text occupies the same place on its page, the categorizing stamp indicates that it, too, comes from a journal, and its language is English. But its type is “Quote”.

Like the first text’s italicized date headline that suggests its journal origin, the second text’s inverted commas identify it as a quotation. So why then the categorizing stamp? The journal writer is the artist, as the colophon will confirm, but the categorizing stamp and the envelope/folder form of the book identify the artist as collector, categorizer and shaper of the evidence. Is the artist implying “heteronyms” like those invented by Fernando Pessoa, another source of quotations?

This out-of-context quotation from William James’ The Varieties of Religious Experience seems to describe the preceding dream as a “genuine first-hand religious experience”. The dream extract is a piece of evidence. The commonplace extract from James is also a piece of evidence that contextualizes the dream extract. Read them.

Other pieces of evidence include

a “To whom it may concern” document on Center for the Book Arts letterhead, folded inwards from all four sides like a deed or secret letter. The letter supports an immigration application. The paper is mulberry tissue paper; so initially the text appears in reverse. Attention is drawn to that view by blocks of black redactions in which right-reading text appears in white (a reverse-out on the reverse side of the letter).

a display of SMS texts between the artist and her mother, made to appear like a print-out that had been folded then sealed with red sealing wax impressed with a sigil.
two Turkish fold maps, both with the same geometric emblem printed inside, one that pops up in the gutter of a double-page spread and one hidden under an inward-folded flap.

a medallion of gampi impressed with the image of a crouching leopard and placed within a journal extract set to surround the medallion. The pressure on the silk-like gampi causes the image to flicker iridescently.

But of what is this a body of evidence? The photo of an empty negligee and the insert of part of a nylon stocking raise the questions – of what body, whose? The empty clothing points to the wordplay on “body” in the categorizing stamp’s own label — “Of Body Of Evidence Of Body”. Perhaps it is missing. Perhaps it is outlined or staring at us from the strobing abstractions over the quotations from Rebecca Solnit and Pessoa. Perhaps it is the artist whose name appears only in only three places — in white against one of the black reverse redactions, in the SMS texts and in her signature in the colophon.

From the artist’s website. Accessed 8 July 2021.

From the artist’s website. Accessed 8 July 2021.

Despite its usual place of culmination, the colophon is just as unusual as the shape of Body of Evidence and its treatment of almost every other material and metaphorical aspect of a book. The colophon comes as an unbound folio, enclosed in a deed-fold sheet that is bound to the book. It is much more than the usual brief assertion of creation by scribe or printer. It is an outpouring, a venting. As the last piece of evidence, it answers the question “Of what is this a body of evidence?”

It is the accretion of the immigrant artist’s tensions and unease in the context of anti-immigrant feeling and, on its heels, a pandemic requiring isolation and its further inciting “fear of the Other”. Like the material aspects of Body of Evidence, those tensions and the unease are complex. In its ambiguity of heteronymy and near anonymity, Body of Evidence invites the reader/viewer to be an empathetic witness to the tension between a desire for privacy and a desire to be open and welcoming. The tension between wanting to belong and not wanting to lose one’s self. A tension arising from hurt inflicted under the guise of intended empathy. The tension of selves.

Whether the reader/viewer can empathize is answerable only from reading, looking and feeling.

Books On Books

Curated by Robert Bolick

Ana Paula Cordeiro

Books On Books Collection – Ana Paula Cordeiro

Lightweight (2015)

Further Reading

Bookmarking Book Art – Ana Paula Cordeiro

Body of Evidence (2020)

Further Reading (and Looking)

Further Reading