Books On Books Collection – Warren Lehrer

A Life in Books: The Rise and Fall of Bleu Mobley (2013)

A Life in Books: The Rise and Fall of Bleu Mobley. An Illuminated Novel Written & Designed by Warren Lehrer (2013)
Warren Lehrer
Casebound, illustrated paper over boards with illustrated doublures. H254 x W198 x D28 mm. 300 pages. Acquired from Amazon, 3 March 2015.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.

A Life in Books is the story of the fictional Bleu Mobley, writer, activist and jailbird, as compiled from Mobley’s prison tape diaries, his books’ jacket blurbs, excerpts from the books, and interviews by the non-fictional Warren Lehrer, writer, designer, performer, educator and citizen, presumably without a criminal record. What A Life in Books really is, though, is a satire on the book industry, bookmaking and book art and the broader social and political scene of the ’70s to the oughties in which it is set.

Each of nine chapters revolves around Mobley’s writing activities and publications, whose content reflects the winding narrative line of Mobley’s life (hence “a life in books”). Fiction, non-fiction and truth start the young Mobley on his oddball writing career, which throughout is characterized by a liberal cast of mind. Mobley is a feminist, anti-racist, environmentalist, pacifist, and anti-capitalist entrepreneur. Winding though it may be, the narrative line drives hard, and believe it or not, A Life in Books is a thoughtful, hilarious page-turner.

Mobley’s origins may remind some readers of John Irving’s The World According to Garp (1978), whose main character is also born out-of-wedlock to an artistic mother. Mobley’s parental puzzles lead him to his first handmade books: a miniature about his mother’s art and a series of dos-à-dos books with one side entitled “My Father” and the other variously entitled with a celebrity name. High-school journalism takes him into professional domestic and foreign reporting, which he quits before being fired for one too many metaphors and after which he begins his teaching and novel-writing career. Still pining for artistic integrity, Mobley experiments with handmade books. There’s a marriage portrait in a dos-à-dos format (two books bound back to back with a single spine) from which he progresses to a three-spine ménage-à-trois. There’s a Tom Phillips Humument-style artist’s book that Mobley makes by redacting his already-redacted FBI file obtained through a Freedom-of-Information-Act request.

Nevertheless he stumbles into financial success with the novel Buy This Book or We’ll Kill You (Maelstrom Limited, 1993), which becomes a bestseller after it has been transformed into a fast-paced crime comedy film reminiscent of Raising Arizona (1987). Mobley’s plan to leave teaching to pursue writing full time falls apart (seemingly) when he is felled by degenerative disk disease and starts down the entrepreneurial path to the equivalent of an artist’s workshop/studio to churn out even more quirky bestsellers. Instead of novels, as planned, the team first issues a successful series of self-help books under the name of Dr. Sky Jacobs, pop Zen psychologist under whose name Mobley wrote Yes, I Can’t: A How Not To Book (Simon & Schuster, 1995). The studio, however, does begin to produce Bleu Mobley fiction such as Outsourcing Grandma (Basic Books, 1999) and even a point-of-sale series of short fiction called The Check It Out Series (Bantam, 2000). All of these works continue to share a mash-up quality that is perhaps fundamental to book art, bookworks, artists’ books or whatever you want to call them.

Mobley’s works also share something else that he articulates only when his studio colleagues challenge the intentions behind his mash-up: End Times (Papyrus Books, 2000). Published as one of the first serialized online novels, End Times tells the story of a sex addict turned evangelical crusader (so is born the trans-genre of religious porn). Challenged to come up with one good reason to justify the book’s and its despicable character’s existence, Mobley responds “because it’s my Project“:

To paint a panoramic portrait of America — of humanity — one person at a time. Sort of like how Bruegel painted vast village landscapes populated by everyone in a village, and each person, no matter who they were, had a story. Only with my work, I suppose, the panorama won’t be complete till I write my last book. Even then it won’t be complete, but a reader could still go through all the books, zooming into the individual stories and out to see the bigger picture. So to ask me why I paint this person and not that one, or what it has to do with me, is sort of meaningless.

Underlying Mobley’s mash-ups, personae, and workshop/studio books, this humanism leads to that liberal cast of mind mentioned above, which draws Mobley to embrace every cause going. Unfortunately, there are plenty of traumatic encounters and personal affronts to encourage Mobley’s activist penchant. It is the combination of this activist penchant with his literary penchant for fictional non-fiction (or non-fictional fiction) that leads to Under the Rug: A Flush and Tell Book (Simon & Schuster, 2006). This White House cleaner’s behind-the-scenes account “of unseemly behavior, indiscretion, and hypocrisy as told … to bestselling author Bleu Mobley” lands Mobley in jail for contempt of court for not revealing his non-existent source.

Of course, since the “Mobley biographer” is Lehrer’s mask, it’s no surprise that the format of A Life in Books consists of its own mash-ups. It is both catalogue raisonnée, novel and more. As catalogue, it has photos of covers and excerpts ginned up to look like Mobley’s 101 volumes of fiction and non-fiction. The book also has the features and production values of a full-color college textbook. In addition to the matte-gloss paper-over-boards textbook cover, it has a textbook’s double-page spread with margin call-outs and boxed inserts to explain how to read the book. The fine press book makes an appearance in the form of patterned end- and head-bands. While the titular illumination occurs not with decorated letters leading off each chapter or paragraph but with the photos of Mobley’s books, Lehrer the designer and book artist sneaks his typophilia under the covers of Mobley’s books where there are typographic fireworks that would tickle a Stéphane Mallarmé, with whom it all began.

A Life in Books will also remind some readers of David Lodge’s campus novel trilogy and its characters Philip Swallow and Morris Zapp. Mobley’s official mentor in the faculty of his college creative-writing program, Tobias Drummond, would fit right in at Swallow’s University of Rummidge with this career advice to Mobley:

And whatever you do, make sure your next few books can fit on a shelf, you know, one spine per book — this weird format stuff is not helping you. Once you get your tenure you can make books with wings for all I care, or make nothing at all. Look at me! I haven’t published a book in twenty-three years, though I’ve been tinkering with a collection of poems — modern sonnets.” (P. 83)

Eventually Mobley and his studio do make books with wings and wearable books as well as many other bookish objets d’art. Perhaps it is the book-art-ishness and the four-color “illuminations” of A Life in Books that has kept it from being issued in paperback and becoming the bestseller it deserves to be. So it goes, as another manic author wrote.

The Flying Books Project

Bookish objets d’art

Jericho’s Daughter (2024)

Eleven years later, it seems that Warren Lehrer has not only taken the advice of Tobias Drummond, Bleu Mobley’s mentor in A Life in Books, he’s also taken two of Mobley’s works and published them as his own: Walls: Stories of Enclosure (Graphic Language Press, 2005) and Riveted in the Word (Kinesthesia Books, 1995). Jericho’s Daughter (2024) is taken from Walls has the dos-à-dos binding against which Drummond warned Mobley. Riveted in the Word (2024) is a complete lifting of it 1995 predecessor but flutters down from the digital cloud to your choice of electronic device for reading. If it weren’t for the fact that Lehrer is the non-fictional, fictional biographer of the fictional, non-fictional subject of A Life in Books, we might expect to see Warren Lehrer in civil court being sued by the fictional, non-fictional Bleu Mobley. Poor Mobley is still presumably in jail, but so what: that wouldn’t prevent him from being nominated and elected president of the United States, so why not lodge a case against his biographer?

Jericho’s Daughter: An alternative telling of the biblical tale of Rahab, the “harlot” who lived inside the wall of Jericho (2024)
Warren Lehrer & Sharon Horvath
Variant dos-à-dos book sewn to a Z-fold wraparound cover with button & string clasp. H227 x W174 mm. 48 pages. Acquired from Warren Lehrer, 25 April 2024.
Photos: Books On Books Collection. Displayed with permission of Warren Lehrer.

Back to the work of art. With the artist Susan Horvath, Lehrer has transformed the biblical tale of Rahab, the Canaanite prostitute, into a work of art. On one side of the dos-à-dos, Lehrer tells the story of Rahab’s hiding of two Jewish spies in her mud hut outside the walls of Jericho. The other side is a catalogue displaying artifacts (made by Horvath) and facsimiles of Rahab’s secret diaries from her later life as Israelite wife and mother.

Four-color throughout and printed on Mohawk Superfine paper, this first edition displays high production values, though not quite to the level of A Life in Books. It has been handbound by Elizabeth Castaldo. Horvath’s artwork, created in response to Lehrer’s text, consists of photographed collages and assemblages of found objects, drawings, clippings, logos, etc. The faux artifacts have a totemic quality, even when partly composed of rotary telephone dials or margarine ads.

Appearing in the Old and New Testaments and celebrated as a reformed sinner and a symbol of faith in the one omnipotent God, Rahab straddles the divide between Canaanite and Israelite in Lehrer’s retelling. Her reimagined story and her diaries portray her as anti-war and a proto-feminist. The book’s primary type family, Input Serif, and its sizes lend a children’s book air to the pages, which only further emphasizes the power of Rahab’s character and her response to the violence and sexuality of her condition. Lehrer’s and Horvath’s collaboration was completed prior to the events of 7 October 2023 and ongoing war between Israel and Gaza. In light of those events, Rahab’s ancient plea for an end to the cycle of blood and death has become all the more present. The proceeds from Jericho’s Daughter will go to Women Wage Peace, a grassroots peace movement in Israel.

Riveted in the Word (2024)

Riveted in the Word (2024)
Warren Lehrer, Andrew Griffin (soundtrack) & Artemio Morales (programming).
Electronic book. Pre-release edition. Acquired from Warren Lehrer, 25 April 2024.
Photos: Courtesy of Warren Lehrer.

In each of its forms, this short story aims to place the reader inside the mind of Norah Hanson, a retired history professor, as she recalls her fight to overcome Broca’s Aphasia after a stroke, but whichever form, though, the reader is, first and foremost, in that form. When Norah’s first-person narrative expresses her condition on the printed page of A Life in Books, the reader accesses the narrative through the book page’s familiar affordances: fixed text to be read from left to right and down the page, then to be followed across the gutter and up to the top of the next page and down, and then to the top of the turned page. The size and weight of the type, word spelling, punctuation marks, and the placement of all these on the page are also affordances affecting how the reader experiences the narrative. All of those affordances can be manipulated to help share Norah’s experience.

After decades of experience with the electronic screen, readers know the additional navigational affordances of clicking and double-clicking (or finger-tapping), scrolling (or swiping), and pressing and holding keys (or dragging). The reader also knows that different ebook applications deploy these affordances differently, and the programmer obligingly explains at the app’s opening its several states of activity (or operating modalities) and how the navigation works.

After its intro, the Riveted in the Word app delivers text and background music that progress from a screen displaying the glowing green set of numbers of an alarm clock without any navigation direction needed from the reader. Think of this as the televisual state of activity. Further on, vertical and horizontal gray lines enter the screen to form the lattice of a bedroom window through which Norah’s textualized and animated observations appear.

In both the print and ebook forms, the symptoms of omitting key words and repeating a word are similarly presented. By animated scrambling text and the jangling of sound, the ebook’s affordances suggest other aphasic experiences. Which form is more effective or stimulating depends on the individual imagination’s engagement and adeptness with the different affordances, and the individual’s preferences between them.

Neither the print or ebook, however, can replicate the experience of expressive aphasia, and a reader’s engagement and adeptness with either form can only go so far in stepping into the patient’s aphasia. A patient with visual agnosia offers symptoms more susceptible to near-replication by the affordances of an ebook app. One successful metaphor in the Riveted app would be particularly applicable to agnosia. Ironically it springs from the skeuomorphic persistence of the printed form’s double-page spread in the app. The display of the print’s verso and recto pages is a visual metaphor for the left and right hemispheres of Norah’s brain, but that is a static metaphor when it comes to enacting the expressive dysfunction. An ebook’s animation affordance could dynamically enact the symptoms of agnosia gradually erasing from one half of the double-page spread text than runs across it, or showing an object on the verso page and gradually presenting the patient’s distorted drawing of it on the recto.

Whether this is unfairly demanding a different patient and a different ebook, the point is to acknowledge Lehrer’s and Morales’ choices in crafting the ebook version of Riveted in the Word. Other crafters of ebooks have faced similar choices. For Between Page and Screen (2012) , Amaranth Borsuk and Brad Bouse chose its webcam functionality to conjure words from an otherwise wordless print book. For the novella Pry (2014), Samantha Gorman and Danny Cannizaro chose among the functionalities of the touchscreen to enable us to read between the lines literally. For Breathe (2018), Kate Pullinger chose GPS to detect and insert the reader’s location, the time and weather, and when the reader tilts the device or rubs the screen, hidden messages from the story’s (the reader’s?) ghosts appear. It is also worth acknowledging that, by extracting Riveted in the Word from his earlier artist’s book A Life in Books, Lehrer has demonstrated the validity of Amaranth Borsuk’s observation in The Book (2018):

Artists’ books continually remind us of the reader’s role in the book by forcing us to reckon with its materiality and, by extension, our own embodiment. Such experiments present a path forward for digital books, which would do well to consider the affordances of their media and the importance of the reader, rather than treating the e-reader as a Warde-ian crystal goblet for the delivery of content. (p. 147)

Snippets of the ebook version of Riveted in the Word can be seen here, and the whole work can be purchased here. Note that the link to the snippets comes from the Wayback Machine and that the link for the purchase comes from the Apple App Store, which are used here to underscore one last point about print and ebook forms. So far, the former can last for centuries, the latter can last only for as long as the existence of the necessary device, operating system and online source allow. Links from the Wayback Machine are only freeze-frame views of a digital artifact. Permalinks (such as Digital Object Identifiers) may be a step toward preserving digital artifacts, but the limitations of device, OS and online source remain.

Ouvert Oeuvre: Openings (2023)

Ouvert Oeuvre: Openings (2023)
Adeena Karasick & Warren Lehrer
Three-piece hardcover binding, smythe-sewn, foil-stamped. H204 x W160 mm. 96 pages. Acquired from Warren Lehrer, 25 April 2024.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.

This artists’ book draws on the traditions of concrete poetry and, somewhat, Lettrisme. It is worth close comparison with other works in the Books On Books Collection such as those by Johanna Drucker, Bernard Heidsieck, Karl Kempton, Anja Lutz, and Sam Winston.

Publisher’s description (Lavender Ink):

Inscribing what the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas might call “espace vital” (the space we can survive), the two poems that embody this work form an ecstatically wrought exploration of re-entering the world after a pandemic that never seems to end.

The title poem and Touching in the Wake of the Virus track trepidations and celebrations of openings read through socio-economic, geographic and bodily space. Both poems explore a range of intralingual etymologies laced with post-consumerist and erotic language, theoretical discourse, philosophical and Kabbalistic aphorisms. They foreground language and book-space as organisms of hope—highlighting the concept of opening and touching as an ever-swirling palimpsest of spectral voices, textures, whispers and codes transported through passion, politics and pleasure as we negotiate loss and light.

In this first collaborative book, Lehrer choreographs Karasick’s words on the stage of the page through typographic compositions that give form to the emotional, metaphorical, historical and sonic underpinnings of the texts. His sensuous, textural, textual settings diagram themes within the poems like approach/withdrawal, navigating between and through a landscape of barriers and openings, seeking intimacy, fearing/daring to touch and be touched. Together, the writing and visuals engage the reader to become an active participant in the experience/performance of the work.

The book also comes with a soundtrack recording (via QR code to Soundcloud page) of Karasick reading the poems with music composed and performed by Grammy award-winning composer and trumpet player, Sir Frank London.

Books On Books Collection – Karl Kempton

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26 Voices / January Interlude (2020)

Front cover / Back cover

26 Voices / January Interlude (2020)
Karl Kempton
Sewn booklet. H190 x W177 mm. 28 pages. Edition of 60 unnumbered. Acquired from Derek Beaulieu, 4 January 2021.
Photos of the work: Books On Books Collection. Displayed with permission of the artist.

Derek Beaulieu deserves a vote of thanks for bringing this work back into print, even if for a limited edition. 26 Voices / January Interlude first appeared under the title Rune 2: 26 voices/ january interlude as number 10 in Robert Caldwell’s Typewriter series, published by Bird in the Bush Press (1980). In the Acknowledgements, Kempton writes that the series “was composed in January, 1978 in 28 days. After the letter K the flow stopped until a dream of L’s form arrived unblocking the flow”.

The series of patterns, each made from an upper case letter of the alphabet typed over and over, range in appearance — some like Amish quilts, some like Byzantine rugs, some like Celtic knots, but like snowflakes, no two alike. Given how some pairs of letters are mirror images of each other (bd, pq) or inverse (bp, dq), you would expect some close affinity in their two patterns, but no. No pairs of those patterns look at all alike. You would also be mistaken to expect a pattern to reflect the letter that constitutes it. Instead, you find one pattern resembling the letter X, but it is made of letter U’s. There are naturally some similarities between patterns at the broadest level — E and N, L and M or R and S — but these have little to do with the letters themselves, and the similarity recedes as details come to the fore or falls into the background with illusory three dimensionality. The shapes are not rune like, but individually and sequentially, they have the associative dream-like qualities of runes.

A close up

Double-page spread B&C

B close up

C close up

Center double-page spread N&O

Double-page spread X&Y

X close up

Y close up

Z close up

Actual runes appear in the following work, similarly in black and white and with similarly illusory three dimensionality. Not technically in the Books On Books Collection, playground (2013-14) can be found online. Surprisingly, it has not been in print.

playground (2013-14)

playground (2013-14)
karl kempton
Online, 78 pages (screens). Accessed 7 August 2022.
Screenshots reproduced with permission.

What an opportunity for collaborators to join with Kempton to produce playground in different editions varying in color (black and white, red and white, green and white, blue and white, etc.), in paper (handmade, watercolor, washi, high gloss, matte, etc.) and in binding (accordion, stab binding, case bound, scroll, etc.). Perhaps such an extravaganza is not in keeping with Kempton’s style and approach over the years, but this playground is such an invitation to play.

Games and sports are depicted together with letters and punctuation marks on platforms made of the musical staff or stave, all of which offer Kempton multiple means of metaphor. FIrst, inked martial arts figures break a K of karate boards. Then, a baseball player bats the dot of a lowercase i into the air. A basketball player jumps and aims at a basket formed of a half note. A golfer chips toward a half-note hole flagged with a pennant bearing the treble clef G. A boxer punches the bowl of a large P.

The images become more worked as the book proceeds. A weightlifter atop a lowercase e lifts a set of weights composed of the umlaut above the e, and the shadow of the image is cast across the stave lines behind the letter. Shadows of gymnasts appear behind an uppercase G, lowercase o and lowercase i.

Animation sequences occur, such as the platform diver leaping from the body of a lowercase i and creating an exclamation-point splash in a pool formed by a circle that widens across the stave as the diver submerges.

Around the same time of playground‘s inception, this combination of letters and musical notation found expression among other artists: for example, Jim Avignon & Anja Lutz in Neoangin: Das musikalische ABC (2014) and Bernard Heidsieck in Abécédaire n° 6 clef de sol : été 2007 (2015). Metaphorically linking textual expression, if not individual letters of the alphabet, with musical scores goes back at least as far as Stéphane Mallarmé’s Un Coup de Dés Jamais N’Abolira le Hasard (1897) and carries forward into explicit linkage by Michalis Pichler (2009) and Rainier Lericolais (2009) in their works of homage to Un Coup de Dés.

To return to Kempton’s playground, an interlude occurs to associate the alphabet with magnetism, then breaks off to return to the games motif, this time in the form of winter sports. The musical notation motif is still there, but Kempton modifies it with a piano keyboard at both ends of the stave and with manicules fingering the keyboards at both ends while articulating a variation on sign language. Musically and metaphorically, matters become more complex with the introduction of two pairs of staves, pyramids of squares and circles and one manicule using the lowercase i to bring back the magnetism interlude.

From here on, additional motifs are developed, and words and phrases appear: a physics experiment punningly labeled “period piece”, a night game lit by inverted question and exclamation marks, and juxtaposed opposites (“covered/uncovered” and “sunrise/sunset”).

All these motifs, textual and visual puns, and images seem concerned with the development of symbols for interpreting the world and communicating that interpretation. With the appearance on black background of an exclamation mark with an open book inside its point, then a pair of rectangles each suspended by the sentence “volumes lines speak / lines speak volumes”, an animated sequence begins an extended narrative drawing everything together.

After the descending hand squeezes out the yin yang symbol onto the stave from the image of an open book, Kempton joins this theme of interconnected opposite forces with the development of language, which is where the runes come in, held in an unclosed fist. Eventually the book concludes with an open pair of hands, centered on reversed-out stave/keyboards and holding a point of light radiant against the blackness.

Books On Books Collection – Jim Avignon & Anja Lutz

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Neoangin: Das musikalische ABC (2014)

Neoangin: Das musikalische ABC (2014)
Jim Avignon and Anja Lutz
Paperback, saddle stitched, staples. H330 x W240 mm, 60 pages. Acquired from Gallix, 25 July 2022. Photos: Books On Books Collection.

Jim Avignon’s website describes Neoangin: Das musikalische ABC (2014) as a “synaesthetic experiment, [on] which Lutz and Avignon have worked together again after almost 15 years, [in which] music, illustration and typography mix in the most cheerful and unsparing way”. For each letter of the alphabet, Avignon has written a song, presented on a double-page spread designed by Lutz and Avignon. The book and performance were prepared and premiered at Typo Berlin 2014.

Songs A through C are “Animal Hypnotist”, “Bad Photoshop” and “City of Strangers”.

The song for Q is “Q Typology of Letters”. The tails of various Qs straddle female, male and epicene symbols and characters as well as emotional quotients and characters.

The songs for X, Y and Z are “X-Files: All Deleted Pages”, “Yeah” and “ZZZZZ”.

Synesthesia of the alphabet can be found elsewhere in the Books On Books Collection: Jean Holabird’s Vladimir Nabokov: AlphaBet in Color (2005) and Le Cadratin’s rendition of Rimbaud’s Voyelles (1871/1883/2012) under Jean-Renaud Dagon. And so can conjunctions of the alphabet and musical notation: Karl Kempton’s playground (2013-14) and Bernard Heidsieck’s Abécédaire n° 6 clef de sol : été 2007 (2015). But Avignon and Lutz have the claim to the only combination of the two and certainly when the musical performance is added.

Books On Books Collection – Jeremy Adler

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Alphabet Music (2d ed., 1992)

Alphabet Music (2d ed. 1992)
Jeremy Adler
Loose folios. H252 x W354 mm. 7 folios. Edition of 25, of which this is #23. Acquired from Antiquariat Willi Braunert, 2 August 2022.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.

Clearly the alphabet has held an especially productive place in Jeremy Adler’s imagination.

From 1972 to 1977, he issued A: an envelope magazine of visual poetry. His Alphabox (1973) was the first issue in the Writers Forum Object Series, founded by Bob Cobbing, and he named his Alphabox Press after it. Alphabox consisted of four sheets, printed on one side only, each folded six times and fixed at three edges in total, folding out concertina-style to show twenty-eight panels with one letter of the alphabet per panel. The following years brought Alphabet Music (1st ed., 1974), two alphabet-themed exhibitions (1975-77), Vowel Jubilee (1979), Alphabet (1980), Soapbox (1991) including “Alphabet Spaghetti”, and The Electric Alphabet/Elektrická Abeceda (1996) with Jiří Šindler. What makes most of these works — and particularly Alphabet Music — stand out is their synesthetic suggestion and calculated complexity.

The colophon to Alphabet Music, a separate folio accompanying seven loose folios, says, “Each sheet of Alphabet Music contains 15 letters, either whole, or split up into fragments, except the last, where the sequence breaks off… For a full reading, the sheets should be laid out in sequence… Colour denotes key.”

In Oulipo-esque fashion, that limit appears to be determined by the sum of the first five letters’ numerical position in the alphabet (1+2+3+4+5 = 15, so sheet one has 1 A, 2Bs, 3Cs, 4Ds and 5Es). Sheet two, likewise, has 6Fs, 7 Gs, and 2Hs to make 15 letters. Sheet three continues with the remaining 6 Hs for this eighth letter in the alphabet plus 9 Is for the ninth letter, adding up to 15 letters. Sheet four includes 10 Js and 5 letter Ks, and sheet five continues with the remaining 6 Ks for the eleventh letter plus only 9Ls of the twelfth letter, leaving sheet six to pick up the remaining 3 Ls and 12 Ms of the thirteenth letter. Contrary to the explanation, the seventh and last sheet doesn’t break off the sequence; its 1 M and presumably 14 fractured Ns add up to 15.

But why does the music end there? The letters tumble, leap and cascade like musical notes or expressions on the page. Why not additional sheets? Having come this far with the constraint of 15, perhaps Adler worked out that no sum from any summative series from the start of the alphabet could provide a constraint that would work out “evenly” in the end. There would always be leftover or remainder Zs. Alphabet Music has always to be unfinishable — much like the textual expressions the alphabet can yield.

The first edition of Alphabet Music was published in 1974 in an edition of 130 copies by Adler’s Alphabox Press (London) and was first performed with Paul Burwell, Bob Cobbing, and Bill Griffiths at the Poetry Festival in Münster 1979. Extracts first appeared in Kroklok 3 (December 1972), Poetry Review 63:3 (Autumn 1972), and Typewriter (NY) 3 (1973). Although online searching has not uncovered any recording of this performance, or instructions for performing Alphabet Music, perhaps an impression can be gleaned from this recording of Alphabox. Given the title of Alphabet Music, the visual impression it makes, its expressed intent and its reported performance, Alphabet Music would seem an exemplar of Dick Higgins’ definition of an intermedial work: “a conceptual fusion of scenario, visuality and, often enough, audio elements”.

Books On Books Collection – Anja Lutz

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Marginalia (2017)

Marginalia (2017)
Anja Lutz
Open back sewn spine with dust jacket 245 x 330 mm. 112 pages. Acquired from The Greenbox Press, 3 August 2022.
Photos: Books On Books Collection. Displayed with permission of the artist.

In 1964, the Fluxus artist George Brecht created a work called Book, which Michael Werner published in 1972 and which Moritz Küng reintroduced in facsimile in 2017. Also sometimes called This is the cover of the book, it proceeds to label each of the otherwise blank pages with its structural label: “These are the end pages of the book”; “This is the page before the title page of the book that tells you what the title is or was, or is going to be”; “This is the title page”; “This is the other side of the title page …” and so on. Like most self-referential or tautological artists’ books, it has its facetiousness. One page is labeled “This is the page with text on it”; another, “This the page that rustles when you turn it (maybe)”. Individual pages and perhaps the whole will lead to pauses to reflect on the thing being defined by labels and self-reference and how the mental funny-bone is being tickled. In the end, the structure or skeleton of the book as a thing — one thing — has been defined by the naming of parts.

Anja Lutz ‘s Marginalia proceeds differently. Her pages are the pages without text on them — or images, running heads, page numbers, etc. Lutz has taken thirty-four of the books she has designed under her imprint The Greenbox Press and carefully excised from each the text and images layer by layer until the empty spaces define the blank spaces that previously supported the content. But this does not result in the definition of a generic book structure or skeleton.

While Lutz’s technique might be similar to that of other book artists who have altered books by excavating or strip mining them, she is not offering precisely the same invitation that, say, Brian Dettmer offers with Tristram Shandy (2014). Dettmer, too, has excised layers away from an underlying work — the Folio Society’s illustrated edition of Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759-67). While both works invite us to think about the book as thing (or the guts and structure of this thing the book), Dettmer is inviting us to look into the specific underlying work in a different way or consider how the new shape is his response to the underlying work. Sterne’s novel remains present, and we can peer into its crevices and nooks to pick out words, sentences and images — to look into the novel in a new way. Lutz’s surgery does not leave enough of the underlying work to permit a “look in”. We look through instead. Even though she provides a list of the designed books she used, they are not present as Tristram Shandy is.

Each of the books with which Lutz start is, as she puts it, “unique in its choice of format, material, layout, composition, and rhythm”. Despite her nod and the listing of books, this does not mean that she wants us to respond to the results of her surgery with “before and after” comparisons. Rather she invites us to look only at the newly created works. In the end, each has its own structure or skeleton — the struts or bones of the marginal space defined by the negative space of removed content.

But the means of that invitation is this codex entitled Marginalia. With its dust-jacket-like wrapper around the exposed sewn spine, is Marginalia being offered as an artist’s book itself or a catalogue with artist’s book-like features? Beautifully produced, Marginalia is nevertheless not a limited edition. Besides the book, a limited number of collages shown in it are available, each framed floating between two panes of glass. They certainly qualify as works of sculptural book art, and if the artist were to turn her scalpel to copies of Marginalia itself, they too would surely qualify as artist’s books. A collection that held one of the collages, a copy of Marginalia and an altered copy of it would have won a trifecta.

Front and back of the book block, showing the exposed spine.

Neoangin: Das musikalische ABC (2014)

For the entry on Neoangin and Further Reading, see “Jim Avignon & Anja Lutz“. 29 October 2022. Books On Books Collection.

Books On Books Collection – Bernard Heidsieck

2022/10/292024/02/23Books On BooksLeave a comment

Abécédaire n° 6 clef de sol : été 2007 (2015)

Abécédaire n° 6 clef de sol : été 2007 (2015)
Bernard Heidsieck
Accordion book in slipcase. Closed: H230 x W170 mm. Open: W442 mm. 26 panels. Acquired from Gallix, 17 July 2022.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.

In French, wouldn’t an abecedary in the key of G (the fifth note “sol” in the Do-Re-Mi song) have to be associated with the summer (été) and sun (soleil)? That may be the nearest to the fixed association of letters with objects you will find in this work by one of the 1950s creators of Sound Poetry (Poésie sonore).

The collage mixes uppercase and lowercase, serif and sans serif and numerous families of type.

Like beauty and a Rohrshach test, any significance to the collage of each letter is left to the eye of the beholder. Or the ear. Do the positions of the main A, B and C suggest the opening notes of the ABC song?

The confetti-like N’s and n’s look like stemless notes being drawn up and down the staves. The O in the center of the staves surrounded by a rectangle of O’s resembles the sound hole in a cigar box guitar. The P’s are dripping in three dwindling streams of p’s. The Q’s and q’s seem bottled up and rising to spout onto the staves.

The X’s make an X, or perhaps the struts of a drum with a bass drum stick tucked in. Y forms a mosaic banjo. While Z looks like a bird of prey with its wings at the peak of an upbeat, readied for a powerful downbeat and lift off, it could the horned helmet of a nineteenth-century opera soprano.

Other artists in the collection have used the musical stave in their alphabet-related works: Karl Kempton and Jim Avignon & Anja Lutz. But Heidsieck uses the stave like a musical note and the leporello structure like a musical stave itself. Across its panels, the image of the stave sometimes keeps to the same position, sometimes descends or ascends across two or more panels — like musical notes. Sometimes it supports the letters, sometimes it suspends them, sometimes it embraces them, sometimes it embeds itself among them. The letters defy any expectation of behavior of notes fixed to the stave, but they are never independent of it. Rather than asserting synesthesia as Rimbaud or Nabokov do with words, Heidsieck’s work enacts it by conflating the structures and elements of musical notation, the alphabet, the accordion book and painting.