Erica Baum

Books On Books Collection – Inscription: The Journal of Material Text, Issue 4 on Touch

Inscription: The Journal of Material Text, Issue 4 on Touch
Simon Morris, Gill Partington and Adam Smyth (eds.)
Cased perfect bound paperback, printed paper cover. 313 x 313 mm. 120 pages. ISSN: 2634-7210. Acquired from Information as Material, 29 November 2023.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.

Different readers will come to different conclusions on whether Inscription #4 dedicated to the subject of touch evokes the level of tactility in Melville’s famous Chapter 94 “A Squeeze of the Hand”. But all can agree that they share a certain seminality. Like Herman Melville with his preliminaries to Moby Dick, the editors of Inscription lead their fourth issue with definitions and choice quotations on the subject of “touch”, as much a Leviathan subject as that of Melville’s novel. Where Melville merged scholarly apparatus with narrative fiction to create a novel literary work, Simon Morris, Gill Partington and Adam Smyth have merged photography, poetry, augmented reality and audio with academic and critical essays to create a novel form of scholarship.

As noted in the review of Issue 2 on Holes, Inscription‘s composition is close to that of Aspen produced by Phyllis Johnson, and to this should be added the Fluxus productions inaugurated by George Maciunas, the AR Fluxus Box initiated by Art is Open Source (AOS) and Fake Press Publishing in 2010, and Franticham’s Assembling Box published by Redfoxpress (57 of them since 2010). Inscription‘s juxtaposition (sometimes fusion) of the imaginative with critical rigor continues to set it apart. In this particular issue, the contribution that most sets it apart from the preceding three is the editors’ reproduction of Robert Rauschenberg’s Automobile Tire Print (1953), with permission of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The original consists of twenty attached sheets of paper over the length of which John Cage drove his car at Rauschenberg’s direction. Rauschenberg had placed a pool of sticky black paint in the car’s path. Here is the editor’s description of their use of the print:

To make the journal operate as an artist’s book for issue 4 of Inscription, we used Robert Rauschenberg’s Automobile Tire Print from 1953 to allow metaphorically John Cage to drive right through our journal, from left to right, following the direction of type and providing breaks (pun intended) that demarcate the space between different sections. (p. 111).

How is it that this makes the journal “operate as an artist’s book”? Well, perhaps as an Oulipean artist/editor’s book. The 726.4 cm of the Rauschenberg/Cage artwork is divided into double-page spreads of 62.6 cm (the journal’s trim size is 31.3 x 31.3) and thereby takes up 24 pages, leaving the editors 96 pages of the 120-page issue to allocate to the rest of the journal’s content. It is the internal frame for the artist’s book. The tire tread print provides a unifying thread and spatial constraint for the remaining contributions the artists/editors can accommodate. Some would-be contributor has to be left on the side of the road, or parts have to be ganged together into the trunk (or boot), or someone has to deliver urgent roadside assistance to fill in for a missing part. All to work with the Rauschenberg/Cage tire tread frame.

If this seems metaphorically far-fetched, consider the framing allusions in two of the issue’s sections: the table of contents and “The Grid” from the Fraser Muggeridge Studio. The former is the usually expected front matter signaling what’s to come, except for its unusual cross-hatch, frame-like layout; the second is the unusually extant appearance of the usually invisible set of guidelines for the layout of the pages, presumably offered up as the visible touchpoints or tracks that the rest of the issue follows and fills in. So the two standard unifying frames for any book allude with their line-crossing to that page-crossing, book-crossing internal frame of tire treads. And if, up to this point, the reader still doubts the allusion, a handprint and fingerprints in sticky black ink conclude the Muggeridge grid. This self-reflexivity is quintessentially how artists’ books operate.

Aside from the table of contents, the introductory Melvillean definitions and quotations, the Grid and the colophon, there are thirteen internal components to this issue of Inscription to be interspersed among the Rauschenberg/Cage skids. Most of them evoke the issue’s theme of touch visually, metaphorically and conceptually.

“Marking Readers: Pain, Pleasure, and the Nineteenth-Century Tactile Book” by Taylor Hare and John Gulledge explores the history of reading by touch “to argue that reading by touch … constituted an event in which reader and book each took the position of marker as well as marked, subject as well as object” and that “haptic encounters between books and readers … layered pain and pleasure overtop of one another in ways that scholars have yet to fully appreciate” (p. 6). Just as the body of the book can be studied to learn about humans’ reading, the bodies of readers by touch can be studied to learn about the body of the book.

“Make the Poem aka Language Fabric” by Ben Miller is a four-section extract from the long hand-scribed visual-textual poem Make, which has been excerpted in several literary magazines. Its thick lettering and doodles and its multidirectional, multipositioned text bleed across the gutter and off the top and bottom of the pages. On the lead-in page, there is a typeset “Aside to the kind reader” that instructs “Pick a point on the edge of each spread and slowly move a finger across the terrain at any angle. The action, repeated three times, is how I re-read for editing” (p. 21).

“‘The Divell’s Hand’: Touching Special Collections” by Matthew Shaw provides a special collection librarian’s and curator’s mixed views and metaphors on touch in an entertaining scroll from the anecdote about Charles II’s touching a purported demonic invocation inscribed in a 1539 linguistic history in the “divell’s hand” to anecdotes about the role of touch in the coronation of Charles III.

“All Fingers & Thumbs: Reading/Handling/Editing: Nabokov’s Pale Fire” by Gill Partington combines her exposition of her own altered-book revision of Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire with a rumination on touch and reading.

Reading/Handling/Editing: Nabokov’s Pale Fire
Gill Partington

“Measuring the Sun –, 2023” by Jen Bervin and Deborah D. Mayer presents magnified photographs of embossments in packet VI of Fascicle 18 of Emily Dickinson’s poems held at the Harvard Houghton Library.

“The Felt Dimension: The Haptic Intuition of Hansjörg Mayer” by Bronac Ferran digs into the deep indentations that Mayer created in his Sixties works and makes the case that “we find traces of an early digital heritage embedded within the felt textures of print, given life within our fingers”.

“Sequences of Touch: Dried Flowers; Linen Rags; Rotten Potatoes; Wool Roving” by Sheryda Warrener, Claire Battershill, Amy E. Elkins, and Jayme Collins is a collaborative presentation of four hands-on engagements in craftwork: a poetry workshop based on the textile and matière-inspired work of Black Mountain artists Anni Albers, Josef Albers, Eva Hesse, Ruth Asawa and Sheila Hicks; an exploration of offcuts and hand papermaking; a revel in homemade inks potato prints; and a textile-production approach to Cecilia Vicuña’s poetry.

“Taction”, a poem by Vona Groarke, that challenges the reader: “bring your bare skin/ to the flesh of the words.”

“Letter as Monument: The Architectural Majuscule, the Inscriptional Page, and the Rise of Roman Type” by Katy Nelson makes a convincing case that the physicality of engraved Roman majuscules as well as their later ideal-driven geometric derivation secured their combination with the humanist miniscules in painting, manuscripts and printing.

“A Play Between Illusion and Awareness of Illusion” by the editors — Simon Morris, Gill Partington, and Adam Smyth — explores Natalie Czech’s prints that appear on the front and back covers as well as pages 84, 87-89 and 91-93. The prints’ trompe l’oeil character not only provides the theme of the essay, it prompts the shift from matte to coated paper. The Zephyr and Koh-In-All pencils look three-dimensional enough to roll off the covers and page if the issue is tilted.

This change of paper is surprisingly the only distinctive use of paper in the bound issue. There’s no other change of surface nor any use of embossing or debossing in the printing to address the reader’s sense of touch. Only two of the items included separately and shrink-wrapped with issue 4 do more than flirt with the physical sense of touch: Fraser Muggeridge Studio’s embossed card and Steve Ronnie’s and for you (love), which was originally produced with a Perkins mechanical Brailler.

Foilblock on 360 gsm Materica Gesso. Fraser Muggeridge Studio

Fabriano 5 300 gsm watercolor card with the characters “and for y” repeating over nine lines to surround the characters “love” in the fifth. Steve Ronnie.

Although all of the other items each vary in weight and finish, they primarily evoke the sense of touch visually, metaphorically or conceptually — like the bound issue except for its aforementioned one switch from matte to coated paper. There is one item, or rather feature, that has no weight or finish: a pair of QR codes, engineered by Katarina Rankovic and Ian Truelove, that enable the reader’s smartphone to activate the augmented reality features of Instagram when pointed at the front and back covers of Inscription 4 — and, of course, tapped with a finger.

First row, left to right: Leonora Barros, POEMA; Yoko Ono, Touch Poem for a Group of People; Harold Offeh, Holding On.
Second row: Alice Attie, Roland Barthes (from the series Annotations); Mohammed Hafeda, The touching of borders; Erica Baum, untitled (Finger-prints).
Third row: Graham Ellard & Stephen Johnstone, Geneva Express side of LP vinyl jacket; Geneva Express side of LP sleeve; jacket insert showing photo of Geneva Express installation; reverse of jacket insert showing photo of Wall of Death installation.
Fourth row: Ellard & Johnstone, Wall of Death side of LP vinyl record jacket; Wall of Death side of LP sleeve.

Papers made of stone, glass, plastic, metal, fabric and all sorts of vegetal material could have increased the variety of tactile sensations. Budget permitting, perhaps a future issue of Inscription will take the theme of “substrate” and demonstrate physically — as well as discuss and depict — how the surface of inscription contributes materially to the meaning of the inscribed. Nevertheless, like the previous three issues, Inscription 4 — as is — bursts with academic insights to appreciate and pursue, art and literature to enjoy and ponder, and production artistry at which to marvel.*

*In correspondence (21 February 2024), Simon Morris has mentioned a philatelic touch to be found in Jen Bervin and Deborah D. Mayer’s contribution on Emily Dickinson. To provide further clues would rob the feeling reader of the hunt and, perhaps, the editors of a subscription from a library yet to have recognized that any serious collection of works on art and literary theory or the history of the book or artists’ books must have these four issues (and those to come) on board.

Books On Books Collection – Inscription: The Journal of Material Text, Issue 3 on Folds

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Now here’s a rare thing — a journal issue that requires a video to show the reader h0w to open it.

Inscription: The Journal of Material Text, Issue 3 on Folds
Simon Morris, Gill Partington and Adam Smyth (eds.)
Printed boards over recurring origami square-base folded leaves. 300 x 300 mm. 120 pages. ISSN: 2634-7210. Acquired from Information as Material, 29 November 2022.
Photos: Books On Books Collection. [Front and back covers, Kimsooja’s bottari artwork commissioned for Inscription 3.]

The structure is built on the simple principle of an origami square base. A diagonal mountain fold bisects two corners of a square, followed by two perpendicular valley folds bisecting the edges of the square; then the north, south and west corners come together and down atop the east corner. For the printer, the not-so-simple principle is how one base connects to the next to make a book!

Inscription 3 has ten essays, including the editors’ introduction. As seen below, the latter neatly fits with the issue’s table of contents on a single unfolded sheet in a layout that offers considerable creative opportunities for structure and design to enact the theme of the issue.

The essays fall across eleven of these large unfolded sheets, with a twelfth sheet serving for the contributors’ biographies and description of the nine commissioned artworks shrinkwrapped with this journal issue. In general, each unfolded sheet breaks down into quadrants, and each quadrant breaks down into three columns to accommodate text and images. The designers run images across columns, across the vertical and horizontal folds dividing the quadrants and, later on, even in alignment with the diagonal fold.

The structure and layout of Inscription 3 take the star billing in this issue and, to varying degrees, interact with the content. Two essays in particular highlight this. In the issue’s first contributed essay (see above), Craig Dworkin and the editors seem to have conspired to present an essay that enfolds its subject with the design of Incription 3. While Dworkin’s essay explores Stéphane Mallarmé’s efforts to reconcile his ideal of the Book with his ambivalent inspiration for it from the spaciousness of newspaper print, it has to be read across a sheet of book paper unfolded like a Sunday newspaper spread out on the dining room table. To reveal the end of the essay, the sheet of pages must rise, fold and unfold like the wings of a bird. Compare that with Dworkin’s description of Mallarmé’s imagined fusion of newspaper and book in which his landmark poem Un Coup de Dés should appear:

Curving from their center fold like wings, the newspaper sheets in flight through the park – animated by the breeze and wafting like a feather from the birds they mimic – corroborate the operation of the mobile new book, in which the pages assume the rhythmic function of verse itself, abstracted and projected onto the architecture of the assembled volume with folded sheets smoothed into the single surface Un Coup de dés describes with the phrase insinuation simple [simple insinuation], where the etymology derives from the Latin insinuare [to fold in].

The second example coinciding with Inscription 3‘s structure and layout is Justine Provino’s “0, 1, 2, many folds”, which explores an artist’s book just as abstruse semantically and physically as Mallarmé’s poem:

What is the common denominator between the DNA of the fruitfly, the codex-form book and a floppy disk? They all fold. In a particular turn of events in the year 1992, DNA, codex and floppy disk managed to fold over each other through the collaborative making of the artist’s book Agrippa (a book of the dead), famous – or infamous – for the self-destructive intent programmed into it by its makers …

Agrippa (a book of the dead) by Dennis Ashbaugh, Kevin Begos, Jr. and William Gibson incorporates each of these elements, as Provino creatively and critically explains, in ways that ask

… what can – or should – an object that we call ‘book’ look like, and what purpose should it serve? We may easily visualise how pages of paper can be folded into a codex-form book to communicate and preserve reading matter. But can we establish an analogy between this topology underlying the functioning of a codex and the structures of DNA and floppy disk? Can we speak of ‘material texts’ (or even ‘books’) in the context of DNA and floppy disk in the way that we do for the codex?

As soon as the double helix of DNA structure is raised, the reader turning the pages of Inscription 3 will surely have a frisson of recognition.

The skill with which the structure and layout enhances the essays’ content presents a challenge to the nine standalone works of commissioned art. They are individually delightful, but only Daniel Jackson’s into and out of integrates with Inscription 3 “physically”, and then only by virtue of its augmented reality nature that works when pointed at artist Kimsooja’s bottari fabric art commissioned for the front and back covers.

First row: Daniel Jackson, into and out of; Pavel Büchler, Translate Here. Second row: Rick Adams & Simon Morris, Less is More. Third row: Eleanor Vonne Brown, War Unfolding. Fourth row: Marjorie Welish, Indecidability of the Sign; Erica Baum, Embrace. Fifth row: Daniel Starza Smith, Jana Dambrogio, Jessica Spring, and the Unlocking History research group (Letterlocked), It’s a Wonderful World [self-enveloping letter]. Sixth row: Abigail Reynolds, The Red Library. Last row: Nikos Stavropoulos, Folds [vinyl LP record jacket and sleeve, sides A and B].

One more point about structure and a pointer for the reader. This issue manages to include twelve diptychs on the reverse of the twelve large unfolded sheets. Each diptych presents a figure, diagram or list on one half and a sizable corresponding label on the other half. Getting to them is the trick not explained in the video.

Top-down edge view of figures, diagrams and lists. How to see them and their labels?

With a large unfolded sheet in view, turn (carefully!) the left half to the right. There is the label below the front cover. Now turn the whole over. There is the figure, diagram or list above the back cover. The figures, diagrams and lists deal with works by Samuel Beckett, Stéphane Mallarmé, James Joyce, Laurence Sterne, Daniel Spoerri, Guillaume Apollinaire, Italo Calvino, Raymond Queneau and (below) Christine Brooke-Rose.

By the way, the large unfolded sheet above is the last of the twelve in Inscription 3. In addition to providing the biographies of the contributors and the list of nine commissioned artworks, it offers one more diagonal flourish from the designers. Call it a cheeky parting kiss.

Books On Books Collection – Inscription 2

2022/05/292024/02/19Books On BooksLeave a comment

Inscription: The Journal of Material Text – Theory, Practice, History, Issue 2 on Holes (2021)
Simon Morris, Gill Partington and Adam Smyth (eds.)
Perfect bound softcover, H314 x W314 mm, 180 pages. Editions included: Fiona Banner (aka Vanity Press), Full Stop, front & back covers; Kendell Geers, Stripped Bare, end papers; Carolyn Thompson, The Beast in Me, H1180 x W1180 mm; Erica Baum, Piano Rolls, H120 x W120 closed, W960 mm open; Harold Offeh, Crystal Mouths, H210 x W105 closed, W480 mm open; David Bellingham, Cigar Burn Apertures, H210 x W105 mm; Miranda July, Bookmark, H302 x W54 mm; Christian Bök, Supermassive, LP. Acquired from Information as Material, 10 October 2021.
Photos of the issue: Books On Books Collection.

How materially perverse is it that the second issue of Inscription is devoted to “the hole”, yet it is the first issue that actually has a hole in it? The first issue of Inscription did set a seriously playful — or playfully serious — tone, and the second issue does not fail to maintain it. The second issue continues the dos-à-dos binding but with only the front and back covers as the external giveaway. In the middle of this single-spine paperback, pages 1-90 meet an inverted pages 90-1 in the middle, which prompts the reader to turn the open book 180° and flip back to page 1. From either direction, the reader meets the traditional backmatter of a journal in the middle.

Inverted cover and center of Inscription (2021).

Such reversals of expectation call for a countervalent design element to avoid too much confusion. In this issue, that element consists of constant earth-tone backgrounds framing constant black-on-white text boxes (square holes?) for each article. Even within these constants, reversals of expectation play out. The backgrounds are drawn from 14 different sources, ranging from laid paper samples, parchment, pulp and brown boards to a slice of Emmental cheese (sorry, Gromit, no Wensleydale), and the layouts for each square hole differ, being taken from 16 other journals such as The Criterion, The Egoist and National Geographic.

List of backgrounds used throughout the issue.

List of publications whose layouts are used throughout the issue.

The Emmental cheese background around the opening of Marcinkowski’s essay; Hybrid wove/laid paper made for James Watt & Co around the opening of Lüthi’s essay.

There is an even more recurrent “bass” line in this issue. It comes from the South African artist Kendell Geers, interviewed by the Editors. Even this bass line plays with variable perspective. Marking the start of most articles is a sheet bearing on recto and verso pages the image of a bullet hole (entry then exit) taken from Geers’ work Point Blank (2004). Bullet holes in glass — from Geers’ Stripped Bare (2009) — punctuate inversely the inside covers, bringing two symmetric/asymmetric openings to this topsy turvy production.

Kendell Geers, Point Blank (2004), front and back covers; Stripped Bare (2009; inside covers of Inscription (2021).

Long-time admirers of the 1960s-70s multimedia magazine Aspen, the editors have continued their practice of including unbound elements. In this issue, they have included Carolyn Thompson’s enormous poster The Beast in Me, whose sentences and part-sentences beginning with “I” have been cut from eight different novels and pasted down to form the hole seen below. Also included are Erica Baum’s Piano Rolls, Harold Offeh’s Crystal Mouths, David Bellingham’s Cigar Burn Apertures, Miranda July’s, Bookmark and Christian Bök’s Supermassive LP.

Carolyn Thompson, The Beast in Me, H1180 x W1180 mm. Photo: Ricky Adam. Photos of the work: Books On Books Collection.

Erica Baum, Piano Rolls, H120 x W120 closed, W960 mm open. Photos of the work: Books On Books Collection.

Harold Offeh, Crystal Mouths, H210 x W105 closed, W480 mm open; David Bellingham, Cigar Burn Apertures, H210 x W105 mm; Miranda July, Bookmark, H302 x W54 mm; Christian Bök, Supermassive, LP. Photos of the works: Books On Books Collection.

Like the famous combined Aspen issue Nos.5/6 — an homage to Stéphane Mallarmé — Inscription manages to pull off an eclectic unity with the essays included, which unlike Aspen was accomplished after a double-blind review process. Inscription‘s editors have turned on its head Robert Frost’s dismissive characterization of free verse as playing tennis without a net; they are playing doubles with a net and blindfolded and have created a work of art. This issue’s entries range from Paul Reynold’s erudite and whimsical definitions of all sorts of holes; the scholarly detective work on the holes that bind (pin holes and punch holes by Craig Robertson and Deirdre Lynch and filing holes by Heather Wolfe); James Mission’s tracking the crafts of scribe, typesetter and coder in representing lacunae, gaps or holes in the text; Louis Lüthi’s puncturing juxtaposition of W. Somerset Maugham’s 1948 abridgment of Moby-Dick, Orion Books’ 2007 Moby-Dick in Half the Time and Damion Searls’ 2009 riposte ; or The Whale; to Fiona Banner’s photo-essay on her hole-creating Full Stop‘s, granite sculptures of full stops (periods) created from the Peanuts , Klang and Orator typefaces, two of which were dropped into the marine protected area of Dogger Bank to put a sure stop to industrial fishing there. Here is the table of contents:

Michael Marcinkowski — “house / table”
Galina Oustinova-Stjepanovíc — “Reading the Hole on the Last Address Memorial Plaques in Moscow”
Fiona Banner — “Full Stop intervention with Greenpeace”
Simon Morris — “Perspective Correction”
Dianna Frid, Carla Nappi and Ian Truelove — “Wormholes, The Cascabel Butterfly and an AR collaboration”
Aleksandra Kaminska and Julian De Maeyer — “The Perfect Cut: Talking with Myriam Dion”
Paul Reynolds — “A Glossary of Holes”
Louis Lüthi — “A Snow Hill in the Air”
James Mission — “Signifying Nothing: Follow a Hole Through Three Text Technologies”
Editors — “An Interview with Kendell Geers”
Heather Wolfe — “On Curating Filing Holes”
Craig Robertson and Deirdre Lynch — “Pinning and Punching: A Provisional History of Holes, Paper, and Books”

Inscription continues to provide one of the liveliest examples of what Anne M. Royston calls “artistic arguments (my emphasis), a term that indicates theory that pushes back against the expectations of the theory or criticism genre, specifically by employing signification that exceeds the semantics of printed text”.

Books On Books

Curated by Robert Bolick

Books On Books Collection – Inscription: The Journal of Material Text, Issue 4 on Touch

Further Reading

Books On Books Collection – Inscription: The Journal of Material Text, Issue 3 on Folds

Further Reading

Books On Books Collection – Inscription 2

Further Reading