Books On Books Collection – Lisa Merkin

Bodies Making Language (2021)

Bodies Making Language (2021)
Lisa Merkin
Brocade-covered box containing six blocks and compartment with three cards. Box: H95 x W225 x D155 mm. Blocks: cube 50 mm. Cards: H105 x W205 mm. Unique work. Acquired from the artist, 20 September 2021.
Photos: Books On Books Collection. Displayed with permission of artist.

In a play known from fragments as the Alphabet Tragedy (although it sounds more of a comedy), the ancient Greek playwright Kallias had his chorus and actors mime and dance the letters of alphabet. Lisa Merkin’s book of blocks in a box shows that bending bodies to make letters has never grown old. Appropriately, her most recent image comes from Diego Rodas Feroni’s typeface Adonis (2018), which seems to recall the Greek playwright’s actors. Also in the Books On Books Collection, Vítězslav Nezval & Karl Teige’s Abeceda (1926), Pilobolus Dance Company’s Human Alphabet (2010) and Marie Lancelin, Gestes Alphabétiques (2014) have carried on the tradition of the alphabet dance.

Block 6: During his studies at UFRJ Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Diego Rodas Feroni designed the Greek God figurine typeface Adonis (2017).

Many of Merkin’s choices celebrate the more comic aspects of anthropomorphic letters: Carington Bowles’ The Comical Hotch-Potch (1782), Bowles & Carver’s The Man of Letters, or Pierrot’s Alphabet (1794), Honoré Daumier’s Alphabet comique (1836), Edward P. Cogger’s Funny Alphabet (c. 1850-64), Aaron McKinney’s The Unruly Alphabet (2010) and Jérôme Viguet’s caricatures Alphabet (2013).

Block 4: Funny Alphabet (c.1850 – 1864) by illustrator and engraver Edward P. Cogger. McLoughlin Brothers Publishing, NY.
Block 5: The Unruly Alphabet is a “lively and haunting abecedary“ book created in 2010 by the English illustrator Aaron McKinney, who sets the alphabet against a backdrop of rebellious behavior showcasing human nature.

Maybe the human body and the perfect letter have something in common. Geofroy Tory (1529) and Anthon Beeke (1970) certainly thought so — the former in a neo-Platonic, religious way and the latter in a more secular way. Although Beeke is not represented among Merkin’s blocks, she does not neglect celebrations of the female form. Most of them come from the realm of fashion: Erté’s Alphabet (1927-67), Horst P. Horst’s Vogue cover (1940), Yvette Yang’s The Fashion Alphabet (2010) and Alexia Yang’s Grotesque Beauty (2011). From the collection, Rebecca Bingham’s miniature Lady Letters (1986) could qualify for the catwalk.

Champ Fleury by Geofroy Tory Translated into English and Annotated by George B. Ives, Designed and printed by Bruce Rogers (1529)[1927]
Alphabet by Anthon Beeke, Geert Kooiman and Ed van der Elsken (1970).

Block 6: The Fashion Alphabet by Korean-born, Dutch-educated, and Paris-based artist, Yvette Yang. In 2007, Yang began creating her font fashion series with bits and pieces from the runways and magazines. This T is from her interpretation of Spring/Summer 2010.
Lady Letters (1986) by June Sidwell and Rebecca Bingham. The miniature book captures Sidwell’s designs and poses.

Historiated and figurative letters from the 6th to 15th centuries so well represent the Latin alphabet in Merkin’s box of blocks it would be greedy and thematically problematic to wish for one of the Hebrew letters from the Kennicott Bible. If there is ever a second Merkin volume to celebrate anthropomorphic letters, though, another range of languages beckons. For Ukrainian, there are the letters of Tatyana Mavrina. For Arabic, there are Mahmoud Tammam’s inventions, but then the volume would have to admit the zoomorphic, which suggests perhaps a third Merkin volume of animal alphabets.

Block 6: Horae ad usum Parisiensem (Hours of Charles of Angoulême) (ca. 1475-1500) by the French illuminator and painter Robinet Testard (fl. 1470–1531). Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris.
Block 2: Moralia in Job by Pope Gregory the Great (590-604). The Abbaye Notre-Dame, Cîteaux, France.

Hebrew Bible with David Kimhi’s Sefer Mikhlol (“Kennicott Bible“) (1476). Neubauer 2322. Bodleian Libraries, Oxford.
Сказочная Азбука / Skazochnaia Azbuka / A Fairy Tale Alphabet (1969) by Tatyana Mavrina.
In his Arabic letters project, Mahmoud Tammam manipulates the Arabic script ضفدع meaning “frog” to illustrate its meaning.

As shown with the Adonis letter W, Merkin’s blocks remind us of the influence of past art on the alphabets of 20th- and 21st-century designers and artists. Among the modern alphabetic variants, Dada and Surrealism make a strong showing of influence on Yvette Yang’s letter T (above) and Roman Cieślewicz’s letter i (below), and who knows, perhaps Giuseppe Maria Mitelli’s letter O influenced the Dadaists and Surrealists themselves. More than a strong showing, these styles highlight something fundamental about the alphabet and art. Both the alphabet and art ask, Are we discovering meaning or making meaning?

Block 4: Alfabeto in Sogno (1683), etchings by Giuseppe Maria Mitelli (1634-1718).
Block 3: From the fantastical alphabet created by Roman Cieślewicz (1930 -1996) for Guide de la France Mystérieuse” (1964).

Every history of letters or script begins with the figuratively pictographic. Someone somewhere at some time scrawled a shape tied to a sound tied to an object — A is for Ox — and some other(s) in the same place and time recognized and accepted the discovery that this handmade shape could conjure up that object in the mind. It would have seemed magical, and they imagined that somehow meaning and reality inhered in that shape or sound waiting to be discovered.

Yet, the shapes of characters — whether Latin or Chinese or Arabic or any language — and their relationship to the sound or meaning they represent is arbitrary, a prehistorical and historical function of social convention, a collective making by individuals. That arbitrariness provides the opening for artists to use the alphabet to question our meaning-seeking behavior and our assumptions about reality, and modern artists’ anthropomorphizing the alphabet pokes fun at that behavior and those assumptions. Perhaps a fourth Merkin box — one for bodies making “asemic alphabets”?

Books On Books Collection – Marie Lancelin

2023/01/042023/01/02Books On BooksLeave a comment

Gestes Alphabétiques (2014)

Gestes Alphabétiques (2014)
Marie Lancelin
Double-sided leporello with sleeve. H200 x W170 mm (closed). 14 panels. Laser-printed, screen print. Interior: offset on Arcoset Extra White 170 gsm. Cover and band: serigraphy on Curious Skin 270 gsm. Edition of 100. Acquired from Printed Matter, Inc., 31 July 2022.
Photos: Books On Books Collection. Displayed with permission of the publisher, Grante Ègle (Nantes, France).

There is a long-standing tradition of “dancing the alphabet”. In his satyr play Amphiaraus, Sophocles brings in an actor dancing the letters. A more extended instance comes from 5th century Greek dramatist Kallias; his entire play Grammatike Theoria (“ABC Show” or “The ABC Tragedy“) presents the alphabet and pronunciation exercises. Apparently in acting out the letters psi and omega, the chorus member’s performance tended to the erotic, a phenomenon still to be found in Erté’s alphabet suite (1927/1978) and Anthon Beeke’s Alphabet (1970). Less suggestive are Vítězslav Nezval’s Abeceda (1926), Toshifumi Kawahara’s Dancing Alphabets (1991) and, most recently, Marie Lancelin’s Gestes Alphabétiques (its publisher issued two editions of 100 copies each in 2008 and 2014).

All the media and techniques that Lancelin engaged to make Gestes Alphabétiques — photograms, photomontage, laser printing, serigraphy, staging, lighting, drawing, printing — take her gestures beyond the alphabet and geometric abstractions we can easily see. Also apparent is her grounding in filming; the overlaying of the model’s poses transform that side of the leporello into a dance sequence. With the combined techniques, the ink and paper create the effect of displaying the dance through transparencies or glass or within some black and white computer graphic setting.

Fundamentally, through these media, techniques and the double-sided leporello form, Lancelin translates gesture, symbol, shape and light into one another and back again, offering the viewer the opportunity to see the artist explore the making of meaning.

Books On Books Collection – Rebecca Bingham

2022/12/302023/02/21Books On BooksLeave a comment

Defining the Rainbow (2018)

Defining the Rainbow (2018)
Rebecca Bingham
Matchbox-style box containing a miniature open spine book with paper over board covers. Box: H57 x W82 x D35 mm. Book: H51 x W73 mm. 46 pages. Edition of 81 (50 regular and 26 deluxe), of which this is #34. Acquired from Rebecca Press, 23 November 2022.
Photos: Books On Books Collection. Displayed with the artist’s permission.

Defining the Rainbow is the product of a rainbow of talent. Madeleine Durham made the paste papers for the box and covers of the book. Leonard Seastone of Tideline Press printed the book on his VanderCook from polymer plates made by Boxcar Press. Two four-page signatures for the front matter and colophon sandwich six four-page signatures of text listing shades and hues of Purple, Blue, Green, Yellow, Orange and Red. Between those signatures of handmade Hayle paper are back-to-back dividers made of marbled papers, hand-marbled by Jemma Lewis meeting several requirements: a scaled-down pattern and very specific color needs for the marbling to extend the idea of many-hued colors. Having collected and squirreled away names of shades and hues such as Byzantium, Zaffre, Smaragdine, Gamboge, Tangelo and Thulian (and researched them) and having waited for 30 years for the right project on which to expend a hoard of the handmade Hayle paper, Rebecca Bingham conceived and designed the project, convened the above-mentioned talents, spelled out their requirements, then hand-sewed and bound the results of their efforts.

On the Rebecca Press site, Bingham provides an engaging and enlightening description of the book’s letterpress printing “for those who are more familiar with the near-immediate gratification of digital printing”:

Each side of the page is printed separately (in this case, with the sheets being hand-placed into the press), after the ink has been applied (manually) to the type or (in this case) polymer plates. For something printed in one color, this means each sheet of paper passes through the press twice (front and back and alignment is not automatic — it’s fiddly work). In between, the ink needs several hours to dry. If you want a second color (for example, in my “green” section, both black and green inks are used), then the sheet must go through the press again (if color on 2 sides, then that means twice). I remind you of the alignment challenge. If you remember how hard it was to reinsert a typewriter page when corrections were needed (well, if you’re pretty old or are freakishly fascinated by ancient tech), you’ll have an idea of what this means. Plus, if you are changing the color on the press then the press needs to be thoroughly washed down so that the new color is crisp and clean (in the case of a light color like yellow, this can require more than one washing). Of course, this is a book about color, so 6 of the sections have their own second color and must go through the press 4 times (multiplied by the number of copies, of course). With the washing up and the aligning and the waiting for things to dry…

Alphabet Salmagundi (1988)

Alphabet Salmagundi (1988)
Rebecca Bingham
Miniature casebound, cloth over boards, colored decorated doublures, perfect bound book block. H66 x W57 mm. 40 unnumbered pages. Edition of 200, of which this is #150. Acquired from Rebecca Press, 23 November 2022.
Photos: Books On Books Collection. Displayed with the artist’s permission.

This alphabet book is a miscellany of letter styles and images, some of which clearly reflect the letters with which they are associated and some of which are less clear. For instance, C is clearly associated with cat, but the big cat depicted looks like a lioness. The letter B has a bare-breasted young lady bathing, so the usual one-to-one association is elusive. And for the letter A, any association between it and two birds eying a nervous frog — unless the scene stands for “Appetite” — is downright obscure.

The relation of the letters X, Y and Z with their images is just as loose. X for oak or acorn? Y might be for youngsters. Does the decoration of letter Z suggest a zephyr?

If “salmagundi” implies a loose collection, a mélange, a potpourri, an olio, then this little book lives up to its name.

Lady Letters (1986)

June Sidwell designed, modelled and illustrated the haute couture alphabet for which Rebecca Bingham designed this book. Sidwell’s “lady letters” will likely remind the viewer of Erté’s alphabet, although his ladies take more risqué poses than Sidwell’s. Bingham actually met Erté, and on her site, she relates how she met him and presented him with a miniature version of his alphabet.

Lady Letters (1986)
June Sidwell and Rebecca Bingham
Miniature casebound, plain doublures, sewn book block. H58 x W48 mm. 40 unnumbered pages. Edition of 200, of which this is #33. Acquired from Rebecca Press, 23 November 2022.
Photos: Books On Books Collection. Displayed with the artist’s permission.

The tradition of anthropomorphic abecedary reaches back at least as far as biblical manuscripts. The Bodleian Libraries’ “Kennicott Bible” is one example.

(Hebrew Bible with David Kimhi’s Sefer Mikhlol) MS. Kennicott 1 (1476). 447r. Oxford, Bodleian Library.
Photo: © Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford.

Other examples in the Books On Books Collection that compare enjoyably with Lady Letters are

Anthon Beeke, Alphabet (1970)

Anthon Beeke & René Knip, Body Type (2011)

Toshifumi Kawahara, Dancing Alphabet (1991) [entry in progress]

Marie Lancelin, Gestes Alphabétiques (2014) [entry in progress]

Lisa Merkin, Bodies of Language (2021)

Annette Messager, Mes Enluminaires (1988)

Vítězslav Nezval, Abeceda/Alphabet (1926/2001)

Golden Alphabet (1986)

Golden Alphabet (1986)
Rebecca Bingham
Miniature casebound, gilt-titled leather front cover label, decorative doublures, sewn. H68 x W38 mm. 28 unnumbered pages. Edition of 200, of which this is #96. Acquired from John Howell for Books, 31 October 2022.
Photos: Books On Books Collection. Displayed with the artist’s permission.

Although each letter has its own artistic treatment, this alphabet of gilt letters with their rococo decoration is no salmagundi. The folios are uncut at the top edge (the inner pages not printed on or included in the pagination), which would have been necessary for the application of the gilt foil. In a separate order, the artist sent a gratis loose folio, shown below.

Books On Books

Curated by Robert Bolick

Erté

Books On Books Collection – Lisa Merkin

Bodies Making Language (2021)

Further Reading

Books On Books Collection – Marie Lancelin

Gestes Alphabétiques (2014)

Further Reading

Books On Books Collection – Rebecca Bingham

Defining the Rainbow (2018)

Alphabet Salmagundi (1988)

Lady Letters (1986)

Golden Alphabet (1986)

Further Reading

Bodies Making Language (2021)

Further Reading

Like this:

Gestes Alphabétiques (2014)

Further Reading

Like this:

Defining the Rainbow (2018)

Alphabet Salmagundi (1988)

Lady Letters (1986)

Golden Alphabet (1986)

Further Reading

Like this: