A Long Piece of String (2010 [1963])
William Wondriska
Casebound, illustrated paper over boards, illustrated pasteboards. H185 x W290 mm. [44] pages. Acquired from Thrift Books, 25 May 2025.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.
The Red Thread (1988)
Tord Nygren
Hardback, casebound, sewn. H305 x W 215 mm. [30] including pastedowns. Acquired from Better World Books, April 2025.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.
The Swedish expression “den röda tråden” translates best as “the common thread”, the thing that links together otherwise disparate things and experiences. The literal translation, however, works best for Tord Nygren’s Den Röda Tråden (1987), leaving us to follow the red thread that the clown offers to the children on the front cover. The thread wraps around to the pastedown and across the fly leaf chased by the runaway carousel horse …
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Three Cats (1992)
Anne Brouillard
Casebound, illustrated paper over boards, sewn, dustjacket. H280 x W223 mm. [28] pages. Acquired from private seller, 27 August 2023.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.
This wordless picture book tells a humorous brief tale of three curious cats and three insouciant fish. It marks an early stage in Anne Brouillard’s journey from picture book artist to book artist.
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A Slow Air (2016)
Thomas A. Clark and Diane Howse
Perfect bound softcover. H200 x W150 mm. 64 pages. Edition of 750. Acquired at the Small Publishers Book Fair, London, in 2018.
Photos of the work: Books On Books Collection.
If you live where red kites thrive, you will see them most often singly, in pairs or threes. If you are lucky, you may see as many as eight or ten at a time. Near Harewood House in West Yorkshire where red kites were reintroduced in 1999, there are hundreds. In 2016, photographer/artist Diane Howse (Countess of Harewood) and poet/artist Thomas A. Clark collaborated on an exhibition at Harewood House: the grove of delight. Using objects, words and images, the exhibition turned the house’s Terrace Gallery into a symbolic grove; also displayed was a series of 15 photographs by Howse of red kites over Harewood. For the exhibition and under the direction of Peter Foolen, the diligent Dutch publisher of herman de vries, Peter Liversidge and others, A Slow Air (the book) was produced and published by Harewood House. Foolen and the artists have assembled and manipulated the photos in a sequence of color and image that exerts a forward movement like a film or narrative. Like a real sighting of these birds circling and banking as if to a slow musical air, the book mesmerizes.
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Restless (2020)
Jacobus Oudyn
Loose sheets from plastic comb bound notebook in a clamshell box covered in Japanese paper. Box: H240 x W170 x D40 mm. 60 pages. Unique. Acquired from the artist, 2 January 2024.
Photos: Books On Books Collection. Displayed with permission of Jacobus Oudyn.
Restless consists of a continuous drawing with graphite and collage across sixty loose sheets of 120gsm cartridge paper removed from a plastic comb bound notebook. Like Oudyn’s earlier work Out of Breath (2019), meant to represent the medical conditions of mesothelioma and black lung, Restless aims to evoke chronic restless leg syndrome.
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Transformations I: 1973-74 (1977)
Ellen Lanyon
Leporello with board covers. 174 x 115 mm. [24] pages. Acquired from Specific Object, February 2024.
© The Ellen Lanyon Estate, courtesy GRAY, Chicago/New York.
Photos: Books On Books Collection. Displayed with permission of artist’s estate.
Transformations is a book as drawing. Across 24 panels of this accordion-fold book, Ellen Lanyon develops a surreal graphical fantasia from a single image.
Continue readingIn a video prepared for the Virtual Tokyo Art Book Fair in 2020, Jan Voss speaks of getting artists’ book viewers into a state of mind where they allow themselves to be surprised (9’14”). His artist’s book Detour (1989) does just that.
Detour 1989
Jan Voss
Open sleeve slipcase, softcover side-sewn and glued bifolios. 180 pages. Edition of 1000, of which this #568, signed and dated in pencil by the artist on the last page. Acquired from Antiquariat Uhlmann (Zürich, Switzerland), 10 April 2024.
Photos: Books On Books Collection. Displayed with the artist’s permission.
Books On Books 