Books On Books Collection – Sunkyung Cho

This is not a stone (2017)

This is not a stone (2017)
Sunkyung Cho
Exposed spine binding with cross weave filament tape, board-covered. 170 x 170 mm. Acquired from SpazioB**K, 6 April 2025.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.

Just as you think this will be another two-dimensional riff on René Magritte’s The Treachery of Images (aka Ceci n’est pas une pipe), the Chinese fold title page turns to reveal a cutout well with a stone at the bottom.

With the turn of the next two pages, it appears we are in for a series of metaphors and riddles, and something more than a three-dimensional riff on the anti-metaphor and the gap between words (symbols) and objects. First, this not-a-stone is “an apple,” but then turn the next page, and the not-a-stone is also “a sun flower”. Is there some law of commutation that applies: If not-a-stone = apple, and not-a-stone = sun flower, therefore, apple = sun flower? Because it is round, because it is vegetal?

Over the next turns, we have “the Sun” and “the earth”, then “a crystal” and “a flake of snow in the Himalyas”, then “a beetle” and “a scorpion”, and on the pairs go, each separated with the spread “This is not a stone”. All along, while being urged to deny the evidence of reality, we are asked to accept the evidence of metaphor and imagination. Naturally our inbred pattern-seeking and ludic behaviors kick in, as if this were a game of “Twenty Questions”. But the pairs run the gamut of Animal, Vegetable, Mineral and beyond.

By the last page, it is as if we are playing “Twenty Questions” with the stone itself. That is, if the “I” is the stone saying, “and this will be I”. Is the stone uttering a deliberate a-grammatical union of subject (I) and object (me)? Is it a verbal visual pun (I-eye) evoking Emersonian Transcendentalism? Perhaps this stone that says “This is not a stone” is a Cretan philosopher’s stone, and round and round we will go.

On the artist’s website (www.somebooks.kr), the product page displays this Korean expression and its translation: 하나의 돌은 돌이자 다른 모든 것이다 [“One stone is a stone and everything else”]. It does not appear anywhere in the book, so perhaps it is unfair to invoke it as confirmation of any reading of This is not a stone. On the other hand, if you are going to play “Twenty Questions” with a Cretan philosopher’s stone, cheating may be your best option.

The other works by Sunkyung Cho in the collection are wordless, except for their titles, and lean more toward children’s books than This is not a stone. Like so many artists’ books, they occupy that crossover zone discussed by Sandra Beckett, Johanna Drucker, and Carol Scott (see Further Reading).

In the beginning (2012)

In the beginning (2012)
Sunkyung Cho
Softcover, sewn, exposed spine binding with cross weave filament tape. H260 x W150 mm. [36] pages. Unknown edition, of which this is #146. Acquired from SpazioB**K, 6 April 2025. Photos: Books On Books Collection.

From the artist’s website: 빛 이전의 태초, 사회화되기 이전의 인간에 대해 생각하는 책. [“In the beginning before light, a book that thinks about people before they became socialistic.”]

A translation that resonates more with the paper, structure, and images might be “A book contemplating the primordial state of the human before light and socialization.” Such a book would, of course, not have the normalized appearance we enlightened and socialized humans expect. Hence the black oddly shaped covers and leaves across which the gray, almost headless creature crawls on all fours and begins to sprout antlers or branches.

When other creatures enter the primordial state, they are oriented to it differently, which our branch-headed forebearer notices and tries to assume but fails.

Having failed, our precursor tries to merge with one of the other creatures, but this elephant-like being will have none of him and flings the proto-human off.

Whereupon, branch-head seeks affiliation with the vegetable kingdom and climbs toward the top.

Having reached the top, our forebearer confronts and succumbs to the source of light and, having fallen and lost the semblance of antlers or branches (or both), yearns with arms outstretched for what once was.

The book’s unusual shape recalls Helmut Löhr’s Visual Poetry (1987), Kevin Osborn’s Tropos (1988), and Philip Zimmermann’s High Tension (1993), where likewise the shape contributes to meaning.

The Blue Bird (2011)

The Blue Bird (2011)
Sunkyung Cho
Exposed spine binding with cross weave filament tape, board-covered. 200 x 200 mm. [40] not including 2 illustrated fly leaves. Acquired from SpazioB**K, 6 April 2025.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.

The Blue Bird leans much more toward the children’s book end of the crossover spectrum than in the beginning. The website’s description of it — “Blue Bird and Boar’s story of how to be a child and parent” — underscores all of the physical evidence except for the delicate nature of the paper. It is hard to imagine a copy surviving childhood use. But that might well be in keeping with the tender mix of joy and sadness in the tale.

The simplicity and evocative sophistication of composition and line eliminate the need for any words to carry the narrative. In the sequence below, Boar’s protective parental handling of the egg against wind and wave ends in predictable exhaustion and birth.

The remainder of the book in which Boar introduces Blue Bird to the world of foraging, running, jumping, sky- and star-gazing is landbound. Boar climbs trees to let Blue Bird sleep there, but when returns to the ground to sleep, Blue Bird follows, preferring to nestle against Boar under the stars.

Boar’s continued efforts to teach Blue Bird about flight lead to a separation that some parents may not be ready to explain to a child.

Kiss (2015)

Kiss (2015)
Sunkyung Cho
Board-covered books, bound face-to-face, exposed spine binding with cross weave filament tape. H200 x W400 mm (open); W800 (open). [16] Chinese fold folios. Acquired from Somebooks, 6 April 2025.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.

Kiss is far more whimsical. It works somewhat like a harlequinade, allowing multiple juxtapositions of images. The structure by which it does this is complex enough and the juxtapositions, subtle enough, that adult assistance is likely required. The book is actually two books joined at edges of their back covers, one opening to the left and the other, to the right.

The precision of the registration between the facing books will generate delight as a gorilla kisses a mouse. The mouse kisses a bird. The bird, a crocodile. The crocodile, a gorilla or octopus. The octopus, a mouse or frog. And so on with sharks, snakes, and others.

Among the effective subtleties that more experienced observers will note are Cho’s handling of bleeds and the facing sets of double-page spreads. The large expanses of white behind each of any two smaller figures facing each other from single pages contribute to a non-threatening delicate kiss. The larger, more threatening creatures extend across their double-page spreads and even bleed off their pages. When they meet, or when one of them meets a smaller figure, there is an edge. It may be an edge of curiosity on one side or the other or both, but it is likely also one of threat and unease.

Another subtlety is the handling of the human figure. It occurs in the recto book. Like the smaller figures, it occupies a single page with a page of white behind it. It is expressionless, regardless of what it faces whether fish or lion. Oddly, the fish seems to be curious, and the lion, reserved.

Here is another subtlety that Cho raises. The last figure in the recto book is a stone, large enough to extend over its double-page spread. No doubt it is an anthropomorphizing tendency to read something (puzzlement, curiosity, annoyance, etc.) into the silhouette of each creature confronting the stone. But it is only the stone and human that exude indifference.

For an interesting structural, line and color comparison with another osculatory work, see Antonio Ferrara’s Ventiquattromila baci (Twenty four thousand kisses) (2021).

Books On Books Collection – Chisato Tamabayashi (II)

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Spirit (2024)

Spirit (2024)
Chisato Tamabayashi
Yellow cloth-covered slipcase. Leporello of 8 panels and enclosing cover. Slipcase: H168 x W129 x D24 mm. Book: H160 x W120 mm (closed); W2100 mm. 16 panels (excluding enclosing cover). Edition of 60, of which this is #2. Acquired from Chisato Tamabayashi, 5 November 2024. Photos: Books On Books Collection.

Chisato Tamabayashi’s leporello Spirit departs from her usual paper-engineering techniques. It relies on hole punching, paper sculpture, and display with light. Her crossover in techniques will remind close observers of Katsumi Komagata’s movement from Little Tree/Petit arbre (2008) to「Ichigu」(2015).

Spirit is accompanied by the 20th century poet Misuzu Kaneko‘s poem “Stars and Dandelions” (in English and Japanese) from which Tamabayashi has taken her inspiration.

Viewed standing or lying flat, the leporello’s arranged holes echo the seeds leaving the dandelion heads bare in the second stanza of the poem.

Just before the last spread of imagery, the upper edge takes on the shape of the ocean surface beneath which the stones mentioned in the first stanza lie.

A projection to the background echoes the stars from the first stanza of the poem.

A projection to the foreground echoes the stones on the seabed from first stanza of the poem. Photos: Courtesy of the artist.

Like Misuzu Kaneko’s poetry, Chisato Tamabayashi’s artwork appeals to children and adults, underscoring the link between children’s books and artists’ books explored so well by the Huberts in The Cutting Edge of Reading, Johanna Drucker in “Artists’ Books and Picture Books”, and Sandra Beckett in Crossover Picturebooks.

Tamabayashi’s and Komagata’s handling of holes, paper engineering, and display with light should be considered alongside the efforts of the book and paper artists’ explored in the second issue of Inscription as well as those of Eleonora Cumer and Jenny Smith.

Books On Books Collection – iOiO Studio

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Pliplop (2020)

Pliplop (2020)
iOiO Studio
Trifold cover, side-by-side leoporellos. H120 x W105 (closed), W895 mm (open). 16 half-panels, 1 full center panel. Acquired from StudioiOiO, 6 November 2025.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.d from StudioiOiO, 6 November 2025. Photos: Books On Books Collection.

Based in Montélimar, France, and Seoul, South Korea, iOiO Studio produced this ingenious micro-edition leporello that invites its audience to behold and play. The folds and registration of images allow the viewer to find and create new shapes and color combinations. Its shapes and colors might remind viewers of Heinz Edelmann’s art for The Yellow Submarine. In its appeal to the child in the adult, it will remind book art enthusiasts of the works of Katsumi Komagata, Warja Lavater, Bruno Munari, and Peter and Donna Thomas. In its sophistication, it might remind them of the contributions to LL’Éditions leporello series. Many other connections can be found in Stephen Perkins site Accordion Publications, where Pliplop first came to my attention.

Two works that explore the curious but natural connection between children’s books and artists’ books are Johanna Drucker’s contribution to The Routledge Companion to Picturebooks and Sandra Beckett’s Crossover Picturebooks.

Books On Books Collection – Clarissa Sligh (II)

2025/06/042025/11/17Books On Books2 Comments

The entry on Transforming Hate by Clarissa Sligh, her first work acquired for the Books On Books Collection, was posted in September 2020, just over a month from an election that offered a step away from hate, prejudice, and bigotry. Unfortunately insurrection brushed the offer aside. Four years later, another election, and reactionism and revanchism seem to have the upper hand. In such times, Clarissa Sligh’s book art, photographs, and recorded lectures provide a tonic of bittersweet hope. You cannot help but be struck by the persistent but wary humanity of the art and the artist.

Voyage(r) (2000)

Voyage(r): A Tourist Map to Japan (2000)
Clarissa Sligh
Perfectbound paperback. H184 x W127 mm. [144] pages. Edition of 1000. Acquired from Hudson River Books, 11 February 2021.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.

Artist’s description: “In this diary-like artist’s book, Sligh recounts a trip to Japan through a thoughtfully constructed montage of photography, texts, and abstract gestural paintings. In personal and poetic musings, the author ponders her relationship to Japanese culture, both as a first time visitor and as an African American woman. Beautifully printed in blue and black duotones, the book comes in a cloth bag.”

The trip begins with reluctance and trepidation.

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Books On Books Collection – Kitty Crowther

2025/05/302025/10/24Books On BooksLeave a comment

Va faire un tour (1995)

From the first wordless illustration onwards in Kitty Crowther’s Va faire un tour, you don’t have to know French to know that the book’s title means imperatively “take a walk” — or maybe even “take a hike” — in English. There is no mistaking the tone of Maman’s character nor the reaction of her little one stomping along, circling the globe, even under bodies of water, oblivious to characteristic scenery and inhabitants.

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Books On Books Collection – Louis Lüthi

2025/03/232025/08/07Books On Books1 Comment

Infant A (2012)

Infant A (2012)
Louis Lüthi
Thread-stitched signature. H225 x W160 16 pages. Edition of 1000. Acquired from Torpedo Books, 8 January 2024.
Photos: Books On Books Collection

Infant A is part of a collection of essays commissioned by castillo/corrales and published by Paraguay Press under the series title The Social Life of the Book. Lüthi’s contribution fits the Books On Books Collection on several scores. First is the epigram’s invocation of the alphabet, which echoes the collection’s concentration of alphabet-related artists’ books and children’s books. See Alphabets Alive! Second is the epigram’s source: Wallace Stevens, whose poetry has inspired Ximena Pérez Grobet’s Words (2016). Would that other book artists be so inspired. Third is the narrator’s fictional conversation with Ulises Carrión in a celebration of all things A-related, in particular Andy Warhol’s novel a: a novel (1968), which finds analogues in Warren Lehrer’s A Life in Books: The Rise and Fall of Bleu Mobley (2013) and Derek Beaulieu’s a, A Novel by Andy Warhol (2017) (entry in progress). Fifth is how the dialogue reminds me of Suzanne Moore’s A Musings (2015).

A Die With Twenty-six Faces (2019)

A Die With Twenty-six Faces (2019)
Louis Lüthi
Paperback. H200 x W130 mm. 104 pages. Acquired from Amazon, 18 September 2022.
Photos: Books On Books Collection

Walter Benjamin’ unpacking of his library has a lot to answer for. Not only do we have Buzz Spector‘s take on it in 1995, but Jo Steffens’ Unpacking trilogy of photos of architects’, artists’ and writers’ bookshelves, Alberto Manguel’s elegiac Packing My Library (2018), and here is Louis Lüthi’s.

Publisher’s website: In A Die with Twenty-Six Faces, the author — let’s call him L. — guides the reader through his collection of alphabet books, that is, books with letters for titles. Some of these titles are well known: Andy Warhol’s “a,” Louis Zukofsky’s “A”, Georges Perec’s W. Others are obscure, perhaps even imaginary: Zach Sodenstern’s A, Arnold Skemer’s C and D. Tracing connections between these books, L. elaborates on what the critic Guy Davenport has called the “Kells effect”: “the symbolic content of illuminated lettering serving a larger purpose than its decoration of geometry, imps, and signs.”

The title stirs thoughts of Marcel Broodthaers’ oracular statement in 1974 “I see new horizons approaching me and the hope of another alphabet”. An alphabet that unrolls across the twenty-six faces of a die would certainly qualify as another alphabet. Broodthaers and the die also stir thoughts of Stéphane Mallarmé’s Un Coup de Dés Jamais N’Abolira le Hasard to which Broodthaers paid repeated homage. Throwing a twenty-six-sided die would certainly no more abolish chance than would a roll of Mallarmé’s six-sided die. Lüthi’s game, however, has little to do with chance unless we count his luck in finding the works to build his library of single-letter-entitled books. Even less to do with luck if some of the library is fictitious, a likelihood that the “publisher’s” statement suggests. Lüthi’s die is loaded!

A selection of Lüthi’s “alphabet” books on display. Courtesy of the author.
Photo: Gesellschaft für Aktuelle Kunst Bremen

On the Self-Reflexive Page II (2021)

On the Self-Reflexive Page II (2021)
Louis Lüthi
Paperback. H200 x W130 mm. 304 pages. Acquired from Idea Books, 18 September 2022.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.

This is a peculiar book in its order and nature. After two variant half-title pages, it begins with a section entitled “Black Pages”. Only on flipping through the volume can we find the remaining front matter — just after page 208. There’s another half-title and then the Table of Contents. Reproducing the marbled page from Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759–1767), the book’s cover gives a clue to this peculiarity. Sure enough, Lüthi spells it out later in the section entitled “On Drawing Pages”.

So much in Tristram Shandy is presented out of order: a second dedication comes not after the first but on page 27, the preface is not at the beginning of the novel but in chapter 20 of volume three, and chapters 18 and 19 of volume nine come not after chapter 17 but are inserted after chapter 25. In a similar act of transposition, we find a marbled page in volume three, even though hand marbling is customarily used to decorate covers and endpapers. As Viktor Shklovsky observed, “It is precisely the unusual order of even common, traditional elements that is characteristic of Sterne.” (p. 240)

This one paragraph confers on Lüthi’s entire book the very self-reflexivity that it explores across a range of literature and artists’ books. Reflecting the custom to which it refers, On The Self-Reflexive Page II carries Sterne’s marbled pages on its front and back covers. In the text before his marbled leaf, Sterne refers to it as the “(motly emblem of my work!)“. Lüthi has taken that exclamation to heart (and cover) as if it were advice in creating this hybrid, motley work of his own: “part artist’s book and part essay, part literary excavation and part typographical miscellany” as he calls it in his middle-of-the-book Foreword.

Lüthi’s work is just one in the Books on Books collection of several inspired by Tristram Shandy. There is Erica Van Horn’s Born in Clonmel (2011), Simon Morris’ Do or DIY (2012), Abra Ancliffe’s The Secret Astronomy of Tristram Shandy (2015), and Shandy Hall‘s The Black Page Catalogue (2010), Emblem of My Work (2013), Paint Her To Your Own Mind (2018) and The Flourish of Liberty (2019). Outside the collection, there is Brian Dettmer’s Tristram Shandy (2004), commissioned by Shandy Hall’s Laurence Sterne Trust, and also Sean Silver’s Shandean online venture called The Motley Emblem (2022~) celebrating Sterne’s marbled leaf and the analytical chemistry of marbling. The latter may become a book, even an artist’s books to add to the tally. In The Century of Artists’ Books, Johanna Drucker draws attention to Sterne’s novel twice as an example of self-reflexivity or self-interrogation, but in 1994 and 2004, Sterne did not rise to the same level of precursor to book artists as William Blake or Stéphane Mallarmé in Drucker’s view. With these later works of book art inspired by Uncle Toby’s nephew in the bag, a dozen or so more might nudge Sterne up the scale.

In the meantime, anyone interested in artists’ books could fruitfully apply to the medium Sterne’s exhortation to his own readers:

Read, read, read, read, my unlearned reader! read, — or by the knowledge of the great faint Paraleipomenon — I tell you before-hand, you had better throw down the book at once; for without much reading , by which your reverence knows, I mean much knowledge, you will no more be able to penetrate the moral of the next marbled page (motly emblem of my work!) than the world with all its sagacity has been able to unraval the many opinions, transactions and truths which still lie mystically hid under the dark veil of the black one.

Artists’ books are to be read, handled and digested, not stored away in the archives.

Books On Books Collection – Vico’s Spiral: Half Century of Artists’ Books

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Vico’s Spiral: Half Century of Artists’ Books (2024)
Robbin Ami Silberberg and Carole Naggar, editors
Paperback. H210 x W150 mm. 256 pages. Acquired from Center for the Book Arts, 7 March 2025.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.

With Vico’s Spiral, Robbin Ami Silverberg, Carole Naggar, and Kinohi Nishikawa have made a significant contribution to how we can better appreciate artists’ books. The publication accompanied the exhibition by the same name celebrating the 50th anniversary of New York’s Center of Book Arts from 26 September through 14 December 2024.

The exhibition’s curators — Silverberg and Naggar — chose their organizing metaphor well. The 16th century philosopher Giambattista Vico proposed that history did not proceed in a straight line but instead spiraled, with patterns of events recurring with near similarity in different periods and even different regions. Naggar writes, As in Vico’s Spiral, artists’ books disregard linear chronology and geographies. Based on recurrent concepts and forms, they “meet” in vastly different time-spaces.

To prove the aptness of Vico’s model of history for book art, the curators paired art works from different times and places. For example, New York-born Warren Lehrer’s French Fries (1984) is paired with Israeli-born Uriel Cidor’s Greetings from America (2018).

Lehrer’s satiric take on “what is America” aims to visualize the text of a ten-part play set in a DREAM QUEEN restaurant with its “core of regulars: four faithful customers, three employees and one mobile juke-box on wheels”. He calls it a “psycho-acoustic” translation in which “each character is typecast into a distinct color and typographic arrangement”. On the pages, “an array of images and marks accompany the text, evoking an appropriate ambiance, and further serving to chart the cacophony of shifting internal projections that make up the characters’ collective consciousness”.

If the satiric target of French Fries isn’t clear, consider the A assembled on the double-page spread by the text’s layout and the stars-bars-and-stripes.

Cidor’s abecedary is populated with words that are the artist’s answers to the question “what is America?”. Each letter of the Hebrew alphabet appears on a recto page, and a word beginning with that letter is worked into an abstract image on the facing verso page. At a further level of abstraction, all the letters are formed with Cidor’s stylized Hebrew font Octavk’tav.

From right to left, the Octavk’tav version letter ayin (ע‎) is for shem’at ha’omes (שְׁעַת הַעוֹמֶס) or “rush hour”. The words’ letters sprawl in brown across an intersection gridlocked with ayins.

As Lehrer does in French Fries, Cidor uses the arbitrary abstraction of letters and page order along with not-so-arbitrary typographical layout and words in translation (for example, Resh for the Hebrew for Rocknroll and Ronald Reagan, Tsade for Extra large Cheezburger with fries and a soda) to capture his satirical target: the big Aleph (New York and America).

Above or beside each work displayed, a vertical time scale showing the exhibition’s span (1964-2024) was repeated on the walls. A red pin designated the nearby item’s year of publication, and a red thread ran from pin to pin around the room. Along with the spiral of tables displaying past exhibition catalogues, this fluctuating red line evoked Vico’s Spiral for visitors.

“Vico’s Spiral” at the Center for Book Arts, New York. Photo: Daniel Wang.

“Vico’s Spiral” at the Center for Book Arts, New York. Photo: Daniel Wang.

The exhibition’s catalogue emulates some of this design across pages 17-120, and what can be seen more clearly is how the curators daisy-chain their pairs with the headings used on the exhibition walls. Below are the two pairs that follow Lehrer, whose heading is “Challenging typography … to comment on America”, and Cid0r, whose heading is “Using American culture … to transform letterforms”. Foxcroft’s Square Route picks up the chain …

Pages 66-69. Photos: Books On Books Collection.

Pages 70-73. Photos: Books On Books Collection.

Kinohi Nishikawa’s essay “Strange Loops” brings a related metaphor to the party. He begins with another anniversary: the 2oth anniversary edition of Douglas R. Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach: The Eternal Golden Braid (1979/1999).

At the heart of GEB, as devoted readers call it, is an exploration of how selfhood emerges from repeating patterns of cognition that mirror repeating patterns of the natural world, only for the cognitive patterns to turn inward and mirror themselves. GEB’s thesis is derived from Austrian mathematician Kurt Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, which contends, “All consistent axiomatic formulations of number theory include undecidable propositions.” Gödel’s theorem defines the constitutive externality of any set and, in so doing, identifies the minimal gap within a system for self-awareness to emerge. Crucially, Hofstadter does not limit his account of selfhood to the operation of cognitive processes. The metaphor of strange loops suggests how patterns that fold on themselves are perceived, felt, and, indeed, experienced by an embodied being. (p. 175)

Nishikawa’s immediate task in Vico’s Spiral is to survey the CBA’s previous half century of exhibitions, and he uses the strange loops metaphor to understand the CBA through the “set” of its exhibitions. All well and good, it is a brilliantly written and insightful essay. But if only he had also been asked to apply the metaphor to the set of artists’ books in the CBA’s archive or the set selected by Silberberg and Naggar!

In The Century of Artists’ Books, Johanna Drucker highlighted the self-interrogatory nature of the artist’s book as its defining characteristic. The application of these metaphors of Vico’s Spiral and strange loops to the history of artists’ books adds a new sense to that. The self-interrogatory nature of the artist’s book is a pattern recurring similarly but differently across time and space in those works of art created by artists who play with the book whether as material object as a whole or in its parts, as vehicle, as site of performance, as a tool-made and tool-making technology, or as concept. As each of those aspects yield fresh artists’ books with differences, we have new opportunities to perceive, feel, and experience an artwork’s pursuit of its self, the artists’ pursuit of their selves and our pursuit of our selves.

Nishikawa comes tantalizingly close to applying the strange loops metaphor to the domain of artists’ books when he writes, “Book arts is about discovering the self at the edge (fold, seam, spine) of insight and creation” and, when he writes, “… the essential question of selfhood isn’t What? or Why? but How? How do these patterns work, how do I know myself better through them?”

Indeed, “how?” is the question to be brought to each artist’s book. How do I encounter this artwork? How is it manifesting its patterns? And then to bring ourselves full circle back to Vico’s Spiral, How are those patterns manifest in other works in other times and other places?

Nishikawa’s approach to the CBA’s catalogues also offers a baton that we can hope others will carry forward. The CBA’s exhibitions provided not only a way into understanding the CBA itself but one into researching the world of artists’ books. Aware of this opportunity, Silberberg concludes the volume with a listing of artists’ books exhibitions from around the world. Who will grasp this baton next in the race along Vico’s Spiral?

Books On Books Collection – Jane Cradock-Watson

2024/08/062024/11/08Books On BooksLeave a comment

Ebb and Flow (2023)

Ebb and Flow (2023)
Jane Cradock-Watson
Concertina book with cloth hard bound covers. H155 x W27 mm (closed), W680 mm (open). 64 panels. Edition of 20. Acquired from the artist, 21 January 2024.
Photos: Books On Books Collection. Displayed with artist’s permission.

An exploration, both visually and physically, the ‘edge’ of the sea where it meets the land, with its continuous ebb and flow of the breaking waves, rhythmically rolling back and forth onto the sand. (Artist’s description)

With the binding and her photography in Ebb and Flow, Jane Cradock-Watson has sculpted and painted the sea’s edge. Four digital photographs printed on Zerkal paper have been spliced together between two cloth-covered boards. The flexibility and extent of the concertinaed paper create an undulating structure that turns seascape stills into mesmerising cinema.

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Books On Books Collection – Lily Markiewicz

2024/07/242024/11/08Books On BooksLeave a comment

The Price of Words, Places to Remember 1−26 (1992)

The Price of Words, Places to Remember 1-26 (1992)
Lily Markiewicz
Perfect bound paperback with deep cover flaps. H200 x W155 mm, 60 pages. Acquired from Bookworks, 11 July 2022.
Photos: Books On Books Collection and Emilia Osztafi*. Displayed with artist’s permission.

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Books On Books Collection – Warren Lehrer

2024/05/282025/07/07Books On BooksLeave a comment

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.

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