Books On Books Collection – Karen Kunc

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While Stéphane Mallarmé and his Un Coup de Dés may be the front runner among contenders for the title of literary patron saint of the artist’s book, Jorge Luis Borges and Italo Calvino appear in a tie for a distant but respectable second. Each have inspired some striking works. In her series Ten Thousand Things, Karen Kunc has boosted both Borges’ and Calvino’s chances and nudged Calvino’s with an additional homage in leporello format.

A collection of artistic books titled 'Ten Thousand Things' displayed in various colorful covers and opened pages, showcasing unique designs and patterns.

A stack of colorful booklets arranged neatly, displaying various covers with visible titles and volume numbers, resting on a dark surface.

Ten Thousand Things series (2012-13)
Karen Kunc
Images courtesy of the artist.

The series title of Ten Thousand Things springs from Chapter 42 of the Tao Te Ching:

The Tao begot one.
One begot two.
Two begot three.
And three begot the ten thousand things.
The ten thousand things carry yin and embrace yang.
They achieve harmony by combining these forces.

The series consists of 74 books in two sizes as the monoprints were made in two sizes of papers. The papers varied. Most of the works are on Torinoko, a Japanese paper that Kunc found to work well with waterbased Akua Intaglio inks. Some are on Arches 88 paper, a waterleaf she found also very absorbent for the Akua inks. Many of the prints have some handcoloring with ink or liquid acrylic. A few prints as well as all of the covers were made on Japanese Nishinouchi paper, a kozo fiber paper, which she has used extensively for her large woodcut prints. Printing is from collagraph plates on an etching press, with hand coloring and waxing afterwards.

Kunc chose excerpts from the works of five poets/authors and responded to each with several different monoprints not as illustrations of the text but as evocations prompted and to prompt. In addition to Borges and Calvino, she selected from Guillaume Apollinaire, Annie Dillard, and Marge Piercy. Kunc handset the metal type and letterpress printed several sheets of each text on different papers for variety with the monoprints. In each book, the text-bearing sheet folds around the sheet that bears two monoprints, one on each side.

The Tate Museum remarks that “The beauty of monoprinting lies in its spontaneity and its allowance for combinations of printmaking, painting and drawing media.” Kunc’s series extends that allowance to combinations with the elements of the book.

Ten Thousand Things, No. 51 (2012)

Cover of a book titled 'TEN Thousand THINGS,' Volume No. 51, featuring a textured background with orange and gray patterns.

Ten Thousand Things, No. 51 (2012)
Karen Kunc
Single-signature booklet containing a recto and verso monoprint created by pressure printing, pochoir, and mixed media, with letterpress text. H205 x W110 mm. [8] pages. From a set of 75. Acquired from the artist, 9 February 2026.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.

From Borges’ 1945 short story “The Aleph“, No. 51 in Kunc’s Ten Thousand Things series extracts four descriptions of the object or phenomenon Borges the narrator sees in the basement of his intolerable acquaintance Carlos Argentino Daneri:

I saw a small iridescent sphere of almost unbearable brilliance[;]
a sphere whose center is everywhere and circumference is nowhere;
convex equatorial deserts and each one of their grains of sand;
that secret and conjectured object whose name is common to all men but which no man has looked upon — the unimaginable universe.

An open book displaying a textured page with orange and gray lines on one side and a blank page with the text 'I saw....' on the other.

With a deft touch, Kunc has selected and slightly altered the more abstract of Borges’ long Whitmanic observations (in the first, she inserts an ellipsis and substitutes a semicolon for a full stop; for the second and third, the order of appearance is changed). Borges prefaces his catalogue of what he sees with a caveat about the inadequacy of words to depict the concept of multum in parvo [“much in little”]:

All language is a set of symbols whose use among its speakers assumes a shared past. How, then, can I translate into words the limitless Aleph, which my floundering mind can scarcely encompass? Mystics, faced with the same problem, fall back on symbols: to signify the godhead, one Persian speaks of a bird that somehow is all birds; Alanus de Insulis, of a sphere whose center is everywhere and circumference is nowhere; Ezekiel, of a four-faced angel who at one and the same time moves east and west, north and south. (Not in vain do I recall these inconceivable analogies; they bear some relation to the Aleph.) Perhaps the gods might grant me a similar metaphor, but then this account would become contaminated by literature, by fiction. Really, what I want to do is impossible, for any listing of an endless series is doomed to be infinitesimal. In that single gigantic instant I saw millions of acts both delightful and awful; not one of them occupied the same point in space, without overlapping or transparency. What my eyes beheld was simultaneous, but what I shall now write down will be successive, because language is successive.

In light of the snide literary sniping and rivalry that forms the background to “The Aleph”, Borges may be forgiven for omitting William Blake’s spectacular translation of “the limitless Aleph”:

To see a World in a Grain of Sand,/ And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,/ Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand,/ And Eternity in an hour. (Auguries of Innocence, 1803).

It might have brought Borges’ descriptive and narrative enterprise to an harrumphing halt. We would then not have had this particular instance of Karen Kunc’s taking up the challenge of rendering in an artist’s book Borges’ verbal description of the Aleph. What image could resonate with or reflect his words and reflect the impossibility he describes? How might the arrangement of pages enhance/diminish it? How might the act of turning a page reflect or obscure it?

The vibrant circle of deep blue is only two dimensional, but perhaps the abstractions behind the dark convex grid suggest the three dimensionality of the story’s sphere. Perhaps the more brilliant but smaller blue circle beside the larger one conveys the multum in parvo concept in the style of medieval narration differentiating multiple points in time with images of different size in the same plane. Perhaps the full-page bleed of the image even suggests that paradoxically the image extends from the page yet encompasses the page. Likewise might the sheet’s fold that truncates the circle and the dark and light grids imply continuity coexisting with discontinuity? Does the dark blue grid that curves over the orange and burnt umber colors imply the “convex equatorial deserts”?

Open book page featuring colorful abstract artwork alongside text describing a sphere of brilliance and its attributes.

Turning from that half view of the monoprint, we have the full view of the monoprint on the other side of the sheet. An angular and checkered blue background hovers over two ellipsoid figures in an orange foreground. Is the background network with its numerous small red dots a version of Indra’s net, that cosmological metaphor of an infinite net with a jewel at each juncture reflecting and being reflected by every other? The dark ellipsoid seems to quiver surrounded by crosshatching. Is it in motion toward the upright orange ellipsoid? Is this a moment in time and space?

Abstract artwork featuring geometric shapes, including oval and elliptical forms, with a blend of colors such as orange, yellow, blue, and purple, along with various lines and dots.

The other half of the monoprint with the dark blue circle comes into view with the last double page spread. If we could see all at once the monoprint with the dark blue circle, the juxtaposition of spheres and ellipses would stand out more.

An open book page featuring colorful abstract art with a grid pattern on the left side and a quote by Jorge Luis Borges about 'the unimaginable universe' on the right.

The white stars behind the grid stand out a bit more, and the small bright circles seem more clearly positioned on curving white orbital tracks. Is it an allusion to planetary and constellatory movement, bring a universe within this small book? Without photographic manipulation, we have to open our minds to imagine it. As Carlos replies when Borges worries that it will be too dark in the cellar to see the Aleph, ““Truth cannot penetrate a closed mind. If all places in the universe are in the Aleph, then all stars, all lamps, all sources of light are in it, too.”

Of course, this photographic manipulation is a cheat and overlooks that Kunc has combined the half-views of one side of the monoprint with the full view on the other side to reflect the challenge of embodying a simultaneous phenomenon with successive phenomena.

Open book displaying textured artwork on the cover, featuring abstract patterns in gray, orange, and yellow, along with text detailing the author's name and publication information.

Ten Thousand Things, No. 64 (2012)

Cover of a booklet titled 'TEN Thousand THINGS', Volume No. 64, featuring abstract circular patterns and a blue spine.

Ten Thousand Things, No. 64 (2012)
Karen Kunc
Single-signature booklet containing a recto and verso monoprint created by pressure printing, pochoir, and mixed media, and a letterpress text on various papers.H250 x W125 mm. [8] pages. From a set of 75. Acquired from the artist, 9 February 2026.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.

Of the 74 books in the Ten Thousand Things series, 11 of them pay homage to Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities (1972/74). The book’s premise is that Kublai Khan sent Marco Polo out into the empire to visit the Khan’s cities and return with close descriptions. In nine parts, each prefaced and closed with a philosophical dialogue between the Khan and Polo, the traveller describes fifty-five cities — all of them imaginary. While most works of homage to Invisible Cities select one or more of these fictitious 55 cities on which to focus, Kunc chooses more general text from the preface to Part 9. This is the text used in all 11 of the works of homage to Calvino:

…. (there is) an ATLAS in which are gathered the maps of all the cities:

THOSE whose walls rest on solid foundations, THOSE which fell in ruins and were swallowed up by the sand, THOSE that will exist one day and in whose place now only hares’ holes gape.

In colored miniatures the atlas depicts inhabited places of unusual form: an OASIS hidden in a fold of the desert from which only palm crests peer out is surely Nefta; a castle amid quicksands and cows grazing in meadows salted by the TIDES can only suggest Mont-Saint-Michel;

and a PALACE that instead of rising within a city’s walls contains within its own walls a city that can only be Urbino.

With certain words appearing in all caps in a lighter weight and lighter color than the surrounding text, the excerpts have a different texture from those in No. 51. The all caps words rise above or fall below the line of type.

A textured book cover featuring a circular pattern in warm colors on the left and a light green page with text on the right.

As with No. 51, only one side of the double-sided monoprint is viewable as a whole; the other side is viewable in halves. In No. 64’s first half-view, the shapes and colors have a submerged quality that echoes the now sinking or subsiding type of “THOSE”, “OASIS”, and “TIDES”:

A page from a book featuring abstract artwork with various circular shapes and colors, accompanied by a poetic text discussing themes of foundations, ruins, and unusual landscapes.

As the most prominent feature of the full-view monoprint, perhaps the two rectangular sail-like shapes recall the Chinese emperor and Venetian traveler. Or perhaps they allude to the remnants of a tower poking above the sands. The ellipsoidal shapes might be the “hares’ holes” mentioned above. The seemingly non-allusive flurry of white dots across the spread behave strangely. They lie in the background in the upper two thirds of the spread but then shift into the foreground in the lower third. The four bright blue dots may have migrated from the first half-view, but the trio of red dots are new participants. The presence of both contributes to an urge to flip back and forth between the first half-view and this full view.

Abstract artwork featuring colorful shapes and patterns on a textured background with dotted details.

The second half-view faces text that again displays all caps letters that sink below the line: “PALACE”, but more notably, the palace does not sit within a city but a city sits within the palace, “a city that can only be Urbino”. So, a real city within a fictive palace.

An artistic page featuring colorful abstract patterns alongside text from Italo Calvino's 'Invisible Cities' describing a palace that contains a city within its walls.

We can perform the photographic cheat to bring the two halves of the monoprint together, but as with No. 51, we overlook the deliberate hiding of the whole within the halves — like the paradoxical fictive palace that holds a real city (Urbino).

A closed booklet featuring artistic designs in earthy tones with circles and swirls in the background, and text describing an experimental monoprint and letterpress series by Karen Kunc, published by Blue Heron Press.

Type Cities (2018)

A book titled 'TYPE CITIES' with a pink label on a textured gray cover.

Type Cities (2018)
Karen Kunc
Leporello. H190 x W114 mm closed, extends to 1346 mm. [12] panels. Edition of 8, of which this is #2. Acquired from the artist, 25 March 2026.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.

Like most other homages to Invisible Cities, Karen Kunc’s Type Cities (2018) focuses on one of the fictitious cities; in this case, Aglaura. As with Ten Thousand Things, she uses an excerpt:

The city that they speak of has much of what is needed to exist whereas the city that exists on the site, exists less.

That is cryptic. Just as the paradoxical characterizes the general cities in No.64, so it is for the particular city of Aglaura here:

So if I wished to describe Aglaura to you, sticking to what I personally saw and experienced, I should have to tell you that it is a colorless city, without character, planted there at random. But this would not be true either: at certain hours, in certain places along the street, you see opening before you the hint of something unmistakable, rare, perhaps magnificent; you would like to say what it is, but everything previously said of Aglaura imprisons your words and obliges you to repeat them than say. Therefore, the inhabitants still believe they live in an Aglaura which grows only with the name Aglaura and they do not notice the Aglaura that grows on the ground.

For Ten Thousand Things, the single-fold double-sided monoprint provided Kunc a surprisingly flexible tool with which to capture the paradoxical in two very different texts. This time she chooses the accordion structure. Also, as the title Type Cities suggests, she chooses type as an additional tool to capture what Marco Polo describes as Aglaura’s “enduring assortment of qualities”. Across the twelve panels of the leporello, Kunc lays out the text of her chosen excerpt in multiple faces and fonts:

An artistic fold-out book with layered translucent pages, featuring text and abstract designs in blue, black, and purple. The text reads: 'THE city that THEY speak of has much of what.' The background is a light blue texture with circular cutouts.

Also across the twelve panels, the color change of black dots to purple, violet, and then yellow echoes the shift from the colorless city to something else “at certain hours, in certain places along the street”.

Artistic folded paper display with abstract designs and colorful shapes, featuring text fragments including 'is needed', 'exist', and 'EXISTS LESS'.

The “much of what is needed to exist” manifests at the bottom edge as wood type letters in dark blue floating along a river (?), then as Ss, 2s, and $s floating over a pond (?), and then yields to the less of zeroes scattered over a grid. The contrast of much and less even extends vertically to the handmade paper with its messily torn upper edge opposed to its neatly trimmed lower edge. It also extends horizontally to the paper as its tint shifts gradually from a deep blue to a light gray. These photographs do not do justice to the painted and stamped elements or texture of Type Cities.

A folded artist book with abstract designs and text on blue textured pages, featuring phrases about existence and cities.

Books On Books Collection – Abra Ancliffe (II)

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This entry is preceded by “Abra Ancliffe (I)“, which describes the Personal Libraries Library (Winter 2009-10 to Spring/Summer 2021) and The Secret Astronomy of Tristram Shandy (2015).

The constellatory asterisks in The Secret Astronomy of Tristram Shandy also evoke those flowers that our Personal Libraries Library (PLL) Artist/Librarian “picks” from the PLL and, later, Oleg Polunin’s Flowers of Europe: A Field Guide (1969) to include in the periodic issues of ephemera. Perhaps this confluence of stars and flowers created a predisposition in our Artist/Librarian that drew her to Johannes Kepler’s Astronomia Nova (1609). Unlike Sterne’s novel, which was part of Calvino’s personal library, Astronomia Nova lies outside the five personal collections. Of course, since Maria Mitchell was an astronomer, the works in her personal library refer to Kepler, and similarly, Robert Smithson had multiple books about astronomy, even Arthur Koestler’s Watershed: A Biography of Johannes Kepler. Still, Kepler’s “New Astronomy, Based upon Causes, or Celestial Physics, Treated by Means of Commentaries on the Motions of the Star Mars, from the Observations of Tycho Brahe, Gent.“, to give it its full and translated name, appears in Ancliffe’s heavens and garden like a new galaxy or specimen.

Astronomia Nova provided and further refined the mathematical and observational proofs of the Copernican planetary model of heliocentrism first laid out in De revolutionibus orbium coelestium [On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres] (1543). A little over 400 years later, our Ancliffe noticed in Kepler’s watershed publication something previously unobserved, something peculiarly geocentric about its heliocentric model.

An open historical astronomy book page displaying diagrams of circular orbits with annotations, including references to Copernicus, Ptolemy, and Tycho Brahe.

Astronomia nova (1609) Johannes Kepler. Bodleian Libraries.

Astronomia Nova‘s anonymous woodcut artist had ornamented Kepler’s astronomical diagrams and calculations with flowers.

A Field Guide to “A Field Guide to the Flowers of ‘Astronomia nova‘” (2018)

A close-up of an open field guide book titled 'A Field Guide to the Flowers of Astronomia Nova' with blue spiral binding and a signature by the author, Abra Anchifé, dated 2018.

A Field Guide to “A Field Guide to the Flowers of ‘Astronomia nova‘” (2018)
Abra Ancliffe
Spiral bound book. H140 x W120 mm. [90] pages. Edition of 27, of which this is #24. Acquired from the artist, 7 February 2026.
Photos: Books On Books Collection. Permission to display images from the artist, otherwise © Abra Ancliffe.

There is no florilegium or guide to these woodcut flowers, but there they are, sprinkled throughout Johannes Kepler’s 650-page investigation of Mars’ orbit, tracked by the observations of his mentor Tycho Brahe, Emperor Rudolph II’s imperial astronomer.

On one level, Ancliffe’s spiral bound handbook is the field guide to these flowers. Its photos of flowers , harvested from Pulinin’s Flowers of Europe, offer candidates for the historical real-life counterparts to the ornamental woodcuts. The handbook’s title, however, indicates another level: that of “a field guide to ‘a field guide’ “. But of what could such a meta-guide consist? In Ancliffe’s case, it is the artist’s book, the work before us that addresses the fields of vision and perspectives embedded in Kepler’s work, the engraver’s woodcuts, and the book artist’s work itself. The first three opening spreads of A Field Guide to “A Field Guide to the Flowers of ‘Astronomia nova‘ ” stake out the environment of the “field guide to a field guide” as well as the zooming-in approach it takes.

An open notebook featuring an illustrated map of a city landscape with buildings, hills, and fields, showcasing historical architecture.

An open book with a map illustration on the left page and a title page on the right, featuring historical text and a blue spiral binding.

First three opening spreads: cityscape of Prague; map of Prague’s location and fragment of Astronomia Nova‘s title page; cropped page of AN showing ornamental flowers alongside cropped blown-up photo of the flower.

The field of vision hops from the cityscape of Prague to a geographical map, then to the cropped title page of Astronomia Nova, then to a detail of the Copernican model bracketed by ornamental flowers, and finally to a cropped blown-up image of one of those flowers from Polunin. The next two spreads that follow those first three underline the field guide’s zooming in across time and space.

A close-up image of a Nigella damascena flower on the left page, with accompanying handwritten text and an ornamental design on the right page of a spiral-bound notebook.

Open notebook featuring a decorative floral design on the left page and vibrant pink flowers printed on the right page, bound with blue spiral rings.

The fourth and fifth spreads: close-ups of the ornamental woodcut flowers and live photos; from the 17th century to the 21st.

Later spreads showing similar zoomed-in images highlight that we have actually hopped from the second century (Ptolemy) to the seventeenth (Tycho Brahe) to the twentieth (Polunin).

An open spiral-bound notebook featuring an illustration of a historical map with the text 'Ptolemai' on one side, and a close-up photo of a flower on the other.

Open notebook page featuring a photograph of a blue Centaurea cyanus flower on the left and decorative handwritten text on the right.

Zoomed-in images of woodcut flowers and live flowers; from Claudius Ptolemy (2d century) to Tycho Brahe (17th century) to Polunin (20th century).

Planetary diagrams, celestial maps, mathematical models, descriptive text, woodcuts and engravings are all at several representational removes from one another and from actual planetary movements over time. Likewise, the woodcutter’s ornaments had their corresponding actual flowers in the gardens and meadows of Prague. The closeness in appearance between the woodcuts and photos argues that Kepler’s artist was drawing and cutting from real-life observation. And yet the photos lie at historical and medial removes that question their correspondence. Like Kepler’s and Brahe’s mathematical and textual models of planetary movements, the artist’s book’s photos are speculative models of the flowers Kepler’s woodcut artist would have observed in Prague at the turn of the 17th century.

The field guide’s movement across media — engraving, printing, woodcut, photography, casebound book, and spiral bound book — is underscored by Ancliffe’s variation and sequencing of spreads. Just as we start to assume an alternating verso/recto rhythm of print/image then image/print, Ancliffe interrupts the flow with a double-page spread of print/print.

A pink poppy flower and unripe seed pods on the left page, next to a sketch of geometric lines and a floral illustration on the right page of a spiral-bound notebook.

Open book with text on pages, showing blue and red spiral binding, viewed from above.

There is also interruption within the interruption: the double-page spread of text is an English translation whereas so far the text has been in Latin. Is the translation’s appearance a reminder that the various media are means of translating the observed?

Other interruptions consist of image/image spreads followed by text/text spreads. The juxtaposition seems to suggest an abstract affinity of shapes, as if the side-by-side flowers hint at an abstract shape of the map spread, and the side-by-side maps hint at an abstract shape of the flower spread.

Open spiral-bound notebook with colorful images of flowers on pages, featuring purple and blue blossoms.

An open spiral-bound notebook displaying a historical map of a city, featuring fortifications and labeled structures. The map is in sepia tones, with a list of locations and names at the bottom.

If that seems an interpretive stretch, consider the following sequence that draws comparisons between flower photo and cityscape detail, between zoomed-in cityscape detail and flower photo, and between zoomed-in cityscape detail and ornamental woodcut detail.

A spiral-bound open book displaying two pages: the left features a close-up photograph of purple flowers, while the right displays an illustration of ancient ruins.

An open spiral-bound notebook featuring a black and white abstract design on the left page and a vibrant image of yellow flowers against a natural background on the right page.

Note the sequence — photo/engraving; engraving/photo; and engraving/woodcut — drawing attention to translation from medium to medium.

If we step back to take in the whole of the artist’s book and note the changing rhythms and punctuations across the spreads, it is hard not to conclude that this artist’s book as field guide is teaching us how to read the environment it has created.

A spiral-bound notebook featuring an artistic illustration of a historical cityscape with hills in the background and fields in the foreground.

An open notebook with a spiral binding, displaying an old illustrated map of a city, featuring buildings and a river.

Opening and closing landscape spreads.

Ancliffe’s next work in her astronomy series extends her aim of teaching us how to read her artist’s books.

4522,. + K (companion volumes, to be read concurrently) (2024)

Two spiral-bound notebooks resting on a wooden surface, one featuring a black and white illustration of a flower and the other with a similar design and text.

4522,. + K (companion volumes, to be read concurrently) (2024)
Abra Ancliffe
Two spiral bound books, one with black coil, one with white coil. H267 x W165 mm. [80] pages; [90] pages, including bibliography. Edition of 30, of which this is #10. Acquired from the artist, 7 February 2026.
Photos: Books On Books Collection. Permission to display images from the artist, otherwise © Abra Ancliffe.

The cryptic title of this dual-volume work signals that we have some detecting to perform in order to read it. In fact, we have to read the companion volumes concurrently to perform our detective work. More teaching us how to read. The volumes’ respective title pages shed some light on the cryptic titles, but only a little. As the first volume’s title page spells out the vertically arranged numerical title 4522,., we learn at least that it has its roots in Ancliffe’s Personal Libraries Library series.

A spiral-bound book page featuring a title and text discussing views and ways of reading ephemeral posters from the Personal Libraries Library from 2011 to 2023, along with a list of numbers.

The title page of the second volume presents the title K inside a shaded irregularly shaped rectangle extracted from a map of Prague (1650) by Matthaus Merian and Martin Zeiller (which we can track through the last entry in K‘s bibliography). The letter K comes from the key to that map, which tells us that it marks the Jewish quarter of the city. It’s a “nice-to-know” detail but not essential for appreciating how to read the second volume.

The title page tells us that K is “a represencing” or “a satellite to a satellite” or “an attendant to be read in concurrence”. We already know about the concurrence from the first volume’s title page. As for “satellite to a satellite”, we can see that K is a satellite to 4522,., which makes 4522,. a satellite to something. But to what? More on that in a minute. As for “a represencing”, the volumes’ covers (above) give us a hint. Notice how the irregular rectangle on K‘s cover re-presents or represences a snippet of the floral poster image shown on the cover of 4522,. That is the recurrent pattern between the two volumes:

An open spiral-bound book displaying images of various minerals and gemstones on the left page, with a blank right page featuring a cut-out revealing part of the left page.

From the poster image shown in 4522,. on the left, a snippet is taken and displayed within the map segment in K on the right.

Just with the covers and two title pages, we have detected two of the “Four viewings through … the ephemeral posters of the Personal Libraries Library (2011-2023)”:

The PLL posters viewed in 3/4 scale (as seen in 4522,.)
Snippets of the posters viewed through the map segment (as seen in K).

The third “viewing through” has a physical and literal form. In 4522,. a hole is punched in the recto pages where the poster images are displayed. Through that hole in one poster, the poster underneath can be viewed. In K, when a recto page turns t0 the left, its poster snippet reappears on the verso but in reverse as if we were looking through the other side of stained glass window.

An open spiral-bound book displaying a page with a black and white image of a tunnel, alongside a hand pointing towards the image.

With both volumes’ recto pages having been turned, we can see the punched hole on the verso of 4522,., a new poster image on its recto page, the mirror image of the three minerals from K‘s preceding recto page, and the new poster image’s snippet in K’s new recto page.

In this third “viewing through”, there is also a clue to what 4522,. is a satellite of. The small hole punched in each leaf of 4522,. seems to meander in its position from leaf to leaf. Actually it tracks a very specific shape: an analemma — a tilted, figure-8-like form. An analemma is the visual representation of the data recorded in ephemerides (tables of star positions at fixed times). In 1627, Kepler published his Rudolphine Tables, which became the new standard for accuracy of this data. If we were to point a camera skyward from a fixed location at the same angle and take multiple photos at the same time of day throughout the year, the sun’s position would form that figure across all the exposures. This is because the earth tilts on its axis as it orbits the sun and moves along an ellipse rather than a circle. So, the placement of punched holes in 4522,. embodies this projection of our orbit around the sun, and if we miss the point, the following near-to-last double-page spreads from 4522,. and K drive it home.

On the left, 4522,. shows the analemma diagram composed of the tiny views of the PLL posters’ images viewable through the holes in the book’s preceding pages. On the far right, K recapitulates the punched hole from 4522,. and wittily drives home the star/flower coordinates by positioning the hole over the center of the flower on the next spread, which doubles the wit with a black-and-white spread save for the strategically placed spot of yellow in the moon-gray center of the flower. The PLL posters’ images “light up” the recto pages of 4522,., and K reflects those images. In other words, K is the lunar satellite to 4522,., which is the terrestrial satellite orbiting the sun (the PLL project). These are the “two orbits” from the title page of 4522,.

Two open spiral-bound sketchbooks on a wooden surface. The left book contains a line of colorful dots arranged in a wavy pattern, while the right book has a rectangular colorful floral sticker placed on its page.

A blank spiral notebook on the left and a decorated spiral notebook featuring a floral design on the right, both displayed against a wooden surface.

The fourth “viewing through” comes into play with the Bibliography at the end of K. Although we had recourse to it to lead us to the map of Prague, a closer look reminds us of the PLL posters and the personal libraries from which they emerge.

A close-up of an open spiral-bound book displaying a list of minerals, their descriptions, and references related to geology, along with bibliographic entries for various texts associated with the Robert Smithson Personal Library.

So of course, the “five ways of reading” signaled on the title page of 4522,. refer to the five personal libraries from which the posters are composed.

In an uncanny case of serendipity, there happens to be a galaxy cluster identified as NGC 4522.

A vibrant image of a galaxy showcasing swirling clouds of stars and cosmic dust against a dark background.

A cosmic image showcasing a spiral galaxy with vibrant blue and pink star formations, surrounded by a dark expanse of space filled with distant stars.

NGC 4522. Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, S. Veilleux, J. Wang, J. Greene⁣.

Astronomia Nova Florilegia or A Strange Shallow Papery Cup or .888 inch (2025)

A hardcover book with a light blue-green cover featuring the title 'Astronomia Nova Florilegia or A Strange Shallow Papery Cup or .888 Inch' printed in black.

Astronomia Nova Florilegia or A Strange Shallow Papery Cup or .888 inch (2025)
Abra Ancliffe
Hardcover, casebound with light blue cloth over boards; violet and white endbands; printed doublures, and foil-stamped fleurons and ink-stamped title on covers and spine. H250 x W160 mm. [322] pages. Edition of 123, of which this is #6. Acquired from the artist, 7 February 2026.
Photos: Books On Books Collection. Permission to display images from the artist, otherwise © Abra Ancliffe.

This extraordinary part-autobiographical, part-biographical, part-bibliographical artist’s book brings Abra Ancliffe’s twin obsessions with astronomy and botany to their highest pitch of unity so far. Ancliffe has built it with an extended epistolary poem, collaged images from Polunin’s Flowers of Europe, and photos of the map of Prague (1650) by Merian and Zeiller, pages from Kepler’s Astronomia Nova (1609), and family memorabilia.

The poem addresses “Dear Dear Woodcutter”, the unknown artist who decorated Kepler’s orbital diagrams with flowers. Ancliffe’s observation of the flowers stands out when you consider that the still standard Collected Works (1938) omitted the flower images. Trying to identify the woodcutter, Ancliffe tracked down the sole reference to his existence and even visited William Donahue, Astronomia Nova‘s translator, in New Mexico to discuss the mystery. More impressively, she identified the woodcut flowers, their scientific names, and various common names, and their local habitats in and around Prague. From their unexplained presence, Ancliffe launches lyric observations on flowers (their colors, parts, and growth), astronomy, ink, paper, type, woodcutting, bookmaking, the idea of the book, and the interconnectedness of it all.

The book opens with Ancliffe’s first letter to “Dear Woodcutter”. It includes a facsimile double-page spread from Astronomia Nova , pages 28-29, showing where she first saw his woodcut flowers. From the start, Ancliffe signals how tightly woven she feels this autobiographical, biographical, bibliographical artist’s book will be. Instead of being numbered 2 and 3, her pages leading to the facsimile spread are numbered 26 and 27. So, at that moment of turning from “page 27” to page 28, the 21st century work strangely becomes part of the 17th century work as the book artist reaches back through time and craft. The letter’s tone blends fondness and fascination with matter-of-fact yet evocative observations about ink, printing methods, and the geology underlying lithography.

An open book showing a partially visible page with text on the right and a blank page on the left. A wooden hand puppet is holding the book. The text discusses memories related to astronomy and printing techniques.

An open historical book page featuring Latin text and a diagram illustrating celestial motions and planetary orbits.

The intensity of her reaction to the woodcutter’s flowers and her absorption in her subject and craft translates into an affinity with the woodcutter that has Ancliffe addressing him in the present. This is poetic license and invention. In the act of addressing him, she is addressing us, her readers/viewers. If we are in any doubt of this, the second letter concludes with at a pitch that eliminates it and leaves us with a clear assertion of what she intends:

I see you.
I see your book of flowers.
I am seeing you.
I am seeing you to others.
I am seeing your book of flowers to others.

An open book displaying a handwritten letter on the left page and printed text on the right page, accompanied by a wooden hand model resting on the edge.

After this introductory section, Ancliffe lays out a recurrent marker of the book’s structure: a facsimile spread followed by a page reproducing a selection of woodcut flowers. There are twelve such markers.

Open ancient book page with handwritten text in Latin, featuring diagrams related to astronomy, including a circular chart and illustrations of celestial movements.

An open book page titled 'MAY, PRAGUE, 1607' displaying illustrations and descriptions of various plants, including Peony, Snowdrop, Purple Crocus, Bindweed, and Wood Anemone. A wooden hand is holding the book.

After each of them, the poem continues, accompanied by brightly colored jigsaw-like cutouts from photos of flowers Ancliffe has matched to the woodcuts. In each section, a jigsaw puzzle piece appears, then another and so on until the section ends with a page of accumulated pieces. Below is the section that follows the marker above. The accumulation (or gathering) page brings together the five preceding pieces.

An open book with a poem displayed on the left page, accompanied by a colorful cut-out design on the right page featuring a flower and leaves.

An open book with blank pages, a wooden hand model holding the left side, and a cut-out illustration of greenery with repeated text 'in the morning' on the right page.

There are 12 gathering pages, and they are all brought together in a closing double-page display.

An open book with blank pages and a circular cutout revealing a collage of colorful flowers and plants, accompanied by a wooden mannequin hand holding the book.

An open book with blank pages and a wooden hand holding it, displaying cut-out shapes of colorful flowers on the right page.

Twelve “gathering pages”.

Open book pages featuring cut-out shapes of flowers and other floral images, with wooden hands holding the book.

The closing accumulation page, a gathering of gathering pages.

There are also four labelled subsections or interludes that appear out of the blue.

The first entitled “The Blue of the Page or How to fix Blue when Blue cannot be Fixed” addresses the color of the paper, ink, and flowers, what Ancliffe can see and cannot see but perceives (color of paper), knows (ink), imagines (flowers), metaphorizes, finds, and names.

Open book page with poetic text discussing the color blue and flowers, featuring artistic typography and interpretations of color.

The second entitled “The Shape of the Book or Ellipses or Ellipsis” draws metaphorical, etymological, and visual links between books and orbits (ellipses) and sewing holes (ellipsis).

An open book with blank pages and a diagram on the right page, showing gathered and nested pages in curved lines, along with text explaining the sewing holes.

The third interlude “Interlude or Worms and Wormholes” develops an extended metaphor of the book’s sewn edge as a sinuous gathering together of nature, type production, planetary charts, and seasonal movements. It also makes another extended metaphor of the book spine as the most interconnected point of organization and confusion, the orbital point closest to the sun, and the shapes of a shallow papery cup, sewn folds, and flowers.

The fourth interlude is “Violets and Pansies or I Think of You or Waysides” plays on Paul Klee’s observation that “A line is a dot that went for a walk”. In Ancliffe’s case the line begins with the dot of the etymology of “violet” that leads both to the Jupiter/Io myth and Ancliffe’s grandmother’s name, that links Io to the origin of the exclamation point, which Ancliffe appends to grandmother Violet and the flowers, that jumps to Derek Jarman’s etymological linking of the common names violet/pansy/heart’s ease to the French “pensée” and thus to “I think of you”, that leads to wild pensée (wild thought), which leads back to the dubious etymology of via leading to violet and thereby “wayside”, which leads to thinking of you (woodcutter) and the flowers found by the waysides.

Open book page with text about the origin of the word 'Violet', featuring wooden mannequin hands holding the book.

What links these subsections is their use of the elements of book production to support Ancliffe’s theme of interconnectedness. At the start of the book, she wonders whether the purpose of the woodcut flowers is that of bearing type, an insertion to prevent the weight of the press from breaking the finer woodcut lines of the orbits. Now, as the final gathering of gatherings approaches, she returns to that notion. Notice below how the layout of text and flowers on the left and the layout of the collage on the right mimic one another, which echoes Ancliffe’s observation

your flowers and Kepler’s orbits correlate.

They hold each other up,

bear the weight for one another so that one,

alone,

is not crushed.

An open book displaying a page with handwritten text addressed to 'Woodcutter' and numerous botanical illustrations scattered across the page. The illustrations are in black ink, set against a simple white background, while wooden mannequin hands are holding the book.

Open book displaying pages with intricate floral cut-outs and colorful floral imagery, alongside wooden hand props.

But for Ancliffe, a mutual bearing up is not the whole story of the interconnectedness she is pursuing in Astronomia Nova Florilegia or A Strange Shallow Papery Cup or .888 inch. For her, interconnectedness (correlation) is historical, metaphorical, etymological, rhetorical, seasonal, geographical, typographical, material, and personal. She sees in the woodcutter’s Prague flowers a florilegium (“you hid a book within a book!”) and a purpose — “I am seeing your book of flowers to others” — for which she chooses the medium of the artist’s book. Because this medium is so frequently recursive or self-reflexive, it is well-suited to a book hidden within a book. Like a planetary system, an artist’s book often has multiple orbits and multiple points of orbit. As noted in the interludes, any element of “the book” and its production can play a role — punctuation, words and wordplay, ink and its color, type and typesetting, images and carving, paper, sewing holes, thread, and so on.

In a final honor to Dear Woodcutter and personalizing capstone, Ancliffe adds two appendixes: “the first, Appendix or A Book within a Book or .918 inch”, and the second, “K or a Represencing or Studying an Engraving of Prague in Topographia Bohemiae, Moraviae et Silesiae, 1650″.

An open book page with the title 'APPENDIX OR A BOOK WITHIN A BOOK OR .918 INCH' printed in an elegant font, accompanied by wooden articulated hands holding the book.

An open book with wooden mannequin hands holding the pages, displaying the title 'K or A Representing or Studying an Engraving of Prague in Topographia Bohemiae, Moravia et Silesiae, 1650' on the right page.

In the first appendix, Ancliffe introduces the map of Prague, familiar from the two earlier artist’s books and then points us to K, the Jewish quarter, by filling it with a thumbnail flower. This is her book within a book: 37 flowers laid within the Jewish quarter of Prague 1650. Their color re-presences the absence surrounding the K in the map.

In the second appendix, Ancliffe begins with the materiality of type and setting it — how it’s made, how it feels, what it looks like — in particular for the letter K and her maternal grandmother’s married last name set in type. Again, it is an element of the book that provides the metaphor that pulls “what connects” into the orbit of Ancliffe’s artist’s book. Absence evokes presence; presence evokes absence. The absence around the carved upside down and reversed metallic strokes defines K as much as does the ink transferred from them. Likewise the presence of her grandfather Victor’s and grandmother Ruth’s metal and messy tools evokes their absence, and it is their impression on the artist that defines their presence in her,

A red toolbox with the name 'Ruth' and other markings, placed open on a book's pages with wooden hands visibly holding the book.

A close-up view of wooden-handled wood chisels arranged on a page of an open book, with hands partially visible holding the book. The chisels have visible markings and varying shapes.

which brings us to the autobiographical closing statement framed by Dear Woodcutter’s flowers.

An open book with blank pages on the left and a decorative poem on the right, framed by a border, with wooden mannequin hands on both sides.

A collection of five wood chisels displayed on an open book page, with wooden handles and metal blades. The book's background is dark, enhancing the visibility of the tools.

An open red toolbox filled with paint tubes on a page of a book, held by wooden hands.

Abra Ancliffe has created a body of works that, as Brian Davis puts it, “not only exploit the material and expressive possibilities of the book as object, they function as physical sites for compiling and organizing heterogeneous collections of textual artifacts for narrative and other expressive purposes”. As aesthetic objects, they demand more than a glance in an exhibition or flick-through at a book fair. They richly repay the greater attention.

Books On Books Collection – Lizzie Brewer

2023/07/042026/06/17Books On Books1 Comment

Babel (2019)

Babel (2019)
Lizzie Brewer
Box: H278 x W158 mm. Leporello: Closed H195 x W97 mm. Open 825 mm. 14 panels. Unique edition. Acquired from the artist, 14 February 2023.
Photos: Books On Books Collection and courtesy of the artist.

Inspired by a 2019 exhibition at the Scuola Internazionale di Grafica in Venice, Lizzie Brewer created this work that sculpturally explores the border between image and letters. The laser-cut letters and words in black calligraphy from various languages (Farsi, Chinese, Kufic, Arabic, English, Greek, Japanese, etc.) seem to pour off the pages of a white leporello. Recalling the tower with which the Babylonians dared to reach heaven (Genesis 11:9), the multiple languages and randomness of the script accentuate the disorder visited on humankind when God decided they were being blasphemous.

Whatever Ur language preceded those languages is lost in the blackness of the cloud of ink from which the texts seem to rain. And perhaps the blackness also implies the punitive nature of the Old Testament deity. The leporello and calligraphy should certainly remind us of the pre-codex and pre-typesetting time of the story.

Some of the letters and words, all made from 150gms black Canford paper, are attached to the white 220gms cartridge panels, some are left free to be leaned against the panels or puddled in front, adding to the watery effect of the thinning black India ink in the background.

Library of Babel (2019)

Library of Babel (2019)
Lizzie Brewer
Leaflet. H210 x W105 mm. Acquired from the artist, 14 February 2023.
Photos: Books On Books Collection. Displayed with artist’s permission.

With its hand-printed title, gold leaf mark and insert, this folded leaflet of hand-made paper made its appearance in an exhibition at the Westminster Reference Library in 2019. The quotation in the insert comes from the “The Library of Babel” by Jorge Luis Borges, and the phrase “[t]his set of works” refers to several of Brewer’s striking sculptures in homage to the story. These works are not in the Books On Books Collection (yet?), but these images (courtesy of the artist) are too complementary to the works above to be overlooked.

Hexagon (2019)
“The Universe (which others call the library) is composed of an indefinite, perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries” — Borges “The Library of Babel”

410 pages (2019) and detail
“Each book contains four hundred and ten pages.” — Borges, “The Library of Babel”

Lead Page (2019)

Untitled [Labyrinth] (2019)

Books On Books Collection – Abra Ancliffe (I)

2022/06/192026/05/31Books On BooksLeave a comment

Personal Libraries Library (Winter 2009-10 to Spring/Summer 2021)

Imagine belonging to a library composed of selected personal libraries and housed on another continent. Imagine that the Librarian who selects those personal libraries and hunts down copies of the works (preferably the same editions) needed to recreate those libraries completely is also constantly harvesting them for cross-references and delivers the discoveries to you in the form of ephemera. It exists. I have a library card for it.

Personal Libraries Library (2009 to present)
Abra Ancliffe
Various forms. Acquired from the artist, 11 April 2022.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.

Since 2009, Abra Ancliffe has been replicating and making art from the personal libraries of

Maria Mitchell (1818-1889), Massachusetts astronomer, educator, suffragist and librarian
Robert Smithson (1938-1973), New Jersey-born land artist, sculptor and art theorist
Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986), Argentinian writer of fiction, poetry and essays
Italo Calvino (1923-1985), Cuban-Italian writer of fiction, poetry and essays
Anne B. Spencer (1882-1975), Virginia-based member of the Harlem Renaissance circle, poet, civil rights activist, teacher and librarian [added in early 2014]

Each personal library has a catalogue derived from our Librarian’s research and consultation with foundations associated with each of the owners. Each library has its wish list of works needed to complete the holdings; and a Reference Library Catalogue for background on each of the owners has been added. But why these particular personal libraries? Was there a rule?

The library itself has rules (courtesy of our Librarian’s fellow artist Larissa Hammond):

1 The Library is a coordinate geometry that is initiated within and between the booksets.
2 The books within each set may not be disassociated and circulate as a singularity.
3 Each individual book is zero dimensional unless activated by its faction.
4 Reference materials are considered an empty set and may not be removed from the Library.

Given such rules, it is no surprise that our Librarian has included Borges. The fabulist of “The Library of Babel” once held the job of first assistant in a Buenos Aires municipal library and reportedly remarked “if I were asked to name the chief event in my life, I should say my father’s library” and “I always imagined Paradise to be some kind of a library”. Also, given such rules and the inclusion of Borges, could the Cuban-Italian Italo Calvino, a member of the Oulipo movement, be far behind?

Maria Mitchell’s personal library was the seed or germinating star of the PLL in the winter of 2009-2010 (see the item in the upper right corner of the photo above). Flowers and constellations are two elements in the coordinate geometry that our Librarian finds “within and between the booksets”.

Another link between the libraries are the books common to more than one library. For instance, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Essays appears in Maria Mitchell’s and Robert Smithson’s libraries. Perhaps there is a sort of transcendentalism driving the library! How appropriate that the first book from Mitchell’s library acquired and the first in the PLL was Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Essays.

By virtue of these collage-like connections that our Librarian draws in the periodic issues of ephemera, a book published at a later date may seem to belong equally to an earlier owner. Perhaps, as in the collages into which the ephemera can fall, “one book may hide another” to paraphrase Kenneth Koch. The issues of ephemera arrive like challenges to Robert Smithson’s notion of site and non-site works of art. They are works that depend and do not depend on their site. They arrive so similar and so different, regular enough but sporadic enough, that they are like “Miss Mitchell’s comet” — non-periodic (until it appears again).

PLL Ephemeral Issues.
Top down and left to right: 1) PLL 2011 Winter, PLL 2010 Summer, PLL 2009-10 Winter. 2) PLL 2013 Summer/Winter, PLL 2012 Summer/Winter. 3) PLL 2016 to 2014. 4) PLL 2017 Summer/Winter. 5) PLL 2018 Spring/Summer, Fall/Winter. 6) PLL 2019 Spring/Summer, Fall/Winter. 7) PLL 2020 Spring/Summer, Fall/Winter. 8) PLL 2021 Spring – Summer. 9) PLL 2023 Spring-Summer 10) PLL 2023-2024 Fall Winter.

The ephemera themselves represent “collaborations” among the personal libraries — courtesy of our Librarian’s reading of the Library’s “coordinate geometry”, of course. For the Spring/Summer 2021 issue, the first piece of ephemera listed on the blue manifest (its Bibliography) is “Paper to be Placed in a Window” (see the upper left-hand corner of the photo immediately above). Glossy black on both sides, the single folded sheet displays an astronomical photo with holes of different size punched to let light light up the constellation.

According to the manifest or Bibliography, the work connects the constellation Aguila (Eagle) “in and around the Milky Way south of Cygnus” with J.B. Sedgwick’s Introducing Astronomy from Smithson’s library and with Laurence Sterne’s The Life & Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman from Calvino’s. The connection with Sedgwick is obvious. The connection with Sterne’s novel may be obvious to readers familiar with its “black page”, or will be to readers here who proceed to the entry for the next of Abra Ancliffe’s works in the Books On Books Collection.

The Secret Astronomy of Tristram Shandy (2015)

The Secret Astronomy of Tristram Shandy (2015)
Abra Ancliffe
Paperback. H175 x W273 mm, unpaginated. Edition of 100. Acquired from the artist, 11 April 2022.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.

It is no surprise that Ancliffe’s work of book-art-cum-academic-treatise is part of the Laurence Sterne Trust Foundation’s permanent collection. Like Shandy Hall’s own The Black Page Catalogue (2010), The Secret Astronomy extrapolates and celebrates page 73 with the same whimsy and seriousness that the 73 writers and artists invited to make their own Black Page exercised. In its own self-publishing status, it also underscores like Simon Morris’s manifesto Do or DIY (2012) the same status of Sterne’s work as a forerunner to the self-published, self-referential works of book art of the mid- to late 20th century. It is Ancliffe’s elevation of the self-reflexive academic treatise to art status that secures The Secret Astronomy its position in the Books On Books Collection.

L-R: Shandy Hall, The Black Page Catalogue (2010); Simon Morris, Do or DIY (2012).

The rectangle of black appearing on page 173 in the first edition of Sterne’s novel faces the brief announcement of Parson Yorick’s death on page 172: “Alas, poor Yorick”. Taking off on the concept of academe’s variorum edition, Ancliffe has reproduced the black pages from more than one hundred editions of Sterne’s novel. What is a singularity in the novel becomes a contemplation of a regularity that reveals a material irregularity since the 1759 edition. Densities of ink have varied, oxidation occurred, spots from lint and fingerprints accumulated — even show-throughs from the next chapter’s text — so that the eye begins to read the accumulated pages for astronomical images — Tristram’s and Sterne’s secret astronomy. (The temptation to Grangerize this work by slipping into it Ancliffe’s ephemera “Paper to be Placed in a Window” is strong.) Ancliffe urges forward her case for the discovery of a secret astronomy with a series of appendices, one of which draws attention to Sterne’s use of the asterisk in the novel and proposes one of its hidden kabbalistic meanings in an equation: if star = *, and Sterne = star, then Sterne = *. There is even the dutiful source appendix listing all of the editions from which black pages have been gathered.

Pages 169-70 of the first edition of Tristram Shandy account for another famous singular, regular irregularity — the marbled page, which Tristram calls “the motly emblem of my work”. Ancliffe’s black, brown and gray marbled spine and inside covers make for an apt, ironic and artistic stroke — a reminder of the element of chance that is so characteristic of Sterne’s narrative project, of The Secret Astronomy, and of the ephemera arising from the Personal Libraries Library.

From Shandy Hall’s Emblem of My Work blog, accessed 18 September 2019.

This entry continues with three other works by Ancliffe. To continue reading, click here.

Books On Books Collection – Ines von Ketelhodt

2021/02/012024/08/18Books On BooksLeave a comment

Alpha Beta (2017)

Alpha Beta (2017)
Ines von Ketelhodt, text by Michel Butor
Plexiglass slipcase (287 x 203 x 14 mm) containing two volumes (278 x 198 x 3 mm), 48 unnumbered pages. Edition of 35, of which this is #18. Acquired from the artist, 14 December 2020. Photos: Books On Books Collection, displayed with the artist’s permission.

Paul van Capelleveen, curator at the National Library of the Netherlands, writes in his contribution to Ines von Ketelhodt’s exhibition catalogue Bücher///Books (2019):

The artist’s book is, perhaps, more than other book forms, a stage where conventions and innovations may be brought to life. On this stage, typography is a means of text interpretation; it can be visual, decorative, or alienating. It should be noted that typography is only one of the key players in artists’ books. We have to consider the book’s materiality (paper, binding, weight, size, etc.), its images or blank spaces, and interventions such cutting, erasing, pasting, embossing, and covering. The reader is a spectator, listener, and in many cases an actor as well. (P. 18)

With Alpha Beta, we are reader, spectator, listener and actor. Its plexiglas slipcase must be shaken sharply to start the two thin volumes slipping out. On acetate, the first recto page presents an extract from an essay by Michel Butor describing a fantastical library. The acetate pages crinkle and mesmerize as they turn. Alphabetically, letter by letter, the transparency lifts from Butor’s text all the instances of that sans serif character into the air, falls leftward and settles onto the accumulation of clear verso pages showing the letters reversed.

Traditionally the cellophane or transparent overlay and their predecessor the “flap book” were meant to reveal the layers of the human body, a geological formation or an edifice — to show us how something is made or built up. With an alphabet and punctuation, an infinite number of words, sentences, essays and books can be made. In Alpha Beta, however, as letter by letter is removed, what was made becomes indecipherable, disintegrates. Page by page, what was there depends on memory, or the eye’s ability to decipher from what is left, or a willingness to flip back to the beginning. We know, of course, that Butor did not piece together his disintegrating text letter by letter alphabetically in the first place, but materially and typographically that is what von Ketelhodt did to present the full text to us on the first recto page. If we return to that page to fix the text in memory, we notice that not only is it justified left and right, its words break at the end of a line without hyphenation or regard for syllabification. This is not typography in transparent service to legibility but rather to its own materiality and a concept or concepts. But what is it, what are they?

Just as strange is that Alpha Beta is materially multilingual. The first volume, Alpha, presents and disintegrates Butor’s text in its original French. The second, Beta, does the same in German.

Why this multilingual materiality? Could it be the advantage of appealing to two language markets? Could it be as simple as the text’s being available in French and German? There’s no denying von Ketelhodt’s multilingual proclivity. Many of her solo works involve multiple languages, but it is how and why that count. Consider her sequential photographic work Times Square 1-2-3 (2014). In it, she uses a quotation from Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography in its French original for volume 1, German for volume 2, and English for volume 3. Von Ketelhodt took three photos in quick succession, with time exposure, from the same spot in Times Square. She then split the photos across the three volumes. To see the sequence, we have to look across the three volumes. By virtue of its focus on the effects of photography on the spectator and its availability in three languages, Camera Lucida was the ideal source from which to draw a quotation as inspiration and compositional material for Times Square 1-2-3.

So why this particular text from Michel Butor? A bilingual market advantage was probably decisive for Campus Verlag, publisher of Butor’s volume of essays in which von Ketelhodt found the text. If a trilingual market advantage had outweighed the additional production costs for Campus Verlag, von Ketelhodt might have created Alpha Beta Gamma instead. The essay she selected from Butor is “Les bibliothèques/Die Bibliotheken” (“The libraries”), which appears in the collection’s second part: “Itinéraires à travers l’univers de Maria-Helena Vieira da Silva/Reiserouten durch das Universum von Maria-Helena Vieira da Silva” (“Itineraries through the universe of Maria-Helena Vieira da Silva”). None of Butor’s essays are about the alphabet. So, still, why this particular text?

Butor wrote extensively in response to Da Silva’s works. A French-Portuguese abstract/figurative artist, she drew on cityscapes, railway stations, bridges as well as books and libraries for her source of figures. The libraries led to a series of canvases with titles such as Bibliothèque Humoristique, La Bibliothèque, and La bibliothèque en feu. The latter appears dimly reflected in the upper left-hand corner of this photograph from the Paris exhibition La Pliure (2015). A clearer image can be found on the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum’s site.

Display of Ed Ruscha’s Various Small Fires and Milk, 1964, at Pliure: La Part du Feu, 2 February – 12 April 2015, Paris. Photo: Books On Books. Reflected in the lower left hand corner is the display of Bruce Nauman’s Burning Small Fires; in the upper right corner, the film clip of Truffaut’s 1966 Fahrenheit 451; and in the upper left, Maria Helena Vieira da Silva’s La bibliothèque en feu, 1974.

In its capture of Bruce Nauman’s referencing Ed Ruscha’s Various Small Fires, the photo is serendipitously apropos to Alpha Beta and its use of Butor’s “Les bibliothèques”. Butor’s essay is ekphrastic, built on the premise of referencing a visual artwork. It does not, however, describe the details of any particular one of the paintings; it is rather a fantasia on all of them, distilling them into a universal library. Von Ketelhodt’s ABC book is built on the very premises of Butor’s extract as well as on the premise of referencing the subject of Butor’s essay. Alpha Beta does not describe Butor’s essay; rather, it physically reaches into the text, extracts and abstracts from it an ABC book letter by letter. As the letters fly up, they could be those “birds that fly upward when you turn the pages”. The light reflected from the transparent pages could be that of the “soft lamps hovering”. The transparent pages recall the libraries’ “crystalline sonnets” and their “glass ceiling that reflects back the drowsiness, the leafing”. (See full English translation under Further Reading below.)

Von Ketelhodt’s work of art is far from an illustration of Butor’s universal library just as Butor’s essay is far from a verbal attempt to describe any one of Da Silva’s paintings. If this response to Alpha Beta seems “too clever by half”, consider the multilingual, self-referencing and self-referential complexity of the next work in the collection.

Zweite Enzyklopädie von Tlön (2007)

Zweite Enzyklopädie von Tlön (2007)
Ines v. Ketelhodt and Peter Malutzki
Catalogue casebound, thread-stitching, in printed linen-over-board cover with embossed spine title. H302 x W217 x D25 mm, 256 pages. Acquired from the artists, 21 August 2017. Photos: Books On Books Collection, displayed with permission of the artists.

Inspired by Jorge Luis Borges’ epilogue to his short story “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”, von Ketelhodt and Peter Malutzki embarked on their fifty-volume multilingual masterpiece Zweite Enzyklopädie von Tlön (2006), two decades before Alpha Beta (2017). Between 1997 and 2006, the fifty volumes appeared. For the catalogue, they collaborated with twenty-three authors. The site devoted to the project provides a look inside all of the volumes and its companion catalogue. The catalogue alone, however, works well as the tip “of the tip” of the book-berg as von Ketelhodt and Malutzki call it:

Now the fifty volumes lie before us, and we see they are actually only a tiny part of a huge ice-berg that is really a book-berg. Most of it we cannot see because it is below the surface, but we are aware of its existence. We see the project connected to a multitude of other books and are happy that, by the incorporation into public collections, it is now literally close to an enormous number of other books.

The fifty-volume work’s residence in libraries and collections around the world matters to the artists not only financially but conceptually. Only in that setting or frame does the artwork “converse” multilingually with simulacra of the Tlön library. The catalogue includes text in English, French, German and Spanish, and its own system of internal and external cross-referencing is enacted typographically and in color across Spanish, German and English in that order. After all, Borges’ short story was the origin of the work, and it is in Spanish.

Bücher /// Books (2019)

Bücher /// Books (2019)
Ines von Ketelhodt
Catalogue for the exhibition at the Klingspor Museum Offenbach, 3 March to 19 May 2019. Card slipcase (H281 x W233 x 21 mm), Perfect bound, photographic-board covered book (H280 x W230 x D19 mm), 192 pages. Acquired from the artist, 22 November 2018. Photos: Books On Books Collection, displayed with permission of the artist.

Catalogue entry for Alpha Beta. Photo: Books On Books Collection, displayed with artist’s permission.

Catalogue entry for Zweite Enzyklopädie von Tlön. Photo: Books On Books Collection, displayed with artist’s permission.

Catalogue entry for Times Square 1-2-3. Photo: Books On Books Collection, displayed with permission of the artist.

Photo: Books On Books Collection, displayed with artist’s permission.

Alpha Beta is von Ketelhodt’s primary solo work in the collection. As such, it does not reflect her extraordinary talent with photos (B/W and color) in making book art. The description above of Times Square 1-2-3, its representation in this catalogue of her work, and the catalogue’s cover have to suffice as place holders for now.

Books On Books Collection – Aurélie Noury

2020/11/092026/06/02Books On BooksLeave a comment

Perhaps there is some peculiar feature of “the book as intellectual instrument” that explains the phenomenon of book-artist-cum-impresari. In the last century, we had Ulises Carrión and Dick Higgins among others. In this century, we have Alicia Bailey, Sarah Bodman, Hubert Kretschmer, Antoine Lefebvre, Laura Russell to mention only a few. They flourish and with such variety. Some manifest as curators, others as gallerists, and others as publishers. Some transform that manifestation into a form of art itself. Aurélie Noury verges on doing this with the works under her imprint Éditions Lorem Ipsum.

El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha by Pierre Ménard (after Jorge Luis Borges, “Pierre Ménard, auteur du Quichotte” in Fictions) (2009)

El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha by Pierre Ménard (after Jorge Luis Borges, “Pierre Ménard, auteur du Quichotte” in Fictions) (2009)
Aurélie Noury
Perfect bound with folded cover, H170 × W120 mm, 38 pages.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.

Borges would be the first to congratulate Noury on her persistence, diligence and taste. Of course, he would be biased, but what else to call her recovery of these pages so briefly mentioned in his short story “Pierre Ménard, author of Quixote”, how else to describe their careful resetting in the precise order mentioned, and what other choice of fonts could be suggested than Garamond for the cover and Times New Roman for the text?

For any reader finishing the discourse on what the narrator calls Ménard’s unfinished oeuvre, it is a solace to turn to Noury’s reproduction and see exactly where Ménard left things hanging in the fragment of Chapter XXII that the narrator mentions so tantalizingly. It is a vicarious thrill to share with the narrator the strangeness of that fragment appearing after the ninth and thirty-eighth chapters!

Given the intrepidness of our artiste éditrice, it may seem churlish to mention the acute accent that appears in the last name of the latter-day author of Don Quixote. No such accent appears in the original Spanish of Borges’ story. Perhaps the Argentinian or his secretary had a momentary lapse. Then again, to give Noury the benefit of doubt and Borges the gift of future vision, the narrator’s Pierre Ménard (or Menard) could very well have been the ancestor of the eponymous founder of a micro vineyard in the Loire Valley who cannot seem to settle on one spelling or the other. It cannot be an accident that this vineyard recently produced a vintage named “Chaos” (2017), a wine that, one critic writes, “should not exist”.

Borges invented other authors besides Ménard and his bio-bibliographical narrator. Borges and his life-long friend Adolfo Bioy Casares came up with Honorio Bustos Domecq, a fictitious detective under whose name they wrote numerous short stories and through whom they introduced other fictitious authors — one such was Federico Juan Carlos Loomis. In “A List and Analysis of the Sundry Books of F. J. C. Loomis”, “Bugsy” Domecq chronicles the work of the legendary writer and critic. Loomis’s chief claim to fame is his collection of six books, whose contents consist solely of their titles.

Were it not for Aurélie Noury’s translating and publishing skills, the Francophone population would have to remain content with Domecq’s Spanish listing and analysis. (Saving, of course, the one title that Loomis wrote in French: Béret Basque.) Regardless of fluency in French or Spanish, the attentive reader will appreciate how the publisher’s sensitive translations capture the denotative, connotative, spiritual and cultural intent of Federico Juan Carlos Loomis’s singular texts.

Each of the French versions is tastefully set in Cochin on the cover and Times Roman in the text. The works’ restrained design (H190 x W130 mm, four pages, three covers in black & white, three with the addition of colored rule) complements their minimal contents.

Many book artists have paid homage to Borges (see Further Reading below). These seven works surely secure a place of honor and humor among them for Aurélie Noury.

Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard (poster) (2008)

Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard (poster) (2008)
Aurélie Noury
H100 x W700 mm. Photo: Courtesy of the artist.

Except for her Rubik’s Coup de Dés, Noury’s poster version of Mallarmé’s poem would be the thing for summarizing, critiquing, parodying and paying homage to le Maître‘s work. Why not collapse all of the spacing and text in its varied type sizes and styles into one double-page spread? But then, if the game is “the total expansion of the letter”, the dispersal of letters from keywords in the poem across the 54 spaces on a Rubik’s cube would be the thing. Unfortunately, at the moment, this particular thing does not reside in the Books On Books Collection, so the following photos (courtesy of the artist) stand as a collector’s reminder.

Noury’s inventive literary/artistic appropriation does not end with Borges and Mallarmé. Marcel Duchamp, Honoré de Balzac, John Irving and Louis Aragon also come in for varying treatments at her hands. Her choices for these reversals of ekphrasis — proceeding from an existing text to a newly created work of art, rather vice versa — are clever. But it is her combination of the techniques of appropriation, homage and parody and intermedial play with the various techniques of print and digital publications in a distinctive way for each target text that is ingenious.

No doubt there could be many more such works to come, but even the most ingenious of appropriators finds her time appropriated by other ventures. As directrice of the imprint Éditions Incertain Sens, she engages with the works acquired for Le Cabinet du livre d’artiste (CLA) at the University of Rennes 2 as well as with their documentation in the CLA’s newspaper Sans niveau ni mètre. These ventures have been apropos and obviously influential for Noury. Éditions Incertain Sens and the CLA were founded by Leszek Brogowski, who has written extensively on book artists such as Bernard Villers. The furniture of CLA was made by artist and writer Bruno di Rosa, who has appropriated and extended the works of Gustave Flaubert and Joachim du Bellay. The situation could be only more apropos if Éditions Incertain Sens had been founded by Mallarmé and Borges at some point in the future!

Books On Books Collection – Klaus Detjen

2020/09/092023/07/01Books On BooksLeave a comment

Un Coup de Dés Jamais N’Abolira le Hasard – Ein Würfelwurf niemals tilgt den Zufall (1995)

Un Coup de Dés jamais n’abolira le Hasard: Poème – Ein Würfelwurf niemals tilgt den Zufall: Ein Gedicht (1995)
Klaus Detjen
Casebound. H300 x W255 mm, 85 pages. Acquired from Stefan Schuelke Fine Books, 30 June 2020.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.

This work strikes a curious chord with two exhibitions from 2016 and 2018 — “Reading as Art” at the Bury Art Museum and “The Art of Reading” at the Museum Meermanno, respectively. The works in both exhibitions not only challenged notions of the book and ways of reading but posed the act of making as a form of reading and the act of reading as a form of making. By prefacing this French-German edition of Un Coup de Dés with a book-arts-driven “transcreation”, Klaus Detjen demonstrates that the act of making also implies the act of translating. Typographer, designer, scholar and recipient of the Leipzig Gutenberg Prize for 2017, Detjen has used color, shape, line and binding here as his tools of translation and interpretation.

To use the term “transcreation” here may be taking liberties with Haroldo de Campos’s portmanteau for the idea of “translation as recreation”, or translating with creativity and therefore making “translation-art”. The term and definition perhaps better describe works such as those shown in The New Concrete: Visual Poetry in the 21st Century edited by Victoria Bean and Chris McCabe. But then De Campos and his brother, Augusto, singled out Un Coup de Dés as one of the cornerstones (along with Ezra Pound, James Joyce and e.e. cummings) for their group Noigrandres, and Mallarmé’s poem certainly fits the bill of the ideal target of transcreation:

The more intricate the text is the more seducing it is to “recreate” it. Of course in a translation of this type, not only the signified but also the sign itself is translated, that is, the sign’s tangible self, its very materiality (sonorous properties, graphical-visual properties…. Haroldo de Campos, “Translation as Creation and Criticism”, p. 315.

This notoriously difficult poem to translate (or even comprehend) with its cascade of metaphors and symbols (the central ones being a shipwreck and a constellation) appears three times in Detjen’s volume: first, in French with Detjen’s interpretive design, then in French and finally in German. All three instances follow the typography and layout of the first book edition of the poem as published in 1914 by Gallimard. Detjen’s own treatment of the poem very much focuses on the edition’s graphical-visual properties.

In that edition, the rhythm and position of the lines, the font and all the font sizes are precisely specified. Nine typographical motifs structure the poem. They are additionally highlighted in the front part of our book with colors, the meaning of which will be discussed later. Font sizes, styles (roman or italics) and the colors of the motifs used are as follows: First double-page spread: UN COUP DE DÉS, 11.25 mm, blue-violet / Second DS: QUAND BIEN MEME, 3.5 mm, cyan-blue / Third DS: que, 3.5 mm, green / Sixth DS: COMME SI, 5.25 mm, magenta; Une insinuation, 3.5 mm, yellow / Eighth DS 8: SI, 5.25 mm, magenta red / Ninth DS: C’ÉTAIT, 4.5 mm, orange red; autrement qu’hallucination, 2.5 mm, yellow; issu stellaire, 2.5 mm yellow. Klaus Detjen, “Zum Gestaltung”, p.81 (my translation).

The colored linear frames, threads and markings give the nine typographical motifs additional structuring. Detjen intends them to highlight the reading order to guide the reader through the text like a score. Detjen’s later discussion of their meaning, however, focuses mainly on les blancs, the white space around the text of the poem. Taking Mallarmé at his word in the poem’s foreword, Detjen seizes on the whiteness of the surrounding space and runs to the prismatic metaphor that the spectrum of colors is simply the decomposition of white light. Detjen also notes that the unorthodox Rien/Nichts printed on the volume’s opening page alludes to the expanse of blank space enclosing the lines of text and, in support, quotes from Mallarmé’s “Crisis of Verse”:

Everything is suspended, an arrangement of fragments with alternations and confrontations, adding up to a total rhythm, which would be the poem stilled, in the blanks; … Mallarmé, “Crisis of Verse”, p. 209.

From all this, Detjen avers that it is

as if Mallarmé did not want to have his poem depicted, that is, printed, but perhaps only thought or, at best, whispered. Or did the author see the poem printed in white on white paper? Detjen, “Zum Gestaltung”, p. 82 (my translation).

Following that line of thought, Detjen switched from Mallarmé’s preferred classical serif typeface to News Gothic Bold after experimentation showed that sans serif enabled him to print legibly in flat white on white paper. Confirming his primary focus on the expanse of blank whiteness, Detjen even concludes his afterword by quoting Jorge Luis Borges on Mallarmé:

The impersonal color white itself — is it not utterly Mallarmé? Borges, “Narrative Art and Magic”, p. 79.

In his heavy emphasis on les blancs, Detjen ends up not doing justice to other more subtle aspects of his design artistry. Before he comes to the poem’s expanse of whiteness, note how the opening page of Rien/Nichts follows the black pastedowns and endpapers — the absence of light contrasting as much with the cover’s pure white as with the poem’s blank spaces.

Note how the colors to come in his interpretive version appear in dice shapes arranged on the front and back white covers to suggest the faces of a pair of dice. The whole volume becomes ein Würfelwurf, un coup de dés, a throw of the dice, which echoes Mallarmé’s obsession with le Livre — that work that everything in the world comes to be.

More subtly, Detjen combines the uncut folios with the colored shapes and markings to suggest “rigging” for the foundering ship and a “mapping” for the constellation. The turning uncut folios become billowing sails or rising and falling waves, across which the rigging cuts and the constellation shines.

Detjen’s visual and physical “transcreation” underscores why the French and German translations are not side by side, page for page. How could they be given the way the poem’s words work with the type, the page, the double-page spread and folios? All of which meets de Campos’s definition of the ideal target for transcreation — where the work’s signified, sign and materiality are intricately bound to one another.

In Detjen’s version preceding the French and German versions, the act of translation and interpretation meets the act of creating a work of art.

Books On Books Collection – Peter Malutzki

2019/11/112025/03/22Books On BooksLeave a comment

Doctor Diderot’s & Mister d’Alembert’s Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking Glass (2018)

Doctor Diderot’s & Mister d’Alembert’s Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking Glass (2018)
Peter Malutzki
Book: H368 x W120 x D80 mm; Slipcase: H374 x W124 x D140 mm
Acquired from the artist, 10 February 2019

Malutzki’s tall small work evokes memories of Max Ernst’s Une Semaine de Bonté (1934) but pushes back on them with the work’s fine book execution. The book’s startling height derives from the more startling source of the paper: original pages from the plates volumes (1762-72) of Diderot’s Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers (1751-72). Through antiquarian dealers, Malutzki collected loose sheets from the first Paris folio edition and some from Italian editions (Lucca or Livorno).

The original engraving-papers (printed on one side as usual) are folded and glued together on the fore-edge. The stack of folded leafs has been glued at the spine with a small strip of glue so that each double spread has just a fold in the gutter, but no stitching, which shows the complete copper engraving unharmed structurally.

The endpapers are dyed through, and the fly-leaves are glued on the fore-edges to the first and last leaf of the book-block. The dark blue material used for the end-papers and the slipcase is an industrial one (Napura Khepera marine by Winter & Company) and is used for the endpapers. The Xian scarlet cloth for the cover also comes from Winter & Company. Throughout the book’s brief narrative, the dark blue associates with Diderot, and the scarlet with d’Alembert.

While Malutzki combines Ernst-like elements of the comic book and collage, the work is more of a conversation among imagery and concepts of the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries than an exercise in surrealism. It is a narrative built with the “pictures and conversations” that Alice finds lacking in the book her sister is reading by the river as Alice‘s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) opens. Malutzki piles this 19th century Victorian fantasy atop the 18th century by substituting the Enlightenment’s Encyclopédistes Doctor Diderot and Mister d’Alembert for Alice and her sister in the opening lines from Lewis Carroll’s story. The 20th century makes its appearance with the Playboy bunny in place of the White Rabbit and a clipart-like image of a book labelled “READ ME” in place of the bottle and cake labelled “DRINK ME” and “EAT ME”. The images in the 18th century engravings underlie the 19th century text in its speech bubbles. Nearly the only change to the text from Alice‘s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass (1871) is the substitution of the characters Diderot and d’Alembert for those in Carroll’s world.

In further allusion to Through the Looking Glass‘s mirror-world and upside-down logic, Malutzki has set some of the banderolle text in reverse and placed pairs of mirrored images crosswise — all overprinted on those 18th century engravings. Malutzki‘s precision and extensive experience with overprinting and the transparency of oil-based ink was essential given the limited supply of paper from the 250-year old volumes.

Inevitably, the collector has to confront the print preservationist’s question: how can you countenance the destruction of these 18th century prints? There is a several-fold unease. First, a worry for the security of such historical material (even altered) in the collection. Second, perhaps ironically, a worry over its preservation. And third, the worry whether the artistic quality of the work justifies the trade-off of the lost prints.

With at least a thousand complete sets of the original Encyclopédie (including the plates volumes) safely ensconced in academic and national libraries from France to Australia and still more loose prints (and sets) available from antiquarians, the use of these loose sheets for artistic purpose is lighter in the scales than the use of something far more rare or, worse, unique.

The preservationist might argue, “why not use the plates from one of the 20th century reprints?” Response: not the same tactility, not the same authenticity, not the same challenge or risk — not the same unease that prods the mind.

More directly to the artistic quality of Doctor Diderot’s and Mister d’Alembert’s Adventures: The photos here do little justice to the work’s precision, the sound of the slipcase’s snug fit, the layering of colours on the page, the motion of the spine, and the different textures of the 21st century cloth binding, the slipcase, endpapers and leaves of engraving papers so neatly adhering to each other that they feel like a single leaf. It is refreshing to see Alice appear outside the tableaux to which so many book artists have turned when inspired by Carroll. It is genius to have merged Carroll’s fictive exploration of logic and epistemology with the Enlightenment’s attempt to encompass humankind’s knowledge of the sciences, arts and industries or crafts.

Doctor Diderot’s and Mister d‘Alembert’s Adventures falls outside the span covered by Malutzki’s autobiography buchstäblich Buch (see under Further Reading). As such, it occupies a prospect from which to view Malutzki’s decades-long musing about the visual arts, knowledge and whimsy, all evident from his work — both solo and in collaboration with Ines von Ketelhodt — in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

Zweite Enzyklopädie von Tlön: Ein Buchkunstprojekt von Ines von Ketelhodt und Peter Malutzki, 1997-2006 (2011)

Zweite Enzyklopädie von Tlön: Ein Buchkunstprojekt von Ines von Ketelhodt und Peter Małutzki, 1997-2006 (2011)
Ines von Ketelhodt and Peter Malutzki
H302 x W220 mm
256 pages; printed linen-over-board cover with embossed spine title, thread stitched; LuxoCream 115 gsm text paper; Frutiger, typeface.

Through his fiction — especially his story ”Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” — Jorge Luis Borges has played as inspirational a role for artists and book artists as have Lewis Carroll, Stéphane Mallarmé and Laurence Sterne. An incomplete list includes Katie Holten’s About Trees, Sean Kernan’s Secret Books, Aurélie Noury‘s “Pierre Ménard, El Ingenioso hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha“, Hanna Piotrowska (Dyrcz)‘s Jorge Luis Borges, The Maker, Liliana Porter’s prints, Elaine Sturtevant’s Sturtevant: Author of the Quixote and Daniel Temkin’s and Rony Maltz’s Borges: The Complete Works. For book art, though, Malutzki’s and Von Ketelhodt’s fifty-volume work must lead the list, closely followed by this descriptive catalogue, a bookwork in itself.

Eva Hanebutt-Benz (Gutenberg-Museum Mainz) introduces the catalogue by defining the various sorts of encyclopedic reference work, where the Zweite Enzyklopädie fits in, how it is organised, and the inspirational role played by Borges’ story “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”, which is reproduced complete in the catalogue in Spanish as well as German and English. Hanebutt-Benz’s essay, too, is given first in German, then in English, establishing the pattern for all of the essays from the other twenty-two contributors to the catalogue — librarians, artists and curators — each describing two or more volumes of the Zweite Enzyklopädie.

This multilingualism of the catalogue is characteristic across the fifty volumes and the works of Von Ketelhodt and Malutzki in general. More important, by echoing the exploration of multilingualism, language and meaning in Borges’ story, it joins the story as a unifying force in the catalogue and across the Zweite Enzyklopädie. Excerpts from the story appear in many of the volumes, as the relevant contributors note and elucidate. Another unifying force aligned with the story is the artists’ use of the primary colours in the catalogue.

Sampling several paragraphs from the opening and closing of each language version, we can see the red, blue and yellow inks that are used to signal those portions of Borges’ text that appear somewhere in the fifty volumes. In the margins, the volume’s title and specific page number are called out in the relevant colour. The double-page spread separating the contributor’s essays from the section of photos of the fifty volumes applies the primary colours and black across the names of the fifty volumes, leaving space for future volumes. This is the sort of maker’s detail linked with the larger organisational elements that contributes to the unity of a work that, in Hanebutt-Benz’s words, is an “encyclopedic collection of creative possibilities, generating a book cosmos, closed within itself, playfully and yet following strict guide lines.”

As a work in and of itself, the catalogue intensifies so many of the characteristics of the more traditional “artist’s book” that, without the monolithic presence of the fifty volumes, sight of its “book art-ness” could slip away. The artists have a dual preventative. One is to make the fifty volumes a visible presence by giving each volume its own double-page spread following the double-page spread shown above. This generates 300 colour photos.

Another is a gamble: a roll of the dice that the twenty-three contributors would deliver comments on each volume that rise to the occasion. It was a winning gamble, but there is one superlative pair of essays that rings like a tuning fork: COOKBOOK and QUIZ as explained by librarian James Henry Spohrer (University of California, Berkeley). They are at once Borgesian, Malutzkian and Von Ketelhodt-esque.

Only the discussion of COOKBOOK is offered here — an incentive to visit QUIZ. In QUIZ, Spohrer seamlessly carries on his conversation with his “colleague“ Extasio Antón in a way that proves Hanebutt-Benz’s statement true:

The world recorded in this encyclopedia is, in the end, an actual encyclopedic collection of creative possibilities, generating a book cosmos, closed within itself, playfully and yet following strict guide lines.

“There was an old book out on a table. I went to put it away, but instead I just opened it and gazed. I looked at the way the sharp metal type cut into the paper, at the blooms of foxing in the margins. I smelled its slight odor of papery rot, caught Latin words here and there and made out that they said something about the spirit and devotion. I stood there for the longest time. The book had stilled me.

On an impulse, I went to the closet where I keep a compost heap of props and got four black stones from a Japanese river. I set them out carefully in a line across the pages of the book. And suddenly it looked to me like…a poem. Or a kind of poem, at least. Maybe a Haiku or something by one of the Imagists, something that didn’t narrate or argue but just placed a few simple things before you and invited you to complete the work. This book with its stones was a pure image, the kind that can move from one mind to another and root there in some mysterious panspermic process. Joining things that didn’t logically go together–Latin meditations and Japanese rivers, black stones and creamy paper–broke apart some notion of what these things should say and set my imagination free to work. I had always wanted my photography to do this, and now I saw this wonderful composition open on the table before me.

I took a picture of this poem. And that was the beginning of these books.

After a while there were enough of them to suggest that they might themselves make a book, and indeed had to be a book. So I began to think about what might be necessary to make this happen. Perhaps it needed the armature of a text, but what that text might be and how it might work to unite the whole wasn’t clear. Then a designer friend, Lana Rigsby, saw the pictures and said they reminded her of Borges.

Of course! …

The Secret Books doesn’t attempt to illustrate Borges, and it doesn’t aspire to be a collaboration–as an artist I couldn’t hold his coat. I have simply found some instances in which he speaks directly about books and have put them with my images of books to make a kind of sequence, or perhaps a dialogue. And navigating thus under the star of Borges, I look at this book–words and images, side by side on the table before me–and find myself looking down dark, unfamiliar paths across the plane of the world with a rising sense, both exciting and ominous, that everything is about to change.”

The Secret Books was published in 1999 by Leete Island Books to coincide with the centennial of Borges’ birth and, by happenstance, with the start of the long journey to the EPUB standard. The month before The Secret Books appeared the Open eBook Forum (now the IDPF) released the Open eBook Publication Structure (OEBPS) version 1.0. A coincidence Borges would have relished.

Ten Thousand Things, No. 51 (2012)

Ten Thousand Things, No. 64 (2012)

Type Cities (2018)

Further Reading

Works of homage to Jorge Luis Borges

Works of homage to Italo Calvino

A Field Guide to “A Field Guide to the Flowers of ‘Astronomia nova‘” (2018)

4522,. + K (companion volumes, to be read concurrently) (2024)

Astronomia Nova Florilegia or A Strange Shallow Papery Cup or .888 inch (2025)

Further Reading

Babel (2019)

Library of Babel (2019)

Further Reading

Personal Libraries Library (Winter 2009-10 to Spring/Summer 2021)

The Secret Astronomy of Tristram Shandy (2015)

Further Reading

Alpha Beta (2017)

Zweite Enzyklopädie von Tlön (2007)

Bücher /// Books (2019)

Further Reading

El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha by Pierre Ménard (after Jorge Luis Borges, “Pierre Ménard, auteur du Quichotte” in Fictions) (2009)

Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard (poster) (2008)

Further Reading

Un Coup de Dés Jamais N’Abolira le Hasard – Ein Würfelwurf niemals tilgt den Zufall (1995)

Further Reading

Doctor Diderot’s & Mister d’Alembert’s Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking Glass (2018)

Zweite Enzyklopädie von Tlön: Ein Buchkunstprojekt von Ines von Ketelhodt und Peter Malutzki, 1997-2006 (2011)

Further Reading

Further Reading