Infant A (2012) Louis Lüthi Thread-stitched signature. H225 x W160 16 pages. Edition of 1000. Acquired from Torpedo Books, 8 January 2024. Photos: Books On Books Collection
Infant A is part of a collection of essays commissioned by castillo/corrales and published by Paraguay Press under the series title The Social Life of the Book. Lüthi’s contribution fits the Books On Books Collection on several scores. First is the epigram’s invocation of the alphabet, which echoes the collection’s concentration of alphabet-related artists’ books and children’s books. See Alphabets Alive! Second is the epigram’s source: Wallace Stevens, whose poetry has inspired Ximena Pérez Grobet’s Words (2016). Would that other book artists be so inspired. Third is the narrator’s fictional conversation with Ulises Carrión in a celebration of all things A-related, in particular Andy Warhol’s novel a: a novel (1968), which finds analogues in Warren Lehrer’s A Life in Books: The Rise and Fall of Bleu Mobley (2013) and Derek Beaulieu’s a, A Novel by Andy Warhol (2017) (entry in progress). Fifth is how the dialogue reminds me of Suzanne Moore’s A Musings (2015).
A Die With Twenty-six Faces (2019)
A Die With Twenty-six Faces(2019) Louis Lüthi Paperback. H200 x W130 mm. 104 pages. Acquired from Amazon, 18 September 2022. Photos: Books On Books Collection
Walter Benjamin’ unpacking of his library has a lot to answer for. Not only do we have Buzz Spector‘s take on it in 1995, but Jo Steffens’ Unpacking trilogy of photos of architects’, artists’ and writers’ bookshelves, Alberto Manguel’s elegiac Packing My Library (2018), and here is Louis Lüthi’s.
Publisher’s website: In A Die with Twenty-Six Faces, the author — let’s call him L. — guides the reader through his collection of alphabet books, that is, books with letters for titles. Some of these titles are well known: Andy Warhol’s “a,” Louis Zukofsky’s “A”, Georges Perec’s W. Others are obscure, perhaps even imaginary: Zach Sodenstern’s A, Arnold Skemer’s C and D. Tracing connections between these books, L. elaborates on what the critic Guy Davenport has called the “Kells effect”: “the symbolic content of illuminated lettering serving a larger purpose than its decoration of geometry, imps, and signs.”
The title stirs thoughts of Marcel Broodthaers’ oracular statement in 1974 “I see new horizons approaching me and the hope of another alphabet”. An alphabet that unrolls across the twenty-six faces of a die would certainly qualify as another alphabet. Broodthaers and the die also stir thoughts of Stéphane Mallarmé’s Un Coup de DésJamais N’Abolira le Hasard to which Broodthaers paid repeated homage. Throwing a twenty-six-sided die would certainly no more abolish chance than would a roll of Mallarmé’s six-sided die. Lüthi’s game, however, has little to do with chance unless we count his luck in finding the works to build his library of single-letter-entitled books. Even less to do with luck if some of the library is fictitious, a likelihood that the “publisher’s” statement suggests. Lüthi’s die is loaded!
A selection of Lüthi’s “alphabet” books on display. Courtesy of the author. Photo: Gesellschaft für Aktuelle Kunst Bremen
On the Self-Reflexive Page II (2021)
On the Self-Reflexive PageII(2021) Louis Lüthi Paperback. H200 x W130 mm. 304 pages. Acquired from Idea Books, 18 September 2022. Photos: Books On Books Collection.
This is a peculiar book in its order and nature. After two variant half-title pages, it begins with a section entitled “Black Pages”. Only on flipping through the volume can we find the remaining front matter — just after page 208. There’s another half-title and then the Table of Contents. Reproducing the marbled page from Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759–1767), the book’s cover gives a clue to this peculiarity. Sure enough, Lüthi spells it out later in the section entitled “On Drawing Pages”.
So much in Tristram Shandy is presented out of order: a second dedication comes not after the first but on page 27, the preface is not at the beginning of the novel but in chapter 20 of volume three, and chapters 18 and 19 of volume nine come not after chapter 17 but are inserted after chapter 25. In a similar act of transposition, we find a marbled page in volume three, even though hand marbling is customarily used to decorate covers and endpapers. As Viktor Shklovsky observed, “It is precisely the unusual order of even common, traditional elements that is characteristic of Sterne.” (p. 240)
This one paragraph confers on Lüthi’s entire book the very self-reflexivity that it explores across a range of literature and artists’ books. Reflecting the custom to which it refers, On The Self-Reflexive Page II carries Sterne’s marbled pages on its front and back covers. In the text before his marbled leaf, Sterne refers to it as the “(motly emblem of my work!)“. Lüthi has taken that exclamation to heart (and cover) as if it were advice in creating this hybrid, motley work of his own: “part artist’s book and part essay, part literary excavation and part typographical miscellany” as he calls it in his middle-of-the-book Foreword.
Lüthi’s work is just one in the Books on Books collection of several inspired by Tristram Shandy. There is Erica Van Horn’s Born in Clonmel (2011), Simon Morris’ Do or DIY (2012), Abra Ancliffe’s The Secret Astronomy of Tristram Shandy (2015), and Shandy Hall‘s The Black Page Catalogue (2010), Emblem of My Work (2013), Paint Her To Your Own Mind (2018) and The Flourish of Liberty (2019). Outside the collection, there is Brian Dettmer’s Tristram Shandy (2004), commissioned by Shandy Hall’s Laurence Sterne Trust, and also Sean Silver’s Shandean online venture called The Motley Emblem (2022~) celebrating Sterne’s marbled leaf and the analytical chemistry of marbling. The latter may become a book, even an artist’s books to add to the tally. In The Century of Artists’ Books, Johanna Drucker draws attention to Sterne’s novel twice as an example of self-reflexivity or self-interrogation, but in 1994 and 2004, Sterne did not rise to the same level of precursor to book artists as William Blake or Stéphane Mallarmé in Drucker’s view. With these later works of book art inspired by Uncle Toby’s nephew in the bag, a dozen or so more might nudge Sterne up the scale.
In the meantime, anyone interested in artists’ books could fruitfully apply to the medium Sterne’s exhortation to his own readers:
Read, read, read, read, my unlearned reader! read, — or by the knowledge of the great faint Paraleipomenon — I tell you before-hand, you had better throw down the book at once; for without much reading , by which your reverence knows, I mean much knowledge, you will no more be able to penetrate the moral of the next marbled page (motly emblem of my work!) than the world with all its sagacity has been able to unraval the many opinions, transactions and truths which still lie mystically hid under the dark veil of the black one.
Artists’ books are to be read, handled and digested, not stored away in the archives.
The Century of Artists’ Books (1994) — An Appreciation
Before Johanna Drucker’s The Century of Artists’ Books (1994), the discussion of artists’ books was all argy-bargy about definitions, boundaries, neologisms or the placement of apostrophes. The Century cut through all that to become the introductory textbook to the field’s evolutionary biology. Decidedly post-Darwinian, it avoided rigid taxonomy and categories.
If all the elements or activities which contribute to artists’ books as a field are described[,] what emerges is a zone of activity, rather than a category into which to place works by evaluating whether they meet or fail to meet certain rigid criteria. There are many of these activities: fine printing, independent publishing, the craft tradition of book arts, conceptual art, painting and other traditional arts, politically motivated art activity and activist production, performance of both traditional and experimental varieties, concrete poetry, experimental music, computer and electronic arts, and last but not least, the tradition of the illustrated book, the livre d’artiste. — (p. 2).
More than occasionally, certain denizen of this “zone of activity” emerge to question, prod, probe, devour, regurgitate, excrete, smash, bang together, impale, immerse, soak, burn, freeze, distill, erase, sculpt, digitize or otherwise engage the physical aspects, possibilities and very idea of “the book”. When they do, “[t]he book becomes a form of artistic expression in the hands of these artists rather than a convention-bound mode of reproduction” (p. 47). The Century of Artists’ Books serves up numerous examples of them. It teases out the various strands of book-DNA that these specimens engage in becoming artists’ books. In doing so, The Century has proven to be a valuable tool for the collector, not just for historians and critics. It enhances appreciation and enjoyment when reviewing acquisitions or considering new ones.
The numerous specimens and the different ways they interrogate “the conceptual or material form of the book” (p.3) offer points of comparison and contrast for the work acquired or about to be acquired. Is it a democratic multiple or a rare and auratic object? Is it a codex or one of its variants or its precursors or its digital successors, and is it playing them off one another? Does it exhibit a self-reflexive form? Is its form celebrating the visual over the textual/verbal, and if so, with what visual arts and what visual aspects of the book? If vice versa, what aspects of the book’s textual/verbal form does it explore? Is the work a play on sequence (narrative and non-narrative) in the book? Does it intentionally dance on the border between the ephemeral performance or installation and the more lasting book? Is it questioning the book as document? Is it posing itself as a metaphor of the book? Does it somehow declare its affinity with any of the artist’s book’s antecedents identified by The Century?
As comprehensiveas The Century is, the haptic is one element of book-DNA that it does not single out for a chapter of its own. Codex works in the Books On Books Collection that primarily address what the eye can feel and fingers see, such as Tim Mosely’s The Book of Tears (2014) and Grasping the Nettle (2020), do not have easily found specimens with which to compare and contrast. Drucker’s decision to exclude “book-like objects or book sculpture” may have led to this, although the sections “Hybrid and Spatial Variants” and “Interior Spaces” (pp. 145-53) certainly touch on them and their engagement of hand and eye.
Arguably over-inclusive is The Century‘s designation of antecedents: William Blake (for his illuminated books’ union of text and image, craft and art, and vision with form and structure), Gelett Burgess (for Le Petit Journal des Refusés and its spontaneous, topical and zine-like spirit), Gustave Flaubert (for Bouvard et Pécuchet and its idea of the “book as failure” to transmit knowledge), Stéphane Mallarmé (for Un Coup de Dés Jamais N’Abolira le Hasard and its revolutionary use of type, page layout and a metaphysical idea of The Book), William Morris (for The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer and his eccentric designer’s eye) and Laurence Sterne (for Tristram Shandy‘s rollicking interrogation of the book as novel).
Of those antecedents Blake and Mallarmé (and more Mallarmé than Blake) are the most useful touchstones for a collector. Blake’s innovation with etching that enabled him to unify script and image on the page and his mythic stance as a one-man band present a high bar to subsequent book artists. But for the collector, he stands as a reminder to consider both works of rude as well as fine craft, to inquire into technique and painstaking effort, and to look for unity (or intentional dis-unity) of word, image and form when contemplating an acquisition.
As abstruse as Mallarmé’s writings are, Poème‘s content, its play with type and the double-page spread, and its possible embodiment of Mallarmé’s metaphysical notion of the book all offer book artists more approachable avenues. In fact, so many book artists have paid direct homage to Poème and Mallarmé’s idea of le Livre (“the Book”) that a sub-genre of artists’ books has evolved. Poème‘s trueness as an antecedent touchstone can be found in the various and extraordinary ways those hommageurs respond to, and even appropriate, its book-DNA. For the collector, Mallarmé acts as a reminder to see what the book artist is doing visually, structurally and conceptually with type, the leaves, the pages and the idea of the book.
Unsurprisingly The Century proves helpful for appreciating and enjoying Drucker’s own artist’s books in the Books On Books Collection.
Stochastic Poetics (2012)
Stochastic Poetics(2012/2024) Johanna Drucker Softcover, flexible, high-gloss laminated cover. Facsimile (original’s cover was in brushed steel). H250 x W200 mm. 62 pages. Acquired from Blurb, Inc., 28 March 2024. Photos: Books On Books Collection. Displayed with artist’s permission.
In Stochastic Poetics (2012/2024), Drucker scatters words and letters and plays with typography in a manner that makes Mallarmé’s revolutionary poem look almost staid. As Drucker explains in the colophon to Stochastic Poetics, the poem’s text is taken from Aristotle, sources on complexity theory, and “observations of readings and events at L.A.C.E. and Modern Language Association”. Aristotle might be deducible from lines such as “Poetry in general seems to have sprung from two causes in each of them lying deep in our nature”, but you would have to be vaguely familiar with his Poetics. The “observations” seem more personal, ephemeral, period-specific, but deducing their sources seems beside the point. It’s best to “go with the flow” — to unravel the explosions of sentences, phrases and words on the page and follow their imaginative leaps.
For example, on the page where Aristotle refers to the causes of poetry, that phrase “deep in our nature” leads to the wordplay of “stochasm”, and its typographic display enacts a chasm (or abyss if you’re feeling the Mallarméan vibrations). The first half of that wordplay comes from the word stochastic, whose root is stókhos [“aim, target, bullseye”], and “a stochastic process is a collection of random variables used to represent the evolution of some random value, or system, over time”). Again, if you’re feeling the Mallarméan vibrations, you’ll remember that throwing dice — one means of generating random variables — lies at the heart of Un Coup de Dés Jamais N’Abolira le Hasard (“A Throw of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance“).
Later among the poem’s seemingly random linguistic and typographic acrobatics, two phrases jump out — “Constellationary living / language” and “MOOmeNTARY CoNsTeLLaTiOn” (see below, lower left and lower right, respectively). Those phrases clearly evoke Mallarmé’s lines from Poème: “Nothing will have taken place except the place… except perhaps a constellation”. Mallarmé’s mise-en-page fireworks have often been taken as figurative allusions to the listing and foundering ship, central to the poem, or to the Big Dipper (Septentrion) constellation, or tumbling dice. Drucker’s typography and layout take Stochastic Poetics more in the direction of the abstract than the figurative, although some of its appearance could be considered representative of randomness or the tracks on a well-used dartboard, which alludes to the stókhos [“aim, target, bullseye”] of stochastic.
If these sparks of recognition between Drucker’s and Mallarmé’s poems still seem tenuous, this brief passage from Drucker’s essay on Mallarmé’s poem may add wattage:
Another set of three phrases “Except” “Perhaps” and “A Constellation” form a typographic group. Indeed, they express the crucial exception to the terms of abyss and dissolution, scattering and fragmentation, …. Redescribed in the smaller roman font as features incidentallycreated through “obliquity” and “declination” –- astronomical terms -– that are reinforced by invocation of the “Septentrion” or Big Dipper, and the north star …. The final line, “All thought expresses a throw of the dice,” recapitulates the theme of the whole work, showing that thought as well as language is caught in the probabilistic system between chance and constellationary form. — Drucker, 2011, pp. 12-13.
But enough of Mallarmé for a moment: go with the flow and read/view Stochastic Poetics without precisely tracking down its allusions. Clusters of letters not quite forming words, phrases or sentences suggest abstract doodling. The shapes of the clusters and lines create a sense of mental motion, or “AACTIION”. Eyes twist and turn as hands rotate the book to untangle words, phrases and sentences. In disentangling the portmanteau words and phrases such as “skeptical delightenment”, the mind finds itself playing out the reading — being skeptical, delighting, experiencing enlightenment. This is the artist-printer interrogating “the conceptual or material form of the book as part of [her] intention, thematic interests, or production activities” (The Century of Artists’ Books, p.3). This is the author-artist-printer twisting and turning the visual and verbal strands of book-DNA. This is a true specimen of the artist’s book.
The Word Made Flesh (1989/1996)
The Word Made Flesh (1989/1996) Johanna Drucker Casebound. H267 x W315 mm. 26 unnumbered leaves. Acquired from Black Dog Books, 16 August 2022. Photos: Books On Books Collection. Displayed with the artist’s permission.
When it comes to The Word Made Flesh, we find the Mallarméan influence again in the typographic and mise-en-page fireworks and some choice allusive phrases. Not content with spreading the oversized words of the title across the book’s pages as Mallarmé’s does with UN COUP DE DÉS JAMAIS N’‘ABOLIRA LE HASARD, Drucker amplifies each letter of each word. As if stuttering or trying to unstick its tongue from the roof of its mouth, the letter T takes up each of four pages until, on the fifth try, it is followed by the letter H on the next page, then E and so on until THE WORD MADE FLESH is spelled out. In the original letterpress edition, whose fiftieth and last copy provided the source for this facsimile edition (five hundred copies, fittingly), these oversized letters presumably came from wooden type. À la Mallarmé, the surrounding letters come from various families, fonts, sizes and styles of type, but amplifying and extrapolating his typographic technique, Drucker attaches the oversized letter to multiple words: “it”, “the”, “this, “table” and so on.
In Un Coup de Dés, the syntactically split and parallel texts become difficult to read. In The Word, the typographically split words add to the difficulty of reading the text. Already at the opening of The Word, Drucker has flagged that she will out-Mallarmé Mallarmé and take us à l’interieur du langage and à l’interieur de la langue (“into the interior of language and into the interior of the tongue”). Keep in mind that la langue not only means “tongue” but also “language” in the usual sense in English, whereas le langage means diction, a kind of language (jargon, computer, etc.) as well as the faculty of speech.
Adding another level of difficulty in reading is a background grid of red letters in small caps that appears behind the fifth T in the sequence above. It spells out a text made difficult to read by the spacing between letters and their disruption by the separate text of the black letters in the foreground and center. The visionary background text reads:
All the waters, elements and primal fishes broke through air around us into tongues. How was the trace of displacement into pale air made into speech by a breaking wave of chance? All the nights, broken glass and starstruck children woke to find themselves enslaved by authoritarian strictures placed into the face of stone on the shelves of supermarkets naming themselves judiciary operations. The sting of power marked the world into small spaces of unorthodox arrangements. Vivid scarlet as the fact of blood against the winter wash. Then all the earth. Unfocused energy and wandering eyes made their way into the pulse of a primitive economy and waited there for the ice to crack on our surface of time. But how about old engines accustomed to being seen in untoward emergencies? Where the shining streaks of chrome brought to bear upon the mass of chaos and bring it in baptismal fonts of timely mercy? Following a bus into battle we shook with a horror at the dimness of the horizons we approached, and hope of a casual sacrifice was made for us time after time while moments were substituted one for another in a succession so rapid no accounting was made of their relation to themselves to us or to each other, we have listened to tales of trading we have seen flights of birds into men, women pigs and out again as babies hurried off in designing programs whose wily whistling whims would wake the world from wild slumber if that were that possible. Ripeness was a matter of appetite, not taste, in the sweet afternoon of a genuine opportunity the afterimage on the glass was a miracle of form and of correctness. The slipping substance of jam on sticky fingers of engagement worked their own way into the graces of prevalent currents, and when the matter was fully in hand, at bay, up for question and review, there was no longer any sort of book into which to enter the record of tasks which showed up on glass as a mere trail of slime. How to imagine the world without remembering how it had been presented to us in the past and in the package of delights according to rules of the game were measured out in draughts matched to a mood of a brilliant day. Some small needles had been heated and grasses lit as sparks to sponsor a crusade to mentor the insects listening just below the ground, training their small ears to take notice of complex arrangements of formal elements in the sky. The most complex movements of plates of earth, most a minute opening in the sphere of heavens we know what was wrong as sighs slid into a hallway of archival dust and we had never felt more grateful than when well laundered meaning implied by an inflamed arc of successes glowing with salvation for the aching heart of bankrupt gossip, found meandering through the powdered landscape, trailing its timely marks the next day, its activity, a prefigured silence dancing in front of us at last and all attendant fantasies flushed our wistful flesh, and many fragmentary signs of monumentality, suggestions and reconditioned bodies manifest themselves long enough to be recognized according to the delicately nuanced pace of articulation of a raw and passionate tongue.*
There are hints of Mallarmé above in phrases such as “a breaking wave of chance” and “complex arrangements of formal elements in the sky” and, of course, in the general surreality and obscurity. More deeply, though, The Word addresses the elemental, primitive origin of language, its descent into adspeak and legalese, and a need to return to “a raw and passionate tongue” — hence à l’interieur du langage and à l’interieur de la langue. The Mallarmé keen “to purify the words of the tribe” would recognize these concerns and aims. To Mallarmé’s tools for doing this, though, — words, lines, typography, the fold (pli en pli), space (les blancs), the double-page spread, an all-encompassing concept of the book (le Livre) — Drucker the “author-printer” has added the alphabet itself in the next work.
*Some typographical errors transmitted from the original to the facsimile have been corrected here with the author’s assistance. Text displayed with the author’s permission.
For Drucker the scholar, the alphabet has been worth two academic books: The Alphabetic Labyrinth (1995) and Inventing the Alphabet (2022). For Drucker the author-printer-artist, it has been a career-long Muse. So it should be no surprise that alphabet shows up among the strands of book-DNA teased out in The Century‘s discussion of artists’ books. Nor that it centers one of her earliest works: From A to Z: Our An (Collective Specifics) an im partial bibliography; Incidents in a Non-Relationship or how I came to not know who is (1977/2012).
In The Century the three relevant strands and their alphabetic exemplars appear in chapter 7 “Self-Reflexivity in Book Form”, chapter 9 “Books as Verbal Exploration” and chapter 10 “The Book as Sequence: Narrative and Non-narrative”. For an artist’s book whose self-reflexivity depends on the alphabet, The Century gives us Keith Smith’s Book 106: Construct (1985), which uses it as a structuring device by having it disappear from the book letter by letter (p. 180).
Keith Smith, Book 106: Construct (1985). From the Books On Books Collection. Displayed with permission of the artist.
For the book-DNA of verbal exploration, by which Drucker means bringing the sonoric and visual aspects of language “into the book form as part of its substance” (p. 227), The Century give us Maurice Lemaître’s Roman Hypergraphique [“Hypergraphic Novel”] (1950) from the Lettrisme movement (pp. 228).
For the book as sequence, we have Brad Freeman’s Long Slow Screw Alphasex Book (1990), “an alphabet book comprised of fifteen cards drilled through the center and threaded onto a long stove bolt” (p.279). On each side of thirteen of the bolted cards, the artist has printed various anatomical and sexual terms in different fonts and sizes in alphabetic order. Unscrewed, the thirteen cards can be arranged in alphabetic order with the result being two large images on either side. The non-narrative sequence is dually dictated by the alphabetic order of the words and the composition of the images.
Brad Freeman’s Long Slow Screw Alphasex Book (1990). From the Carol Barton Collection, James Madison University Special Collections. Accessed April 14, 2024. Displayed with artist’s permission.
From A to Z appears in The Century as an example of self-reflexivity in book form, but it also uses the alphabet to explore the verbal and sequence elements of book-DNA. The book’s self-reflexivity appears at various levels, culminating in a two-page artist/author’s statement explaining the book’s subject, features and workings. It’s hard for a book to be much more self-reflexive than that, but in living up to the statement’s description, Drucker’s book manages to do so.
The main level comes from the book’s being a roman à clé, the key being that each character name is a letter of the alphabet. Self-reflexively at the end, the roman (“novel”) offers a key — a list of the characters and their characteristics. A, for example, is a “Miss East Coast uptight hot shit coed-just so smart and attractive and well educated and able to play it all right”, and Z is “Very Ivy League, greying prematurely and into the distinction it lent him – good family, good education, & good prospects, nice inheritance – poor fellow”, especially as his description is preceded by the word “constipation” spelled backwards. A’s preceding backwardly-spelled word is “diarrhea”, which seems appropriate for A’s failed May-December crush that is the central story played out only on the recto pages of this epistolary novel, or novel of letters from A to Z” (get it?).
The rest of the book, however, isn’t a narrative, but rather A’s anthology of poems by the twenty-six characters. In her introduction, A asserts that “the poetry of the period, as best exemplified by A, has an impressive complexity which can be traced to various contemporary influences” and then proceeds to put down the other twenty-five poets, which rather skewers her own poetry as the best exemplifier of the period. In her commentary and diaristic addresses to Z, A swings wildly between self-aggrandizement and self-deprecation. So not only is the book self-reflexive, its lead character is as well.
Left: A’s poem in the anthology. Right: Annotated citation of the volume from which the poem is taken.
Left: Z’s poem in the anthology. Right: Annotated citation of the volume from which the poem is taken.
From A to Z also plays self-reflexively with other parts of a book besides the Key and also with structural elements of page layout. The dedication’s sentences are numbered from 1 to 26, echoing the alphabet-referencing title. The table of contents embeds and interleaves the titles of the A-Z characters’ poems in a descriptive list of scenes in which the epistolary narrative will play out in the margins alongside the poems. The running heads and running feet abandon their usual function and consist of continuous text that runs across the head and foot of each page all the way to the end of the book. In keeping with A’s forwardness and Z’s indifference in the novel of letters, the text at the head begins “Approach:” and the text at the foot begins “Avoidance:”, and both capture the awkward sublimation of sex and power in a stilted acadamese.
With the exploration of the sonoric and visual aspects of language as an element of book-DNA, Drucker runs riot with peculiar misspellings (LEDDERS, DEADD’CAKESHÙM, etc.) and the diction and typeface assigned to each poet. She amplifies this sonoric/visual play with an Oulipian restriction to the use of the forty-some drawers of lead type available to her at the time. Each piece of type is used once and only once, which adds to the eyeball-twisting appearance and introduces a randomness to her Mallarméan play with the type fonts. By the time, the reader reaches
the entries under it are nigh illegible, a self-reflexive comment on the poets’ acadamese.
As for sequence (narrative and non-narrative) as a strand of book-DNA, Drucker’s use of alphabetic order throughout ties that one into a Gordian knot. The alphabetic sequence of the anthology, the naming of each character with a letter, the 26 numbered statements in the dedication, etc., call attention to the book’s self-commentary on the expected sequencing of a book. The game with sequencing occurs even at the level of the word in the “Key to Abbreviations” with the backwards spelling of the characters’ illnesses, infections or physical conditions. It’s a case of adding injury to the insults of the snarky descriptions of the characters!
Otherspace: Martian ty/opography (1992)
Otherspace: Martian ty/opography(1992) Brad Freeman & Johanna Drucker Casebound hardback, printed paper over boards. HxW mm. 92 pages. Acquired from Mallory Books, 11 March 2022. Photos: Books On Books Collection. Displayed with the artists’ permission.
There’s a sort of academic or anthropological distancing in the settings of Drucker’s works considered so far. In StochasticPoetics, street-level images of Los Angeles enter by way of a workshop exercise at either the Modern Language Association or Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (L.A.C.E.). In The Word, the abstract, surreal, geologic and primordial put women, babies, men, fish, birds, insects, buses and even fingers sticky with jam at a surreal distance. The distancing tracks back to two trends that Lawrence Alloway noted when reviewing the exhibition “Artists’ Books and Notations” in 1978. He wrote:
There are two loose tendencies in recent art that have not yet been definitely named. One is art as an elaborate projection of the self. In one sense, of course, the firstperson of the artist is expressed in all personally originate painting and sculpture: it has been a constituent of art since the Renaissance. What is at issue here, however, is the use of confessions, souvenirs and calendars. The other tendency derives from a notion of art as simulation of social systems — from imaginary museums to the picturesque anthropology of whole cultures. The two modes, of expanded autobiography and legible societies, approach one another. Both exemplify an art of human traces, whether the perspective is that of the diarist or of the weather satellite.
Budding poets in the seventies and eighties were seeking the sun from under the shade of the Confessionals (Robert Lowell, John Berryman, Sylvia Plath et al.). Budding feminist poets had the obvious added struggle from under the shade of patriarchal societies. Alloway’s second trend identifies an effective strategy. As an emerging art form, the self-reflexive artist’s book offered an effective vehicle for adopting that strategy for poets and prose writers alike. Susan E. King’s Lessons from the South (1986) is a good example of the latter. Drucker’s three works above are good examples of the former. With Otherspace (O/u/t/h/erspace?), she adopts prose and the role of omniscient narrator.
The words “slant” and “oblique” come to mind when enjoying Drucker’s book art — not just because of the distancing or the use of the punctuation mark the “solidus” or slash. With an omniscient narrative and a collage of snippets from the main character’s work/personal diary and of quotations and images from various sources, Otherspace unfolds the story of telepathic Jane, the scientist of astrophysical phenomena, her growing obsession with Mars and her frustrating romantic relationship with J. But it’s really the story of the discovery of an Other through the alphabet — told slant through Jane’s encounter with the planet/character Mars and discovery of its topographical/typographical alphabet.
Everything seems to comment on everything else. The pixellated glyph for the letter h parades as an illustration of Martian canals described in the quotation from Alfred Russell Wallace’s Is Mars Habitable?, which runs across the double-page spread and in between snippets from Jane’s diary describing the “unintelligible transmissions” from Mars. And all of that seems glossed by the diary entry: “No word from J.”
As Jane’s curiosity about the hieroglyphic face of Mars’ messages and their seemingly subliminal linguistic effort toward order grows, her disenchantment with J. intensifies to the point that, as the excerpt from Percival Lowell’s Mars and Its Canals implies, the grass grows redder on the other side. Sure enough, J. falls out of the picture, and Jane obsesses with her extraterrestrial Other. Accordingly, the book’s pages redden, and some Other-erasing fusion or consummation is sought. Mars, however, rejects Jane and her “bounded form”, and the messages cease. Mars the Other reverts “to its status as object”, returning “only an inert and passive face” while Jane tunes “her gaze into the remote monitor, hoping for renewed exchange”. The images on two final double-page spreads obliquely punctuate that ending
Polarized images Left, scene from Invaders from Mars (1953) showing the bridge into the pit where people go and come back changed; Right, extraterrestrial craters.
Still, the real mystery in Otherspace (O/u/t/h/erspace?) is not in its science fiction but rather the mysterious origin and role that our own alphabet plays in our simultaneously solitary and social existence. Jane’s futile quest to absorb and be absorbed by the Other through language has its parallel in Mallarmé’s “the Book, the total expansion of the letter”. Drucker’s comment below on Mallarmé’s quest could be taken as an oblique comment on Otherspace:
[Mallarmé’s] ideas about the metaphysical extension of “The Book” were in effect unrealizable. … Though the structure of poetics might be stretched to the point where it could attempt to be the crystallized form of thought (abstract, mobile, complex, interrelated at numerous levels), the possibility of a book which contained “all earthly existence” was always precluded by its own conceptual parameters. At the point of this limit, the end of the book begins. (Drucker, The Century, pp. 34-37).
For Jane, the end of the book Otherspace also leaves her at the point of a limit: working to decipher the Other’s mute ty/opography but still hopeful: My sense of what is to be gained is complicated by my own limitations. Maybe there will be a way to understand more than I do, after all.
For Drucker, the end of Otherspace (O/u/t/h/erspace?) is its colophon. It is an element of book-DNA that she almost always blends with the tradition of the “artist’s statement”.
Her online archive expands on the colophon: “The idea of the book came to us in the National Air and Space Museum in DC. We were looking at images of the Mars lander and the photo caption included the phrase “Martian topography.” Almost simultaneously we said aloud, “Martian TYpography.” So the project began.”
Other works by Johanna Drucker in the Books On Books Collection
The Fall (2008)
Artist’s statement (website): Another post-Trump election work, this is fully elegiac. Using the same I-am-an-algorithm technique that I used in Fabulas Feminae, I did compression writing for a series of weeks after the election. I drew on two corpora, the mainstream newspapers and Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Brad Freeman collaborated, creating the rich, dense, dark imagery on the pages through his techniques of offset overprinting.
Damaged Nature Salvage Culture(2006)
Artist’s statement (website): The overall project for which these books were editioned included a series of watercolors and other studies that were exhibited in Charlottesville, first at the Off-Grounds Gallery in December, 2005, and the second time at Les Yeux du Monde as part of the Compicit Codex! exhibit in August-September 2006. The books are meant to provide a catalogue of the smaller pieces from those exhibitions and also offer a text stating the premises that underlie the works. In many ways, these pieces and the publication continue a project that has been ongoing for several decades that addresses organic process and form through drawings and watercolors.
From Now (2005)
Artist’s statement (website): From Now continues the strain of my work that processes news and events through a locus of subjectivity as an organizing lens or principle. The project makes use of snippets, fragments, bits and pieces of different kinds of writing projects, most deliberately granting each autonomoy within a whole. The multiple spheres of language discourse each register in the structure and compositional mode, as well as the texture and graphic presentation of language. The “now” this is “from” is the lived and real, monstrous, grotesque, supersaturated with the noise of mass mediated culture, and yet, it is also the now of being, always, aware and present, in the midst of all that stimulation, what we are. Awareness shoots through the full world, and returns as a projection of self, that set of bounding and defining specifics that delineate a place as a profile, position, from which the world is made. So the curious codependent systems work. And language? Endlessly polyphonic, heteroglossic, multifaceted, varied in tone and vocabulary, look and sound, image and texture.
Simulant Portrait (1990)
Artist’s statement (website): In the late 1980s, I was still involved in working on the biography of Ilia Zdanevich (Iliazd), begun in 1985 when I was a Fulbright Fellow in Paris, working on my dissertation. That biography went through many iterations, and was finally left unpublished after Northwestern cancelled my contract. I had lost interest in the project, swept up in other matters, but the process of research and synthesis from documents and snippets of different kinds of materials had touched a nerve. I found this utterly satisfying to a certain obsessive streak. And so the structures of biography-writing, with all their connect-the-dots assumptions, varieties and ranges of sources and voices, evidence and documents, etc., were extremely appealing. Structurally, then, Simulant Portrait was conceived to mimic that process of research. Thematically the book was closer to older themes, of women and their lives, biographies and celebrity, the tensions of mass and literary culture in my own mind, and so on. The cyber-pulp aspect of the book is harder to place, as my proclivities were hardly sci-fi at that moment. Only that such notions were in the air, with Philip K. Dick (particularly the film Blade Runner) and William Gibson (rising star) occupying a certain popular imagination.
Further Reading
See “‘Un Coup de Dés Jamais N’Abolira l’Appropriation’ — An Online Exhibition“, 1 May 2022, Bookmarking Book Art, for works of homage to Mallarmé with which Drucker’s works can be compared and contrasted. Other works in the Books On Books Collection whose comparison/contrast with Drucker’s artist’s books provide appreciation in both directions include:
The Fall (1976) Michelle Stuart for the trend of distancing described by Alloway.
Auparavant (1991) by Roland Sabatier for the Lettrist context.
A Life in Books(2013) by Warren Lehrer for comparison with Otherspace for format and Stochastic Poetics and From A to Z for commentary on the academic literary milieu. See also Lehrer’s “Note from the Editor” for comparison with the “Biographer’s Note” from Simulant Portrait (1990) above.
Alloway, Lawrence. 9 December 1978. “Art”. [Touchstone Gallery, 118 E. 64th Street, New York] The Nation, p. 653.
Drucker, Johanna. N.D. “An Introduction to the Work of Johanna Drucker“. Artists’ Books Online: An online repository of facsimiles, metadata, and criticism. Archived 22 April 2021 at the Internet Archive Wayback Machine.
Drucker, Johanna. August 2012. “Future Visions and Versions of the Codex“. Transforming Artist Books. London: Tate Research Publication. Archived 26 March 2024 at the Internet Archive Wayback Machine.
Drucker, Johanna. 2022. Inventing the Alphabet: The Origins of Letters from Antiquity to the Present. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Like The Century of Artists’ Books, Drucker’s scholarly works on the alphabet — this one and The Alphabetic Labyrinth below — enrich the appreciation of her artist’s books.
Drucker, Johanna, Brad Freeman and Jessica Cochran. 2020. Aleatoric Collaborations. Chicago, IL: Center for the Book and Paper/Columbia College. If any proof of Poème‘s direct influence on Drucker were needed, here it is:
Aleatoric Collaborations (2020) Johanna Drucker, Brad Freeman et al. Photo: Courtesy of Brad Freeman.
Mallarmé, Stéphane, and Bertrand Marchal (ed.). 2003. “Le Livre, Instrument Spirituel“. Œuvres Complètes. New ed. Paris: Gallimard. Vol. 2, p. 224-28.
Marginalia (2017) Anja Lutz Open back sewn spine with dust jacket 245 x 330 mm. 112 pages. Acquired from The Greenbox Press, 3 August 2022. Photos: Books On Books Collection. Displayed with permission of the artist.
In 1964, the Fluxus artist George Brecht created a work called Book, which Michael Werner published in 1972 and which Moritz Küng reintroduced in facsimile in 2017. Also sometimes called This is the cover of the book, it proceeds to label each of the otherwise blank pages with its structural label: “These are the end pages of the book”; “This is the page before the title page of the book that tells you what the title is or was, or is going to be”; “This is the title page”; “This is the other side of the title page …” and so on. Like most self-referential or tautological artists’ books, it has its facetiousness. One page is labeled “This is the page with text on it”; another, “This the page that rustles when you turn it (maybe)”. Individual pages and perhaps the whole will lead to pauses to reflect on the thing being defined by labels and self-reference and how the mental funny-bone is being tickled. In the end, the structure or skeleton of the book as a thing — one thing — has been defined by the naming of parts.
Anja Lutz ‘s Marginalia proceeds differently. Her pages are the pages without text on them — or images, running heads, page numbers, etc. Lutz has taken thirty-four of the books she has designed under her imprint The Greenbox Press and carefully excised from each the text and images layer by layer until the empty spaces define the blank spaces that previously supported the content. But this does not result in the definition of a generic book structure or skeleton.
While Lutz’s technique might be similar to that of other book artists who have altered books by excavating or strip mining them, she is not offering precisely the same invitation that, say, Brian Dettmer offers with Tristram Shandy (2014). Dettmer, too, has excised layers away from an underlying work — the Folio Society’s illustrated edition of Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759-67). While both works invite us to think about the book as thing (or the guts and structure of this thing the book), Dettmer is inviting us to look into the specific underlying work in a different way or consider how the new shape is his response to the underlying work. Sterne’s novel remains present, and we can peer into its crevices and nooks to pick out words, sentences and images — to look into the novel in a new way. Lutz’s surgery does not leave enough of the underlying work to permit a “look in”. We look through instead. Even though she provides a list of the designed books she used, they are not present as Tristram Shandy is.
Each of the books with which Lutz start is, as she puts it, “unique in its choice of format, material, layout, composition, and rhythm”. Despite her nod and the listing of books, this does not mean that she wants us to respond to the results of her surgery with “before and after” comparisons. Rather she invites us to look only at the newly created works. In the end, each has its own structure or skeleton — the struts or bones of the marginal space defined by the negative space of removed content.
But the means of that invitation is this codex entitled Marginalia. With its dust-jacket-like wrapper around the exposed sewn spine, is Marginalia being offered as an artist’s book itself or a catalogue with artist’s book-like features? Beautifully produced, Marginalia is nevertheless not a limited edition. Besides the book, a limited number of collages shown in it are available, each framed floating between two panes of glass. They certainly qualify as works of sculptural book art, and if the artist were to turn her scalpel to copies of Marginalia itself, they too would surely qualify as artist’s books. A collection that held one of the collages, a copy of Marginalia and an altered copy of it would have won a trifecta.
Front and back of the book block, showing the exposed spine.
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.
Since 2009, Abra Ancliffe, its artist/librarian, has been replicating 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
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 themes that our librarian finds as links among the personal libraries.
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. Left to right and top to bottom: Winter 2009/2010; Summer 2010; Winter 2011; Summer 20012; Winter 2012; Summer 2013; Winter 2013; Summer 2014; Winter 2015; Summer 2016; Winter 2016; Summer 2017; Fall/Winter 2017; Spring/Summer 2018; Fall/Winter 2018; Spring/Summer 2019; Fall/Winter 2019; Spring/Summer/Fall/Winter 2020; Spring/Summer 2019.
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 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.
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.
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 reproducedthe black pages from more than one hundrededitions 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 Workblog, accessed 18 September 2019.
Further Reading
“Shandy Hall“. 1 January 2021. Books On Books Collection.
“Jorge Luis Borges“, last edited on 8 May 2022. Wikipedia. Accessed 15 May 2022.
“Italo Calvino“, last edited 20 April 2022. Wikipedia. Accessed 15 May 2022.
“Maria Mitchell“, last edited 8 March 2022. Wikipedia. Accessed 15 May 2022.
“Robert Smithson“, last edited 14 May 2022. Wikipedia. Accessed 15 May 2022.
“Anne B. Spencer“, last edited 25 April 2022. Wikipedia. Accessed 15 May 2022.
Baldwin, Kate, Denise Bookwalter, Sarah Bryant, Macy Chadwick and Tricia Treacy. 2021.REF.
The Black Page Catalogue(2010) Coxwold, UK: Printed by Graham Moss (Incline Press) for The Laurence Sterne Trust. Contains 73 numbered leaves in a matte black card box (H235 x W168 mm). The leaves are glossy cards (210 x 148 mm) on which contributed texts and illustrations (chiefly colour) are printed; the reverse of each provides the contributor’s comments on the text or illustration and the “page” number. Also enclosed are a single-sheet folded pamphlet (“Printing the Black Page” by Graham Moss, Incline Press) and two cards, one of which is the invitation to the exhibition inspired by the ‘black page’, p. 73 of the first edition of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, held at Shandy Hall, Coxwold, North Yorkshire, 5 Sept.-31 Oct. 2009, and the other, sealed in an envelope, being the index of the contributors and their page numbers. Edition of 73. Acquired from the Trust. Photos: Books On Books Collection.
Collectors come up with the most ingenious reasons for acquiring things. In this case — along with astrological, numerological and other rational rationale — Rebecca Romney’s reminder that The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman is one of the earlier instances of book art led inevitably to my acquiring Shandy Hall’s The Black Page Catalogue. But it took time.
Several months after enjoying the Romney essay, I met Brian Dettmer in February 2015 by happenstance at a book art exhibition in New Haven, CT. As we chatted about past inspirations of book art, Tristram Shandy came up, so he told me of an upcoming event called “Turn the Page” in Norwich, UK, where I could more easily see some of his work — and one in particular having to do with Tristram Shandy. So in May 2015, I went.
Tristram Shandy (2014) Brian Dettmer Carved and varnished, two copies of the 2005 Folio Society edition of Tristram Shandy. H230 x W190 mm Commissioned by The Laurence Sterne Trust, Coxwold, UK. Photos: Books On Books Collection.
The marbled page, an “emblem of my work”, p. 169. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759) by Laurence Sterne Illustrated with wood engravings by John Lawrence. Set in ‘Monotype’ Plantin, printed by Cambridge University Press on Caxton Wove Paper. New York: Folio Society, 2005.
So a year passed. Another visit to “Turn the Page” was made. And as I was leaving, lo, a sign and small display came unto me:
Only a negligent collector would ignore such clear signs.
Parson-Yoricks-to-be can select their own favorites here.
Emblem of My Work (2013)
Emblem of My Work (2013) Coxwold, UK: The Laurence Sterne Trust. Consists of a 24-page booklet and 170 numbered cards in a hinged blue paper-covered box (H160 x W105 x D60 mm. The leaves of this catalogue are bright white cards (152 x 92 mm) on which the artwork is printed; the reverse of each provides the “page” number and the contributor’s comments on the art. The booklet provides alphabetical and numerically ordered indexes listing the contributors and their page numbers. Edition of 225, of which this is #79. Acquired from Shandy Hall, 1 October 2019. Photos: Books On Books Collection.
Volume III of Sterne’s work was the first to be handled by a publisher. Presumably the famous success of the first two self-published volumes helps to explain James Dodsley’s agreement to printing copies in which each page 169 and each page 170 showed uniquely marbled squares. Images from an original copy held at the British Library can be seen here. As Patrick Wildgust, director of Shandy Hall, explains in the booklet:
The central section of p. 169 was laid upon the marbled mixture in order that a coloured impression could be taken as cleanly as possible. This was left to dry and then reverse-folded so the other side of the paper could also receive its marbled impression. This side of the paper became page [170]. As a result, the marbled page in every copy of Vol. III is different — each impression being a unique handmade image. In the text opposite on p. 168, Sterne tells the reader that the marbled page is the “motly emblem of my work” — the page communicating visually that his work is endlessly variable, endlessly open to chance.
Two favorites — one for page [169], one for [170] — artists with other works in the Books On Books Collection. Left: Ken Campbell. Right: Eric Zboya.
Paint Her To Your Own Mind (2018) Coxwold, UK: The Laurence Sterne Trust. Contains 147 numbered leaves in a brown paper-covered box (174 x 124 mm). The leaves are bright white cards (145 x 105 mm) on which contributed texts and illustrations (chiefly colour) are printed; the reverse of each provides the contributor’s comments on the text or illustration and the “page” number. Also enclosed are a “title page” and “index leaf” listing the contributors and their page numbers. Edition of 200. Acquired from Shady Hall, 6 June 2018. Photos: Books On Books Collection.
Page 147 of Sterne’s sixth volume of Tristram Shandy is blank. On the preceding page, he metaphorically throws up his hands over any attempt to describe the most beautiful woman who has ever existed and exhorts the reader: “To conceive this right, —call for pen and ink—here’s paper ready to your hand, —Sit down, Sir, paint her to your own mind—as like your mistress as you can—as unlike your wife as your conscience will let you—‘tis all one to me—please your own fancy in it.” So, accordingly, Shandy Hall invited 147 artists/writers/composers to follow Sterne’s instruction to fill the blank page 147. From the 9th through 30th of September 2016, their efforts were displayed in the Shandy Hall Gallery, Coxwold, York.
The curious reader can choose his or her own favorites here.
The Flourish of Liberty (2019)
In Volume IX on p. 17, the reader reads Corporal Trim’s advice to Uncle Toby, who stands at the Widow Wadman’s threshold about to propose marriage:
Nothing, continued the Corporal, can be so sad as confinement for life — or so sweet, an’ please your honour, as liberty. Nothing, Trim — said my Uncle Toby, musing — Whil’st a man is free — cried the corporal, giving a flourish with his stick thus —
The Flourish of Liberty (2019) Coxwold, UK: The Laurence Sterne Trust. Contains 103 numbered leaves in a gray paper-covered box (174 x 124 mm). The leaves are bright white cards (148 x 105 mm) on which contributed texts and illustrations (black and white, several in colour) are printed; the reverse of each provides the contributor’s comments on the text or illustration and the “page” number. Also enclosed are a “title page” and “index leaf” listing the contributors and their page numbers. Edition of 150, of which this is #133. Acquired from Shandy Hall, 26 October 2020. Photos: Books On Books Collection.
The rest of Corporal Trim’s flourishes flourish here.
Endless Journey (2015)
Endless Journey (2015) Tom Gauld Printed slipcase, twelve cards, leaflet. H165 x W73 mm. Acquired from the Laurence Sterne Trust. Photos: Books On Books Collection.
Living Locally, Nos. 1-40 (2002-2019) Erica Van Horn Tab-and-slot cardboard box, H270 x W190 x D60 mm, enclosing thirty-two items produced with various techniques and in various forms and structures (print, accordion, postcard, pamphlet, paperback, hardback). Acquired from Coracle Press, 16 December 2020. Photos: Books On Books Collection.
Since 1996, Erica Van Horn has lived and worked in Ballybeg, Grange, Clonmel, Co. Tipperary in Ireland with the poet, critic and artist Simon Cutts. Her Living Locally series, which has engendered an online blog and an edited collection, has also had this other incarnation closer to book art, four items of which first drew my attention to Van Horn’s work. In her book for Van Horn’s 2010 Yale exhibition, Nancy Kuhl places the series in a section that “illustrates the artist’s long fascination with the ways language both describes and creates community, even as it determines individual identity and shapes personal memory” (p. 9). Over the years, returning Van Horn’s four small items to display on shelves and discovering her earlier painted bookworks via The Book Made Art, I found Van Horn’s fascination with language expressing itself through graphics, binding and other physical forms of publication in such original ways that this cardboard treasure chest could no longer be resisted.
Some words for living locally (2002 ~)
Some words for living locally, No. 1-8 (2002~) Erica Van Horn Booklet saddle-stitched with staples. H147 x W105 mm, 20 pages. Edition of 300, of which this is #134. Acquired from Coracle Press, 25 February 2015.Photos: Books On Books Collection, displayed with the artist’s permission.
The first work in Living Locally, Nos. 1-40, is this booklet, a copy of which was acquired for the collection in 2015. How is it that what might be simple reminders or observations in a notebook kept to help the writer understand the “locals” become art? For a start, there’s the cover: an altered copy of Van Horn’s Irish certificate of registration. The certificate’s front cover overprinted with the title, the registration number replaced with the copy and edition numbers — these set the stage, telling us that a certificate of registration is a necessary but not sufficient condition for living here. Some words are also required, so the title tells us. Inside the cover, a hallmark of a published work appears: the name of the publisher (Coracle) and place of publication. The photocopied passport photo continues the certificate metaphor, and the signature plays the dual role of registrant’s and author’s signature.
Although there are twenty pages in the booklet, only nine are numbered. Of the nine, only eight display an explanation or comment (in black serif type) facing an unnumbered page with the word under scrutiny (in colored sans serif type). These eight are the “No. 1-8” of the title as given officially in the work’s initial entry in WorldCat and in the complete series’ list.
The ninth numbered page and its facing page are blank. Perhaps in keeping with the registration booklet cover, space has been left for future stamping. Or their blankness might be explained by the preceding double-page spread offering the word or phrase “good-luck” and its explanation on the eighth numbered page:
a farewell expression almost the same as ‘see you later’. Goodbye is final, therefore rarely used.
Perhaps the artist is implying that, “blow-in” though she may be as the locals describe anyone not born of local generations, she is not saying goodbye and plans to record further words for living locally.
8 old Irish apples and 8 old Irish potatoes (2011)
8 old Irish apples (2008) and 8 old Irish potatoes (2011) Erica Van Horn & Simon Cutts Concertinas: apples in eight sections (single-sided) and potatoes in five sections (double-sided). Both: H90 x W90 mm (closed), W720 mm (apples open), W450 mm (potatoes open). Editions of 500. Acquired from Coracle Press, 25 February 2015. Photos: Books On Books Collection, displayed with the artist’s permission.
These are No. 13 and No. 17 of the Living Locally series. On first sight, the two accordion booklets in their acetate sleeves seem to promise images of apples and potatoes. Removed from their sleeves, they deliver on the promise but in typographic and metaphorical ways. There’s a reveling in the pleasure of type impressed on the stiff card surface and of the descriptive or mnemonic names of the pommes and pommes de terre (for example, “Bloody Butcher” and “Yellow Pitcher” for the apples and “Flourball” and “Snowdrop” for the potatoes). Images of fruit and veg would be superfluous.
Born in Clonmel (2011)
Born in Clonmel (2011) Erica Van Horn Booklet saddle-stitched with thread. H142 x W104, 20 pages. Acquired from Coracle Press, 25 February 2015. Photos: Books On Books Collection, displayed with the artist’s permission.
This is #21 in the Living Locally series. Van Horn visited Shandy Hall in 2008. On returning to Ireland, as she explains, she undertook this bit of “living locally” to find out what Clonmel had made and was making of its famous literary son Laurence Sterne. The booklet’s central photo of the Sterne Pub that no longer exists — in the hotel that no longer exists — in Clonmel rises past wryness in the context of the inevitable reader’s snort to which the tale of its non-use on dedication day gives rise. Van Horn’s plain, matter-of-fact observations and graphics would appeal to the original combiner of deadpan text and image in The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman — a forerunner of book art.
Imagine if Henry David Thoreau had had the sense to be born a woman and transported in space and time to consider Irish village and countryside life of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. With wry and gentle humor, he might have written something approaching Too Raucous for a Chorus. Van Horn is a natural and generous collaborator, which manifests itself not only in her works with Cutts but in Coracle Press works such as this. Other artists and writers with whom she has worked include John Bevis, Harry Gilonis, Thomas Meyer and Eiji Watanabe.
Still, as Too Raucous and Living Locally demonstrate, her enduring collaboration is with language and the world around her.
Kuhl, Nancy. The Book Remembers Everything: The Work of Erica Van Horn(Clonmel: Coracle Press, 2010). Until the acquisition of Seven Lady Saintes (1985), this book was the only means in the collection by which to gain a sense of Van Horn’s more painterly bookworks such as La Ville aux dames (“second state”) (1983), which appeared in the 1986 Chicago exhibition “The Book Made Art”, annotated here.
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)
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.
Further Reading
“Ken Botnick“. 16 June 2022. Books On Books Collection. For another homage to Diderot.
“Lizzie Brewer“. 4 July 2023. Books On Books Collection. For another homage to Borges.
Long, Elisabeth. “Second Encyclopedia of Tlön”, The Sign of the Owl, 23 July 2009. Accessed 23 October 2019.
Mellby, Julie. “Zweite Enzyklopädie von Tlön”, Graphic Arts, Princeton University Library, 17 June 2010. Accessed 24 October 2019.
Soltek, Stefan. “Epilog” in buchstäblich Buch: eine Autobiographie by Peter Malutzki (Florsheim/Offenbach, Germany: Peter Małutzki/Klingspor Museum, 2017).
Books On Books 