Books On Books Collection – Camden Richards & Deborah Sibony

Water, Calling (2021)

Water, Calling (2021)
Camden Richards & Deborah Sibony
Felt-covered, modified dragon-scale bound artists’ book, accompanied by audio equipment in custom box. Box: 262 x 262 x D170 mm. Book: H155 x W775 mm (closed). 110 pages. Edition of 15, of which this is #1. Acquired from the artists, 5 October 2022. Photos: Books On Books Collection. Displayed with artists’ permission.

Colophon
“Water, Calling is a collaborative artist book which explores the cyclical and omnipresent relationship of water and the self, inviting the reader to reflect upon water as more than a commodity, but rather as life giving: spirit, flesh and soul. Because water is evidence of all who came before us, it is a foretelling of all who will be; through it we are in conversation with our ancestors, our descendants, and with earth herself. Water, Calling traces these existential threads through waterscapes of text, image and sound, extending an invitation to enter more fully into a dialogue composed of acts requiring active listening, contemplative reading and deep seeing with the hope of inspiring sacred reciprocity.”

The initial attraction of Water, Calling was its modified “dragon-scale” binding (Chinese: longlin zhuang 龍鱗裝). Its lasting attraction has been how the binding and the structure within it join with the text, images, textures and sound to create this work of art so evocative of the element water.

Water, Calling‘s dragon-scale binding is a modified form of the method used with Chinese manuscripts in the 8th century CE and in the oldest printed book known — the Diamond Sūtra, dating back to 868 CE and found in the caves near Dunhuang, China in 1900. In the original structure, sheets of paper of different widths overlap one another with the narrowest on top and the widest on the bottom. They are aligned and attached along the left or right edge, and from the attached edge, the overlapping stack of leaves rolls into a scroll. Below are images from various sources (Drège, Song, and Chinnery).

Drège. Figure unnumbered (p. 197) and Plate XXIV (p. 205).

Song. Fig. 2 Diagrams of whirlwind bindings (top) ‘concertina’ xuanfeng zhuang (旋風裝) and (bottom) ‘dragon scale’ longlin zhuang (龍鱗裝).

Historically the dragon scale seems to occupy a transitional stage between scroll and codex, and the latter seems to inspire most of the modifications of the dragon scale in Water, Calling. Its dragon-scale-like overlapping occurs within each of seventeen codex-like signatures and across them. There is, however, no single widest sheet. The dragon-scale’s characteristic curling, outlying edge occurs due to a staggered fold of one leaf in each signature. The first signature, below with its the first page and edge of its third page showing, is a single-fold leaf that anchors the book block to the long felt cover. As the first signature’s last page is turned to the left, it pulls all of the next sixteen signatures with it. Viewed from the edge in the third image below, the staggered and overlapping signatures mimic waves of water (see the third image below).

A distinctive modification of the binding is the inclusion of a narrow-cut sheet of Gmund Transparent in the second signature that interleaves with the third signature. The dry facts printed on the transparency interrupt the flow of the text debossed at the end of the first signature and beginning of the second. Each of the remaining pairs of signatures has a narrow-cut linking sheet of dry facts making up one stream of text interweaving with the more lyrical text and water patterns debossed on the Rives BFK paper.

Set in the cursive Magdallena, the debossed text reads “through water we are in conversation, | with our ancestors, with our elders, our unborn descendants, our future — with earth herself.”

All eight of the translucent sheets can seen from this sideways rear view of the seventeen signatures. So the dry, however impressive, facts on the translucent sheets make up one stream of text interwoven with the more lyrical text and water patterns debossed on the Rives BFK paper.

A sideways view of the back of all seventeen signatures shows all eight of the translucent sheets.

Within each of the seventeen signatures, there is a double-page spread of artwork: a series of cyanotype prints of original photographs, image transfers sourced from historical maps, and watercolor art.

With the third double-page spread, a third stream of text and a material element of interweaving occurs. Richards introduces a more personal set of observations typeset in New Caledonian on a sheet of Sekishu paper attached to the lefthand edge of an underlying spread of artwork. Nothing quite like this appears in other works of dragon-scale binding. The presence of those Sekishu sheets requires some care in turning the pages, unscrolling and scrolling the work. This modification of the dragon-scale binding heightens its delicacy and slows down the process of reading, looking and reacting, which reinforces the artists’ words.

There are thirteen of these Sekishu sheets in total, leaving two double-page spreads at the beginning and two at the end uncovered. This is not by accident. Structurally it reflects the ouroboros nature of the debossed text on the Rives BFK: it ends as it began.

The width of the opened work and way the reader must almost embrace it to open it reflect the breadth of the artists’ meditation on various bodies of water—wild and managed, urban and rural. The interwoven leaves and text reinforce the makers’ (and water’s) call to “pay attention” and reconnect.

Other examples of dragon-scale binding in the Books On Books Collection include works by Barbara Hocker, Nif Hodgson, Rutherford Witthus and Zhang Xiaodong. It seems no accident that Hocker and Hodgson adopt the dragon-scale binding to evoke the element of water. But other artists in the collection who aim to evoke the element choose another structure that, like dragon scale, seems to be a transition from scroll to codex: the accordion fold or leporello and its variant the window-panel flag book. Among the leporellos are Helen Douglas’ Follow the River (2015-17), and for an example of the variant, there is Cathryn Miller’s Westron Wynde (2016). Of course, the codex is not antithetical to the theme. The sense of water pours from the “Coast & Dunes” and “Banks & Brooks” sections of Margaret (Molly) Coy & Claire Bolton’s Handscapes (2016) and Bodil Rosenberg’s Vandstand (2019), though the size, shape and texture of the latter may have more in common with the sculptural and equally evocative I think that the root of the wind is water (2016) by Susan Lowdermilk and Breaking Waves (2023) by Emmy van Eijk. Still, even in this century, the scroll continues to offer an effective conduit whether in paper or pixels as Helen Douglas’ The Pond at Deuchar (2011, 2013) demonstrates.

Of all these works, Water, Calling engages multimedia the most in its invocation and evocation of the element of water. Its environmental soundscape, created by Anne Hege with a hand-built, analog looping tape machine, consists of water recordings, instrumentals and vocal incantations. To listen to excerpts from the soundtrack, click here, or to listen to the full soundtrack, click here (password required; request access here).

The Space Between (2018)

The Space Between (2018)
Camden Richards & Deborah Sibony
Casebound with cloth-covered spine between bonderized steel covers in a cloth-covered custom box. Box: H216 x W305 x D24 mm; Book: H197 x W284 x D10 mm. 50 pages. Edition of 13, of which this is #11. Acquired from the artists, 5 October 2022.
Photos: Books On Books Collection. Displayed with artists’ permission.

An earlier collaboration between Richards and Sibony, The Space Between is based on ten original monotypes printed by Sibony at Studio 1509 on a Takach press and digitally reproduced for the book by Coast Litho on Grafix matte drafting film. The work’s text is set in Mark Simonson’s Goldenbook; its typographic layout, die-cuts and letterpress printing is by Richards at Liminal Press + Bindery on Somerset Book paper with a Vandercook 4 proofing press; and its handmade paper embedded with local Bay Area plant fibers comes from Pam DeLuco of Shotwell Paper Mill. The Space Between is bound in bonderized steel covers and housed in a custom box by John DeMerritt.

The ten monotypes were inspired by the gradual removal of the eastern span of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge after its partial collapse in 1989. About that inspiration, Sibony writes:

On the day of the Loma Prieta earthquake (October 17, 1989) I had just begun commuting from San Francisco to work at Fantasy Records in Berkeley. Thus began my long-term relationship with the Bay Bridge. The quake caused the collapse of a 50-foot section of the upper deck and led to the death of a 23-year-old woman. I was fortunate not to be driving home on the bridge at the time of the earthquake, when I could easily have been returning to San Francisco. I spent that night in Berkeley with a friend since the bridge was closed to all traffic, and would remain so for several weeks.

Twenty-four years later, on September 3, 2013, a wondrous, white, single-span was set to replace the damaged eastern section of the bridge. On the day before the eastern span was closed forever and the dismantling began, I drove across that compromised structure for the last time. As I shot video from the car, a feeling struck me on a gut level: it was the start of a new era for the geography and landscape of the Bay Area — and the beginning of the end for an iconic structure that would soon cease to exist.

From then on I took photos with my iPhone whenever I drove across the new eastern span, adjacent to the closed cantilevered section, documenting its gradual deconstruction until it finally disappeared. Using a special transfer process I incorporated those images into a series of monotypes that are reproduced in The Space Between.

Sibony’s monotypes are fragments that illustrate moments of a vanishing and a metamorphosis of wood, concrete, and steel. In The Space Between, Richards uses letterpress printing, translucent substrate and die-cuts to pair Sibony’s images with text inspired by a poem by Charles Koppelman and thereby reimagines the two-dimensional monotype form into a three-dimensional book form. As the reader turns the pages, the images simultaneously build upon one another and retreat from one another, mimicking the moments of transition and creating a sense of meaning that emerges from spaces in between.

The Space Between is made with both machined and organic materials — from sheet metal covers to drafting film to handmade paper embedded with plant fibers — materials that ground it squarely in space and time as both a human and natural byproduct. The result is a physical and metaphorical exploration (and experience) of thresholds between those we physically create, those nature creates for us, and the space in between where we exist. Given the name of Richard’s enterprise — the Liminal Press — this work must hold a signal position for the publisher.

In its object and the theme it finds in the object, The Space Between resonates not only with the architecture-inspired works of book art in the Books On Books Collection but also those inspired by typography. See below.

Books On Books Collection – Rutherford Witthus

2021/10/282024/03/22Books On BooksLeave a comment

TRAIANUS (2023)

TRAIANUS (2023)
A Folly for Bibliophiles celebrating the epigraphy, iconography and the architecture of the COLUMN OF TRAJAN through Giambattista Piranesi’s etchings from his Vedute di Roma in the form of a leporello with a hidden tête-bêche woven binding containing an Abecedarium that reveals the work of L.C. Evetts in his study of the letters of the inscription at the base of Trajan’s Column & a set of contemporary photographs by Dartmouth Professor of Classics Roger B. Ulrich of various scenes from Trajan’s Column correlating the Piranesi etchings with the standard identification numbers used by Conrad Cichorius in the first complete photographic documentation of the plaster casts of Trajan’s Column done for Napoleon III and published in 1896 and 1900
Rutherford Witthus
Ebonized walnut box with stone-leaf covered sliding metal cover and hidden central compartment. Double-sided leporello of 7 panels, including title, on front; 3 panels (diagrams) on back. Double-spined Abecedarium of 38 pages and double-spined Addendum of 20 pages, bound tête-bêche together. Box: 392 x 392 x D75 mm. Leporello: closed 374 x 374 mm; extended 2224 mm (7th panel appears 20 mm deep in the base. Abecedarium & Addendum: closed H147 x W245 mm; open W760 mm. Edition of 5, of which this is #1. Acquired from the artist, 1 May 2023.
Photos: Books On Books Collection (and, where noted, Peter Roos; courtesy of the artist).

At almost 30m high with roughly 2,500 figures in a spiralling marble relief stretching 200 meters long, Trajan’s Column celebrates the Roman emperor’s military campaigns in Dacia (southern Romania). The story circles up the column from the bottom, but you’d need wings to read it. Just as important (and easier to reach) is the inscription at the base of the column. Here, the letter forms are said to show the Roman alphabet’s height of perfection. These letters may have had greater impact than all Trajan’s campaigns, and certainly influenced artists and typographers down to the present day.

One such artist was 18th-century artist, architect and archaeologist Giambattista Piranesi. Making the column more accessible, he created an etching — Veduta del prospetto principale della Colonna Trajana / View of the main elevation of Trajan’s Column (1774/79) — over six sheets and 2.6 meters tall with marginalia spelling out the panels’ story. Piranesi also included a smaller prospect in his Vedute di Roma / Views of Rome (1750/59), which help to start the Grand Tour phenomenon of the 18th century.

In the 21st century, we have Rutherford Witthus, professional librarian and, now, book artist. In TRAIANUS, his intricate “folly for bibliophiles”, Witthus pays homage to the column, the etching and the Roman alphabet.

At the dedication in 113 CE, the inscription would likely have been painted red, to which Witthus nods with the box’s slate cover. The leporello beneath that cover extends upwards, reproducing Piranesi’s etching and enriching it with Dr. Marie Orton’s new English translation of Piranesi’s marginalia.

In a compartment beneath the base’s etching, Witthus deposits two books bound together in the unusual structure called tête-bêche and swathed in a fringed linen cloth. A tête-bêche turns the books 180º to each other and attaches them back to back. These books individually have the equally unusual structure of a double-spined gate-fold (the pages overlap, meeting in the middle, and page turning proceeds with a turn to the left, a turn to right and so on).

While researching the column, Witthus found in L. C. Evetts’ Roman Lettering a ready-made Latin alphabet book, including Evetts’ “magnificent drawings of the letters, along with his charming and informative descriptions”. Witthus reproduces this alphabet book in the first side of the tête-bêche under the title A Typophilic Abecedarium.

A Typophilic Abecedarium performs a variation on the gate-fold structure that brilliantly serves the homage Witthus is paying. A recurring image of the column’s inscription runs on the left alongside Evetts’ drawings and description of the Roman letters. This is achieved with a half page that turns to the left. Below, when the half page bearing the description of A’s characteristics turns to the left, its reverse side will repeat the side of the inscription it covers up. When the full page bearing the letter A turns to the right, it reveals the half page bearing the description of B’s characteristics, the letter B itself and the full page on the right explaining the construction of the letter B.

Just for its swash’s daring cross over the gutter and the registration needed to align the image of the inscription, here’s the letter Q before and after the turning of the half page to the left and just before turning the page bearing the letter Q to the right to reveal the letter R.

On the other side of the tête-bêche lies An Addendum to the Leporello of Trajan’s Column by Giambattista Piranesi. Professor Roger B. Ulrich‘s photographs of the column expand from Turkish map folds alongside a reprise of Dr. Orton’s translation of Piranesi’s marginalia.

Photos: Peter Roos. Courtesy of the artist.

With all these features, TRAIANUS the artist’s book nods elegantly to a monumental marker in history, art and the alphabet’s journey to its Roman letter shapes. Professional photographer Peter Roos has created several images of the work. They can be found on the Witthus site. Here are just a few.

Photos: Peter Roos

Galileo Galilei (2018)

Galileo Galilei: Sopra le scoperte de i dadi/Concerning an investigation on dice (2018)
Rutherford Witthus
Panorama concertina structure. H330 x W203 x D35 mm (13 × 8 × 1.375 inches). Edition of 5, of which this is # 2. Acquired from the artist, 27 January 2022.
Photos: Books On Books Collection. Permission to display from the artist.

Forget about “artist’s book”, “bookwork”, “book art” and all that terminological fol de rol. Rutherford Witthus offers a new categorical puzzle: scholarship as art, art as scholarship. Like TRAIANUS (2023), this homage to Galileo finds a form that not only reproduces an image of his writing but also recapitulates, annotates and explores the historical artifact and its substance and, in doing so, becomes a work of art itself.

In 1612, Cosimo II, Grand Duke of Tuscany, had a burning question: since, in the three-die game Zara, there were the same number of possible combinations to throw a 9 or an 11 as there were to throw a 10 or 12, why did the 9 and 12 come up less often? Who better to answer than his former tutor Galileo Galilei? It took Galileo only four pages to give the probabilistic rationale, four pages that now reside in the Bibilioteca nazionale centrale, Firenze. A less thorough answer might have sufficed. A 9 can be rolled with a 3.3.3 triple, and 12 with a 4.4.4, but across all the possible outcomes of rolling three dice, rolling a triple is rarer than combinations of a double and one other number or of three different numbers. In fact, there are only six potential triples — 3, 6, 9, 12, 15 and 18. Since 10 and 11 have no possible triples, they are not lumbered with that rarity and so have the advantage over 9 and 12.

But fewer pages might have left the duke dissatisfied, and it would certainly have hampered the creative results of Rutherford Witthus. The multipage sculptural structure he has chosen is an innovation associated with Hedi Kyle called a panorama concertina. Notice how he uses it to illustrate one of Galileo’s key points and to suggest a bouncing roll of the dice. Arising from throwing the bone dice repeatedly and photographing the more aesthetically pleasing results, the eight images show the three types of possible combinations: 1) three different numbers, 2) a double and another number and 3) a triple. The static photos are dry mounted to floating panels aligned on one level, but the text around them rises and falls to generate a sense of motion additional to the pivoting of the floating panels.

Photo: Peter Roos.

Here is a closer horizontal look at one of the pivoting panels and, below it, four of them stretched out for a different view of the text’s motion around them. Notice how the diagonal cuts that form the floating panels create a tilt around the square photos, increasing the impression of a tumbling motion.

Views of the spine edge and the fore edge tight and slightly open offer another angle on the engineering.

Witthus further enriches the document with relevant layers of history from other periods: a 14th-century psaltery’s illumination showing two apes playing dice, an image of 15th century bone dice, a thumbnail of a 17th-century oil painting of soldiers playing dice over Christ’s tunic, and an excerpt on medieval gambling from William Heywood’s The “Ensamples” of Fra Filippo (1901).

When the colophon relates that the images of Galileo’s manuscript and the individual dice throws were printed on Asuka paper, or that the typeface used throughout is Adobe Jenson Pro, drawn by Adobe’s chief type designer Robert Slimbach from a face cut by Nicolas Jenson in Venice around 1470, or that astronomical calculations from Galileo notebooks appear on the verso of the sheets — Witthus brings present and past together. He is making Galileo’s document tangible — not in the sense of handling the treatise in the Biblioteca but in the tactility afforded by the tools and techniques of book art.

Galileo’s tomb, Santa Croce, Florence. Photos: Books On Books.

Skip for Joy (2021)

Skip for Joy (2021)
Rutherford Witthus
Dragon-scale scroll bound to bamboo rod. H306 x W477 mm, 11 panels. Edition of 5, of which this is #1. Acquired from the artist, 18 August 2021.
Photos of the work: Books On Books Collection. Displayed with permission of the artist.

Rutherford Witthus’ work is strong, quiet, broad and distinctive. It blends Eastern and Western traditions of the book arts. It joins the blackletter fonts of the Cistercian monks with the typography of Hermann Zapf. It joins John Cage’s chance-determined selection in the creation of art with a group of physicists’ fascination with the crumpling of paper. It experiments with abstract art and Japanese fore-edge illustration and binding. It offers a meditation on Gilles Deleuze’s The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque through an intricately folded reprinting. The artist’s eclectic appreciation of the work of Sappho, Walt Whitman, St. Francis, Gilles Deleuze, Søren Kierkegaard, Ernst Haeckel, Robert Herrick, Miguel de Unamuno and others finds an impressive unity across his body of work. Skip for Joy is the first of his works to be added to the Books On Books Collection.

Compounding its compelling structure, Skip for Joy displays accumulating lines of text one by one until there are ten lines of text on the tenth panel. For each line, Witthus draws its words and expressions from an entry in Roget’s Thesaurus. As each panel grows in width to play its part in the dragon-scale binding, each line grows, too, repeating words and adding more synonyms from its entry in Roget’s. Compounding the scaling of structure and text, Witthus varies his lines in color and position. Starting with the phrase “skip for joy” in orange on the first panel, he then adds the phrase “grit one’s teeth” in violet on the second panel beneath the orange line; then “desire” in red on the third above the orange line; then “do up and do” in turquoise on the fourth; and so on.

Second panel

Third panel

Fourth panel

What does Roget’s Thesaurus have to do with dragon-scale binding? The scroll’s first phrase and title provide a clue: an imperative to play. Anyone interested in playing with the dragon-scale (or whirlwind) binding usually goes to the site of the International Dunhuang Project: The Silk Road Online. Among its descriptions so far of the forty thousand works found in the Buddhist cave library near China’s Dunhuang on the western edge of the Gobi desert in 1900, there is this passage:

Old Chinese accounts of whirlwind binding are very rare. However, there was a trail of clues left by a Tang dynasty (AD 618-907) rhyme dictionary called Kanmiu buque qieyun (Corrected rhymes), by Wang Renxu. … From the earliest accounts from the Song dynasty up to the Qing dynasty (AD 1644-1911), references to whirlwind bound books have always been connected with this text. … / Several examples of what is believed to be whirlwind binding have now been discovered in the Dunhuang collections of the Bibliothèque nationale de France and the British Library. Most of these have not been rebound, so it is possible to get a clear impression how these manuscripts were bound and why they were bound in this manner. — IDP

Where Western reference works are organized alphabetically, the Qièyùn rhyming dictionary is organized phonologically. But that phonological organization is complex: starting first by grouping characters according to the five tones, then grouping them into rhyming groups according to a character’s initial consonant, and then into groups according to the rhyme of a character’s final consonant. And determining those rhymes requires instructions — the fanqie method that explains via other characters how a character entry should be pronounced. In short, organization by phonological similarities — of tone, initial rhyming consonant and final rhyming consonant.

So to follow the lead of the dragon-scale bound Qièyùn, Witthus picks an English-language reference work whose entries offer plenty of content based on similarities — such as synonyms. Skip for Joy is playful art. Its “rhymes” are the repetitions and synonyms in a line of text. Its lines of text jump into the panels where they will and in whatever color that suits. In the tenth panel, the seventh line even breaks into a dragon-like undulation.

Tenth panel

As the dragon-scale scroll returns to its archival box, its colors and undulating line unite with the dragon in the box’s silk onlay.

Books On Books Collection – Nif Hodgson

2021/10/282022/03/31Books On BooksLeave a comment

Fluid Horizons (2021)

Fluid Horizons (2021)
Nif Hodgson
Slipcase. Modified dragon-scale concertina. Slipcase: H91 x W158 mm. Book: H90 x W156 mm, 20 panels. Variable edition of 10, of which this is #1. Acquired from 23 Sandy Gallery, 2 September 2021.
Photos of the work: Books On Books Collection. Displayed with artist’s permission.

The opportunity to add another dragon-scale binding (see Rutherford Witthus and Zhang Xiaodong below) to the collection would have been incentive enough. The binding of Fluid Horizons is not, however, the usual dragon-scale binding as applied to multi-leaved scrolls. It comprises an effective accordion spine with leaves attached to the inside folds. What made Fluid Horizons irresistible is the effect the structure achieves with the unusual technique and material: screenprint and archival pigment ink on Arista II transparency film, Duralar polyester film and Lexan polycarbonate film.

Each book in an edition varies because its twenty images are selected from hundreds of photographs taken by Hodgson with the same horizon-dimension. Although not in sequence, each image influences the selection of the next, which creates a sense of progression. With the gradation of light and transparency across the selection, the sense of progression increases. But it is not a “film-like” progression of images, or snapshots taken one after another in sequence. Like memory and our sense of time, on which this work meditates, the progression is a fragile reconstruction. The transparent materials, expandable accordion spine and fluttering panels reflect the ephemeral, flexible and fragmentary way in which memory is shaped while also being affected by perception in the moment.

There is a further material ephemerality to the work. The panel surface is delicate, subject to dissolving from contact with moisture, smudging from fingers and scratching from grit. As Hodgson puts it, “the sensitive materials lightly wear with viewing and play, just as memory faintly fogs with time and recollection”. Fluid Horizons is a stunning union of form and metaphor.

Books On Books Collection – Robin Price

2020/07/072021/05/07Books On BooksLeave a comment

as you continue (2012)

as you continue (2012)

Robin Price

Housed in acrylic tube, eight pages including letterpress printed colophon page, seven pages of USGS topographic maps inscribed with sumi ink by hand, bound with a small piece of Fabriano Tiziano green in Japanese side-stitch. H184 x W679.5 mm unfurled. Edition of approximately 65, of which this one is dated and initialed on 7 November 2012. Acquired from the artist, 25 March 2015. Photos: Books On Books Collection.

When as you continue first appeared, Jen Larson wrote of it in Multiple, Limited, Unique: Selections from the Permanent Collection of the Center for Book Arts (2011):

… this work serves as an elegant meditation and metaphor on the subject of life journeys — and orienting oneself in the midst of landscape or circumstance that can only be apprehended by survey and the will to move forward.

The year 2012 marked the centennial of composer and artist John Cage’s birth. An aficionado of “chance”, Robin Price revisited this work that had begun in December 2010 when she discovered on the Crown Point Press’ Magical-Secrets website the quotation by Cage. Cage had made this remark to Kathan Brown in 1989 after the Crown Point Press’ building was condemned following an earthquake. By chance, it now seemed fitting as a centenary birthday wish to this artistic master of “the purposeful use of chance and randomness”. Also by purposeful chance, Price turned to a technique that seemed entirely fitting for the work, its history and her personal perspective. Price writes:

… I took up the project anew and practiced writing on several different occasions, feeling dissatisfied with various trials. Eventually I found my way to writing with my left (non-dominant) hand as the most authentic expression I could bring to the content, as visualization of struggle, fear, and acceptance of imperfection.

Counting on Chance (2010)

Counting on Chance: 25 Years of Artists’ Books by Robin Price, Publisher,(2010)

Robin Price

Perfect bound. H305 x W229 mm. Acquired from the artist, 25 March 2015. Photos: Books On Books Collection.

The very covers of the book were created by chance operations. Generated solely on press using three of the four process color printing plates from the book’s interior via “make-ready”, areas of image were built up on the paper by repeatedly passing the sheets through the press, and consistently rotating the sheets prior to their feeding through ensured variation among the covers within the edition.

In addition to the theme core to Price’s art, Counting on Chance embodies another aspect key to her work: choice and collaboration. Published in conjunction with the exhibition held at Wesleyan University’s Davison Art Center, the volume includes a brilliant essay by Betty Bright, interview by Suzy Taraba and a catalogue raisonné prepared by Rutherford Witthus. Like choosing the right colors, the right combination of fonts, the right layout, the right weight and opacity of paper, and the right structure, Price’s choice of collaborators (or their choice of her) in her work and publishing is an artistic practice itself.

The Anatomy Lesson (2004)

The Anatomy Lesson: Unveiling the Fasciculus Medicinae (2004)

Joyce Cutler-Shaw

Housed in a custom-made, engraved stainless steel box (H370 x W326 x D44 mm), concertina binding co-designed with Daniel E. Kelm and Joyce Cutler-Shaw, produced at The Wide Awake Garage; twelve signatures of handmade cotton text paper, the central ten signatures each made up of one sheet H356 x W514 mm and one sheet H356 x W500 mm glued to the 14 mm margin of the first sheet, for a total of 96 pages, each measuring H356 x W253 mm.
Binding of leather covered boards (a hologram embedded in front cover) with an open spine, taped and sewn into a reinforcing concertina structure: H361 X W259 mm.
The hologram, produced by DuPont Authentication Systems, features an early eighteenth-century brass lancet. Edition of 50, of which this is a binder’s copy. Acquired from the binder, Daniel E. Kelm, 15 October 2018.

Generating two double-page spreads, one for the Fasciculus Medicinae on the left and Cutler-Shaw on the right, the foldout pages extend to 1016 mm.

Responding to the 1993 Smithsonian challenge to book artists to create a work in response to a scientific or technical work in the Dibner Library, Joyce Cutler-Shaw approached Price for assistance in creating a unique book based on Shaw’s response to the Fasciculus Medicinae (1495), the first printed book with anatomical illustrations. A decade later, Price was convinced to issue this 50-copy edition. In Counting On Chance, Betty Bright recounts the story behind this brilliant collaboration. Detail and additional images about the work can be found here.

Books On Books

Curated by Robert Bolick

Rutherford Witthus

Books On Books Collection – Camden Richards & Deborah Sibony

Water, Calling (2021)

The Space Between (2018)

Further Reading

Books On Books Collection – Rutherford Witthus

TRAIANUS (2023)

Galileo Galilei (2018)

Skip for Joy (2021)

Further Reading

Books On Books Collection – Nif Hodgson

Fluid Horizons (2021)

Further Reading

Books On Books Collection – Robin Price

as you continue (2012)

Counting on Chance (2010)

The Anatomy Lesson (2004)

Further Reading

Bookmarking Book Art – New England Guild of Book Workers