Seth Siegelaub

Books On Books Collection – Inscription: The Journal of Material Text, Issue 5 (Containers)

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Inscription: The Journal of Material Text, Issue 5 (2025)

Although Theodore Roethke had a woman in mind when he wrote “The shapes a bright container can contain!”, the phrase readily comes to mind for this issue of Inscription once you’re past the difficult-to-brighten-up cardboard packaging. Not that you should rip through and discard it. The clues to proceed patiently are the label “recto” on one edge of the box and the page cut from a book and pasted on the box’s top. Is “recto” some sort of “this side up” label? If so, it seems topsy-turvy. Recto (or right-hand) pages are usually have odd-numbered, but the pasted-down book page is numbered 20. Wait a second; those random colored rectangles have been printed over the book page as if meant to draw attention to the “gridness” of the apartment blocks. Maybe this box is meant to be preserved and framed (after all, Toulouse-Lautrec drew on cardboard).

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Books On Books Collection – “Books on Books” edited by Jérôme Saint-Loubert Bié

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Artists ‘ book s are often self-conscious about the elements of book structure. This can involve self-reflexive humor or serious philosophical interrogations of a book’s identity. Disturbing conventions of reading by calling attention to these structures is often a feature of artists ‘ books through an emphasis on the features of the page and pointing to the book as a whole. But a book can also be a self-conscious record of its own production – it can simply examine itself as a proposition – one laden with specific ideas about the ways a book can embody an idea through its material forms. There are really two subtexts here. One is the “idea of the book as Idea” – the self-reflexive creation of books · which are about being books, or what a book can be as an idea in form. The other is the “idea of the book as art idea” – which takes these investigations of the book into a dialogue with the concept of art, and shows that books are an art idea. — Drucker, 2004.

Books on Books (2011)

Books on Books (2011)
Jérôme Saint-Loubert Bié, Yann Sérandour & Jonathan Monk
Perfect bound paperback. H160 x W115. 260 pages. Acquired from Chapitre.com, 29 November 2023.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.

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