Walter Hamady

Book designer, bookbinding http://www.ttbook.org/walter-hamady

Books On Books Collection – Buzz Spector

Books On BooksLeave a comment

With the exception of Unpacking my Library and Between the Sheets, Spector’s works in the Books On Books Collection fall into the category of ephemera. More than most book artists’ ephemera such as invitations, broadsides and the like, however, Buzz Spector’s ephemera have that self-reflexiveness so characteristic of book art.

The Book Made Art (1986)

The Book Made Art: A Selection of Contemporary Artists’ Books, exhibited in the Joseph Regenstein Library, The University of Chicago, February through April 1986
Curated and edited by Jeffrey Abt; catalogue designed by Buzz Spector.
Saddle-stitched, staples; H200 x W200 mm.
Chicago: University of Chicago Library, 1986.

Artist, curator and historian Jeffrey Abt wrote that the “irresistible” idea of placing an exhibition of artists’ books alongside the University of Chicago Library’s collection “broadly representative of the history of the book” started with a visit to famed art dealer Tony Zwicker‘s studio. It was also, however, almost as if he were taking a cue from this statement by artist-printers Betsy Davids and Jim Petrillo just the year before:

A representative collection of artists’ books often does not seem visually remarkable in a gallery, where a wide range of visual experience is the norm. The same collection, installed in a library or bookstore, can seem visually startling almost beyond the limits of decorum. — “The Artist as Book Printer: Four Short Courses”).

While Abt’s introductory essay rings the historical changes on the roots of book art — once there was Mallarmé’s Un Coup de Dés Jamais N’Abolira Le Hasard, but before Mallarmé, there was William Blake — the works included and the catalogue’s design ring some chimes of their own about book art. One way or another, all book art self-consciously draws attention to some particularly bookish element. For the most part, the 49 works listed in this catalogue ring true. The catalogue’s design itself, however, not only chimes to that notion of self-reflexiveness but also to wider notions about the nature of book art within contemporary art.

Not long after this exhibition, Spector wrote of “the language of the book” and all its parts — pages, signatures, cover, letter forms and their placement on the page, etc. — as having a syntax (“Going Over the Books”). With its pencil-circled numbers, alignment guides, pastedowns and other designer’s marks appearing throughout — as if a printer’s devil had run amok and let the marked-up proofs go to press unchanged — the catalogue draws attention to that syntax, the underlying processes of bookmaking and, therefore, this object’s “bookness”. The colophon’s note initialed by Jeffrey Abt to Buzz Spector and “pasted” on the last page jokingly rings the self-reflexive chime of the markings throughout the catalogue.

The second chime comes in the catalogue’s verbal and visual punning. Like book art, punning is self-reflexive, words playing on words. The title ”the book made art” can be read with different meanings: “the book made into art”, “art that is bookish” and so on. The catalogue’s trim and two-dimensional representation of three-dimensions create the visual pun of a glass or white cube. The verbal and visual puns also play with Abt’s “irresistible” context. Here in the Joseph Regenstein Library was an exhibition catalogue, teasing the viewer with a reminder that vitrines separated them from the bookworks. Reviewing two other exhibitions of book art, Spector elaborated explicitly on his visual tongue-in-cheek irony:

The dilemma in staging exhibitions of books as art objects is the denial of access to the work that conservation necessarily demands. … and it is a more than passing irony that implications of hermeticism and elitism should surround books shown to a public using the library as a means of gaining access to texts. — “Art Readings”.

The catalogue also teases with its title and design by suggesting that once books have been placed on display like this, the setting is no longer a library but a “white cube gallery“. As the catalogue progresses, black-and-white photos of items from the exhibition appear on the verso page in frames that appear to be hanging on the trompe l’oeil cube’s rear wall.

Poster distributed on the University of Chicago campus.
The image combines Michael Kostiuk’s Airplane Shadow Book (1981/82) with a variation of the catalogue cover.
Photo: Courtesy of the artist.

But a viewer standing in the “brutalist” construct of the Regenstein Library and holding the finished catalogue might have asked, “What makes these objects I cannot touch — or, in some cases even if I could, cannot read — art?” There is the catalogue’s third chime. From the start, book art has faced a constant definitional or identity crisis and even the challenge “but is it art?” The catalogue’s title echoes Lucy Lippard’s Duchampian proposition: “It’s an artist book if an artist made it, or if an artist says it is”. The catalogue’s design says, “This is the gallery, these are the objects on display in it, they are art”.

The “white cube gallery” brings on a fourth and final ironic chime. In the 1970s and early ‘80s, artists’ books were pitched as a “democratic” medium and means by which art could escape the clutches of the gallery and reach a wider public. In another catalogue — the one for the 1973 Moore College exhibition, nominated as the first of book art — John Perreault writes:

Books as art, from the artist’s point of view and the viewer’s point of view, are practical and democratic. They do not cost as much as prints. They are portable, personal, and, if need be, disposable. Because books are easily mailed, books as art are aiding in the decentralisation of the art system. — “Some Thoughts on Books as Art”.

By the mid-80s, lo and behold, The Book Made Art’s catalogue-cum-gallery jokingly recaptures “books as art”. And in a further irony, by the mid-80s and since, the increased rareness and price of such bookworks have made them into galleries‘ and museums’ expensive objects of desire. Including this catalogue.

The Library of Babel (1991)

The Library of Babel
Curated and edited by Todd Alden; catalogue designed by Buzz Spector.
Dos-à-dos binding, offset. H241 x 177 mm
Buffalo, NY: Hallwalls Contemporary Art Center, Hallwalls Inc., 1991.
Photo of the work: Books On Books Collection.

As with The Book Made Art, Spector uses the cover (this time with a photograph of The Library of Babel) to introduce the self-reflexivity so characteristic of book art, but he does not stop there. Pagination and the back-to-back binding structure work together to evoke a mirror’s reflection; the last page of the first half “faces” the last page of the second half.

Photo of the work: Books On Books Collection.

The first half contains Todd Alden’s essay “The Library of Babel: Books to Infinity”, Paul Holdengräber’s “Unpacking Benjamin’s Library: Bibliomania in Dark Times”, and a checklist of the 34 works by their 10 artists.

Photo of the work: Books On Books Collection.

The second half contains half-tones of selected works and brief CVs of the artists. Among the half-tones are also photographs of works referenced by Alden (one by Jasper Johns, two by Marcel Broodthaers). Notice how the rules change position in the footers of the two halves, again evoking the back-to-front theme of the dos-à-dos binding.

Photo of the work: Books On Books Collection.

As in The Book Made Art, Spector had an entry in “The Library of Babel“ exhibition. With its torn pages, North Sea (for M.B.) (1990) echoes Altered LeWitt (1985), further below, but it is instead a work 10 feet long and presented on a table appropriately jutting out from the wall like a pier. “M.B.” is Marcel Broodthaers, to whose works there are multiple and layered references. The eleven “waves” of torn pages placed in a row on top of the steel shelf are the excised material from another of Spector’s works: Marcel Broodthaers, made from eleven copies of the Walker Art Center’s 1987 catalogue to Broodthaers’s first U.S. retrospective. Spector painted all the pages in each copy with white gesso before excising them and leaving behind his 1990 “altered Broodthaers”.

Marcel Broodthaers (1990)
Buzz Spector
An altered copy of: Marcel Broodthaers (Minneapolis/New York: Walker Art Center/Rizzoli, 1989).
Photos: Courtesy of Buzz Spector.

He saved the excised “wedges” and bound them at the fore edges. Because the gesso does not completely obscure the text and images from the catalogues, viewers who come close to the work can see slivers of some of Broodthaers’ works along with the word fragments typical of Spector’s altered books.

North Sea (for M.B.) (1990)
Buzz Spector
Books, steel, gesso, 25 x 96 x 10 inches
Collection Orange County Museum of Art,CA; Museum purchase with additional funds provided by Peter and Eileen Norton and the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency.
Photo: Courtesy Orange County Museum of Art.

Spector’s library contains a copy of Broodthaers’ 1974 artist book, A Voyage on the North Sea. These layered references and self-references — direct references to Broodthaers’ A Voyage, indirect references through the self-reference to Spector’s Marcel Broodthaers (1990) — bring into sparkling focus two features of book art and, in particular, late 20th century book art: reverse ekphrasis and bookworks in conversation with one another.

When a visual work of art inspires poetry or prose, the literary result is called ekphrastic:  “the verbal representation of visual representation”. But where the poets Keats, Auden and Jarrell, for example, use words to “recreate”, re-present, evoke or respond to works of art — an antique urn, a painting by Brueghel and Donatello’s sculpture of “David” — book artists have in turn used the letter, words, actual books, the physical materials of the book or even the shape of books, their functions or processes of making them to create works of art. A kind of ekphrasis in reverse. 

Not only does Spector perform this reverse ekphrasis with exhibition catalogues in North Sea (M.B.), he does it in conversation with a multimedia work by Broodthaers. Works in conversation with one another is also a common occurrence in poetry. An entire anthology showcases these poems that talk to other poems. The later work not only evokes the earlier work, it illuminates and adds to it. In book art, other instances include Bruce Nauman’s Burning Small Fires (1968), a one-sheet folded book of photos of Ed Ruscha’s Various Small Fires and Milk (1964) being set on fire and burning to ash, and Dennis Oppenheim’s Flower Arrangement for Bruce Nauman (1970), a leporello which refers to Nauman’s Flour Arrangements (1967), a video in which the artist pours over 50 pounds of flour on a mock talk-show studio floor and then sculpts it into ephemeral shapes. Nauman’s shift to an ingenious folded single-sheet structure and Oppenheim’s shift (and pun) to an accordion view of flowers are part of the addition to their conversations with their very structurally different counterparts. Spector’s shift to the sculptural is part of the addition to his conversation with Broodthaers’ book and video. Consider not only Spector’s gessoed sea of pages and the pier, but also those two 19th century black bronze sailing ship bookends evoking the 19th century nautical painting that Broodthaers appropriated in A Voyage on the North Sea.

North Sea (for M.B.) (1990)
Buzz Spector
Books, steel, gesso, 25 x 96 x 10 inches
Collection Orange County Museum of Art,CA; Museum purchase with additional funds provided by Peter and Eileen Norton and the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency.
Photo: Courtesy Orange County Museum of Art.

Screenshot of “Marcel Broodthaers: A Voyage to the North Sea“, an exhibition at Specific Object, 28 January-20 March 2009.

Unpacking my Library (1995)

Unpacking my Library (1994-95)
Buzz Spector
Leporello full-colour offset printed; folded H100 x W155 mm, unfolded W3600 mm; Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art.
Installation exhibited at the San Diego State University Art Gallery, 1-31 October 1994.
Photo of the work: Books On Books Collection.

Clearly from his entry in The Library of Babel, Spector’s artistic output extends beyond altered books and catalogue design to larger scale installations. One of the more well-known, Unpacking my Library imposes multiple orders on what Walter Benjamin called “the chaos of memories”. How “multiple orders”? First, because of its subtleties; second, because of its several forms.

From the start at the San Diego State University Art Gallery, 1-31 October 1994, the installation imposed the order of “descending height” on Spector’s library, unpacked and displayed across one shelf attached along the white walls of a room in the gallery. The single shelf ran 188 feet.

Although Spector is rejecting the library’s traditional method of making sense of a collection of books — ordering by academic category — in favor of a physical criterion, the title imposes another method of making sense — allusion. The installation makes “more” sense if you have read Walter Benjamin’s essay “Unpacking My Library — A Talk on Collecting” (1931). If you haven’t, then, on the reverse of the leporello produced with the Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art, are these two sentences from the essay:

This or any other procedure is merely a dam against the spring tide of memories which surges toward any collector as he contemplates his possessions. Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector’s passion borders on the chaos of memories.

So what has ordering by height to do with the chaos of memories? Well, if the order of the personal library had been chronological by acquisition, that would be an assertion against chaos, a kind of aide- mèmoire. If the order had been by the library’s traditional method, again that would be an assertion against chaos. Benjamin and Spector embrace the chaos. Spector’s at-first amusing and puzzling organization of his library prods the viewer into the chance to do somewhat the same — to wander along the shelf with that phrase of process hovering in the mind and be reminded of books once read (when? where?), familiar and almost-familiar names and places (from when or where?) and subjects studied (what did that cover?). But the viewer also experiences a surge of unknown names, places and subjects, and spines that mystify.

The allusion to Benjamin’s essay offers another way of making sense of this experience into which the viewer is prodded. If a personal library is a kind of self portrait you can detect from the clues that its usual groupings into fiction, biographies, history, science, etc., give us about the owner, then here the order by height washes them and the portrait away. And if the viewer knows the essay, Benjamin’s last sentence may come to mind:

So I have erected one of [the real collector’s] dwellings, with books as the building stones, before you, and now he going to disappear inside, as is fitting. — Walter Benjamin, “Unpacking My Library”

Screenshot from Buzz Spector, inSITE 94 (interview).

Spector mentions this disappearance in a video record of the making and showing of the installation. Whether or not the installation’s spectator knows Benjamin’s essay, the installation’s title is a clue to the imposition of a fictional order. “Unpacking my library” is a phrase implying an activity that is just getting going. For his essay, Benjamin created the fiction of the reader’s being present as the library is being unpacked. Likewise for Spector’s installation, any spectator walking into it has entered a fiction. Spector’s library has already been unpacked, sorted on the floor and placed on the single shelf running around the room.

Of course, however, the owner of the leporello form of Unpacking my Library does not experience this fiction as directly. The opening and arranging of the leporello is a hands-on activity; the unpacking of Spector’s library occurs panel by panel in the reader’s hands. The library’s arrangement by height appears more gradually than in the gallery. Once the bookwork is fully extended, the installation’s fiction then becomes more readily available to the leporello’ s reader/viewer.

Photo of the work: Books On Books Collection.

As fictions, Benjamin’s essay and Spector’s installation need an ending. Benjamin’s technique is to disappear into his collection. Spector chooses a different technique. In correspondence with Books On Books, he writes:

The length of all the publications in my library was 165 feet; the single shelf, at the UCSD Art Gallery, on which they were placed ran 188 feet. That additional space implied a future, and life-affirming, growth of my collection. — Buzz Spector, 26 March 2020.

Photo of the work: Books On Books Collection.

Whether it is leporello or installation, the reader/viewer of Unpacking my Library is launching and launched on this open-ended ending.

The Book Maker’s Desire (1995)

The Book Maker’s Desire: Writings on the Art of the Book
Buzz Spector
Pasadena, CA: Umbrella Editions, 1995. 2nd printing.
Cover design by Buzz Spector. Image: History of Europe (1983) by Buzz Spector; plaster over found book, 10.5 x 12 x 15 inches.
Photo of the work: Books On Books Collection.

Spector’s essays are tonic. His comments on Margaret Wharton’s bookworks could refresh any reader and viewer lucky enough to see her works (Union League Club-Chicago or Yale) or remind the viewer of them when looking at works by later artists such as Thomas Wightman or the “Mystery Book Artist of Edinburgh”. In the past few months, Walter Hamady and John Baldessari have died, and Spector’s essays on them bring them both and particular works of theirs to present life. His essay and letter on Broodthaers would enhance any reading of the artists who have stood on Broodthaers’ shoulders to address Mallarmé’s Un Coup de Dés: Bennequin, Mutel, Pichler, Wyn Evans, Zboya. The essay “Going Over the Books” may have inspired Alden’s curation of ‘The Library of Babel” exhibition.

The essays are not entirely the point of having The Book Maker’s Desire in the Books On Books Collection. What completes the point is the cover design. The object on the book’s front cover is Spector’s own work History of Europe (1983), which pays homage to Broodthaers’ Pense-Bête (1964). But look closer. The cover stock has elements of text and colour seeping through, almost as if it were made of shredded books. The aptness and artistry of the cover design make The Book Maker’s Desire an object of desire in and of itself.

Detail of cover: Books On Books Collection.

Between the Sheets (2003)

Between the Sheets (2003)
Buzz Spector
Cloth over boards, Japanese stab binding, 15 folded sheets, outer sides offset printed with enlarged “artist photos” clipped from dust jackets of art books repurposed by Spector for his bookworks, inner side printed (recto only) with text by and selected by Spector. H157.5 x W216 x D12.7 mm. Edition of 40, of which this is #40. Acquired from Olive Branch Press, 26 June 2020.
Photos of the work: Books On Books Collection.

Buzz Spector: Alterations (2020)

Buzz Spector: Alterations (2020)
Buzz Spector
Gretchen L. Wagner; Elizabeth Wyckoff; Andrea Ferber Brochure. H254 x W256 mm, 4 unnumbered pages. Acquired from the artist, 23 June 2020.
Photos of the work: Books On Books Collection.

Two items of ephemera make up this entry: a pristine copy of the announcement for Spector’s retrospective at the Saint Louis Art Museum, held 20 November 2020 through 31 May 31 2021; and a copy of it with the front cover hand torn by the artist. Both are displayed in the images above and below. Again, Spector makes an ephemeral piece echo the works in the exhibition.

Photos of the work: Books On Books Collection.

Between the Lines (2021)

Between the Lines (2021)
Buzz Spector
Elizabeth Wyckoff, Gretchen L. Wagner, Meredith Malone, Michael Garzel, Jane E. Neidhardt
Perfect bound paperback. H268 x W 230 mm, 81 pages. Acquired from the artist, 10 March 2021.
Photo of the work: Books On Books Collection.

The Zolla/Lieberman Gallery, which has supported Spector’s work since 1995, sponsored this monograph following 2020/21 retrospective held at the Saint Louis Art Museum. As a slightly less ephemeral item, it neatly rounds off this entry. Its cover image shows one of Spector’s well-known alterations: Altered LeWitt (1985), one of five of the found and hand-torn catalogue: Sol LeWitt, Drawing Series I, II, III, IIII A & B (Turin, Italy, at the Galleria Sperone, 1974). Compare it with North Sea (for M.B), above, which Spector created five years after Altered LeWitt. Spector extends the technique and concept across the two works in distinctive ways to echo two distinctive artists and yet also speak to commonalities and originality among the three artists.

Photo of Between the Lines (pp. 12-13): Books On Books Collection.

Between the Lines‘ presentation of the works is spectacular. Recalling the effect in The Book Made Art (above), they seem to float three dimensionally on the page. The detail photo of Unpacking my Library across a double-page spread offers a good example, especially when compared with the images above.

Photo of Between the Lines (pp.16-17): Books On Books Collection.

Between the Lines also provides the opportunity to end this entry with an image of the work incorporating an image of the author and his generosity toward his fellow bookworkers. Note in particular the reference to Michael Garzel, the monograph’s designer and creator of the typeface used so strikingly on the cover, for chapter titles and here in the heading “Acknowledgments”.

Photo of Between the Lines (pp. 4-5): Books On Books Collection.

Revised entry, 24 September 2021; original entry, 31 March 2020.

Further Reading

“Buzz Spector“, Bookmarking Book Art, 12 March 2016.

Baran, Jessica. 16 March 2021. “Showing What Has Been Forgotten“. Art in America. Accessed 23 September 2021.

Benezra, Neal. “Buzz Spector: The Library of Babel and Other Works“, [exhibition] 16 February – 17 April 1988, The Art Institute of Chicago. Accessed 26 March 2020.

Davids, Betsy, and Jim Petrillo. “The Artist as Book Printer: Four Short Courses” in Artists’ Books: A Critical Anthology and Sourcebook, edited by Joan Lyons (Rochester, NY: Visual Studies Workshop Press, 1985), p. 160.

Krauss, Rosalind. “A Voyage on the North Sea”: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition (London: Thames & Hudson, 1999). Accessed 26 March 2020.

Lippard, Lucy. “New Artist’s Books” in Artists’ Books. A Critical Anthology and Sourcebook, edited by Joan Lyons (Rochester, NY: Visual Studies Workshop Press,1985), p. 53.

Mathews, Emily, and Sylvia Page. “Off the Shelf and Into the Gallery: Librarians on Spector”, Buzz Spector: Off the Shelf, Grunwald Gallery of Art, October 19 — November 16, 2012 (Bloomington, IN: Grunwald Gallery of Art, Indiana University, 2012), pp. 9-15.

Otten, Liam. “A sea of torn pages“, The Source, Washington University in St. Louis, 26 February 2010. Accessed 26 March 2020.

Perrault, John. “Some Thoughts on Books as Art” in Artists Books, Moore College of Art, 23 March – 20 April 1973, curated by Dianne Perry Vanderlip (Philadelphia, PA: Moore College of Art, 1973), p. 21.

Platzker, David. “Marcel Broodthaers : A Voyage on the North Sea”, Specific Object, New York, New York, 28 January — 20 March 2009. Accessed 31 March 2020.

Ray, Ashley. 28 December 2020. “At the Saint Louis Art Museum, artist Buzz Spector considers literature by playing editor“. St. Louis Magazine. Accessed 23 September 2021.

Schlesinger, Kyle. “The Missing Book”, Buzz Spector: Off the Shelf, Grunwald Gallery of Art, October 19 — November 16, 2012 (Bloomington, IN: Grunwald Gallery of Art, Indiana University, 2012), pp. 17-25.

Spector, Buzz. “Going Over the Books” in The Book Maker’s Desire (Pasadena, CA: Umbrella Editions, 1995), p. 8.

Spector, Buzz. “Art Readings” in The Book Maker’s Desire (Pasadena, CA: Umbrella Editions, 1995), p. 13.

Spector, Buzz. “I stack things. I tear stuff up”, Buzz Spector: Shelf Life: selected works, Bruno David Gallery, January 22 — March 6, 2010 (Saint Louis, MO: Bruno David Gallery, 2010).

Spector, Buzz. 25 March 2021. “Art Speaks“. Saint Louis Art Museum. Video series of artists’ talks. Accessed 23 August 2021.

Books On Books Collection – Aaron Cohick

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The New Manifesto of the NewLights Press (third iteration) (2017)

The New Manifesto of the NewLights Press (third iteration) (2017) Aaron Cohick
Booklet, saddle-stapled, risograph, letterpress/collagraph, and hand painting. H165.1 x W139.7 mm (closed), 20 pages. #000611, unlimited, iterative edition. Acquired from New Lights Press, 11 December 2020.
Photos: Books On Books Collection. Displayed with permission of the artist.

The New Manifesto of the NewLights Press (third iteration) has multiple starting points. Even in its first iteration, we have

  • The book is a dangerously unstable object, always between, continuously opening. It is interstitial, occupying many planes at once.
  • Digital technology has killed the book, finally.
  • The book is an impossible thing — comprised entirely of edges and full of holes. It moves. It happens in between.
  • Readers move through authors and books. Books move through readers and authors. Authors move through books and readers. They exist between each other’s pages. They only exist in between.
  • The form of the book, the history of the book, and the processes involved in its production provide a foundation for rethinking and re-evaluating the dominant discourse(s) of contemporary art.
  • The book … exemplifies a model that expands beyond form and content…. It is a field, whose axis points [form, content, production and reception] are always held in tension. In this model a piece or practice is a “zone of activity.”

Moreover, there are ten refinements on these starting points, touching on Julia Kristeva’s “intertextuality”, Roland Barthes’ “death of the author”, Michel Foucault’s “death of the book” and much more in the same vein. Each iteration even has diagram and footnotes, underscoring the academic nature of the starting points.

The New Manifesto of the Newlights Press (first iteration) (2009)

The second iteration emphasizes the starting points of physicality and more so the role of the reader:

  • [The book] is shot through with sunlight, hooks, teeth. It blinds, catches, gnaws.
  • From the book we gather the scraps of ourselves …
  • [T]he reader is both a consumer and a producer.
  • Our existence is a constant generating of text.
  • A book read is a book alive — breathing, beating, shining and reverberating through its readers.

But the second iteration’s most important additional starting point is this:

  • We find [books] participating more & more in the world of visual art. This is extremely dangerous, but also potentially revelatory.

The New Manifesto of the Newlights Press (second iteration) (2013)

By its third iteration, The New Manifesto‘s words been further refined as a combination of announcement, exposition, lyric and prayer. It soars beyond literary theories and finds birds of a closer feather among Ulises Carrión and Michalis Pichler.

The book is a dangerously unstable object // It is a series of edges // Once clustered and knotted // Now open and spreading // Now cutting and bending // Mostly // The book betrays // Mostly // The book howls // The book falls apart in the face of our anguish // In the face of our quiet // In the silence of our slipping // Mostly // It will also always be something else // That we did not // Can not yet // See // The book is a remarkable technology // It is a shimmering substance // It is a noise of the hands and thought // The book is perhaps now a dead thing // In the hands of the dead // So be it // We never mattered much anyway // Beyond our capacity to consume // Our capacity to labor // We are fuel // So be it // We remain in the dark // With these books // The original autonomous window technology that is us looking through // At // In // Against // With care // The book returns our labor to us //

If a new edition of Publishing Manifestos is ever issued, Cohick’s hortatory words should be considered. The words, however, cannot be considered alone. Over the three iterations, The New Manifesto — the only one in the collection and, therefore, the only one tangible for the visitor — has “participated more & more in the world of visual art”. Cohick’s use of the collagraphic technique increases. It adds painterliness to the booklets as well as a sense of depth and spatial play within the page, across the gutter and from recto to verso pages. In a series of online essays for the College Book Art Association, Cohick confirms the pleasure and intent here:

Collagraph is a well-known technique and is usually taught as part of introductory letterpress courses. It has an immediacy and fidelity that is very exciting—you can stick a leaf or other flat object to a block, print it, and get a decent image of that object. Unfortunately it usually stops there. Those flat objects are hard to push beyond that initial single-color print. Linoleum, photopolymer, wood and metal type, and to some extent woodcut are all made to be “neutral” printing surfaces—flat and smooth. Trying to get collagraph to be flat and smooth begs the question: why use collagraph at all? In collagraph the material that makes the plate is not neutral—the material is exactly the point. That embrace of material and its many, varied effects and marks is what moves collagraph closer to the direct markmaking of drawing/painting. It makes all of those “unacceptable” (or abject?) marks readily available. Relief collagraph printed with letterpress equipment can be a method of painting or drawing in multiple, with control as good as—if not better than, but also different from—the hand. “You’re doing it all wrong (Part 2)“

From the first iteration of the manifesto, black & white details of Jan Van Eyck’s The Arnolfini Marriage appear and are manipulated on the cover and throughout. Although they recede in the second iteration, they move strikingly to the fore in the third. Constantly alongside the Arnolfini details has been the ampersand, enlarged, reversed, in different colors, and present — almost ornamentally — within the text line. The increased visuality of the third iteration announces itself on the booklet’s cover and inside with the grainy enlarged detail of the mirror from The Arnolfini Marriage. What do the Arnolfini details signify? Although Van Eyck’s original itself is straightforwardly representational, its meanings are not always any clearer than that of its use in Cohick’s collage. With his slices of black (“a series of edges”) obscuring the image of the groom, perhaps Cohick is compounding obscurities to present “something else // That we did not // Can not yet // See”.

And what about the large overlapping ampersands in red and gray, systematically reversed and alternating in color? Are they emphasizing the “and so on and so on” of tradition in Cohick’s painterly printing technique? Are they alluding to the joining of hands in the marriage? Are they alluding to, and performing, a marriage of the book and visual art? On a verso page in the manifesto’s first iteration, he writes, “The form of the book, the history of the book, and the processes involved in its production provide a foundation for rethinking and re-evaluating the dominant discourse(s) of contemporary art.” On the facing recto page, the Arnolfini bride in reverse from the original extends her hand to a reversed ampersand.

In perhaps the most important enhancement of the third iteration’s visuality, Cohick’s full-blown typographic redesign of the alphabet occupies the visual foreground, middle ground and background. It is as if Cohick sets out to demonstrate Mallarmé’s proposition that the book is the “total expansion of the letter”. The first iteration’s completely legible Palatino, Arial and Placard Condensed typefaces used in the text line have yielded to what Cohick calls a “dislegible” font, which he often reverses, lays out as occasional “running sides” rather than “running heads”, and subjects increasingly to collagraphic layering. In his “You’re doing it all wrong” series, Cohick explains:

If “legible” and “illegible” are binary opposites, then the term “dislegible” is about looking at the space between those two poles. Dislegibility displaces, dislocates, deforms, and/or disrupts the process of reading, with the ultimate goal of making that process of reading (dis)legible to the reader. The dislegible can be read, but it resists closure or certainty. “You’re doing it all wrong (Part 1)“

Also contributing to dislegibility is the reversal of images, the ampersand and letters. More than that, the reversal reminds us of what is involved in letterpress production — the inked relief surface and its reversed image or letter to be transferred to paper. Always in tension with form, content and reception, production makes up the open field from which the artist’s book emerges. The third iteration exudes production’s physicality. A black saturated endleaf bleeds over onto a stark white sheet that faces a stamped title page, intensifying a feel of mechanical working. Letterforms behave as so much raw material — as if they were oil, acrylic, brick or mortar — to be re-seen from different angles, noted for more than one function and their text read for more than one meaning.

According to Cohick, “For art to thrive, form and content must be in a dynamic relationship… It must contain enough disruptions, ambiguities, and peculiarities to resist the deadly state of stable signification.” The iterations of The New Manifesto enact that statement.

Alphabet One: A Submanifesto of the NewLights Press (2017)

Alphabet One: A Submanifesto of the NewLights Press (2017)
Aaron Cohick
Booklet, center-stapled. Letterpress printed from woven collagraph blocks on newsprint. H165 x W140 mm, 28 pages. Acquired from the artist, 11 December 2020. Edition of 250, unnumbered.
Photos: Books On Books Collection, displayed with permission of the artist.

Alphabet One, “companion book to the third iteration of The New Manifesto of the NewLights Press”, presents Cohick’s “complete ‘noise’ alphabet, in order, in condensed and full form”. In The New Manifesto, Cohick has described the book as “a noise of the hands and thought”. Well then, being a book, Alphabet One demonstrates that the manifesto is the alphabet, and the alphabet is the manifesto, and “woven collagraph blocks” could hardly be less “a noise of hands and thought”. Lest those inferences seem strained, continue reading the passage Cohick reproduces from The New Manifesto immediately after the reference to the “complete ‘noise’ alphabet”:

This is not a utopian program // This is not an alphabet for saving the world // Such a thing is a dangerous lie // This is one possibility // Not a tool // But a movement-between // An object-between // A growing // Changing thing // Meant to do just that // It is about attention and its revitalization // It is about structure and our being in it //

A, B, C, D. Photos: Books On Books Collection.

W, X, Y, Z. Photos: Books On Books Collection.

It cannot be an accident that the “noise” alphabet’s letterforms arise from varyingly shaded bricks: rose, gray, reddish gray and reddish black. To left and right of each letter, the rose color dominates. A reddish gray bar tops and tails each letter. The color gray forms the “strokes” of each letter. Reddish black fills the counters. Extracting the signal from the noise of the alphabet or books does not come easily. This is intentional. Just as The New Manifesto says,

With these books // The original autonomous window technology that is us looking through // At // In // Against // With care // The book returns our labor to us //

Days Open Air (2016)

Days Open Air (2016)
Aaron Cohick
Booklet, center-stapled, H203 x W152, 12 pages. Edition of 100, of which this is #40. Acquired from the artist, 11 December 2020.
Photos: Books On Books Collection, displayed with artist’s permission.

Days Open Air is one of those books returning our labor to us that The New Manifesto announces. Cohick call it “an artists’ book/poem thing … an experiment: with our new Risograph, with the alphabet, with writing, with random numbers, and with noise.” Letterforms stretch. Words run sideways, they break in the middle across lines, even across pages.

Look-See (REAED) (2014)

Look-See (REAED) (2014)
Aaron Cohick
Print. H300 x W456 mm.
Photos: Books On Books Collection, displayed with artist’s permission.

More evocative of barcode stripes than bricks, the letterform strokes in this poem-print-poster stretch even more than in Days Open Air. Printed on a Vandercook 219 from vinyl and gesso collagraph blocks, the letterforms challenge us to “look” and “see”. An angle at the top right, two angles midway on the right and two counters condensed to small squares suffice to define the first letter — R. The letters E and A are more efficient, requiring only the placement of two counters each. Note how the textural effect of the gesso and letterpress printed collagraph on chipboard joins The New Manifesto‘s celebration of the physicality and noise of production.

In Cohick’s world, the book and art make, and should be perceived as, a “strange” continuity. His vision and embrace of the collagraph suggest a 21st century version of William Blake. He names his nearer contemporaries as Ken Campbell, Walter Hamady, Amos P. Kennedy, Jr., Karen Kunc, Emily McVarish, Dieter Roth and Nancy Spero. In the Books On Books Collection, those far and near can also be found in Eleonora Cumer, Raffaella della Olga and Geofroy Tory.

Further Reading

“Abecedaries I (in progress)“, Books On Books Collection, 31 March 2020.

Cohick, Aaron. “Notes toward the emergent book (Part 1)“. Book Art Theory, College Book Art Association. 1 July 2019. Accessed 14 May 2021.

Cohick, Aaron. “Notes toward the emergent book (Part 2)“. Book Art Theory, College Book Art Association. 15 July 2019. Accessed 14 May 2021.

Cohick, Aaron. “Notes toward the emergent book (Part 3)“. Book Art Theory, College Book Art Association. 1 August 2019. Accessed 14 May 2021.

Cohick, Aaron. “You’re doing it all wrong (Part 1)“. Book Art Theory, College Book Art Association. 15 September 2020. Accessed 15 May 2021.

Cohick, Aaron. “You’re doing it all wrong (Part 2)“. Book Art Theory, College Book Art Association. 1 October 2020. Accessed 15 May 2021.

Cohick, Aaron. “You’re doing it all wrong (Part 3)“. Book Art Theory, College Book Art Association. 15 October 2020. Accessed 15 May 2021.

Pichler, Michalis, ed. 2019. Publishing manifestos: an international anthology from artists and writers. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Books On Books Collection – Barbara Tetenbaum

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Image of map of My Ántonia reproduced in A Close Read: The Cather Projects (2012)
Barbara Tetenbaum and Jennifer Viviano
Photos: Books On Books Collection, displayed with permission of the artist.

For the Books On Books Collection, Barbara Tetenbaum’s works have offered a map for exploring the different ways that text, image, structure and material bring about enjoyment and meaning in book art and bookmaking. Broadsides, chapbooks, a codex, a sculpture and, yes, a map have joined the collection over time.

The broadside and chapbook forms seem to be both a rite of passage and a pastime of pleasure for book artists. For Tetenbaum, it has been both of these and a rite of remembrance of friendship. During Tetenbaum’s time at Circle Press, founded and run by UK artist Ron King, she reconnected with Chicago friends poet Michael Donaghy and his wife Maddy Paxman, who had moved earlier to London. Understandably taken with his poetry, she chose his “Machines” when King offered her the chance to set and print anything she liked while King and his wife were away on vacation.

The earliest of Tetenbaum’s work in this collection, the chapbook Machines (1986) pairs Donaghy’s neo-metaphysical poem with the asemic markings that Tetenbaum had begun to pursue as a technique in 1985. Taken on their own, the markings do not call to mind any particular image or metaphor in the poem. Considered more closely as a physical response to the poem, though, they do share in the poem’s building rhythm and density (see further commentary here).

Machines: A Poem by Michael Donaghy with Artwork by Barbara Tetenbaum (1986)
Designed and printed by Barbara Tetenbaum at Circle Press, Guildford. Handset 14 pt Optima printed on rag paper, artwork printed on Himalayan mitsumata paper. Edition of 75, of which this is #72. Acquired from Circle Press, 22 June 2015. Photos: Books On Books Collection. With permission of Maddy Paxman and the artist. “Machines” © Michael Donaghy Estate.

Back in the US, the artist continued with the marks and Donaghy’s words. The broadside below was the result. This time, technique, form and subject cannot avoid similarity — like a reflection in a mirror. ‘Smith’ has a regularity but looseness often found in Donaghy’s poems, something essential to their charm. The iambic pentameter is not always iambic or ten-syllabled, and the length of stanzas vary. Flush right to Donaghy’s flush left, Tetenbaum’s lines of marking mirror the poem’s ragged right and variable counts — but not precisely.

‘Smith’ (1988)
Poem by Michael Donaghy, artwork and printing by Barbara Tetenbaum
Broadside. H333 xW268 mm. Unnumbered edition, signed on reverse. Acquired from the artist, 31 October 2020. Photo: Books On Books Collection, displayed with permission of Maddy Paxman and the artist. ‘Smith’ © Michael Donaghy Estate.

A love poem that takes off from the act of trying to remember forging a name in a hotel register for an assignation that forged something true and lasting, ‘Smith’ is about making one’s mark as artist and responding, intimately, one human to another. To transfer her marks made in response to the poem, Tetenbaum used

coated wire (bell wire) brought to type high on a piece of MDF covered in carpet tape to hold them in place. This is a technique I learned from Elmar Heimbach and used in a bit of the illustration in O’Ryan’s Belt. (Correspondence with artist, 21 November 2020. Link added.)

Another of Tetenbaum’s earliest chapbooks, Donaghy’s O’Ryan’s Belt (1991) foreshadows her move toward work that responds with a growing independent relationship to the text.

O’Ryan’s Belt: Eleven Poems: 1990-1991 by Michael Donaghy (1991)
Handbound book of poems produced by Barbara Tetenbaum at the Silver Buckle Press.
Structure designed by Marta Gomez; handbound by Tracy Honn; typography, setting and artwork by Barbara Tetenbaum. Acquired 1 October 2020. Edition of 70, of which this is #31. Photos: Books On Books Collection. With permission of Maddy Paxman and the artist. O’Ryan’s Belt © Michael Donaghy Estate.

The spine of O’Ryan’s Belt consists of a small fold. Inside, on either side of it, is a gathering of folios. The two sets of folios are sewn (belted?) together through the small fold. Each set includes a tunnel-book-like artwork of three layers. The first sits adjacent to the poem “A Spectacle”, and the second, to “The Hunter’s Purse”, a line from which the chapbook takes its name.

View of the “internal spine”, an inward fold of the cover creating a tab to which signatures on either side are sewn.

View of the tunnel-book image adjacent to “A Spectacle”

The colophon explains that stencils, string and other found objects were used to print the illustrations. Note how the artworks’ lines cross the pages but not into the space of their adjacent poems. It’s as if the artwork is asserting a claim — this is a part of, but apart from; or this is apart from, but a part of. The images created by the artwork seem more related to “A Spectacle” than “The Hunter’s Purse”. Both artworks capture the idea of the image started by the lines “The shape of man, a shadow on the ground,/ Returns a mirror image from pondwater.” As the poem proceeds, we see through the shadow/mirror image to the objects and gravel at the bottom of the pool. Hinting at stalactites or stalagmites as well as the layers reflected on and beneath the water, the first paper sculpture makes sure we recognize the poet’s shadow boxing here with Plato’s cave.

So snugly fitted to the structure, the artwork seems to be waiting to surprise the reader.

The broadside Co-Pilot extends this structurally interpretive technique. The poem “Co Pilot” (no hyphen in the original) hilariously turns the speaker’s conscience into a parrot on his shoulder, “a tiny Charlton Heston” squawking the Ten Commandments. But there is no parrot, no Charlton Heston, no Ten Commandments in the broadside’s artwork beneath the typeset poem.

Co-Pilot (March 2002)
Poem by Michael Donaghy, art and printing by Barbara Tetenbaum.
Broadside H500 x W233 mm. Edition of 35, which this is an artist’s proof. Acquired from the artist, 31 October 2020. Photos: Books On Books Collection, displayed with permission of Maddy Paxman and the artist. “Co Pilot” © Michael Donaghy Estate.

There is, however, an eye peeking from four holes scattered among bubble-like transparent circles printed over a collage of images and texts from newspapers, health and housekeeping guides (from the Fifties?), history books, clothing ads and prayer cards. Are the eyes the conscience in bubbles beneath the surface of a clear punch bowl? Are those images the compromised and socially mundane background noise of the party?

The collage comes from a large photoengraved block, originally made for a tiny book, Collage Book #3 (see below). This may explain the viewer’s urge to turn the broadside upside down to examine the image: it’s an imposition of the unfolded, uncut pages of that book (correspondence with the artist, 21 November 2020).

Not strictly a work in the collection, the installation The Reading Room (2002) should be mentioned here — not merely because it occurred the same year as Co-Pilot but also because it is a reminder of a constant theme and a harbinger of other installations to come. Thin slabs of plexiglas bearing text in black serif type hang at angles to one another from clear fishing line. The words, phrases and sentences suspended in air are drawn from a short story composed by Tetenbaum; they are what make The Reading Room a room for reading. That’s almost all there is to do in it. If, as Anthony Powell’s character Lindsay Bagshaw says, “Books do furnish a room”, Tetenbaum’s installation proves, “Words do furnish a room”. What reading is, can or might be is that constant theme in the artist’s works — whether evoked by asemic markings, a walk through the words of a story, a “map of reading” or a “diagram of wind”.

The Reading Room (2002)
Barbara Tetenbaum
Installation at Nine Gallery, Portland, OR, December 2002. Photos: Courtesy of the artist.

Half-Life: 25 years of books by Barbara Tetenbaum & Triangular Press (2005)
Barbara Tetenbaum
Photos: Books On Books Collection, displayed with artist’s permission.

Half-Life (2005) is the collection’s representative codex by Tetenbaum. A catalogue raisonné for works between 1978 and 2005, with a chronology of the artist’s life and an appreciation of her work from Uta Schneider, the book reveals several of the influences on Tetenbaum’s development, including Ron King (as noted above) and Walter Hamady (evident particularly in the Co-Pilot broadside). Tetenbaum is generous in her collaborations and acknowledgments. Although closer to a fine press edition than anything produced by Dick Higgins, Half-Life notes in its colophon the influence of his FOEW&OMBWHNW (New York: Something Else Press, 1969).

For a body of work realized after Half-Life, Tetenbaum spent a month in a gallery listening to a recording of Willa Cather’s 1918 novel, My Ántonia. The result was two installations and two publications: a catalogue called A Close Read: My Ántonia (2010) and an “artist’s book” or “bookwork” called Mining My Ántonia: Excerpts, Drawings, and a Map (2012). The collection currently includes only the map and the catalogue. Some work in this category of “response to literary material” can be primarily craftwork — as in those well-known narrative scenes sculpted from the pages of the book in question. Other responses to books — including altered books — stand as works of art yielding depths of meaning and aesthetic response on their own.

Of course, the antecedent to this in literature is called ekphrasis. W.H. Auden’s ekphrastic poem Musée des Beaux Arts stands on its own — though with — Breughel’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus. Even more so Keats’ Ode on a Grecian Urn stands on its own; the urn described is unknown. Tetenbaum’s direction of ekphrasis is inverse to that of Auden and Keats. The artwork comes after the literary expression. Nevertheless, her inversely ekphrastic artwork Mining My Ántonia stands on its own — though with — Cather’s My Ántonia.

A Close Read: The Cather Projects (2012)
Barbara Tetenbaum and Jennifer Viviano
Catalogue with three inserts sewn to folded card, published by Oregon Arts Commission. Photos: Books On Books Collection, displayed with permission of the artist.

For the collection, the map has been framed between two sheets of glass to make enjoyment of its translucent paper a daily possibility. Each time the catalogue is opened, its binding harks back to O’Ryan’s Belt (see above). Three inserts of different trim sizes are sewn into the central inwardly folded tab.

The first insert provides details from the 2010 installation; the double-page spread below recalls the dangling tags from The Reading Room (2002). The second insert shows images of the artist book Mining My Ántonia and details from the second installation in the Hoffman Gallery at Oregon College of Art and Craft (2012); an image of the map from Mining My Ántonia: Excerpts, Drawings, and a Map is shown at the start of this entry. The third insert is a 14-page pamphlet from Nathalia King, Professor of English and Humanities at Reed College where the first installation occurred.

Put aside — difficult as it may be — the play of craft and art so plainly suffusing the print, paper and binding of the catalog and artist book, what are their relation to the text that drove them?  Is it like making a “movie of the book”?  Are we looking at some new form of literary/artistic criticism?  As Nathalia King’s essay walks us through the installation, she points out how it teaches the viewer to read My Ántonia in multiple ways. To what degree, though, can we appreciate Tetenbaum’s book art or installations without having read My Ántonia? They certainly inspire the reader/viewer to read or re-read the work. But inevitably this reader/viewer is drawn back to enjoying Tetenbaum’s “making the novel her own” (as in the pun on mining). As with all book art, the more informed we are about the “material” of which it is made, the greater the enjoyment. We want to make such a work our own — to mine it — which may send us back to multiple quarries from which the artist drew her material. Cather’s novel is not the only material of which Mining My Ántonia is made. It is made of the artist’s experience of the novel in print, the novel as read aloud and the exterior/interior space in which that occurred. It is made of various papers, tabs, reveals and media. The artist book offers a solitary way of ”material reading”, but with the catalogue, it also offers a glimpse at the ambulatory and perhaps social way of reading offered in the installations.

Willa Cather's Prairie, Nebraska
Willa Cather’s Prairie, Nebraska (Photo credit: Ross Griff)

Also offering a different way of reading, Diagram of Wind (2015) pulls further away from its responding point than Mining My Ántonia. A line in Donaghy’s poem “Glass” provides the title for this sculptural work, and the work’s structure draws on the poem’s sestina form in its undulating, layering structure. Yet Diagram of Wind goes far beyond that.

Diagram of Wind: architectural book with poem by Michael Donaghy (2015)
Barbara Tetenbaum
Housed in a clothbound box (H590 x W180 x D52 mm). Book of seven overlapping pages of various papers including gampi (silk tissue), Zerkall Ingres and F-color, collaged with letterpress-printed text and images and sewn to backing of cloth and wood slats (H567 x W153 mm). Designed to be viewed horizontally on the wood platform (H565 x W153 x D39 mm) or vertically hung from the wall. Edition of 25, 0f which this is #11. Photos: Books On Books Collection, displayed with permission of Maddy Paxman and the artist. “Glass” © Michael Donaghy Estate.

There are seven “pages” to this work, each sewn to green book cloth panelled with wooden slats and backed with gampi. The first page carries Donaghy’s sestina, each line letterpress printed on a strip of paper pasted to gampi paper. Less wide than the sestina page and shorter than the third, the second page shows an etching image of waterspouts rising from a body of water with mountains in the background. Less wide than the second page and shorter than the fourth, the third page consists of narrow, evenly sized white strips of paper pasted on gampi. The fourth page, slightly wider than the preceding page but still shorter than the following, offers the school-book-like statements: 

Air movements have 
helped to change the 
whole face of the earth. 
We usually call air move-
ments wind. Wind may be 
started when cold and 
warm air masses are 
next to each other.

Suddenly much less wide than the fourth page but still shorter than the sixth, the fifth page presents narrow dark panels or strips that narrow in themselves and narrow the space between them as they descend the page. Much wider than the preceding page, shorter than the seventh and printed with blue and white dots reminiscent of Co Pilot (above), the sixth page gives guidance on determining the amount of space to leave between the top of a flume (an engineering structure for measuring water flow) and the height of the water moving through it. The narrowest page of all and ending flush with the slatted backing, the seventh page shows a print similar to that on page two, but here between the evenly spaced paper strips, there is a small ship in the distance and the subsiding whirlpool and withdrawing upper part of a waterspout in the foreground.

The poem that inspired this work uses images of the natural world — sand, smoke, wind — to build its metaphor of love’s paradox (its holding fast with an open hand). Humanity is in the foreground, nature in the background. Tetenbaum’s Diagram of Wind reverses that. Nature with its air movements and waterspouts move into the foreground. Then humanity with its controlling and measuring flume comes into the middle ground. And finally it ends with humanity’s ship on the horizon and nature’s dissipating waterspout in the foreground. Even though by virtue of its page one position the poem is in the foreground, it has become as much “material” for the artwork as the paper, ink, wood, cloth, earthy colors and physical structure are. The artist has transformed the poem’s sestina shape, its use of nature and its paradox into “material” for Diagram of Wind. In this instance of inverse ekphrasis, Tetenbaum has created a work that stands independently of, and in dependence on, its literary inspiration.

An early guidebook and two of Tetenbaum’s non-ekphrastic works, one early and one late, are in the collection: Paper Art, the third publication under her Triangular Press imprint, and Collage Book #6.

A Guide to Experimental Letterpress Techniques (2004)

A Guide to Experimental Letterpress Techniques (2004)
Barbara Tetenbaum
Spiral-bound. H190 X W123 mm, 16 unnumbered pages, Chinese fold. Acquired from the artist, 11 April 2022.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.

For a non-practitioner, instruction books like this encourage closer examination of artwork and an appreciation of the act of thinking with one’s hands.

Paper Art (1980)

Paper Art (1980)
Barbara Tetenbaum
“Sequential picture plane / book-like object”. String-bound container: 165 x 165 mm; Object: H135 x W145 mm, 16 unnumbered pages and one fold-out leaf. Edition of 42. Acquired from Versand-Antiquariat Konrad von Agris, 22 January 2022.
Photos: Books On Books Collection. Permission to display from the artist.

“Sequential picture plane / book-like object” is the artist’s description of this work. The images come from cut paper and collage, relief printing, pen and ink, and washes. A narrative-like sequence develops involving two triangles and a community of triangles in a sort of landscape with a scribbled wilderness, parallel rivers or tracks, stars above, and moving to a boundaried community of triangles beneath a brownish wash and concluding with a double-page spread of the river or track images migrating to a final blank page.

Just as important are the binding, paper, folds and container. In its three-hole sewn deckle-edged cover, four more different kinds of paper make up the object and its images. The fold-out leaf, composed of the work’s most fragile paper, encloses the central four pages, which have the most intense concentration of images. The cutout paper rivers or tracks are attached with brown thread on either side of this fold-out leaf, which further cues us to be aware of parallel scenes. The range of papers from dense and thick to sheer and thin reminds us that parallels can present opposites: the couple and the collective, conflict and resolution, lost and found.

The container consists of the densest and darkest paper and, at one time, had a box-like shape held closed by string at its four corners. There is a barely perceptible hole in the upper left corner of the container’s cover.

The contrast between the sturdiness of the paper and the flimsiness of the string closure echoes the cut-out rivers or tracks, loosely attached by brown thread and embracing the central fold-out leaf enclosing the densest body of images. All of these material aspects suggest looking for the paradoxical in this “sequential picture plane / book-like object”.

Collage Book #6: A Lesson in Subjective Relativity (2019)

Collage Book #6: A Lesson in Subjective Relativity (2019)
Barbara Tetenbaum H190 x W120 mm, 32 unnumbered pages. Acquired from the artist, 11 April 2022.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.

Collage Book #6 also consists of sequential picture planes, but the sequence is not narrative. Rather it is one of visual association. In an oval shape, a three-masted schooner and longboat hover over a swirling blue abyss. The image is repeated on the following verso page, which faces a full-page bleed depicting a calving iceberg or glacier in blue and white. Again, the image is repeated on the following verso page, which faces an overdrawn black-and-white image of crops along a winding road leading to a steepled building at the edge of a lake. This image, too, repeats on the verso page, and its reddish-orange overdrawn lines or stakes echo the color in the facing photo of a textbook graphic representing exports. And on it goes until the final image on the back cover echoes the initial image on the front cover (see below).

The booklet’s structure recalls that of O’Ryan’s Belt: Eleven Poems: 1990-1991 by Michael Donaghy (see above). The spine consists of inward folds of the front and back covers. Internally (see below) two sets of signatures are sewn together through the inward-folded tabs.

Postscript

Tetenbaum has provided another way to experience the Cather Projects: The Slow Read (2018). Take a wander through that site, composed of an introductory page to “a public literary and fine art project conceived and produced by Barbara Tetenbaum honoring the centenary of the publication of Willa Cather’s novel My Ántonia“, a set of seventy-four links to the daily scheduled readings, a blog section, a “concordance” that is more an unfolding of the installation and artist’s book than a listing of words and phrases against page references, and finally a portfolio of artwork by Tetenbaum.

Further Reading

“… in medias res … Barbara Tetenbaum“, Bookmarking Book Art, 18 August 2013.

“‘Machines’ by Michael Donaghy and Two Artists’ Books“, Books On Books Collection, 12 October 2020.

Michaelis, Catherine Alice. “Elemental Impressions, Artist’s Books Unshelved, Bainbridge Island Museum of Art, 20 March 2021. Accessed 22 March 2021. Video presentation and discussion of Diagram of Wind.

King, Nathalie. “Reading the Literary Text as ‘Art in Space’: Barbara Tetenbaum’s My Ántonia,” The Artist’s Yearbook, 2014-2015. Bristol: Impact Press, pp. 95-99.

Paterson, Don. 2014. Smith – A Readers Guide to the Poetry of Michael Donaghy. London: Pan Macmillan.

Schneider, Uta. “Turning the Page”, pp. 18-28 in Tetenbaum, Barbara, James Carmin, and Uta Schneider. 2005. Half-life: 25 years of books by Barbara Tetenbaum & Triangular Press. Portland, OR: Triangular Press. Three key works not in the collection are described in Half-Life. The first would be an edition from the Gymnopaedia series, based on the artist’s response to Erik Satie’s musical compositions of the same name. The second would be Tetenbaum’s collaboration with Julie Chen that resulted in a powerfully moving work: Ode to a Grand Staircase (for Four Hands) (2001). The third key work returns to Donaghy’s poetry with the clear aim to incorporate sound in book art: Black Ice and Rain: Psalms 6.6 (2002). In the absence of the work itself, Uta Schneider’s description of it in Half-Life is as close as one can come to experiencing it.

Tetenbaum, Barbara. 14 June 2021. “My Ántonia at Six Pages a Day: The Slow Read Project”, presentation for the panel “Willa Cather and Her Readers”, organized by the Willa Cather Foundation for the American Literature Association Virtual Panel. Accessed 19 July 2021.

Books On Books Collection – Nicholas Phillips

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Egyptian Hours (1979)

Egyptian Hours (1979)

Nicholas Phillips

Bound in a leather folding case, a set of 7 hand-colored and variously collaged / cut / embossed etchings, plus title page, on Hot Pressed Saunders paper. H160 x W160 x D40 mm. Edition of XXXIX signed copies in existence, of which this is #XXXVII. Acquired from the artist, 6 August 2020. Photos: Books On Books Collection.

   

Egyptian Hours falls somewhere between book and portfolio box. Somewhat like photos and captions in a photobook, text and relief images play off one another, but only somewhat: at a distance the table of contents names and orders the hours; only the Arabic number glyphs from the “table of contents” mediate the named hours. If the table of contents is held apart as in the photos, the distance shortens.

In the western tradition, the named hours suggest the medieval book of hours, another signal that this is more than a portfolio of prints. There is pleasure in trying to remember the name of the hours from their numbers or guessing it from the evocative images — the image of a window lattice through which to watch, an image of a tile fragment — but the name of the fourth implies a mystery narrative at which to guess.

Who is watching from the window? What does the broken pattern of tiles mean to the watcher? Were the numbered shards found beneath the tiles? What clue do the images of papyrus plants give, or the overlying image of a plot of land (?) bringing the plants into green, the diagonal pattern into blue and black, and the sheet of papyrus into burnt umber? Whose seal holds the folded sheet closed? Whose shroud? Whose garland or necklace with its thread weaving in and out of the intaglio?

The watcher could spend hours turning or spreading the panels out and guessing — and just contemplating this artwork as an evocation of ancient time and time passing.

Egyptian Hours — Addenda

This comparative view of the un-colored embossed prints — especially for the “Hour of Watching” and “Hour of Fragments” — enhances an appreciation of Phillips’ artistry.

Set of 7 blind embossed etching prints, plus 1 intaglio title page. Letterpress numerals. Unnumbered copies. 160 x 160 mm each.  Acquired from the artist, 6 August 2020. Photos: top row, Books On Books Collection and, bottom, courtesy of the artist.

Egyptian Cards (1978)

Egyptian Cards (1978)

Nicholas Phillips (with Fiorenza Bassetti)

Pack of magic playing cards. Offset litho, silkscreen, die cut and held in a silkscreened box. H110 x W62.5 x D22.5 mm. Edition of 10, of which this is #2. Acquired from the artist, 6 August 2020. Photos and video: Books On Books Collection.

Egyptian Cards may be the joker in the pack for the Books On Books Collection. A deck of cards? A magic trick? A dos-à-dos flip book? Without doubt, it is another evocation of different frames of time passing. In one time frame, Nefertiti becomes a mummy.

In another time frame, day dawns on the Pyramids.

And in a third and fourth time frame — the time of the artists’ collaboration and that of a magic trick — a joker (a self-portrait of Fiorenza Bassetti) appears.

Phillips, who has turned to watercolors of a photographic intensity yet pastel texture, continues to layer time in ways that lead the viewer as much into meditation as appreciation. Fitting, then, that these two early works strike that lasting chord.

Further Reading

“An Online Annotation of “The Book Made Art” (1986)“, Bookmarking Book Art, 8 May 2020.

Henry, David J. Beyond Words: The Art of the Book (Rochester, NY: Memorial Art Gallery of the University of Rochester, 1986). Catalogue for the exhibition held 31 January – 30 March 1986. Catalogue designed by Scott McCarney.

Kahn-Rossi, Manuela. Fiorenza Bassetti (Bellinzona, Switzerland: Salvioni, 2010). In English, 2013.

Phillips, Nicholas, and Salma Nasution Khoo. Best Foreign Language (London: Jonathan Cooper Park Walk Gallery, 2011). Catalogue for exhibition, 17 November – 3 December 2011.

Rolo, Jane, and Jennifer Walwin. Book Works (Bracknell, UK: South Hill Park Arts Centre, 1981). Catalogue for the touring exhibition 28 March 1981 – 4 April 1982. Title page designed by Ron King.

Taylor, Michael. “Books for Whose Sake?”, Crafts, No. 63, July/August 1983, pp. 15-18. Excellent color photo of “Hour of the Clue” in context with works by Roy Fisher, Walter Hamady, Ron King, Katherine Kuehn and Toby Lurie.

Bookmarking Book Art – An Online Annotation of “The Cutting Edge of Reading: Artists’ Books”

Books On Books2 Comments

Renée Riese Hubert and Judd D. Hubert’s The Cutting Edge of Reading: Artists’ Books (Granary Books, 1999) is a signal work of appreciation and analysis of book art.  Nearly twenty years on, it can be read and appreciated itself more vibrantly with a web browser open alongside it.

To facilitate that for others, here follows a linked version of the bibliography in The Cutting Edge of Reading — a “webliography”.  Because web links do break, multiple, alternative links per entry and permanent links from libraries, repositories and collections have been used wherever possible. These appear in the captions as well as the text entries. Also included are links to videos relating to the works or the artists. At the end of the webliography, links for finding copies of The Cutting Edge (now out of print) are provided.

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Alechinsky, Pierre; Matta, Sebastian; Mansour, Joyce. Le Grand jamais. Paris: Aimé-Maeght Éditions , 1981. [See also video 1, video 2.]

Arnal, André-Pierre. Conviction du contresens. Paris. Self-published, 1994. [See also video.]

Barrett, Virginia. Sometimes Feeling Like Eve. San Francisco: VB Press, 1992.

Blais, Jean-Charles; Artaud, Antonin. Tuguri. Paris: Ric Gadella, ed.; Frank Bordas, Printer, 1996. [See also video.]

Boltanski, Christian. La Maison manquante. Paris: La Hune, 1990. [See also video.]

Boltanski, Christian. Inventory of Objects Belonging to an Inhabitant of Oxford introduced by a preface and followed by some answers to my proposal. Westfalicher Kunstverein, 1973. [The entry here corrects and extends the title given in the book’s entry. The exhibition itself, held in different locations, appeared with a different title and at different dates.]

Inventory of Objects Belonging to an Inhabitant of Oxford (1973)
Christian Boltanski

Boltanski, Christian. Sachlich. Wien/Munchen: Gina Kehayoff Verlag, 1995.

Boni, Paolo; Butor, Michel. La Chronique des asteroïdes. Paris: Jacqueline de Champvalins, 1982.

Paolo Boni and Michel Butor
La Chronique des asteroïdes (1982)

Braunstein, Terry. On Wrinkles. Self-published, 1978.

Broaddus, John Eric. France I. Altered book, n.d. [See also video 1, video 2, video 3, video 4.]

Broaddus, John Eric. Satyricon. Altered book, 1973.

Broaddus, John Eric. Space Shot. One-of-a-kind book, n.d. Wellesley College Library, Special Collections.

Broaddus, John Eric. Sphinx and the Bird of Paradise. New York: Kaldewey, n.d. [See also video.]

Broaddus, John Eric. Turkestan Chronicle. One-of-a-kind book, n.d. Private collection.

Broel, Elisabeth. Aus dem Liederbuch des Mirza Schaffy. Unikatbuch no. 2. Altered book of Bodenstedt’s, 1992.

Broodthaers, Marcel. Reading Lorelei. Paris: Yvon Lambert, 1975.

Brunner, Helen. Primer of Ritual Elements (Book 1). Washington, D.C.: Offset Works, The Writing Center, Glen Echo, MD, 1992.

Chen, Julie. Octopus. Berkeley: Flying Fish Press, 1992. [See also video.]

Octopus (1992)
Julie Chen
Poem by Elizabeth McDevitt
Letterpress on paper
13.4 X 10.75 in.

Chopin, Henri. L’Écriture à L’ENDROIT. Limoges: Sixtus Editions, 1993.

Chopin, Henri. Graphèmes en vibrances. Paris: Les Petits Classiques du Grand Pirate, 1990.

Chopin, Henri; Zumthor, Paul. Les Riches heures de l’alphabet. Paris: Les Éditions de la Traversiere, 1995.

Closky, Claude. De A à Z. Paris: n.p., 1991. [Compare with Scott McCarney’s Alphabook 13 (1991).]

Crombie, John; Rimbaud, Arthur. Une illumination. Paris: Kickshaws Press, 1990.

Dautricourt, Joelle. Sentences. Paris: Self-published, 1991.

Delaunay, Sonia; Cendrars, Blaise. La Prose du Transsibérien et de la petite Jehanne de France. Paris: Les Éditions des Hommes Nouveaux, 1913. [Title corrected.]

Dorny, Bertrand; Butor, Michel. Caractères. Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1993.

Dorny, Bertrand; Butor, Michel.  Lug à Lucinges. Paris: Self-published, 1993. [Butor added; title corrected.]

Dorny, Bertrand. Supermarché. Paris: Self-published, 1992.  [Butor added.]

Dorny, Bertrand; Deguy, Michel. Composition 7. Paris: Self-published, 1992.

Dorny, Bertrand; Deguy, Michel. Écrire. Self-published, 1992.

Dorny, Bertrand; Deguy, Michel. Éléments pour un Narcisse. Paris: Self-published, 1993.

Dorny, Bertrand; Deguy, Michel. Le Métronome. Paris: Self-published, 1984.

Dorny, Bertrand; Guillevic, Eugène. Si. Nice: Jacques Matarasso, 1986. [First name of Guillevic corrected.]

Dorny, Bertrand; Noel, Bernard. Matière de la nuit. Paris: Self-published, 1990.

Dorny, Bertrand; Smith, William Jay. The Pyramid of the Louvre. Self-published, 1990.

Drucker, Johanna. Narratology. New York: Druckwerk, 1994.

Ely, Timothy; McKenna, Terence. Synesthesia. New York: Granary Books, 1992. [See also video.]

Ely, Timothy. Approach to the Site. New York: Waterstreet Press , 1986. [See also Getty interview; see also video.]

Ely, Timothy. Octagon 3. One-of-a-kind book, 1987. Houghton Library, Harvard University.

Ely, Timothy. Saturnia. One-of-a-kind book, 1995. Private collection.

Ely, Timothy; Kelm, Daniel E. Turning to Face. One-of-a-kind book, 1989. Houghton Library, Harvard University.

Epping, Ed. Abstract Refuse: A Heteronymic Primer. New York: Granary Books, 1995.

Ernst, Max; Eluard, Paul. Les Malheurs des immortels. Paris: Librairie Six, 1922.

Ernst, Max. Une Semaine de bonté. Paris: Pauvert, 1963. [See also video.]

Fahrner, Barbara; Cage, John. Nods. New York: Granary Books, 1991.

Fahrner, Barbara; Schwitters, Kurt. A Flower Like a Raven. Translations by Jerome Rothenberg. New York: Granary Books, 1996.

Finlay, Ian Hamilton. Ocean Stripe Series 3, Wild Hawthorn Press, 1965.

Gerz, Jochen. 2146 Steine: Mahnmal gegen Rassismus. Saarbrucken and Stuttgart: Haje Verlag, 1993. [See also video.]

Gerz, Jochen. Die Beschreibung des Papieres. Darmstadt: Luchterhand, 1973.

Gerz, Jochen. Les Livres de Gandelu.  Liège: Yellow Now, 1976.

Golden, Alisa. They Ran Out. Berkeley: Nevermind the Press, 1991.

Groborne, Robert. Une lecture du Livre des ressemblances [d’] Edmond Jabès. [Xonrupt-Longemer, France]: Æncrages, 1981.

Hamady, Walter. Gabberjab 6. Mount Horeb, WI: The Perishable Press Limited, 1988.

Gabberjab No. 6 (1988)
Walter Hamady

Hamady Walter. Gabberjab 7. Mount Horeb, WI: The Perishable Press Limited, 1997.

King, Ron; Fisher, Roy. Anansi Company. London: Circle Press, 1992. [See also video.]

King, Ron; Fisher, Roy. Bluebeard’s Castle. Guilford, England: Circle Press, 1972. [See also video.]

King, Susan E. Always a Bridesmaid, Never a Bride. Los Angeles: Paradise Press, 1978.

King, Susan E. HomeStead. Los Angeles: The Power of Place, 1990.

King, Susan E. I Spent Summer in Paris. Rochester NY: Paradise Press at Visual Studies Workshop Press, 1984.

King, Susan E.  Salem Witch Trial Memorial. Santa Monica, CA: Paradise Press, 1994.

King, Susan E. Treading the Maze. Rochester, NY: Montage 93: International Festival of the Image, 1993.

King, Susan E. Women and Cars. Rosendale, NY: Paradise Press, 1983. [See also video.]

Koch, Peter; McEvilley, Thomas. Diogenes Defictions. Berkeley: Peter Koch, Printers, 1994.

Kosuth, Joseph. Two Oxford Reading Rooms. London: Book Works, 1994.

Labisse, Félix. Histoire naturelle. Paris: Chavane, 1948.

Histoire naturelle (1948)
Félix Labisse
Histoire naturelle (1948)
Félix Labisse

Lacalmontie, Jean-François. Le Chant de sirènes. Limoges: Sixtus Editions, 1995. [See also video.]

Laxson, Ruth. [H0 + G0]² = It. Atlanta: Nexus Press, 1982. [See also video.]

[H0 + G0]² = It  (1982)
Ruth Laxson

Laxson, Ruth. Measure/Cut/Stitch. Atlanta: Nexus Press, 1987. [See also video.]

Laxson, Ruth. Wheeling. Atlanta: Nexus Press, 1992.

Le Gac, Jean. La Boîte de couleurs. Amiens: Fonds Régional d’Art Contemporain de Picardie, 1995. [See also video at 4’55”.]

Lehrer, Warren; Bernstein, Dennis. French Fries. Rochester/Purchase: Visual Studies Press, 1984.

French Fries (1984)
Warren Lehrer and Dennis Bernstein

Ligorano, Reese. The Corona Palimpsest. New York: Granary Books, 1996.

Lohr, Helmut. Visual Poetry. Berlin: Galerie Horst Dietrich, 1987.

Visual Poetry (1987)
Helmut Lohr

Lovejoy, Margot. The Book of Plagues. Purchase, NY: SUNY Visual Arts Division, 1994.

Lown, Rebecca. Procrustes’ Bed. Purchase, NY: Center for Editions, 1990.

Lyons, Joan. The Gynecologist. Rochester, NY: Visual Studies Workshop Press, 1989.

Malgorn, Jacques; Mabille, Pierre. En N’Ombres. Limoges: Sixtus Editions, 1993.

Mallarmé, Stéphane. Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard. Cosmopolis, mai, 417-28, 1897.

Manet, Edouard; Mallarmé, Stéphane. L’Après-midi d’un faune. Paris: Derenne, 1876.

Martinez, Roberto. Moi Aussi j’aurais peur si je recontrais un ange. 1. La Bataille de Midway. Paris: n.p., 1991.

Martinez, Roberto. Moi Aussi j’aurais peur si je recontrais un ange. 2. L’Anatomie d’un ange. Paris: n.p., 1991.

Masson, André; Mallarmé, Stéphane. Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard. Paris: Amateurs du Livre et de l’Estampe Modernes, 1961.

Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard (1897; 1961)
Stéphane Mallarmé; André Masson

Masson, André; Rimbaud, Arthur. Une saison en enfer. Paris: Société de femmes bibliophiles Le Cent Une, 1961.

Matta, Sebastian; Jarry, Alfred. Ubu roi. Paris: Atelier Dupont Visat, 1982.

Matta, Sebastian. Garganta-tua. Florence: Edizioni della Bejuga, 1981.

McCarney, Scott. Diderot/Doubleday/Deconstruction. Rochester, NY: Visual Studies Workshop Press, 1994. [See also video.]

McCarney, Scott. Memory Loss. Rochester, NY: Visual Studies Workshop Press, 1988. [See also video.]

Memory Loss (1988)
Scott McCarney
2 1/2 x 22 in., 40 pp.
offset edition of 500

Meador, Clifton. Anecdote of the Jar. Purchase, NY: SUNY Visual Arts Division, 1989. [See also video.]

Meador, Clifton. The Book of Doom. Barrytown, NY: Zimmerman Multiples, 1984. [See also video.]

Messager, Annette. D’Approche. Paris: Jean-Dominique Carré Archives Librairie, 1995. [See also video at 5’56”.]

Messager, Annette. Mes ouvrages. Arles: Actes Sud, 1989.

Nannucci, Maurizio. Art as Social Environment. Amsterdam: Lugo, 1978.

Nannucci, Maurizio. Provisoire et définitif. Écarts, 1975.

Newell, Peter. Slant Book. New York: Harper Bros., 1910.

Osborn, Kevin. Real Lush. Arlington, VA: Bookworks, 1991.

Osborn, Kevin. Tropos. Arlington, VA: Osbornbook, 1988.

Tropos (1988)
Kevin Osborn

Osborn, Kevin. Wide Open. Arlington, VA: Bookworks, 1984.

Penck, A.R. Analysis. Berlin: Edition Klaus Staeck, 1990.

Phillips, Tom. A Humument. London: Thames & Hudson, 1980.

Polkinhorn, Harry. Summary Dissolution. Port Charlotte, FL: Runaway Spoon Press, 1988.

Reese, Harry. Arplines. Isla Vista, CA: Turkey Press, 1988.

Roth, Dieter. Daily Mirror. Köln: Hansörg Mayer, 1961. [See also video.]

Roth, Dieter. Bok 3C. Stuttgart: Hansörg Mayer, n.d. [See also video.]

Rullier, Jean-Jacques. 10 exemples. Limoges: Sixtus Editions, 1994.

Ruscha, Edward. Twentysix Gasoline Stations. Los Angeles: National Excelsior Press, 1963. [Publisher added; see also video.]

Sharoff, Shirley; Lu Xun. La Grande Muraille/The Great Wall. Paris: Self-published, 1991.

La grande muraille/The Great Wall (1991)
Shirley Sharoff
La grande muraille/The Great Wall (1991)
Shirley Sharoff

Sicilia, Jose Maria; Lux, Thomas. You Are Alone. Paris: Michael Woolworth, 1992.

Sligh, Clarissa. Reading Dick and Jane with Me. Rochester, NY: Visual Studies Workshop Press, 1989. [See also video.]

Sligh, Clarissa. What’s Happening with Momma? Rosendale, NY: Women’s Studio Workshop, 1988.

Smith, Keith. Construct. Rochester, NY: Visual Studies Workshop Press, 1985. [See also video.]

Spector, Buzz. Broodthaers. 1988. Altered book. [See also video links embedded in the artist’s name below.]

Spector, Buzz. Kafka. 1988. Altered book.

Spector, Buzz. Malevich. 1988. Altered book.

Spector, Buzz. A Passage. NY: Granary Books, 1994.

Spector, Buzz. The Picture of Dorian Gray. 1987. Altered book.

Spector, Buzz. Silence. 1989. Altered book.

Staritsky, Anna; Albert-Birot, Pierre. La Belle histoire. Veilhes, Tarn: Gaston Puel, 1966.

Staritsky, Anna; Butor, Michel. Allumettes pour un bûcher dans la cour de la vieille Sorbonne. Paris: Self-published, 1975.

Staritsky, Anna; Guillevic, Eugène. De la prairie. Paris: Jean Petithory, 1970.

De la prairie (1970)
Eugene Guillevic (text)
Anna Staritsky (art)

Staritsky, Anna; Iliazd. Un de la brigade. Paris:Atelier Lacourière-Frelaut, 1982. [Publisher identified.]

Staritsky, Anna; Lemaire, Jacques. Le Zotte et la moche. Moulin du Verger de Puymoyen, 1969.

Stokes, Telfer; Douglas, Helen. MIM. Deuchar Mill, Yarrow, Scotland: Weproductions, 1986. [See also video.]

Stokes, Telfer; Douglas, Helen. Real Fiction: An Inquiry into the Bookeresque. Rochester, NY: Visual Studies Workshop Press, 1987.

Stokes, Telfer; Douglas, Helen. Spin Off. Deuchar Mill, Yarrow, Scotland: Weproductions, 1985.

Van Horn, Erica. Scraps of an Aborted Collaboration. Docking, Norfolk: Coracle Press, 1994.

Van Horn, Erica. Seven Lady Saintes. New York: Women’s Studio Workshop, 1985. [Publisher identified.]

Van Horn, Erica. Ville aux dames.Vitry-sur-Seine: n.p., 1983. One-of-a-kind. [Title corrected.]

Walker, Anne; Coppel, Georges. Les Formes de l’univers (ou l’univers des formes). Paris: L’Oeil du Griffon, 1995. [Name of publisher corrected.]

Wegewitz, Olaf. Mikrokosmos. Edition Staeck, 1992. [Publisher identified; date reflects publisher’s information; see also video.]

Yvert, Fabienne. Transformation. Marseille: Éditions des Petits Livres. 1995.

Zelevansky, Paul. The Case for the Burial of Ancestors. New York: Zartscarp, Inc. and Visual Studies Workshop Press, 1981.

The Case for the Burial of Ancestors (1981)
Paul Zelevansky

Zimmermann, Philip. High Tension. Rochester, NY: Visual Studies Workshop Press, 1993. [See also Craft in America video and video of High Tension.]

Zimmermann, Philip. Elektromagnetism. Barrytown, NY: Space Heater Multiples, 1995.

Elektromagnetism (1995)
Philip Zimmerman

Zubeil, Francine. Panique générale. Marseille:  Éditions de l’Observatoire, 1993.

Zweig, Janet. This Book is Extremely Receptive. Cambridge, MA: Pyramid Atlantic, 1989.

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The Cutting Edge of Reading: Artists’ Books by Renée Riese Hubert and Judd D. Hubert available:

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