Neckoracle (Know): edible book, stage 2, 2010. Fortune cookies, sacred string.

In other years I’ve structured my class so that each day the students build up skills in creating alternative book structures: concertina binding, Asian stab binding, coptic or longstitch binding and some simple section sewing. This year, at the Winter School in July,  I will be doing something a little different.

I’ve called the class ‘The Complete Book’ (even though Sturt list it as ‘Bookbinding’) after listening to an exhibition report-back by Rosemarie Jeffers-Palmer at The Gathering last year. This is now a category in the British bookbinders annual exhibition, and it it meant to differentiate artists’ books from conventional bindings. Why? Because with artists’ books, everything works together to form a complete whole: the structure, the materials, the content. If an artist book is blank, then it should be blank for a reason, not because it has an artistic cover and the maker will use the inside later. A sculptural book is perfectly valid, as long as the seemingly blank content supports the message.

This is what I want to explore with this class: we will be going through different binding structures, but the way we learn them will depend upon the concepts that the students bring to the class with them. It’s the perfect chance to workshop that idea you’ve had for ages and didn’t know how to bring to fruition. We will be playing with ideas and how to make them material book objects. We will also explore different ways to produce text and images and how to plan books (leaving plenty of room for spontaneity!). And let’s not forget the fun of altering books to make new content and context. All of that in a week, plus a lot of good conversation. If you’ve done my other Sturt classes, this is like an extension pack… it would be fabulous to have you back.

Don’t be scared! If you would love to do the class but think that you have no ideas, come anyway. I can show you that you have lots of ideas, you just haven’t met them yet. This is a fantastic chance for some professional development if you’re an art teacher, and especially good if you’re a printmaker and have lots of proofs and bits of prints lying in your paper drawers. Absolute book beginners are also very welcome, you’ve always proved to be exciting book-makers.

There are plenty of places in the class at the time of writing, and the deadline to decide if the class is running is looming, so pass this post on to friends and family! It’s such a good week, working in the beautiful surrounds of Sturt and meeting fellow creatives.

For more information, go to the Sturt website, and feel free to contact me directly for more information, reassurance and encouragement. I’d love to have you in the class.

* You can also stay off-campus in the nearby town of Mittagong or elsewhere in the Southern Highlands of NSW, but if you do that, I highly recommend having lunch in the dining room with the other students so that you get to share the communal learning experience.

The suggestion of an extract from Jeanette Winterson’s Art and Lies novel was, I confess, mine. From the moment I’d read the book, years and years ago, I’d been enthralled by her vision of the Library of Alexandria:

300BC. The Ptolemies founded the great library at Alexandria.

400,000 volumes in vertiginous glory.

The Alexandrians employed climbing boys much in the same way as the Victorians employed sweeps. Unnamed bipeds, light as dust, gripping with swollen fingers and toes, the nooks and juts of sheer-faced walls.

To begin with, the shelves had been built around wide channels that easily allowed for a ladder, but, as the library expanded, the shelves contracted, until the ladders themselves splintered under the pressure of so much knowledge. Their rungs were driven into the sides of the shelves with such ferocity that all the end-books were speared in place for nine hundred years.

What was to be done? There were scribes and scholars, philosophers and kings, travellers and potentates, none of whom could now take down a book beyond the twentieth shelf. It soon became true that the only books of any interest were to be found above shelf twenty-one.

It was noticed that the marooned rungs still formed a crazy and precarious ascent between the dizzy miles of shelves. Who could climb them? Who would dare?

Every boy-slave in Alexandria was weighed. It was not enough to have limbs like threads, the unlucky few must have brains of vapour too. Each boy had to be a medium through which much must pass and yet nothing be retained.

At the start of the experiment, when a book was required, a boy would be sent up to get it. This could take as long as two weeks, and very often, the boy would fall down dead from hunger and exhaustion.

A cleverer system seemed to be to rack the boys at various levels around the library, so that they could form a human chain, and pass down any volume within a day or so.

Accordingly, the boys built themselves eyries in among the books, and were to be seen squatting and scowling at greater and greater heights around the library.

A contemporary of Pliny the Younger writes of them thus:

Fama vero de bibliotheca illa Phariaca, opulentissima et certe inter miracula mundi numeranda, siparis ventisque mercatoriis trans mare devecta; nihil tamen de voluminibus raris ac pretiosis, de membris scriptorum disiectis fractisque, de arcanis Aegyptiacis et occultis devotis, quas merces haud dubio sperarent nostri studiosi, renuntiabant nautae, sed potius aulam esse regiam atque ingentem, tecta ardua et cum solo divorum exaequata ut dei ipsi tamquam in xysto proprio vel solario ibi gestare possent; quibus in palatiis tecto tenus loculamenta esse exstructa et omnes disciplinas contineri, nec tamen intra manus studentium venire sublimitas causa. Maxime enim mirabantur tantam illiam sublimitatem quantam nemo vel scalis vel artificiis machinarum evadere posset, nisi tantum turba innumera puerorum, quibus crura liciis tenuiora, quibus animus ceu fumus in auras commixtus, ut Maro noster, per quos denique multa transmittenda sed nihil retinendum. Illi enim circum bybliothecam in tabulates semper in altiora surgentibus collocati, ratione propria quadam ac secreta inter se mandata permutare poterant et intra tam breve tempus unius diei quemlibet librum demittere.

There is no system that has not another system concealed within it. [my emphasis] Soon the boys had tunneled behind the huge shelves and thrown up a rookery of strange apartments where beds were books and chairs were books and dinner was eaten off books and all the stuffings, linings, sealings, floorings, openings and closings, were books. Books were put to every use to which a book can be put as long as it is never read.

Jeanette Winterson, Art & Lies (London: Jonathon Cape, 1994), pp. 4-6.

Isn’t it marvellous? Everyone else in BAO thought so too, or at least enough of us to form a posse while the others did Paper Wrestling (I did PW as well, cos I’m a sucker for participation).

But you know, when it came to actually making the response, I got stuck. There were just SO MANY ideas, most of which involved altered books, and then I had to move house and studio and my year just went pear-shaped. One morning, as I am wont to do, I woke up having dreamed the book I wanted to make. It seems my subconscious never sleeps. And the book had nothing to do with the Library of Alexandria, except…

except that the internet is our LofA now, isn’t it? It holds more than anyone could hope or dream of being able to read in one lifetime, and just like the LofA, it could be destroyed quite easily. All it would take is the inability to generate electricity. Simple. That was my dream, and my starting point.

So I wrote my own story, modelled on the structure of this excerpt (without, of course, the brilliance of it being, you know, Winterson’s writing) and made a book that is unstable. I’ve done this before; the topic interests the hell out of me.

I wanted it to look groovy (ahem) but utilitarian. So the binding is simple wire spiral binding, but on both sides of the book (there’s also a cover that wraps around, spiral-bound on the opposite sides, so the initial view of the work is of a totally encased spiral-bound object) and the pages unfold outwards from the middle. The paper is acid-free, but the ink used to print the book is from my cheap domestic inkjet printer, the kind that pretty much every household has these days, the kind that are cheaper to replace than fix. It isn’t fancy photo-grade archival ink, and it will deteriorate over time. The final question, the one that lingers in my head on almost a daily basis, is printed on the last page, the back of the book, in silver letterpress ink:

It should still be there when the rest of the book is fairly unreadable.

The images, at the risk of Too Much Information, are close-up photos of my jeans taken when I was sitting bored at the dentist while my son was getting his braces fitted. I took one by accident, and then liked the movement of the fibres and threads. I helped it a bit in Photoshop, just enhancing the ‘connection’ twinkles, but the crappy printer created the rest of the atmosphere by itself. Don’t fight it, go with it, always a good motto.

Nothing beats holding the actual book, but I also scanned it and made an online copy. Seemed to complete the circle a bit. It doesn’t quite fit into the template provided by issuu, but that’s not surprising! Click on the link below and see the book in action for yourself.

Quagmire BAO3

OK, peoples, enough time has passed and no-one else has stepped forward as being part of the edition, so I will share with you my one-trick pony.

Front.

Back.

Colophon, tucked under the red heart.

And, when you open it all up, this is what you get:

Which is basically a broadside of the poem, but you have to pull the piece apart to get to it… and then (unless you want to frame the broadside), YOU HAVE TO PUT IT BACK TOGETHER.

Here’s what I wrote in the accompanying statement/letter:

Dear

At the risk of sounding as imperious as an Old Spice ad, if you’re reading this before opening my piece, STOP RIGHT NOW.

Go and do it. Do it, and then come back here to me. Just do it.

How was that?

I worried that you’d be the wrong audience for this idea, because if you’re in Book Art Object, then you’re familiar with paper and folding. Then I realised that you’re the perfect audience – because with the BAO project we all get to actually handle each other’s work whenever we want to. So I can make a work that is intended to be wrestled with, and it won’t just be shoved into an archive box and pulled out once a decade to be displayed in a single static pose. I hope. Please handle it, and encourage others to do so, too.

I wanted, with this work, to catch that moment of dis-ease and slight panic when you’re lured or seduced into an object and then don’t know how to put it back together again. I tested it on a few punters and loved their brief panic when they realised what they’d done and shared their triumph when they succeeded in restoring it to its original shape.

So I guess for me, this work is not about the actual paper or paper quality (I had to use something sturdy and serviceable to cope with all the ink and folding) but all about process, about making and using, which is why I printed it in process colours

I’m pleased to report that people seemed to cope! I chose an origami shape that looked seductive and was relatively easy to undo, but had a small element of difficulty that would give someone a sense of hesitation. Including the name of the fold as I found it on the internet within the colophon also gives people a clue if they are completely stuck.

So, you see, not deep and meaningful, a true one-liner, but I’m happy with it. I learned a lot while doing it, because it took so much planning and setting (I didn’t have enough type to set the whole poem at once, so each colour is printed in three stages. You do the maths). I also used monoprinting again for the yellow texture on the outside of the piece, so each one is unique while still being part of an edition. I guess that’s called a variable edition or something.

A few more photos here.

Because there were so many risks, I printed a lot. It’s an edition of 20, so there are extras. They come with a hand-sewn paper envelope, decorated with a bit of CMY fingerpainting.

I’m still thinking hard about the Winterson piece. This work sprang almost fully-formed into my head, but the Winterson one will be a more difficult gestation.

Finlay Press is a private press established by Ingeborg Hansen and Phil Day. They began printing in Goulburn, NSW, Australia in 1997. In 2001 the press moved to Braidwood, NSW, where they designed and printed numerous publications before closing the press in 2009.

Hansen and Day were graduates of the Graphic Investigation Workshop (GIW) at the Canberra School of Art (now ANU School of Art), where they studied under Petr Herel and Peter Finlay. Herel, an advocate of the artist book, head lecturer of the GIW, and founder of the Artist Book Studio (ABS, est. 1994), and Finlay, a compositor and printer by trade, both inspired Hansen and Day to continue making books after their graduation. Finlay’s name was chosen for their press name largely because of Finlay’s life-long involvement in letterpress printing; he started as an apprentice compositor then worked professionally as a printer, a teacher of all aspects of book production in numerous technical colleges, and he assisted other private press printers including Alec Bolton in the early days of Brindabella Press – a role in private press productions that Hansen and Day thought would otherwise be overlooked.

Hansen and Day’s first collaborative book was Imaginary Thoughts and Their Beings (1995), printed in the ABS. Hansen supplied a prose poem while Day supplied eight etchings. Earlier books by Hansen were often unique copies featuring her own writing, some including textiles for pages, most of them letterpress printed onto cheap coloured papers. Day’s earlier books were more typical hand-made book productions utilizing tradition printmaking and letterpress techniques printed onto art papers.  In 1996 Hansen and Day collaborated on a zine called PAB (taking its name from the initials of the French poet Pierre Albert-Birot), and invited others to contribute to each issue. There were 3 issues in an edition of 100 each. In 1996 the Artists Book Studio was separated from the Graphic Investigation Workshop to make an independent studio space. Herel chose to stay with the GIW. The ABS was renamed the Edition and Artist Book Studio (E+ABS) and was headed by Diane Fogwell. The E+ABS employed Day as its first printer and binder. Hansen was also employed as a printer for some titles. By late 1996 Hansen and Day had started gathering equipment to found a press. By 1997 they had printed their first title Burly Gryphon, dedicated to ‘Peter and Petr’ (Finlay and Herel) under the press name Finlay Press.

Finlay Press set out to work with authors and artists domiciled in Australia. The press wanted to establish a close working relationship with its contributors. Some authors, such as Gary Catalano, Julian Davies, and Robin Wallace-Crabbe had more than one title published; Wallace-Crabbe also contributed as a visual artist to three book titles, one folio, and a broadsheet.

The earlier books were printed under the imprint Yabber Yabber Publications as a publishing arm of Finlay Press. The publishing arrangements were simple: Finlay Press supplied half the money for the edition, and the remaining contributors supplied the other half, making all contributors publishers of the title. The finances were used solely for covering the cost of paper, nothing else. Once the edition was completed Finlay Press retained half the edition and the remainder were divided equally among the contributors. Hansen and Day closed Yabber Yabber Publications to gain complete control over all aspects of each title knowing that this would allow them to create a house style and print larger runs, and further books used the imprint Finlay Press.

Early titles from Finlay Press were printed in small runs ranging between twelve to thirty copies (with the exception of one title, The Seven Proses, which ran to two hundred copies). These early books were experimental in binding and layout, but were always true to the traditional notions of a book. Conscious of contemporary changes in paper, inks, bindings and printing techniques, Hansen and Day continued to find a way to a house style suitable for editions of over one hundred that was affordable on both money and time.

Later titles, editions between 25 to 150 copies, were printed and bound with a firm house style. Each publication used Magnani paper folded on the fore-edge, stitched with a Japanese binding and bound with a French false cover, then inserted into a slip case made from cardboard (usually a kraft stock). Some titles employed a concertina fold. Almost all titles were printed letterpress using hand-set Baskerville (with the exception of titling). The first title printed in the house style was Light and Water: Forty Prose Poems 1980-1999 (2002).

One later title deviated from the house style: Goodbye Eggcup. Two titles, I’ll Build You a Stairway to Paradise and Day by Day didn’t sit comfortably within the house style. I’ll Build You a Stairway to Paradise, a poem by Hartmann Wallis, is about a girl who is the sexual desire of an art student. It is accompanied with a lithograph by Day containing overtly sexual images, and the slip case is drawn on (not printed) with a felt pen; neither the subject nor use of felt pen comfortably sit with the printed nature of previous titles. Day by Day, a collection of poems by Pierre Albert-Birot, translated by James Grieve, is given a similar treatment. Its brightly-coloured card slipcases have more in common with Hansen’s pre-Finlay Press titles, and Day’s use of potato prints rather than ‘fine’ press techniques was unusual for the Press. One of the poems, ‘St Vincent’s Day’, is clearly not a Birot poem. It is most likely an original composition by Grieve. The production and content of Day by Day still fits with the Finlay Press house style, but the aforementioned details of the book, while still reserved, show the beginning of an abandonment of the house style. Day by Day was to be the last title published by Finlay Press.

By 2005 Hansen and Day wanted to print lengthy prose, particularly fiction, in higher editions, but the practicalities of doing this with hand-set type was simply not possible due to time, and limited type stock. James Grieve approached Finlay Press with the possibility of printing a novel; using linotype was the only possibility, but this didn’t solve the problem of binding approximately 500 copies. The solution was to create a new publishing arm. Hansen and Day discussed these ideas with Julian Davies and Robin Wallace-Crabbe (two author/artists they had already collaborated with) and enthused by the idea of independent publishing they founded Finlay Lloyd. The name Finlay, again, came from Peter Finlay and was retained from Finlay Press, and Lloyd was the name of Davies’s father, a man who had little interest in books. The first title, a collection of essays loosely discussing the fate of the book and literature titled When Books Die could be seen as a loose-fitting manifesto; it was released in 2006.

As mentioned before, the press disbanded in 2009.

ALL IMAGES BELOW ARE CONTENT © INGEBORG HANSEN & PHIL DAY, FINLAY PRESS. The copies are mine, and the images themselves are © Ampersand Duck.

Bibliography (basic, will add to it as more details come to light)

Early editions (Yabber Yabber, individual designs)

Burly Gryphon (1997)
- Ingeborg Hansen (prose)
- Phil Day (etchings)

Hungry Magpies (1997)
- Bernard Hardy (poetry)
- Ingeborg Hansen (lino cut, wood engraving)
- Phil Day (etchings)

Bomber (1997)
- Emma Veal (poem)
- Phil Day (etching)

Offerings (1997)
- G. W. Bot (poem, lino cuts)
- Ingeborg Hansen (binding)

Fth (1998)
- James Pollock (short story)
- Ingeborg Hansen (lino cuts)
- Phil Day (etchings)

The Last Lost Doughnut (1998)
- Robin Wallace-Crabbe (play)
- Ingeborg Hansen (typography)
- Virginia Wallace-Crabbe (bichromate photographs)
- Phil Day (lino cut paper masks)

Pandora’s Cat (2000)
- Robin Wallace-Crabbe (poem)
- Ingeborg Hansen (typography)
- Katie Clemson (lino cut)

Formingle
- Craig Charlton (musical composition)
- Kirsten Wolf (handmade paper)
- Phil Day (etching)

I, I Am, A Blind Man (1999)
- Petr Herel (etchings)

Household: Eleven Poems (1998)
- Gary Catalano (poems, lino cuts)
- Robin Wallace-Crabbe (lino cuts)
- Ingeborg Hansen (lino cuts)
- Phil Day (lino cuts)

Jabberwocky
- Julian McLucas

The Seven Proses (2000)
- Bernard Hardy (poems, wood engravings)

Finlay Press (with a house style)

Light and Water: Forty Prose Poems (2002)
- Gary Catalano (poetry)
- Robin Wallace-Crabbe (etchings and lino cut)

Pile of Hair (2003)
- Julian Davies (short story)
- John Pratt (etchings and woodcuts)
- Phil Day (Monotypes)

Through Hoops (2005)
- Gina Dow (poetry)
- Phil Day (copper engravings and linocut)
- Ingeborg Hansen (wood engravings)

Familiar Objects (2005)
- Phil Day (essay, lithography – some copies hand-coloured)

Goodbye Eggcup (2006)
- Phil Day (poetry, copper engraving, collograph)

Cat’s Eye (2008)
- Julian Davies (short story)
- Phil Day (copper plate engravings and monotype)

I’ll Build A Stairway To Paradise (2008)
- Hartmann Wallis (poetry)
- Phil Day (lithography)

Day By Day (2009)
- James Grieve (translations of Pierre Albert Birot poems)
- Phil Day (potato prints)

Print Folios

Top Ten Twentieth Century Monsters
- Phil Day (lino cut, copper engraving,  monotype)

Four Men and Their Ideas on the Erotic
- Ingeborg Hansen (lino cut)
- Robin Wallace-Crabbe (photo etching)
- Robert Jones (lino cut)
- Julian Davies (monotype)
- Phil Day (copper engraving)

Broadsheet

An Egyptian
- Hartmann Wallis (poem)
- Robin Wallace-Crabbe (etchings)

I’ll put you out of suspense: the quick answer is NO – but also YES. It all depends, of course, upon what you mean by the word ‘book’, and this is, in a roundabout way, what we’re all talking about, isn’t it?

Provenance
Now, my very hastily-prepared abstract reads as though I’m going to give a blow-by-blow account of the 2009 conference of the Bibliographical Society of Australia and New Zealand (or BSANZ, as its members thankfully dub it, because it is a bit of a mouthful): I’m not. I came back from the conference all fired up and wanted to share the love, but I honestly didn’t listen hard enough to all the papers to sound absolutely authoritative, and I don’t think you’d enjoy it if I did.

It also sounds as though I went to Bristol for the 2009 Impact conference, but I didn’t. I did participate in the Bristol research project about how artists positioned themselves as book makers and publishers, but I only did so at a safe distance, through the ether.

This paper came about because I was struck by the common questions in these and other (mainly online) discussions about the book, its form and its future, regardless of whether the participants were academics, artists or general punters: what is a book, does it have limits, what is the future of the book, and does taking it online change everything? A disclaimer: his is more of a traveler’s meanderings through our common book world than a straight academic paper, because I find it hard to stay on track most of the time, let alone when I’m trying to walk in a straight line…

As you can see from this one component of my submission to the Bristol discussion, I frequently find myself wandering through the various continents of the book world without much of a guidebook or even a plan. Sarah Bodman and Tom Sowden provided interested parties with this standard chart, and asked us to identify the areas in which we publish as artists. I ‘publish’ broadly; I like finding ways to present ideas and text, and I love collaborating with others who have their own book ideas, so my range tends to balloon out. This is why I position myself overall as a private press, a term that gives me the personal freedom to avoid pinning myself down, and why I don’t actually put the word ‘press’ after ‘Ampersand Duck’, but keep the name open, so that it is like an umbrella that sits over my activities.

BSANZ
In July 2009 I decided to travel up to Brisbane to attend the annual BSANZ conference, entitled The Limits of the Book. I’m not a PhD student, nobody funded my trip, and I wasn’t at the time a BSANZ member, although I am now. Essentially, I went there to cold-sell myself and my books. As you can see from the Bristol chart, one of my activities is to produce formal, traditional, hand-set, letterpress-printed, hand-bound fine press poetry books.

Fine press books are listed on the chart at the far right-wing end of Bristol’s art book-making scale, even further across, oddly, than Livre de Luxe or Livre d’Artiste works and they seem at the moment highly unfashionable in Australia, which is perhaps due to the steep decline in awareness of what a private press is and does, thanks to an entire generation of printers and book people ageing and fading away and not passing on their knowledge along with their equipment. Printers and fine binders tend to be shy, solitary creatures, and fast-moving technology, combined with a generational shift to instant gratification has probably forced that very steep and slippery decline. Fine press books take a lot of planning and concentration and time, and hence they cost a lot of money compared to even the nicest commercial hardback book. The decline of awareness of their production is another factor in their being unfashionable.

BSANZ, as an organisation, is full of the kind of people who know (at least in theory) about the sorts of things I do with letterpress, if not with book arts and that was its primary attraction as a group to visit. The membership is stuffed with academics and librarians, and other seriously bookophile individuals. Not many members, unfortunately, are actual makers of books, and this is one of the reasons I decided afterwards to join as a member, to add to the physical production knowledge base. I noticed that the biggest cross-over group between BSANZ and the book arts community is the Rare Book Librarians, and you’ll find at least one here today: Des Cowley, who also attended the BSANZ conference, and may care to comment further about what I’m saying later.

Bibliography, in itself, is a slowly dwindling academic pursuit, also outwardly unfashionable at the moment, and also, like traditional letterpress and fine bookbinding, tenacious in its survival among the few who choose to pursue it. Bibliography is the formal study of written and printed works, with two branches, textual and physical bibliography. It spans the classification, careful description, historical analysis and study of books and manuscripts and ephemera. It’s a broad field of study: even if books vanished tomorrow, there would still be bibliographers working away on what has remained, branching out to explore the reason why books stopped being needed, and debating the pressing question of why people still persist in having bookshelves in their homes. This is only if scholars still by then choose to identify themselves as bibliographers: most who do are of a certain age, those coming up behind seem to prefer to be identified with Cultural Studies, or some such new labelling of their departments.

Once upon a time (and most of us are old enough to know that this time wasn’t so long ago), most English departments, as they were known then, offered some form of bibliographical unit amongst their courses. Some even had their own press and some type lurking in the library or the basement, allowing students to sample hand-setting type for themselves, so that when they studied the problems of say, nineteenth-century book sections that were printed out of order, or wrote a commentary upon the peculiar spellings in a Shakespeare play and whether they were due to Shakespeare’s ingenuity or the dyslexia of the compositor who set the page, they could speak with some personal authority.

Unfortunately, traditional presses are quite big, and type is dirty and mildly toxic, and both collect dust, and do not compare with the satisfactory minimalism of a laser printer, so most presses were discarded by university administrators. I think Monash University is the only campus in Australia to still have a consciously bibliographical press, but even they have been cast out of the English Department and sent to live across the other side of Melbourne with the – gasp — artists at their Caulfield campus, which has been a bit of a culture shock. I recently heard a rumour that Sydney University is talking about reviving their bibliographical press, and ANU has fully functioning letterpress facilities at my department in the art school, but the English department just doesn’t seem to be interested. And so fewer and fewer people are formally taught how to produce a traditional printed page.

When I saw the theme of the BSANZ conference, The Limits of the Book, I thought attending the conference would be a fruitful thing to do, to make contact with the last group of people who might support that side of my work, because I have a personal commitment to not just work with letterpress, but to share what I learn with others, as a kind of ‘tradition bearer’. I have also made an effort to interact actively with the Canberra Bookbinder’s Guild, for similar reasons: while I’m not a formal or trained binder, I figure that they need an injection of people who actually care about the craft.

Interacting with BSANZ wasn’t much of an exotic excursion to me; I should confess now that I am no stranger to bibliography, and in fact, it is what got me here today. I started my adult life thinking that I would be living within its realms; I was studying classics and English with the view to being a librarian or a teacher. I did a course in Bibliography and Scholarly Editing in the early 1990s with Professor Paul Eggert at ADFA@UNSW. Paul regularly took advantage of the ANU presses to send his students over for weekend workshops to experience handset letterpress. My particular weekend workshop changed my life completely and I decided to take physical bibliography literally, and become utterly physical with books and try to always be around letterpress equipment – but not before I’d ingested some of the core concerns of bibliography: the importance of every single physical part of a book as a carrier of meaning, the difference between certain states of text, and the need to keep proofs and records of your process as an author or maker. For anyone who has had me as a teacher, this is why I’m always banging on about books needing a colophon that is designed into the work, not included as an afterthought on a scrap of paper that is easily lost.

So once I finished with ADFA@UNSW I changed track completely and went to ANU art school, to get as close as I could to their letterpress equipment, and I haven’t left yet.

I thought, when I turned my back on what had really been my parents’ expectations of my career, that I’d escaped bibliography, but when I went to the BSANZ conference in July, I discovered that it had stayed with me like a shadow, and I acknowledged to myself that bibliographical concerns matter to my work, and that the scholarly continent of bibliography isn’t across the globe, but next to that of books as art, in the same way that Asia is joined to Europe.

I think as book makers, we all bring our personal interests and strengths to our books, no matter how obscure or even domestic. I always thought that I was a late bloomer when it came to making books (I didn’t get to art school until my 30s), but I know now that my early studies, my passion for reading novels and poetry, and my freelance work with desktop publishing and design all served a crucial apprenticeship that fed into my work once I was freed from the demands of study and a small child. My journey provided a perspective that informs my ideas about books, just as your journeys inform yours.

Epiphany
Back to the conference: what conference participants made of the ‘Book’ and its ‘Limits’ interested me. The program was diverse: it started with a paper on scholarly publishing, and moved swiftly to online ideas of ‘The Book’ before returning to what a presenter jokingly termed ‘hardcore bibliography’. Then there were a number of optional sessions, and I made my choices according to my personal interests: I attended a wonderful talk about illustrations on the margins of medieval illuminated texts, another one that explored the movement of diaries from paper to cyberspace, and a session by Doug Spowart on the rise of online self-published photobooks. Later I chose a talk on author Jasper Fforde’s online paratexts that explored his use of a website to not only promote his novels but to supplement and extend them; also a session about the way poet Susan Howe challenges the printed page, and lastly a study of popular Feminist book blurbs and covers.

But it was a moment in the first part of the conference that made me sit up and think, and to convey it properly, I have to build up the context.

The keynote speaker, Andrew Schuller, was talking from the scholarly publishing sector, about the shift of scholarly works away from physical books into digital publishing because of the costs in producing limited numbers of such books commercially. Among a lot of cogent points about copyright, authorship and textual fluidity (a term I love), he talked about books as artifacts (things that are solid, finite and cannot easily be replicated) as opposed to books as content (‘freed from bondage’, in the eyes of electronic publishers). The former, he said, encourage ‘proper’ deep reading comprehension; the latter, a lighter, multi-layered reading. I mention that last bit as a slight digression, since the ‘artifacts’ and ‘content’ are the dichotomy I want to emphasise here. Still, I’m sure we’ve all noticed how much reading has changed with the move to multifaceted platforms for text (and this was touched upon yesterday by Lyn Ashby).

There were a number of young up & coming academics speaking at the conference, who were mostly exploring digital and online texts and their presentation. Kate Eltham’s topic, early on the first day, was ‘The Book As… Searching for a New Metaphor for the Book in a Digital Age’. It was a great talk, and I’d like to read you a bit of her abstract:

What new metaphors will replace the ‘book as print object’? This presentation explores five different conceptual frameworks for the book with case studies of contemporary usage.
The “book as text” (example: blog books, podcast books, e-books)
The book as “art object” (example: artist books, special print editions)
The “book as a game” (Example: Alternative Reality Games)
The “Book as Place” (Example: comment Press, books as conversations)
The “Book as web service” (Example: The networked book)
What conclusions can we draw from the proliferation of new metaphors for the book and its role within contemporary culture? Certainly it is clear that digital platforms have permanently amputated the content of books from the container in which that content is distributed. We can also observe that the book is moving from a thing (noun) to a process (verb)…

I’m going to come back to her list again later, but first I’ll stick to this pivotal moment. As she talked, I was watching the room around me (I like people watching at events more than the event itself at times) and there was a palpable air of discomfort coming from some of the more traditional people in the room, who clearly wanted to return the discussion to more solid bibliographical topics and were wondering if this was to be the tone of the rest of the conference, in which case they looked as though they wanted to duck out for a while to sit among the books in the library upstairs.

Straight after Kate Eltham, Alan Loney stood up. Alan is a poet and private press printer from New Zealand, and is highly respected there in a way that cannot be replicated here in Australia because New Zealand seems to have retained a close-knit community of fine bookbinders and letterpress printers (craft is strong there because their TV stations are really bad). Alan followed his heart to Melbourne, and prints there as Electio Press, as well as writing poetry and books about books. Alan stood up for his talk, titled ‘The Limits of the Book as Object’, and one of the first things he said was a kind of manifesto:

I know the limits of the book: they are the front cover, the back cover, and the spine.

There was a strong wave of relieved laughter, and that palpable air of concern relaxed. The lines had been drawn; there was now an ‘us’ and a ‘them’ in the room.

There was another moment of ‘us’ and ‘them’ shortly after in Alan’s talk when he said that his definition of a book is a codex with a text, and only the combination of both created a Book (capital B), and he followed this with a disparaging remark about artist’s books, on account of their frequent lack of text and substance. My back stiffened at that moment, and so did Doug Spowart’s, I noticed. Of course, I felt strongly that I had to defend artist’s books, and did so in question time afterwards, then Alan and I carried our discussion about this on through the lunchbreak, most amiably.

But what he had said about the limits of the book as an object resonated with me through the conference and beyond. I disagree violently about the book having to be a text-filled codex, but I have come to believe that the fundamental premise of a book is its physicality. It is, primarily, a tangible container of ideas. It does not have to have text in it, but a book without text still holds the idea of text: our minds provide the textual connections as we gaze at it; a blank book holds potential and is defined by the absence of text. Even a book sculpture is a physical container of implicated meaning and metaphor.

Consequently I’ve come to think that there ARE limits to the book. I think that there are only so many ways you can push the idea of a physical book before it stops actually being a book – although my personal spectrum of physical book-ness as an artist is really very broad. I think that if you remove the book container from its contents, you are left with information. This information can then be presented in myriad other ways, none of which has to be called a book. So if you’re actually asking if there are limits to the way text or information can be presented, then there are no limits , no limits at all. There are now many alternative choices.

I’m not trying to deny the potential of online text, I just think it’s just a matter of our being brave, of jumping to a new way of thinking. Poet Judith Beveridge has said that poetry was a matter of naming things, and I think art is also a matter of finding names for things too, and of finding new things for names. We need to find new names for text and information online that aren’t book-based.

As you probably know, I blog, and in the past I have thought of my blog as a kind of on-going artist’s book, but now I am happy for it just to be a blog, a contemporary (and probably completely ephemeral) publishing entity in itself and an experience that allows me to think about my life in a way that a written diary doesn’t (I also have a written diary, because there are some things in life you just can’t blog). I also really respect the Kindle, because the Kindle doesn’t call itself a book. It is a container that holds text, and it doesn’t pretend to be anything else. In fact, it has been so successful at being itself, that I have heard people use the word Kindle as a generic term for a text reader in the way that people now use Google for any internet search, not just a Google search. A bit of imagination and ingenuity will allow us to move forward with information transformation and presentation and allow the book to just be itself, 3D in the real world.

Orientation

Now, Did anyone spot the anomaly in Kate Eltham’s list of examples, above? They are all virtual entities, except for the artists’ books. This, combined with Alan Loney’s dismissal of the genre, made me realize that we, as an artistic book-making community, aren’t taken seriously by bibliographers unless we are working with ‘serious’ book formats. I think this is a great shame, as we share so much. The genre of artists’ books is so vast, and if you step back and look at their production broadly, they are an ongoing dialogue with the future of the book as a physical artifact, and are and will be worthy of serious scholarly investigation outside of book arts criticism.

Young academics are getting there; Kate Eltham, even though she lumped us in with alternatives to books as physical containers, showed a wonderful selection of artist’s books, including altered books and a fabulous book concept by Shelley Jackson, who uses a vast number of people who have allowed themselves to be tattooed with one random word each to create short stories. Now that is truly a physical book.

I encourage all of you to take interest in BSANZ: it seems to be branching out, stepping up, shifting generationally. Last year’s conference was apparently better attended than ever before, and the 2010 theme, sited in Melbourne, is called To Deprave and Corrupt: Forbidden, Hidden and Censored Texts. Perfect theme for artists, don’t you think? Why not present a paper, attend, or try to exhibit something nearby? It would be great to move our books and our ideas outside of our tight circle of artists, to show – not prove – but just show – that books as art are relevant, fruitful and engaged with the book as an object as it transforms over time.

Uncharted waters
I think I’ve covered a few of the questions I mentioned at the start of my talk: I don’t think anything I’ve said should be treated as a definitive answer, despite the fact that I tend to state things confidently – not only am I a Libran, and apt to change my mind easily, but every experienced traveler knows that you have to take cultural perspectives into account when seeking the truth. As far as the future of the book goes: I’ve got two completely differing endings to this talk. I wrote each one separately, and put them side by side. I can’t decide which I like best, so I provide them both, like one of those choose your own adventure books.

The first, I call
i. post-apocalyptic zombie hunting

There was an underlying theme at the BSANZ conference that kept popping up its head like an uncontained zombie: the Death of the Book (say it out loud with a capital D, capital B).

I don’t think anyone in BSANZ actually believes this, but the debate is certainly fun. I don’t think any of you really think it either, because you all know, as book artists, that the shift away from the book as the primary provider of information frees it up again to be an object of worth and beauty, and beefs up its importance as a cultural symbol that can be used as a metaphor for all kinds of things in an art sense. The Death of the Book  is basically a media beat-up.

I don’t believe in the Death of the Book because of one simple and possibly, you may think, far-fetched fact: humans have not got their act together enough to have sufficient energy to run the internet at current capacity when peak oil runs out. We are living in a weird time of paradox: this is a golden era for information, but a future dark age for record-keeping. It’s an era of amazing accessibility if you happen to be in the first world, but there’s not a lot of access for the third world, and that divide is only going to get more dramatic in the future.

As information is increasingly only accessible online, then we really will have Haves and Have-nots, everywhere. We’ll have a literacy divide as wide as that of the dark ages, when reading was a privilege, only accessible to those who could afford the books. This is my post-apocalyptic extension of the very real question ‘how does the information contained in books survive the constant shifting of software that leaves much behind and only translates what is deemed relevant?’. As someone who has worked in desktop publishing pretty much from the moment it went onto computers (I just felt a grey hair go PING), I have witnessed many incarnations of books fall by the wayside, trapped on disks, drives, sticks, all holding files that are now impenetrable.

The Academy Editions of Australian Literature, a project I’ve worked with since its inception, has spent the last 20 years (PING) trying to perfect a way to strip down their carefully researched and formatted scholarly editions into some holy grail of simple code that can coast along the surface of a very rough software (and hardware) ocean. I don’t know how successful they’ve been, but it’s been a long journey in a very leaky boat.

Do you remember in the mid 1990s, people were getting grants right, left and centre to make computer books that were quite akin to games; lots of movement across the screens, lots of interactivity… for a while. There’s very little interactivity between software and/or hardware developers, and very few of those ‘books’ are still able to be used on our computers now. Our information only accessible for relatively short periods of time.

If you think I’m exaggerating about any of this, take a look at these Anselm Keifer sculptures of unreadable lead books:
and tell me how they are any different from this:

And then look at an object with text.

The benefit of this last image shows that even if something is depicted on the surface in another language, it’s still decipherable if you take the time. With no surface information, or a reliance on technological mediation, data is easily lost.

In a nutshell, I think books will survive anything the internet can throw at them, but maybe just not in the quantity at which they’re being pumped out now. Crap novels can and will easily survive as e-texts, and that will save a lot of trees. Quality books, if printed well and bound properly, will always be collectable, and therefore people will continue to make them, albeit a bit slower and perhaps with more consideration, and artist’s books, if made well and interestingly, will always be valuable – and increasingly relevant as ongoing commentary, societal reflection, and a way of extending an active artistic practice.

ii. the fairytale ending
Bibliographers, especially those interested in physical bibliography, spend a lot of time with the anatomy of books. They can give entire papers on individual parts of book anatomy, such as Victoria Bladen’s BSANZ session on medieval marginalia.

Called ‘Gardens at the Margins: the Limits and Porous Borders of Renaissance Texts’, it was a quite magical talk with the most exquisite images that I can’t, of course, source, about how the margins of illuminated manuscripts were the medieval space to imagine and be creative, a space that evolved over time to the frontispiece of the printed book, and has since moved to book covers, and just like many book covers (especially science fiction covers), the marginalia often had very little to do with the actual contents of the page or book, as if it were an open space, completely outside of authorial control.

This idea translates beautifully into the making of an artist’s book: in my workshop for the forum, Print to Book, I was exhorting my students to think about every part of a book structure, codex or otherwise, as fertile ground for meaning and content, to not just print on the pages or the cover. I was saying that every kind of material you use feeds into the reading of the book and can enhance what you are trying to say. And that it is important to have something to say, rather than just creating empty vessels.

If we look at the traditional terminology of book anatomy, it is redolent with metaphor and suggestion. The top of the book is the head, the base is the tail. Between the two is the spine. We can start talking about the book as a reflection of the human condition, but what human has a tail? I guess if we’re being sensible, we can rationalize that bookbinders couldn’t stomach the thought of calling the lower part of the book something as base as the bottom.

But combining head and tail allows the (capital B) Book to be an indefinable polyglot creature, a unicorn perhaps, or a mermaid, surviving elusively in the corner of our vision, roaming the forests or oceans of our vast book continent. People obsessing about what a book is and is becoming seem to want to catch one of these creatures and pin it down, as if to prove that these magical entities are fakes, like weird false mermaids constructed from fish skin and displayed to gullible punters in freak shows. But they are not: here be dragons, lustrous glimmering seamonsters, and even though they are deemed to be dying out, or even extinct, they will linger long on the edge of our cultural maps, and we are the people who will keep them alive, in all shapes and forms.

If your browser won’t load the image, click here to be taken to the digital file.

The hard copy is 240 x 92mm, printed on two weights of Kraft paper and hand-sewn in a horizontal format. If you would like to purchase a copy, wave your mouse over the top of this page to find the red drop-down Duckshop link. Or contact me directly.

For images of the production, have a look at my letterpress flickr set. For the story of its production, click here.