Welcome back.
And so, yes, welcome to our last session on book arts and book studies or book art in study of the book,
and so which will be led by Adam Smyth, professor of English literature and history of the book at Oxford.
Thank you. Right. Thanks so much, Justine. It's really nice to be here.
I really enjoyed that last session so much. So many questions still to ask and conversations to continue.
And yes, so we're going to have a discussion now about book studies and book arts and the
relationship between the two, I think Agrippa will be present and bubbling around,
but we'll also think about other projects and other work by our speakers too and perhaps
widen things out a little bit and think about where we place Agrippa
perhaps in relation to certain kinds of traditions and other work that's going on.
So what I'll do, I'll introduce our speakers and then they're going to talk for 10 minutes about their own
work and their own thinking in the way in which book studies and bookouts can connect.
And then we'll have a little discussion between the three of us for about 20 minutes or so, and I will open it up to your teeming, urgent questions.
You have the last ten or 15 minutes. That's the plan.
But so let me introduce to our two speakers. Russell Maret is a book artist and letter designer working in New York City.
Russell began printing in San Francisco as a teenager and set up his own press at the Centre for Book Arts in New York in 1993.
And since then he's been printing and publishing and designing type and really fascinating ways.
He was awarded the Rome Prize in Design, the American Academy of Rome in 2009 and has been printing residents at a number of institutions,
including here in the Bodleian Library, in the Bibliographical Press in 2017.
And Russell's books and manuscripts are held in public and private collections throughout the world.
So we're really thrilled to have Russell here to talk about his own book making work.
Gill Partington is an academic and book artist who is a fellow in book history at the Institute of English Studies in London,
where she teaches and writes about 20th century and contemporary book cultures,
focusing particularly on the blurry hybrid hybrid space between book and art, Gill's published on artists,
including Tom Phillips, John Latham, ...and Dust Jackets, and Gill's current research project.
'Page Not Found' a study of the outer limits and the unexpected extremes of the page, with the space to meaning.
And she was also the co-founder and co-editor of Inscription, the Journal of Material Texts and Gill's
creative work her artistic book work has been exhibited in the Bodleian library in my recent fantasic Sensational Books exhibition, Shandy Hall in Yorkshire,
of course, and her work has been commissioned and acquired by the Beinecke Library, at Yale. Ok whose going to go first, ok, Gill.
Okay, Gill, over to you.
Okay.
Well, here we are on day two of Agrippa fest, Agrippa palooza
Justine has been calling it a week. So we've been treating Agrippa as a very special kind of book object, almost a unique kind of book object.
Whoose singularity announces itself in the fact that it is only designed to be read once, but work on it destroys itself.
It does have printed pages, but, as we've seen, these are quite unusual.
They aren't meant to be read, they're a kind of DNA code and actually they're just a container for another medium reclaimed.
digital diskette, so the book is on the one hand distributed or dispersed.
Not quite sure which of its many elements is the actual book.
And it's also a hybrid. It's a piece of technology as much as a codex, it records an operating system.
And it's written in the language of zeros and ones legible in the first instance, but only by the computer.
But. Maybe what is most interesting, most intriguing about the Aprippa is not this unique mix difference, but actually just the opposite.
So, maybe what's interesting is the odd similarities and the continuities that it has with
books in general and the perspectives that it opens up on the history of the book.
And maybe like other artist books, it kind of pushes the boundaries of the conventional codex,
illuminating a whole alternative history of book use and book formats.
So my argument, the point I'm going to try to make here is that artists books have this capacity to unsettle notions
and our definitions of the book that's kind of set in motion a chain of historical resonances,
that useful from the perspective of book history.
So here is a book from a different moment in time.
A different publishing milieu. But one that is also.
To echo Alan Lui's phrase from yesterday, a new media object.
It's a technological device, I'll just do that again since people enjoyed it and.
But it's an object. It's a book that is in the Cambridge University Library Collections.
It's by Lothar Meggendorfer, who is as much a paper engineer as an author
He's a master of full tap mechanisms and movable parts.
So we're dealing here with the context of the movable book, novelties for children emerged in the late Victorian period,
prompting a kind of technological arms race among publishers to innovate ferociously with the form and function of the books.
At this point, pages sprout all kinds of technological add ons
Reavers, rivetts and other moving parts, and these are books that often specifically advertised themselves as mechanical books,
they drew attention to their status as a kind of technology, and Meggendorfer's rhymes.
Often rule about the fragility of these mechanisms, so it says here, if you pull too hard, you may spoil the show, the monkeys, like mortals, are frail you know.
So, this, here is a page which is actually referring to its own material workings, these kind of strangely reflexive pages.
But. Often these warnings went unheeded.
And here's a picture of the same book.
There are places where it has come apart, where it no longer works and where it's damaged,
reavers and workings are exposed that sort of look like sad broken machines, which in a sense, of course, they are, and even more uncanny.
We're looking at a page opening that was never meant to be seen.
So here is the page's hidden operating system and its back end, if you will, circa 1895.
The page is actually quite a complicated object in these mechanical books,
both conceptually and topologically and if you when you handle these kinds of pages, you can often feel that they are thicker than they should be.
Something is concealed inside. It's not really a single leaf.
Although it may initially look like it. It's actually an envelope for moving parts.
So we might think of the page, by being defined precisely by visibility that everything is on the surface because the page is just a surface.
But in this case, it's doubled. It's deceptive. There are actually four sides, but only to a visible.
And there's a secret hidden compartment. And so like Agrippa, these books have dummy pages whose real purpose is to be housing or a mechanism.
Now, in case you're not convinced by my analogy I give you this, which is the insides of something called the Speaking Picture Book 1893.
So you can see that this is basically a box with a kind of.
Heath Robinson set of contraptions with wire and cardboard bellows and whistles and it's bits of wood.
It doesn't actually speak. There's the cover.
Doesn't actually speak, but it does make noises.
So it's nursery rhymes about farmyard animals areaccompanied by sounds which are operated by pull cords.
And each cord has a little arrow at the side of the page indicating which one to call pull.
And so. The Sad thing is that I can't play the sound, but it's a kind of strangled squeak
that is coming from the book at this point.
It's supposed to be a donkey. So we, I mean, we talk about a book being printed and published, but this one is manufactured.
This is a technical device that was subject to patent law.
So its maker, Theodore Brown, registered the German patent for the book a British patent a year later.
So, here is a piece of Victorian kitsch that you wouldn't expect to encounter in relation to a high concept artist book like Agrippa.
So I've thoroughly lowered the tone.
But the similarities are reliable.
So here we have a hybrid multimedia object.
It has pages that can be read. But they're also kind of hollow receptacles.
So. You can see here that the top layer.
are the pages that can be turned, but the bottom.
Basically a box, a hollow receptacle. And inside that are the machinery and operating system that I showed you, like Agrippa's floppy disk.
It's a kind of outdated semi broken mechanism.
It's had more than one reading, but still it's workings are proven to self-destruct.
It's like fragile and it's had a limited lifespan.
So some of these cords are missing some of the work.
So you might argue at this point that these are these examples I've been showing you are
exceptions and special categories of folks and scenic detours on the roadmap of book history.
Like surely the conventional page summary, such an operating system, the technical add ons
Well, let's look at one. This is a page from Laurence Sterne's novel, Tristram Shandy.
So this is an early addition to the 1770s. We can see two things at the bottom here.
For signature E3. Then this catch word 'invented' this kind of stray word at the bottom right.
And these in a way are the kind of operating code of the page.
The hand press book, the book in kind of pre-industrial era
Was it a complex folding structure,
a kind of origami for which instructions were needed from printer to binder, the binders job was to fold and cut the large printed
sheets into gatherings, and signatures are a kind of assembly instruction.
So 'E3' here is part of the signature, the gathering 'E', which would then be sewn together with all the other gatherings to bind the book.
And the catchword you've entered here. This is a peculiar kind of textual stutter in which the first word or syllable
of each page is prefigured in the bottom right margin of the previous one.
So, if we turn the page and then to take the first word on the next page.
So again, assembling the book is prone to error. These are visual aids indicating the correct page sequence followed.
So we might think about these things is a kind of pre-digital source code not designed to be read.
It's not part of the narrative. And it's not even designed to be noticed.
And yet. Nicholas D Nace in nice little artist book called Catch-Words has done just that and.
He's extracted all the catch words from Samuel Richardson's monumental epistolary novel, Clarissa from 1748, and given them a book of their own.
So he's allowed them to generate their own connections and meanings.
And the result is this enigmatic little volume. Here are some slides of what it looks like inside.
So Richardson's story of tragedy, temptation, moral virtue has been completely filleted.
This is a much shorter book, but something of its emotional.
And the overwrought register lingers in these arbitrary sequences of catch words, as perhaps does the endless exchange of letters.
You can see a the left. And this this book Catch-Words.
It mirrors the original novel's construction.
Since Nace's transforms each gathering into a page long stanza and preserves each of its seven volumes as a canto.
So it sort of turns the novel structured into a sort of poem using its catch words.
In a sense, it's like Clarissa, but in miniature.
And then this miniaturisation process repeats itself since each page of Nace's book and you can see here once it's own catchword.
And these are then extracts to be sure to second section and then there's a third
and so on as the words dwindle away to nothing in this kind of recursive structure.
So a bit like reciting Arippa, the text of Agrippa as a series of zeros and ones,
which I gather from texting was once a performance that took place.
Nicholas Nace's book here, rereads only the operating codes and ignores the narrative.
So it's an artist's book that reminds us that the page has always been a mechanism of sorts.
We might not see it as such, but it's a technology and one that's always had its own operating system.
Thanks Gill.
...
Hello. I'm Russell. I want to congratulate Justine and everyone who has put this conference together.
I've just found it immensely inspirational. I've been aware of Agrippa since 1993 when I first met Kevin Begos.
Centre for Book Arts in New York. And that's the only time I'm going to refer to it in my little introduction.
And I love the book, but we're moving on.
So I'm coming at this from the marketing side of things, and I'm a book artists and press printer and publisher and letter designer,
and I spend about equal amounts of time studying and writing about those things as I do making them,
which means that I make quite a lot of different types of books.
And so I'm just kind of sort of giving you an introduction about how my work relates to book studies.
And then we'll get on with our discussion. So I hope that works okay.
So as Oh, I'm not projected. I'm looking at the screen thinking your seeing what I'm seeing and you're not.
I mean this is beautiful. Thank you.
So, yeah, so as far as different kinds of books, so books that varied from my Noise series in the mid nineties,
which was really just a reaction to the endless prattling on about legibility in the typographic literature to my series
of Promethean Elegies inspired by Prometheus Bound in which I made a number of books using historical page proportions.
But in lieu of the text block, I put simply drawings made from candle smoke.
Do I write and publish essays about typographic and graphic letter forms?
In recent years, I've been moving into zine land and doing some street art.
This is my redacted U.S. Constitution. There's a deluxe version of that that you wouldn't want to staple on to a wall, but this is the $10 version.
And then my most recent book is Coloured Objects, which is an excerpt from Goethe's Theory of Colours.
And and it was very interesting seeing Gill deconstruct that movable book because this is a movable book.
These are these are novellas. There are six novels on this page and the whole book is constructed so that you only see two of them before surfaces.
And they're all kinds of mechanisms that are real pain in the ass and hopefully they won't break too soon and hopefully I'll die before they break.
That's the goal anyway.
So it's my general belief or my feeling is that anyone who never makes something automatically is in dialogue with and interacting with history.
The history of that medium, whether they know it or not, or they want to be or not.
And I just happen to like that aspect of it I like.
So I'm just going to go through two quick projects. This is my book, Interstices and Intersections, or an autodidact comprehensive cube.
It's 13 propositions from Euclid, one from each book of the Elements of Geometry,
which are paired with personal essays that I wrote in response to them.
And then I illustrated both Euclid and my texts.
And the thing that is wonderful about Euclid from the perspective of book arts is that every proposition in Euclid has a component
diagram that explicates the text and you can't really it's very hard to understand the book without the images.
And those diagrams were developed in the manuscript era and carried over into the printed book.
So if you were to go up into the reading room of the Bodleian and call up the D'Orville Euclid from 1888,
you'd notice that the diagram for Proposition 1317 looks strikingly similar to the one printed in 1948.
And I don't know of any other text, any other book that has this consistent millennia old tradition of text and image parity.
And because of the sort of stasis of that, it has provided a springboard for a lot of printers to get creative.
And so when I was making this book, I was worried that because I love patterns, that I would respond primarily to the diagrams.
And I wanted to get to know the the text better.
So I chose two things to do. One was to look at over 200 historical editions of Euclid,
and two of which are two of my favourites, of which are the one published by John Day in 1570,
which in this book 11 has paper fold ups of the three dimensional objects that Euclid is describing so the reader can actually make them.
This is 1570. And of course, there's Oliver Byrne's chromatic Euclid, which is wonderfully legible,
but entirely non-Euclidean, because he assigns values to the propositions, which is a no no.
But the and then the other thing I decided I wanted to do was to, I figured the best way to start
was to make a 13 volume manuscript in which I tried to prove every proposition in the book.
And in that way, I would get a you know, my essays would relate specifically to their contents.
So this slide gives you a sense of some of the preparatory work for the edition.
And then along the bottom here, these colourful books are my manuscripts.
So that's one way I interact with book history or book studies.
The other is in my alphabet design.
So in on November 30th, 1996, I was looking at this drawing and I was just seized with a sudden vision for a typeface for the Book of Jove.
I have no training in type design. I have no facility for calligraphy, but it was there clear's as day.
The next morning I got out of bed, christened myself a type of designer, and started teaching myself how to draw letter forms.
And the only technique I really understood was geometry.
So I started there, and I never made a type for the Book of Job.
I ended up making this was the first of a series of edition geometric, alphabetic manuscripts that I made.
I made seven copies of this. Each one is drawn and painted.
And, but ever since then, I've been sort of curious, and I've thought a lot about what made me suddenly feel the need to design my own typefaces.
And so when you think about the history of the typographic book, what you're really thinking about is the history of type design.
And so if we look at these books like the Gutenberg Bible.
Nicholas Jensen. Now this Manutius (Aldus Manutius).
Robert Granjon forgive my French pronunciation...
John Baskerville, John Batiste Levee
And William Morris. Now, all of these books have many planes on which they're interesting.
But from the standpoint of letter design,
what's unique about all of these people is that they started with a backward glance toward alphabetical history,
and then they made new alphabets that were resonant of their time and place that were of their own art historical moment.
And so when you the reason we know these people's names is in the typographic world is because they did that, we would not know who they were.
I'm convinced if they didn't. And the problem that this presents for a letter press printer in the late 20th and early 21st
century is that most of the metal typefaces available to us were designed 100 or more years ago.
The last commercially available typeface released by Monotype until recent years was over 50 years ago.
And so although these typefaces were had a dramatically important impact on the typography of the 1920s and thirties,
I believe that the proposition that I should use them in my book is as absurd
as the proposition that Granjon should have used Gutenberg's type.
These are beautiful examples of machine age, thought and design.
And they have nothing relevant to say, in my opinion, to the digital age.
And so one of the things that interests me is that idea of how people at different points in time view the past.
So these people were making they looked at the past.
You can tell from the correspondence and the literature around the same places that
they viewed the past as something that could now be corrected by their machines.
Whereas I view the past as a digital person,
as something where I can I can embrace the imperfections of the past and recreate
them in a way that I happened to prefer the pre-industrial printed page.
And so when I look at pre-industrial typefaces, I don't want to correct them.
I don't want to align them. I want to I want to have them, warts and all.
And so in 2015, I had the opportunity to sort of test the theory of mind, the theory that was that Monotype faces look the way they did,
not because the machines required them to be standardised, but because the operators of the machines believed that they should be standardised.
And so I started working with a group of people at the Type Archive in London, people who started working at British Monotype in 1945, 1952 and 1965.
And I so I worked on a historic revival of my own that is really sort of grotesque.
I love it. But, you know, some people really hate it. And I developed a workflow where I started with a digital typeface.
Used digital technology to engrave patterns which were then used to engrave using the monitor,
the original monotype, machines to engrave punches, strike matrices, and then cast typed.
And then when I gave the 100 drawings for the hungry Dutch typeface to Graham Sheppard, who was my main collaborator and a great,
great, brilliant man, he said that Monotype would have rejected all 100 of the drawings, and I knew that I was on track.
And so we made them. And because I had a digital master, I was able to see that they were able to recreate exactly what I had designed.
And so there was no need for that fiddling.
So anyway, this just gives you an idea of how, you know, so much of the work that I make is rooted in the history of the book,
but is, you know, my goal in studying the history of the book is to make it work.
That is of my time, of our time. Thank you.
Okay, so great.
Thanks guys. That was so fascinating.
The page as a technology with its own codes and logic and conventions, that's a really helpful idea.
And a book as part of a conversation with history.
Looking back on history from our present moment of history, these are really ideas.
I've got a few questions, I wanted to ask before we open things up.
But first, I was thinking reading and readers and, in your case, Gill.
whether individuals interacting with those fantastic late nineteenth century children's books are reading at all,
or whether we need a different term or a different kind of understanding of what's going on there.
And then Russell I was looking at your piece that responds to Goethe's Theory of Colour too, the volvelles.
I wonder what reading is there, whether you have readers at all or whether you have a different kind relationship.
Maybe Gill you could say a little bit about what these people are doing with these fantastic objects.
Yeah, I don't know. They are doing something different, but I.
I don't know what name we would give it, but I think this is the problem, um, because it's multi sensory.
So, yeah, it definitely involves
It's definitely tactile and visual.
But I think what that means is that the term reading has to be revisited in light of that.
I mean, I think that that seems to be a process that is going on in the history of reading and
Reading the book that we've been thinking about it as a kind of something embodied.
So. But I also think that there's another thing which is like the history of breaking things through reading.
And I was like, I was looking at those volvelles and thinking, Oh, that's so beautiful, but I'd be scared to touch them.
Yeah. You asked a lot, actually, with that question.
But first, the volvelles are meant to be handled, you know, the books are meant to be handled.
I don't know if the Bodleian wants people you know trying to test the limits of them, but.
The book is built to last with the understanding that it's not a commercial object and it's not going to be handled all that much.
I do find that people some people read my books why anyone would pay what I charge for my books and not read them.
I don't understand but some people do that and they're free to do that.
But the.
But for me, and this is the first book I've made with movable parts in it, and then the reason I did it was because Goethe's Theory of Colours,
It's really fun to read because you discover time, but all of the science in it is wrong.
And so you're . But the, the thing that's right is that all of the chromatic phenomena that he describes are real.
He just didn't get the science right.
And so the book is very it's full of his, you know, big exuberance for playing with things and experimenting and everything.
And so I basically made it a children's book for grown ups where I rather than illustrating what he was talking about,
I made the book so that you can perform the experiments he describes.
And and whether people read that or not, I don't know.
I mean, I find that the the greatest agents for people encountering my work are librarians.
That books that go into private collections are usually seen very rarely, but books that go into libraries, librarians actually showed people that.
And yet there is this echoing out of this, you know, small editions.
And someone said, I realised you have the numbers wrong because of the advertising.
There were only 200 copies of Agrippa.
I mean, the these things are so hard to make that they're, you know, they're limited by necessity, not by the desire to make them.
So anyway, librarians are the ones who sort of get them into the public consciousness.
You mentioned children then, and I wanted to ask you about these as children's books that seems to be in certain things,
a certain books, a book history. Why does it matter Gill
That these are books for children? Or are they books for children? They look like they are
And is there a certain kind of inventiveness and radicalism that's going on that has to do with that?
Yeah, I think it is important that they're books for children, because I mean, as I mentioned in the talk that this period in particular.
It's a kind of a period of constant reinvention and kind of experimentation with the form of the book.
But it doesn't happen in the in the realm of art.
I mean, the concept of the artist book was way in the future.
But it's not even happening in the realm of kind of high culture or art it's happening in a space where there's more license to produce,
you know, kitsch and novelty and gimmicks.
And because of that, they are.
They sort of don't get the credit they deserve for their inventiveness.
But I also think that it's it's important because the readership is assumed to be
interactive in a different way and that they will want to kind of pull out and play.
So it assumes that that reading is a kind of physical embodied activity.
But the interesting thing about that one that I was showed is that even
by breaking into the collections of Cambridge University Library under the legal deposit,
so they were never owned by children they've been broken because adults have been playing with them in the collections.
So, I mean, those like about what you will. But I did I think one of the but of course recently a short course about movable books and the final session was
was a hands on session where the room was instantly quiet, where there were 12 adults absolutely engrossed playing with these books.
And so I think they are intended for children.
But there's something about that physical interaction, which is kind of...
Yeah, it's hard to resist once you engage with it. Russell, if you could say something and children and your books.
Well, yeah. I mean, my experience is the same as Gill's with adults.
And, you know, people tend to think of the collecting public as a fine press artist world as being sort of,
you know, they are aerodite and everything else.
but it's amazing how people light up when a book does something unexpected, with the Euclid, for instance,
it's a very simply this it's a two sided accordion.
And when you get to the end of Proposition seven, you turn the book over and you continue.
And every time that I would do that in books, someone would go, Oh, you know, and the same with the Goethe, they love it,
there's a pair of glasses, green glasses, and you take them out to look at the world and people get excited.
And it sort of it is a kind of license to be playful in a world that is thought to be,
you know, in well, at least in public portrayal is suffocatingly unfunny, you know.
So. Yeah. But do you think do you think readers in 1570 the amazing John Day was that, was there
a similar frisson and delight when they saw those amazing works, were they working with the same effect.
I can't see how there wasn't, but who knows? I mean the other thing that book has is it has a bunch of templates for cutting out structures
that you can then fold into the Platonic solids and a number of other, and I'm looking for a copy that.
I've never seen one that has any of them cut out because I would love that to know that, to know that someone just took their scissors to it,
You know, I'm going to make a dodecahedron. A couple of final questions for you and then we can maybe open, one question for both of you is
the relationship between the normal book or the conventional book and then the creative or inventive or
apparent or strange. In your talk you were collapsing.
That divide, in lots of ways, but, is there still a language of normal, regular, Orthodox books?
In contrast to the kind of self-reflective works that you are talking about.
Well, I suppose the answer I want to give is no, because the.
Because there's something about these exceptions that bring out kind of the oddities and querks in the book,
but also the more you dig the more widespread the exceptions seem and the harder it is to find something.
Whereas the ones this kind of normal conventional book and I think listening to Matt Kirschenbaum's lecture yesterday about the,
you know, how the digital book is produced,
you know, the post digital paperback, is something that we all take for granted, that turned out to be something odd
and uncanny about that, about the production of that and what it means and how it comes to be.
So I think the more closely you look, the more oddities and querks you find in even the most conventional book object.
Maybe if I put to you this to you, a final point and to bring it back Agrippa. So where does that leave Agrippa?
Where do we base that? Are there other traditions that it seemed to, is it dramatising an extreme form.
kind of qualities of damage, of use, of history, books as carries a code exception that you were talking
about in different ways. Is it dramatising in an extreme form, but in a representative way?
Is it an outlier at the end of it, when we start to look at it through book studies of artist books today?
I just think of the conversation we were having over lunch about how theatrical it is.
I mean, it looks like something that was forgotten on the set of Indiana Jones or something,
you know, And you open it up and there's a shroud and it's burned and it's,
you know, it's very and then the whole theatrical, you know, it was meant as a spectacle, you know, clearly this performance.
Of the transmission where we're going to send it out into the world and it's going to be, you know, and that's wonderful, I think.
But the but it does, you know, it's something that didn't come up so much in the discussion of it.
I think that it is very much a theatrical piece of work, but.
And but as far as it's I mean.
I'm really hard pressed to think of an artists book that, you know, if you're doing a sort of vertical study of the history of, you know,
a silo where a grip is at the bottom, I'm really hard pressed to think of an artist's book that directly springs out of that.
I mean, it, you know, it happened at the time.
You know, Matt Kirschenbaum showed a bunch of those book is dead articles that were coming out around that time.
And it happened at the time where you kept hearing about these new digital forms
of reading that we were going to encounter with hyperlinks and everything.
But, you know, people just want to read a story.
You know, it's like none of that really came to be and except in very limited small corners of the reading public.
And so I, you know, I guess I'm just going to ramble.
That's fine. Yeah. Yeah. Okay.
Thank you. But we have.