1 00:00:05,380 --> 00:00:08,860 Welcome back. 2 00:00:09,490 --> 00:00:20,620 And so, yes, welcome to our last session on book arts and book studies or book art in study of the book, 3 00:00:21,010 --> 00:00:28,390 and so which will be led by Adam Smyth, professor of English literature and history of the book at Oxford. 4 00:00:29,200 --> 00:00:33,550 Thank you. Right. Thanks so much, Justine. It's really nice to be here. 5 00:00:34,450 --> 00:00:40,780 I really enjoyed that last session so much. So many questions still to ask and conversations to continue. 6 00:00:41,140 --> 00:00:48,640 And yes, so we're going to have a discussion now about book studies and book arts and the 7 00:00:48,640 --> 00:00:53,719 relationship between the two, I think Agrippa will be present and bubbling around, 8 00:00:53,720 --> 00:00:59,800 but we'll also think about other projects and other work by our speakers too and perhaps 9 00:01:00,460 --> 00:01:04,690 widen things out a little bit and think about where we place Agrippa 10 00:01:04,690 --> 00:01:08,410 perhaps in relation to certain kinds of traditions and other work that's going on. 11 00:01:10,330 --> 00:01:18,399 So what I'll do, I'll introduce our speakers and then they're going to talk for 10 minutes about their own 12 00:01:18,400 --> 00:01:23,230 work and their own thinking in the way in which book studies and bookouts can connect. 13 00:01:23,470 --> 00:01:31,000 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. 14 00:01:31,630 --> 00:01:35,560 You have the last ten or 15 minutes. That's the plan. 15 00:01:35,560 --> 00:01:43,450 But so let me introduce to our two speakers. Russell Maret is a book artist and letter designer working in New York City. 16 00:01:44,110 --> 00:01:52,600 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. 17 00:01:54,130 --> 00:01:59,140 And since then he's been printing and publishing and designing type and really fascinating ways. 18 00:01:59,560 --> 00:02:09,100 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, 19 00:02:09,100 --> 00:02:14,739 including here in the Bodleian Library, in the Bibliographical Press in 2017. 20 00:02:14,740 --> 00:02:19,420 And Russell's books and manuscripts are held in public and private collections throughout the world. 21 00:02:19,810 --> 00:02:24,370 So we're really thrilled to have Russell here to talk about his own book making work. 22 00:02:25,180 --> 00:02:32,950 Gill Partington is an academic and book artist who is a fellow in book history at the Institute of English Studies in London, 23 00:02:33,580 --> 00:02:38,530 where she teaches and writes about 20th century and contemporary book cultures, 24 00:02:39,310 --> 00:02:48,100 focusing particularly on the blurry hybrid hybrid space between book and art, Gill's published on artists, 25 00:02:48,100 --> 00:02:58,450 including Tom Phillips, John Latham, ...and Dust Jackets, and Gill's current research project. 26 00:02:58,450 --> 00:03:08,050 'Page Not Found' a study of the outer limits and the unexpected extremes of the page, with the space to meaning. 27 00:03:08,350 --> 00:03:13,959 And she was also the co-founder and co-editor of Inscription, the Journal of Material Texts and Gill's 28 00:03:13,960 --> 00:03:24,310 creative work her artistic book work has been exhibited in the Bodleian library in my recent fantasic Sensational Books exhibition, Shandy Hall in Yorkshire, 29 00:03:24,850 --> 00:03:36,850 of course, and her work has been commissioned and acquired by the Beinecke Library, at Yale. Ok whose going to go first, ok, Gill. 30 00:03:37,270 --> 00:03:47,050 Okay, Gill, over to you. 31 00:03:48,470 --> 00:03:51,500 Okay. 32 00:03:53,640 --> 00:04:00,900 Well, here we are on day two of Agrippa fest, Agrippa palooza 33 00:04:02,280 --> 00:04:12,540 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. 34 00:04:12,550 --> 00:04:21,420 Whoose singularity announces itself in the fact that it is only designed to be read once, but work on it destroys itself. 35 00:04:22,170 --> 00:04:27,959 It does have printed pages, but, as we've seen, these are quite unusual. 36 00:04:27,960 --> 00:04:38,280 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. 37 00:04:38,520 --> 00:04:45,360 digital diskette, so the book is on the one hand distributed or dispersed. 38 00:04:45,870 --> 00:04:49,620 Not quite sure which of its many elements is the actual book. 39 00:04:51,080 --> 00:04:59,030 And it's also a hybrid. It's a piece of technology as much as a codex, it records an operating system. 40 00:05:00,420 --> 00:05:07,680 And it's written in the language of zeros and ones legible in the first instance, but only by the computer. 41 00:05:08,950 --> 00:05:21,180 But. Maybe what is most interesting, most intriguing about the Aprippa is not this unique mix difference, but actually just the opposite. 42 00:05:22,170 --> 00:05:29,729 So, maybe what's interesting is the odd similarities and the continuities that it has with 43 00:05:29,730 --> 00:05:35,190 books in general and the perspectives that it opens up on the history of the book. 44 00:05:36,420 --> 00:05:48,090 And maybe like other artist books, it kind of pushes the boundaries of the conventional codex, 45 00:05:48,090 --> 00:05:54,330 illuminating a whole alternative history of book use and book formats. 46 00:05:55,260 --> 00:06:04,889 So my argument, the point I'm going to try to make here is that artists books have this capacity to unsettle notions 47 00:06:04,890 --> 00:06:11,940 and our definitions of the book that's kind of set in motion a chain of historical resonances, 48 00:06:12,240 --> 00:06:16,290 that useful from the perspective of book history. 49 00:06:17,220 --> 00:06:24,000 So here is a book from a different moment in time. 50 00:06:25,450 --> 00:06:32,990 A different publishing milieu. But one that is also. 51 00:06:34,210 --> 00:06:40,800 To echo Alan Lui's phrase from yesterday, a new media object. 52 00:06:40,810 --> 00:06:46,750 It's a technological device, I'll just do that again since people enjoyed it and. 53 00:06:48,780 --> 00:06:55,890 But it's an object. It's a book that is in the Cambridge University Library Collections. 54 00:06:55,920 --> 00:07:05,040 It's by Lothar Meggendorfer, who is as much a paper engineer as an author 55 00:07:06,330 --> 00:07:10,440 He's a master of full tap mechanisms and movable parts. 56 00:07:10,710 --> 00:07:21,060 So we're dealing here with the context of the movable book, novelties for children emerged in the late Victorian period, 57 00:07:21,990 --> 00:07:30,510 prompting a kind of technological arms race among publishers to innovate ferociously with the form and function of the books. 58 00:07:30,550 --> 00:07:36,340 At this point, pages sprout all kinds of technological add ons 59 00:07:36,460 --> 00:07:45,580 Reavers, rivetts and other moving parts, and these are books that often specifically advertised themselves as mechanical books, 60 00:07:45,580 --> 00:07:52,990 they drew attention to their status as a kind of technology, and Meggendorfer's rhymes. 61 00:07:56,250 --> 00:08:10,610 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. 62 00:08:12,290 --> 00:08:23,000 So, this, here is a page which is actually referring to its own material workings, these kind of strangely reflexive pages. 63 00:08:25,150 --> 00:08:31,209 But. Often these warnings went unheeded. 64 00:08:31,210 --> 00:08:34,210 And here's a picture of the same book. 65 00:08:35,680 --> 00:08:41,710 There are places where it has come apart, where it no longer works and where it's damaged, 66 00:08:42,250 --> 00:08:54,330 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. 67 00:08:55,120 --> 00:09:00,370 We're looking at a page opening that was never meant to be seen. 68 00:09:00,820 --> 00:09:10,120 So here is the page's hidden operating system and its back end, if you will, circa 1895. 69 00:09:12,560 --> 00:09:18,889 The page is actually quite a complicated object in these mechanical books, 70 00:09:18,890 --> 00:09:27,770 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. 71 00:09:29,120 --> 00:09:32,700 Something is concealed inside. It's not really a single leaf. 72 00:09:33,110 --> 00:09:40,750 Although it may initially look like it. It's actually an envelope for moving parts. 73 00:09:41,020 --> 00:09:55,000 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. 74 00:09:55,210 --> 00:10:04,370 But in this case, it's doubled. It's deceptive. There are actually four sides, but only to a visible. 75 00:10:04,850 --> 00:10:19,060 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. 76 00:10:21,400 --> 00:10:34,720 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. 77 00:10:36,960 --> 00:10:41,690 So you can see that this is basically a box with a kind of. 78 00:10:43,310 --> 00:10:52,090 Heath Robinson set of contraptions with wire and cardboard bellows and whistles and it's bits of wood. 79 00:10:54,480 --> 00:10:58,870 It doesn't actually speak. There's the cover. 80 00:11:00,880 --> 00:11:05,740 Doesn't actually speak, but it does make noises. 81 00:11:06,400 --> 00:11:14,090 So it's nursery rhymes about farmyard animals areaccompanied by sounds which are operated by pull cords. 82 00:11:14,110 --> 00:11:20,750 And each cord has a little arrow at the side of the page indicating which one to call pull. 83 00:11:20,820 --> 00:11:30,590 And so. The Sad thing is that I can't play the sound, but it's a kind of strangled squeak 84 00:11:31,420 --> 00:11:34,720 that is coming from the book at this point. 85 00:11:37,760 --> 00:11:50,750 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. 86 00:11:51,200 --> 00:11:55,490 This is a technical device that was subject to patent law. 87 00:11:55,760 --> 00:12:03,860 So its maker, Theodore Brown, registered the German patent for the book a British patent a year later. 88 00:12:05,270 --> 00:12:16,500 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. 89 00:12:16,520 --> 00:12:19,820 So I've thoroughly lowered the tone. 90 00:12:19,970 --> 00:12:24,620 But the similarities are reliable. 91 00:12:24,650 --> 00:12:27,980 So here we have a hybrid multimedia object. 92 00:12:29,000 --> 00:12:36,350 It has pages that can be read. But they're also kind of hollow receptacles. 93 00:12:36,350 --> 00:12:41,090 So. You can see here that the top layer. 94 00:12:42,610 --> 00:12:45,880 are the pages that can be turned, but the bottom. 95 00:12:47,450 --> 00:13:02,050 Basically a box, a hollow receptacle. And inside that are the machinery and operating system that I showed you, like Agrippa's floppy disk. 96 00:13:02,620 --> 00:13:07,000 It's a kind of outdated semi broken mechanism. 97 00:13:07,180 --> 00:13:12,700 It's had more than one reading, but still it's workings are proven to self-destruct. 98 00:13:13,690 --> 00:13:16,920 It's like fragile and it's had a limited lifespan. 99 00:13:16,930 --> 00:13:20,030 So some of these cords are missing some of the work. 100 00:13:22,460 --> 00:13:28,400 So you might argue at this point that these are these examples I've been showing you are 101 00:13:28,790 --> 00:13:37,780 exceptions and special categories of folks and scenic detours on the roadmap of book history. 102 00:13:38,420 --> 00:13:45,160 Like surely the conventional page summary, such an operating system, the technical add ons 103 00:13:45,170 --> 00:13:52,880 Well, let's look at one. This is a page from Laurence Sterne's novel, Tristram Shandy. 104 00:13:52,890 --> 00:13:57,960 So this is an early addition to the 1770s. We can see two things at the bottom here. 105 00:13:59,210 --> 00:14:08,240 For signature E3. Then this catch word 'invented' this kind of stray word at the bottom right. 106 00:14:09,360 --> 00:14:14,850 And these in a way are the kind of operating code of the page. 107 00:14:16,350 --> 00:14:19,710 The hand press book, the book in kind of pre-industrial era 108 00:14:20,280 --> 00:14:23,249 Was it a complex folding structure, 109 00:14:23,250 --> 00:14:32,210 a kind of origami for which instructions were needed from printer to binder, the binders job was to fold and cut the large printed 110 00:14:32,580 --> 00:14:38,400 sheets into gatherings, and signatures are a kind of assembly instruction. 111 00:14:38,420 --> 00:14:49,560 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. 112 00:14:52,260 --> 00:15:00,419 And the catchword you've entered here. This is a peculiar kind of textual stutter in which the first word or syllable 113 00:15:00,420 --> 00:15:06,140 of each page is prefigured in the bottom right margin of the previous one. 114 00:15:06,150 --> 00:15:11,640 So, if we turn the page and then to take the first word on the next page. 115 00:15:15,150 --> 00:15:24,840 So again, assembling the book is prone to error. These are visual aids indicating the correct page sequence followed. 116 00:15:25,830 --> 00:15:32,820 So we might think about these things is a kind of pre-digital source code not designed to be read. 117 00:15:32,910 --> 00:15:37,200 It's not part of the narrative. And it's not even designed to be noticed. 118 00:15:37,500 --> 00:15:48,910 And yet. Nicholas D Nace in nice little artist book called Catch-Words has done just that and. 119 00:15:50,140 --> 00:16:02,410 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. 120 00:16:02,890 --> 00:16:07,300 So he's allowed them to generate their own connections and meanings. 121 00:16:07,510 --> 00:16:14,800 And the result is this enigmatic little volume. Here are some slides of what it looks like inside. 122 00:16:17,410 --> 00:16:22,990 So Richardson's story of tragedy, temptation, moral virtue has been completely filleted. 123 00:16:23,590 --> 00:16:27,430 This is a much shorter book, but something of its emotional. 124 00:16:27,760 --> 00:16:37,450 And the overwrought register lingers in these arbitrary sequences of catch words, as perhaps does the endless exchange of letters. 125 00:16:37,730 --> 00:16:43,310 You can see a the left. And this this book Catch-Words. 126 00:16:43,320 --> 00:16:47,190 It mirrors the original novel's construction. 127 00:16:47,190 --> 00:16:57,320 Since Nace's transforms each gathering into a page long stanza and preserves each of its seven volumes as a canto. 128 00:16:57,360 --> 00:17:03,780 So it sort of turns the novel structured into a sort of poem using its catch words. 129 00:17:04,820 --> 00:17:08,300 In a sense, it's like Clarissa, but in miniature. 130 00:17:08,570 --> 00:17:18,560 And then this miniaturisation process repeats itself since each page of Nace's book and you can see here once it's own catchword. 131 00:17:19,920 --> 00:17:25,239 And these are then extracts to be sure to second section and then there's a third 132 00:17:25,240 --> 00:17:31,170 and so on as the words dwindle away to nothing in this kind of recursive structure. 133 00:17:33,360 --> 00:17:42,120 So a bit like reciting Arippa, the text of Agrippa as a series of zeros and ones, 134 00:17:42,120 --> 00:17:46,830 which I gather from texting was once a performance that took place. 135 00:17:47,640 --> 00:17:54,270 Nicholas Nace's book here, rereads only the operating codes and ignores the narrative. 136 00:17:54,870 --> 00:18:00,810 So it's an artist's book that reminds us that the page has always been a mechanism of sorts. 137 00:18:01,110 --> 00:18:07,530 We might not see it as such, but it's a technology and one that's always had its own operating system. 138 00:18:18,330 --> 00:18:24,790 Thanks Gill. 139 00:18:25,560 --> 00:18:30,250 ... 140 00:18:39,910 --> 00:18:47,500 Hello. I'm Russell. I want to congratulate Justine and everyone who has put this conference together. 141 00:18:47,500 --> 00:18:55,870 I've just found it immensely inspirational. I've been aware of Agrippa since 1993 when I first met Kevin Begos. 142 00:18:56,110 --> 00:19:03,430 Centre for Book Arts in New York. And that's the only time I'm going to refer to it in my little introduction. 143 00:19:05,500 --> 00:19:08,380 And I love the book, but we're moving on. 144 00:19:08,390 --> 00:19:19,090 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, 145 00:19:19,690 --> 00:19:25,450 and I spend about equal amounts of time studying and writing about those things as I do making them, 146 00:19:27,280 --> 00:19:32,919 which means that I make quite a lot of different types of books. 147 00:19:32,920 --> 00:19:37,030 And so I'm just kind of sort of giving you an introduction about how my work relates to book studies. 148 00:19:37,030 --> 00:19:43,150 And then we'll get on with our discussion. So I hope that works okay. 149 00:19:43,960 --> 00:19:53,830 So as Oh, I'm not projected. I'm looking at the screen thinking your seeing what I'm seeing and you're not. 150 00:19:55,780 --> 00:20:16,840 I mean this is beautiful. Thank you. 151 00:20:17,740 --> 00:20:25,090 So, yeah, so as far as different kinds of books, so books that varied from my Noise series in the mid nineties, 152 00:20:25,090 --> 00:20:33,639 which was really just a reaction to the endless prattling on about legibility in the typographic literature to my series 153 00:20:33,640 --> 00:20:42,549 of Promethean Elegies inspired by Prometheus Bound in which I made a number of books using historical page proportions. 154 00:20:42,550 --> 00:20:48,490 But in lieu of the text block, I put simply drawings made from candle smoke. 155 00:20:51,290 --> 00:20:57,290 Do I write and publish essays about typographic and graphic letter forms? 156 00:20:58,760 --> 00:21:05,480 In recent years, I've been moving into zine land and doing some street art. 157 00:21:05,510 --> 00:21:15,740 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. 158 00:21:17,270 --> 00:21:24,110 And then my most recent book is Coloured Objects, which is an excerpt from Goethe's Theory of Colours. 159 00:21:24,110 --> 00:21:32,250 And and it was very interesting seeing Gill deconstruct that movable book because this is a movable book. 160 00:21:32,270 --> 00:21:42,079 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. 161 00:21:42,080 --> 00:21:50,120 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. 162 00:21:50,150 --> 00:21:53,020 That's the goal anyway. 163 00:21:55,790 --> 00:22:06,160 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. 164 00:22:06,170 --> 00:22:10,570 The history of that medium, whether they know it or not, or they want to be or not. 165 00:22:10,580 --> 00:22:14,090 And I just happen to like that aspect of it I like. 166 00:22:15,200 --> 00:22:21,830 So I'm just going to go through two quick projects. This is my book, Interstices and Intersections, or an autodidact comprehensive cube. 167 00:22:22,520 --> 00:22:28,280 It's 13 propositions from Euclid, one from each book of the Elements of Geometry, 168 00:22:29,390 --> 00:22:33,440 which are paired with personal essays that I wrote in response to them. 169 00:22:33,440 --> 00:22:37,160 And then I illustrated both Euclid and my texts. 170 00:22:38,360 --> 00:22:47,059 And the thing that is wonderful about Euclid from the perspective of book arts is that every proposition in Euclid has a component 171 00:22:47,060 --> 00:22:57,290 diagram that explicates the text and you can't really it's very hard to understand the book without the images. 172 00:22:57,290 --> 00:23:02,600 And those diagrams were developed in the manuscript era and carried over into the printed book. 173 00:23:02,930 --> 00:23:08,390 So if you were to go up into the reading room of the Bodleian and call up the D'Orville Euclid from 1888, 174 00:23:09,080 --> 00:23:16,340 you'd notice that the diagram for Proposition 1317 looks strikingly similar to the one printed in 1948. 175 00:23:16,850 --> 00:23:26,990 And I don't know of any other text, any other book that has this consistent millennia old tradition of text and image parity. 176 00:23:27,000 --> 00:23:35,149 And because of the sort of stasis of that, it has provided a springboard for a lot of printers to get creative. 177 00:23:35,150 --> 00:23:49,309 And so when I was making this book, I was worried that because I love patterns, that I would respond primarily to the diagrams. 178 00:23:49,310 --> 00:23:52,580 And I wanted to get to know the the text better. 179 00:23:52,820 --> 00:23:58,850 So I chose two things to do. One was to look at over 200 historical editions of Euclid, 180 00:23:58,850 --> 00:24:06,890 and two of which are two of my favourites, of which are the one published by John Day in 1570, 181 00:24:07,340 --> 00:24:16,790 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. 182 00:24:17,030 --> 00:24:24,729 This is 1570. And of course, there's Oliver Byrne's chromatic Euclid, which is wonderfully legible, 183 00:24:24,730 --> 00:24:30,280 but entirely non-Euclidean, because he assigns values to the propositions, which is a no no. 184 00:24:32,050 --> 00:24:38,440 But the and then the other thing I decided I wanted to do was to, I figured the best way to start 185 00:24:38,440 --> 00:24:43,780 was to make a 13 volume manuscript in which I tried to prove every proposition in the book. 186 00:24:43,810 --> 00:24:50,680 And in that way, I would get a you know, my essays would relate specifically to their contents. 187 00:24:50,680 --> 00:24:56,680 So this slide gives you a sense of some of the preparatory work for the edition. 188 00:24:56,680 --> 00:25:01,720 And then along the bottom here, these colourful books are my manuscripts. 189 00:25:03,610 --> 00:25:08,530 So that's one way I interact with book history or book studies. 190 00:25:08,830 --> 00:25:11,170 The other is in my alphabet design. 191 00:25:11,590 --> 00:25:23,230 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. 192 00:25:23,500 --> 00:25:29,740 I have no training in type design. I have no facility for calligraphy, but it was there clear's as day. 193 00:25:29,800 --> 00:25:38,000 The next morning I got out of bed, christened myself a type of designer, and started teaching myself how to draw letter forms. 194 00:25:38,350 --> 00:25:43,120 And the only technique I really understood was geometry. 195 00:25:43,130 --> 00:25:49,300 So I started there, and I never made a type for the Book of Job. 196 00:25:49,300 --> 00:25:56,890 I ended up making this was the first of a series of edition geometric, alphabetic manuscripts that I made. 197 00:25:56,960 --> 00:25:59,980 I made seven copies of this. Each one is drawn and painted. 198 00:26:01,600 --> 00:26:11,100 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. 199 00:26:11,110 --> 00:26:18,340 And so when you think about the history of the typographic book, what you're really thinking about is the history of type design. 200 00:26:18,700 --> 00:26:23,050 And so if we look at these books like the Gutenberg Bible. 201 00:26:24,780 --> 00:26:29,320 Nicholas Jensen. Now this Manutius (Aldus Manutius). 202 00:26:31,120 --> 00:26:36,790 Robert Granjon forgive my French pronunciation... 203 00:26:39,520 --> 00:26:42,970 John Baskerville, John Batiste Levee 204 00:26:44,080 --> 00:26:49,240 And William Morris. Now, all of these books have many planes on which they're interesting. 205 00:26:49,480 --> 00:26:52,390 But from the standpoint of letter design, 206 00:26:53,800 --> 00:27:01,810 what's unique about all of these people is that they started with a backward glance toward alphabetical history, 207 00:27:02,200 --> 00:27:10,000 and then they made new alphabets that were resonant of their time and place that were of their own art historical moment. 208 00:27:10,960 --> 00:27:20,870 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. 209 00:27:20,890 --> 00:27:29,020 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 210 00:27:29,020 --> 00:27:35,860 century is that most of the metal typefaces available to us were designed 100 or more years ago. 211 00:27:36,640 --> 00:27:44,530 The last commercially available typeface released by Monotype until recent years was over 50 years ago. 212 00:27:46,480 --> 00:27:55,030 And so although these typefaces were had a dramatically important impact on the typography of the 1920s and thirties, 213 00:27:55,390 --> 00:27:59,440 I believe that the proposition that I should use them in my book is as absurd 214 00:27:59,830 --> 00:28:03,280 as the proposition that Granjon should have used Gutenberg's type. 215 00:28:05,020 --> 00:28:09,610 These are beautiful examples of machine age, thought and design. 216 00:28:09,820 --> 00:28:13,900 And they have nothing relevant to say, in my opinion, to the digital age. 217 00:28:15,160 --> 00:28:24,550 And so one of the things that interests me is that idea of how people at different points in time view the past. 218 00:28:24,940 --> 00:28:29,140 So these people were making they looked at the past. 219 00:28:29,800 --> 00:28:34,710 You can tell from the correspondence and the literature around the same places that 220 00:28:34,720 --> 00:28:39,100 they viewed the past as something that could now be corrected by their machines. 221 00:28:40,210 --> 00:28:43,450 Whereas I view the past as a digital person, 222 00:28:43,900 --> 00:28:51,400 as something where I can I can embrace the imperfections of the past and recreate 223 00:28:51,400 --> 00:28:55,960 them in a way that I happened to prefer the pre-industrial printed page. 224 00:28:56,230 --> 00:28:59,670 And so when I look at pre-industrial typefaces, I don't want to correct them. 225 00:28:59,680 --> 00:29:04,210 I don't want to align them. I want to I want to have them, warts and all. 226 00:29:04,840 --> 00:29:13,059 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, 227 00:29:13,060 --> 00:29:21,340 not because the machines required them to be standardised, but because the operators of the machines believed that they should be standardised. 228 00:29:21,820 --> 00:29:32,680 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. 229 00:29:34,420 --> 00:29:44,350 And I so I worked on a historic revival of my own that is really sort of grotesque. 230 00:29:44,350 --> 00:29:52,760 I love it. But, you know, some people really hate it. And I developed a workflow where I started with a digital typeface. 231 00:29:52,780 --> 00:30:01,810 Used digital technology to engrave patterns which were then used to engrave using the monitor, 232 00:30:01,960 --> 00:30:07,970 the original monotype, machines to engrave punches, strike matrices, and then cast typed. 233 00:30:08,220 --> 00:30:16,090 And then when I gave the 100 drawings for the hungry Dutch typeface to Graham Sheppard, who was my main collaborator and a great, 234 00:30:16,320 --> 00:30:26,139 great, brilliant man, he said that Monotype would have rejected all 100 of the drawings, and I knew that I was on track. 235 00:30:26,140 --> 00:30:36,340 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. 236 00:30:36,610 --> 00:30:39,009 And so there was no need for that fiddling. 237 00:30:39,010 --> 00:30:50,979 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, 238 00:30:50,980 --> 00:30:56,080 but is, you know, my goal in studying the history of the book is to make it work. 239 00:30:56,080 --> 00:30:59,610 That is of my time, of our time. Thank you. 240 00:31:10,130 --> 00:31:18,900 Okay, so great. 241 00:31:18,900 --> 00:31:23,370 Thanks guys. That was so fascinating. 242 00:31:24,330 --> 00:31:29,850 The page as a technology with its own codes and logic and conventions, that's a really helpful idea. 243 00:31:30,960 --> 00:31:36,330 And a book as part of a conversation with history. 244 00:31:38,430 --> 00:31:44,579 Looking back on history from our present moment of history, these are really ideas. 245 00:31:44,580 --> 00:31:50,970 I've got a few questions, I wanted to ask before we open things up. 246 00:31:51,370 --> 00:31:58,320 But first, I was thinking reading and readers and, in your case, Gill. 247 00:31:58,830 --> 00:32:04,830 whether individuals interacting with those fantastic late nineteenth century children's books are reading at all, 248 00:32:04,830 --> 00:32:11,340 or whether we need a different term or a different kind of understanding of what's going on there. 249 00:32:12,090 --> 00:32:18,390 And then Russell I was looking at your piece that responds to Goethe's Theory of Colour too, the volvelles. 250 00:32:19,590 --> 00:32:29,070 I wonder what reading is there, whether you have readers at all or whether you have a different kind relationship. 251 00:32:30,490 --> 00:32:35,630 Maybe Gill you could say a little bit about what these people are doing with these fantastic objects. 252 00:32:39,910 --> 00:32:44,630 Yeah, I don't know. They are doing something different, but I. 253 00:32:44,700 --> 00:32:53,890 I don't know what name we would give it, but I think this is the problem, um, because it's multi sensory. 254 00:32:57,160 --> 00:33:01,600 So, yeah, it definitely involves 255 00:33:01,840 --> 00:33:05,620 It's definitely tactile and visual. 256 00:33:08,160 --> 00:33:17,940 But I think what that means is that the term reading has to be revisited in light of that. 257 00:33:18,360 --> 00:33:24,940 I mean, I think that that seems to be a process that is going on in the history of reading and 258 00:33:24,960 --> 00:33:30,480 Reading the book that we've been thinking about it as a kind of something embodied. 259 00:33:31,610 --> 00:33:40,140 So. But I also think that there's another thing which is like the history of breaking things through reading. 260 00:33:40,560 --> 00:33:49,430 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. 261 00:33:52,340 --> 00:33:57,169 Yeah. You asked a lot, actually, with that question. 262 00:33:57,170 --> 00:34:02,960 But first, the volvelles are meant to be handled, you know, the books are meant to be handled. 263 00:34:04,160 --> 00:34:13,880 I don't know if the Bodleian wants people you know trying to test the limits of them, but. 264 00:34:14,560 --> 00:34:25,130 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. 265 00:34:26,330 --> 00:34:35,030 I do find that people some people read my books why anyone would pay what I charge for my books and not read them. 266 00:34:35,030 --> 00:34:38,710 I don't understand but some people do that and they're free to do that. 267 00:34:40,280 --> 00:34:40,940 But the. 268 00:34:42,590 --> 00:34:53,780 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, 269 00:34:53,780 --> 00:35:00,080 It's really fun to read because you discover time, but all of the science in it is wrong. 270 00:35:01,820 --> 00:35:12,590 And so you're . But the, the thing that's right is that all of the chromatic phenomena that he describes are real. 271 00:35:12,770 --> 00:35:14,590 He just didn't get the science right. 272 00:35:14,600 --> 00:35:26,810 And so the book is very it's full of his, you know, big exuberance for playing with things and experimenting and everything. 273 00:35:27,170 --> 00:35:35,420 And so I basically made it a children's book for grown ups where I rather than illustrating what he was talking about, 274 00:35:35,420 --> 00:35:40,220 I made the book so that you can perform the experiments he describes. 275 00:35:41,450 --> 00:35:47,809 And and whether people read that or not, I don't know. 276 00:35:47,810 --> 00:35:59,300 I mean, I find that the the greatest agents for people encountering my work are librarians. 277 00:36:00,710 --> 00:36:10,590 That books that go into private collections are usually seen very rarely, but books that go into libraries, librarians actually showed people that. 278 00:36:10,660 --> 00:36:16,180 And yet there is this echoing out of this, you know, small editions. 279 00:36:16,370 --> 00:36:21,500 And someone said, I realised you have the numbers wrong because of the advertising. 280 00:36:21,920 --> 00:36:24,060 There were only 200 copies of Agrippa. 281 00:36:24,230 --> 00:36:32,510 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. 282 00:36:32,660 --> 00:36:38,180 So anyway, librarians are the ones who sort of get them into the public consciousness. 283 00:36:39,680 --> 00:36:47,540 You mentioned children then, and I wanted to ask you about these as children's books that seems to be in certain things, 284 00:36:47,540 --> 00:36:54,320 a certain books, a book history. Why does it matter Gill 285 00:36:54,590 --> 00:36:57,800 That these are books for children? Or are they books for children? They look like they are 286 00:36:57,860 --> 00:37:02,870 And is there a certain kind of inventiveness and radicalism that's going on that has to do with that? 287 00:37:02,960 --> 00:37:14,600 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. 288 00:37:15,890 --> 00:37:28,790 It's a kind of a period of constant reinvention and kind of experimentation with the form of the book. 289 00:37:28,970 --> 00:37:32,150 But it doesn't happen in the in the realm of art. 290 00:37:34,790 --> 00:37:38,390 I mean, the concept of the artist book was way in the future. 291 00:37:38,750 --> 00:37:49,160 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, 292 00:37:50,330 --> 00:37:54,680 you know, kitsch and novelty and gimmicks. 293 00:37:55,880 --> 00:37:59,440 And because of that, they are. 294 00:38:02,740 --> 00:38:09,100 They sort of don't get the credit they deserve for their inventiveness. 295 00:38:09,100 --> 00:38:18,100 But I also think that it's it's important because the readership is assumed to be 296 00:38:20,200 --> 00:38:28,840 interactive in a different way and that they will want to kind of pull out and play. 297 00:38:29,740 --> 00:38:36,350 So it assumes that that reading is a kind of physical embodied activity. 298 00:38:36,520 --> 00:38:42,669 But the interesting thing about that one that I was showed is that even 299 00:38:42,670 --> 00:38:51,880 by breaking into the collections of Cambridge University Library under the legal deposit, 300 00:38:52,060 --> 00:39:00,310 so they were never owned by children they've been broken because adults have been playing with them in the collections. 301 00:39:01,180 --> 00:39:15,129 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 302 00:39:15,130 --> 00:39:28,240 was a hands on session where the room was instantly quiet, where there were 12 adults absolutely engrossed playing with these books. 303 00:39:28,440 --> 00:39:33,040 And so I think they are intended for children. 304 00:39:33,040 --> 00:39:39,730 But there's something about that physical interaction, which is kind of... 305 00:39:40,740 --> 00:39:49,520 Yeah, it's hard to resist once you engage with it. Russell, if you could say something and children and your books. 306 00:39:49,970 --> 00:39:57,129 Well, yeah. I mean, my experience is the same as Gill's with adults. 307 00:39:57,130 --> 00:40:08,260 And, you know, people tend to think of the collecting public as a fine press artist world as being sort of, 308 00:40:08,770 --> 00:40:11,850 you know, they are aerodite and everything else. 309 00:40:12,070 --> 00:40:24,040 but it's amazing how people light up when a book does something unexpected, with the Euclid, for instance, 310 00:40:24,040 --> 00:40:27,870 it's a very simply this it's a two sided accordion. 311 00:40:27,880 --> 00:40:33,760 And when you get to the end of Proposition seven, you turn the book over and you continue. 312 00:40:34,120 --> 00:40:44,859 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, 313 00:40:44,860 --> 00:40:52,270 there's a pair of glasses, green glasses, and you take them out to look at the world and people get excited. 314 00:40:52,300 --> 00:40:59,920 And it sort of it is a kind of license to be playful in a world that is thought to be, 315 00:40:59,920 --> 00:41:06,940 you know, in well, at least in public portrayal is suffocatingly unfunny, you know. 316 00:41:09,310 --> 00:41:17,110 So. Yeah. But do you think do you think readers in 1570 the amazing John Day was that, was there 317 00:41:17,110 --> 00:41:25,150 a similar frisson and delight when they saw those amazing works, were they working with the same effect. 318 00:41:25,690 --> 00:41:34,870 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 319 00:41:34,870 --> 00:41:40,839 that you can then fold into the Platonic solids and a number of other, and I'm looking for a copy that. 320 00:41:40,840 --> 00:41:50,360 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, 321 00:41:50,590 --> 00:42:04,270 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 322 00:42:04,990 --> 00:42:11,770 the relationship between the normal book or the conventional book and then the creative or inventive or 323 00:42:11,770 --> 00:42:15,610 apparent or strange. In your talk you were collapsing. 324 00:42:15,610 --> 00:42:22,430 That divide, in lots of ways, but, is there still a language of normal, regular, Orthodox books? 325 00:42:22,460 --> 00:42:29,030 In contrast to the kind of self-reflective works that you are talking about. 326 00:42:29,390 --> 00:42:34,520 Well, I suppose the answer I want to give is no, because the. 327 00:42:35,640 --> 00:42:46,260 Because there's something about these exceptions that bring out kind of the oddities and querks in the book, 328 00:42:46,350 --> 00:42:54,010 but also the more you dig the more widespread the exceptions seem and the harder it is to find something. 329 00:42:54,300 --> 00:43:04,140 Whereas the ones this kind of normal conventional book and I think listening to Matt Kirschenbaum's lecture yesterday about the, 330 00:43:05,070 --> 00:43:10,290 you know, how the digital book is produced, 331 00:43:10,290 --> 00:43:19,890 you know, the post digital paperback, is something that we all take for granted, that turned out to be something odd 332 00:43:20,100 --> 00:43:27,970 and uncanny about that, about the production of that and what it means and how it comes to be. 333 00:43:27,990 --> 00:43:37,480 So I think the more closely you look, the more oddities and querks you find in even the most conventional book object. 334 00:43:39,370 --> 00:43:43,410 Maybe if I put to you this to you, a final point and to bring it back Agrippa. So where does that leave Agrippa? 335 00:43:44,350 --> 00:43:56,470 Where do we base that? Are there other traditions that it seemed to, is it dramatising an extreme form. 336 00:43:57,310 --> 00:44:05,380 kind of qualities of damage, of use, of history, books as carries a code exception that you were talking 337 00:44:06,340 --> 00:44:11,380 about in different ways. Is it dramatising in an extreme form, but in a representative way? 338 00:44:12,400 --> 00:44:18,400 Is it an outlier at the end of it, when we start to look at it through book studies of artist books today? 339 00:44:20,170 --> 00:44:26,310 I just think of the conversation we were having over lunch about how theatrical it is. 340 00:44:26,320 --> 00:44:37,059 I mean, it looks like something that was forgotten on the set of Indiana Jones or something, 341 00:44:37,060 --> 00:44:41,710 you know, And you open it up and there's a shroud and it's burned and it's, 342 00:44:41,860 --> 00:44:49,249 you know, it's very and then the whole theatrical, you know, it was meant as a spectacle, you know, clearly this performance. 343 00:44:49,250 --> 00:44:57,729 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. 344 00:44:57,730 --> 00:45:05,290 But the but it does, you know, it's something that didn't come up so much in the discussion of it. 345 00:45:05,290 --> 00:45:11,290 I think that it is very much a theatrical piece of work, but. 346 00:45:15,450 --> 00:45:18,420 And but as far as it's I mean. 347 00:45:21,680 --> 00:45:31,070 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, 348 00:45:31,130 --> 00:45:40,490 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. 349 00:45:40,520 --> 00:45:46,340 I mean, it, you know, it happened at the time. 350 00:45:46,610 --> 00:45:53,870 You know, Matt Kirschenbaum showed a bunch of those book is dead articles that were coming out around that time. 351 00:45:55,640 --> 00:46:01,820 And it happened at the time where you kept hearing about these new digital forms 352 00:46:01,820 --> 00:46:06,229 of reading that we were going to encounter with hyperlinks and everything. 353 00:46:06,230 --> 00:46:08,300 But, you know, people just want to read a story. 354 00:46:08,450 --> 00:46:21,890 You know, it's like none of that really came to be and except in very limited small corners of the reading public. 355 00:46:24,510 --> 00:46:29,330 And so I, you know, I guess I'm just going to ramble. 356 00:46:30,100 --> 00:46:33,390 That's fine. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. 357 00:46:33,410 --> 00:46:34,240 Thank you. But we have.