There is. Hello and welcome to Booklist, a podcast about artist books brought to you by the Library Centre for the Study of the book.
I'm Alice Evans, assistant book conservator and on dramatics, assistant curator of rare books.
And Over the Coming Podcast series, I'm going to be delving into one of our favourite, possibly less well known collections here at The Guardian.
We'll look for books in detail,
talk to the creators and ask the questions that interest is most about the materiality and the intentions of the artist.
So Joe, you are responsible for acquiring and cataloguing a lot of these artist books.
But what is an artist book? Thanks, Alice. That's a really tricky question.
I suppose like any type of creative practice, artist books get harder to define the more closely you look at them.
So the Library of Congress has one of the broadest definitions that I found,
which is the artist books are books that are produced by artists and intended as visual art objects.
So they might be unique items or multiples. They might be published or unpublished works, but then made by an artist and a visual art.
But if you listen to the series, you'll find that not all of the books we cover are intended as visual art.
And you don't have to look very much further into the collection to find artist books that aren't made by artists.
And so arguably in books thanks to you, that's quite confusing still, but good stuff.
You're welcome. So then let me ask you, what is it that you do at the library and how do you encounter artists books as you went?
So I'm a book conservator, and I work in the conservation and collection care team here at the Body.
And our role is to care for and preserve the library's collections,
which might be through monitoring and maintaining a good environment in all our library spaces,
checking for any pests and of course, the practical treatment and repair of objects.
So what kind of objects do we welcome?
My team work on objects from around the world, which could be an early printed book on how may paper an illuminated parchment manuscript,
a Chinese hand scroll, a collection of early photographs.
Or it could be a complicated, mixed media object, like some of the artist books we will be discussing in the series.
And these have certainly caused our team to scratch our heads quite a bit when we've been thinking about how we should best work off them,
particularly those that are made of unusual materials that might be susceptible to change
or are particularly fragile or within themselves a deliberately self-destructive.
And we have to weigh up the options for that treatment with both access and preservation in mind.
So now you've heard a bit about us. Let's get on with the podcast.
First up, we grabbed Chris Fletcher, keeper of special collections,
who gave us a whistle stop tour of some of his favourite artist books and an idea
of what it's like to be the holder of the Special Collections purse strings.
Welcome, Chris. Thank you for joining us this year.
We thought we'd just start by asking you to introduce yourself and what your role here at the board in this.
Okay. So my title is Keeper of Special Collections,
which means I'm responsible for staff about 80 people and they are all committed to building our collections,
looking after the collections, describing the collections, and then doing things with those collections.
So either helping readers look at them in reading rooms or supporting projects,
exhibitions, so and so, thinking about artists books in the collections of the building.
How do you go about building a collection of pieces like the one here?
That's a very good question and a difficult one to answer.
The collections of the problem are encyclopaedic, kaleidoscopic, never ending.
In a sense. It's always a question where or how do we how do we build?
Do we just keep in the same traditions enhancing what we've got?
Do we strike out in new areas? So perhaps a bit of both. And certainly in the case of artist books, I feel and contemporary artists books I feel,
it's a way in which we can really be free to go after things that reflect the whole interesting diversity of views,
geographical locations, techniques and approaches.
It's a way we can really spice up the mix of our collections.
It sounds rather old fashioned, but you will never going to acquire anything unless you have curatorial permission.
People who are looking at keeping that is to the ground, who identify interesting things, have a hunch, take a punt sometimes.
I think for me as well, we do quite a bit of teaching in our in the pocket from our collections, particularly to graduate students.
And I've noticed over the last few years that of course they respond to the world's most expensive folk or beautiful illuminated manuscripts,
an unpublished letter by a significant writer. But students responses to us as folks has been really arresting.
To me, it's something about the beauty,
the technical facility and ingenuity with which that produce and some of the issues that they speak to really galvanise students who,
like the rest of us in it, in a digital world and so much text,
so many publications come to us digitally that I think suddenly confronting the analogue form.
Pull them up sharp would you say when you're collecting,
is there a deliberate attempt to push the boundaries of what people might expect of the Bohemian and what the book is in general?
I mean, I think I one of the collections that I helped to acquire early on in my career was the Archive of the Gripper,
which was a book published in 1992, programmed to self-destruct and stop plays with the no shoes.
The typographical format mimics the Gutenberg Bible, which, of course, we have copy.
And the book was really designed to mess with the minds of people like me and conservators and raises questions about longevity and value.
And it's a gloriously ironic acquisition, in a way, because this was a book that was never meant to last,
that here it is, enshrined in the body and carefully looked after by conservatives, seriously studied in our region.
I guess that got me thinking about books.
The question I don't see as books and questions or assumptions about what a book is.
So yes. In short, I am very keen to acquire things that are provocative in that way.
An addition of Fahrenheit 451 that can't be read unless you expose flame that will never be read in the book.
Or at least librarian glossary check. Hello again.
Thanks there to Richard Open Bodies Librarian who has jumped into glossary check this reference
that the body the body knows is set by all new members of staff and readers who swear,
among other things, not to kindle a flame or fire in the library. One reason why this particular book will never be read back to Chris,
a book whose Endless Sleep by Steve Anderson that is actually made of three layers or pages, if you like, of wasps.
And that's very, very difficult to handle.
And of course witty because he was paper notoriously I guess this keeps coming up is a book by who 20 slices which is 20 slices of encapsulated
crossed cheese of which I think only ten copies were made again playfully is Elise this is a is a slice of prop cheese the leaf of the book.
It is it is bound up and it has a ton to. So it really seems that you are drawn to books that use unusual materials and processes.
Could you speak a bit more about that? Yeah.
Very much material and technique that speaks to the meaning of the word or enhances subversive in some respects.
So when we acquired recently was a short story by Jane Bowles not completed Andrew and
it deals with outcasts and ephemeral characters and Nancy Loba the maker of this book.
Give some gives them a life in a very beautiful coloured book.
And the technique she uses is is one of good cost reduction.
So in creating images of the characters,
she prints from the block and then she cuts the block down to plan on the colour prints from the cut, sit down again, so on and so forth.
And I love the fact that in creating these colourful characters,
she is actually turning the source of the origin, the law, into something that ultimately is destroyed.
And that. Resonates with the story.
So the impermanence of these these characters, that vulnerability.
Of course, that book also comes in a beautiful box,
which includes two marionette puppets with embroidered tunics that Nancy made herself, and a set of sparkles that relate to the story.
But of course, something else that can never fulfil its promise in the book, it will never be allowed to light.
Do you think there are any materials that you wouldn't consider acquiring?
Is there anything that would be pushing the limits too far?
We wouldn't take a vote that takes with the common sidewalk that I think we like to push boundaries.
But I think you still these folks, they still have to have an intellectual integrity.
They have to have some sort of aesthetic value, and they have to be technically clever.
They have to be intelligent and meaningful and.
I guess anybody could do anything that was provocative and just say, well, this is this is a vote that.
It has to have some. Combination of those things.
And I think it also has to speak somehow of. Books or bookshops or a library.
After all this and then I guess it's a collaborative conversation between the departments about how to preserve and how to go.
This is actually, in a sense, the things Cheezburger has so far lost to get pretty well well looked after.
If you I mean, we we have legal deposit books that come in as a matter of course and anyone is for cheap to produce paperback and
discovered it falling apart in their hands as they try to read it will understand that any book can be can be vulnerable.
Yeah, definitely. And we were wondering, do you have a particular favourite in the Oscar collection?
And it depends. It depends.
I mean, it changes. Gosh, everyone is favourite.
I loved quite a modest book by Charlotte called Little Book of Books, which is Wood Engravings of of Birds.
But he has deliberately not cut the pages of the book, so you're forced to disappear into them because you're looking at a hiding in a hedgerow.
And again, I think I was talking to him about scene.
He is generally provocative. Does a library understand that as a concept or does it come out?
Pages. There's only one of the Christians on the list, and he already answered it.
If you'd like to say anything else about how the collections are used in teaching and.
So yes, the collections event for anyone to come up to the reading room.
That's a very good form of research is what we do, but it's quite passive.
So I love to see things in teaching and. So for example, every year Andrew Carney and some fellow conservative.
Show me some chart corrections and.
We didn't ask them to prepare for that. We want them to react to what they see on the table.
And we always includes those as part of.
And it's wonderful to see see their responses once again.
I'm very fond of is by somebody called Shammy and the title is it is this if you leave your home a true story depicted in topographical images.
And it's a book about the Fukushima nuclear disaster and the implications of that.
It's very, very easily printed using typographical devices to create recognisable images.
And it's obviously a very, very profound, very heavy subject,
which is contrasted by physical formats of the book itself, which is actually printed on kitchen paper.
And what I love to do with that book is and it looks like a solid,
heavy book is actually just passing to one of the students and see their reaction when they feel how incredibly light is.
That's the sort of thing that gives me a kick. And the number of these shoes belongs to the films.
Some of them are interested is about pursuing a career in curation.
Some of them even go into the book trades and then end up selling these books at a premium price.
But there you go. That's sometimes the cost of a success in getting people interested in a biographical matters.
We also caught up with Professors Emma Smith and Adam Smith here at the Western Library.
But they spoke to me, to them and how they use them in their own thinking about books and their materiality.
Emma teaches English here Oxford University, specialising in Shakespeare and is one of the curators of the Sensational Books exhibition,
which is on the Western Library in Oxford until the 4th of December 2022, which features many wonderful examples of artist books.
Adam also teaches English here at Oxford, particularly the honeymoon period, and is an editor of Inscription,
The Journal of Material Text Publication, which explores mark making and materiality in all different ways.
We started by asking them both how they use artist books in their work and teaching.
Well I. So I've come really late to find so some advantages for them right now.
Not, not super knowledgeable, but starting to think how they can be peaceful objects that can really do some questions about more ordinary books.
They engage with book practices and book handling in some really fabulous ways.
And I can do that really because of this exhibition that we've just been doing such additional books where lots of
the ways in which books appeal to the different senses are really played with and amplified in an artists book.
So I am definitely thinking that these are objects, beautiful objects that open up really interesting teaching questions.
I think I do use of sometimes particularly credit teaching as teaching when we're thinking
about the affordances of a way of book has a particular logic or how we might move through it,
what a book can and can't do. I think sometimes some of the uses for lots of reasons,
but one of the ways that very explicit is the drawing out the potential of books to do interesting things, to work in surprising ways.
Yeah, there's sometimes like explicit you can use it or otherwise, but then you can go back to as it normal,
such a normal thing as a normal book and that maybe that makes the normal book seem a bit less sensitive.
I think that divide between regular books and that's not that's a permeable wall.
And we go back into that very good definition of afterschool like I want to draw.
Participants are self-conscious about the form of the book that kind of reflecting on the self always how do I work?
What does it mean to have pages in sequence, to be in the code, explore it?
Really good studies in this question is a. One of the things that you talk about in your book Before Magic,
is you say dependence is what combined school and context so completely that they are identical.
Could you talk a bit more about all the content and how they contribute to what we think?
Yeah. So I think one of the ways that artists books reflect on book booklets and the kind of
metal books that books about books in some way that they're about the book for them.
That's one of their purposes, and I think so.
So then Danza's book Made of Cheese has a new writing on it, apart from all this on the spot where it has the title to American Cheese.
So, so there's no content apart from form.
I mean, it's made of cheese. Well, one argument would be it's about cheese.
That's would be its kind of subject. I mean, really, it's about being a book, isn't it?
And what whether how far you could put, you could push that.
Then just got loads of different books off in a dollar bills and books of ketchup sachets and books of sweeteners and all kinds of stuff.
And it's is almost a it's a kind of challenge kind of to see how come you go with me on this?
Is this one syllable? Is this one syllable? Is this one syllable.
So. I think form and content are the same in Denis's Cheese book.
But I think it is not quite true to say full on content.
All cheese people reform and content are both.
And he recently said the book is No Hundred is not really.
But I wonder if you have any thoughts on this in relation to autistics and the
tension that they might create between access and preservation in the library.
I think that tension between those visions so fascinating and that is a brilliant thing that some of those conceptual artist books really,
really engage with. I think I would be on the side of access, partly because constitutionally I am a bit overwhelmed by presentation.
I feel as if somehow in our urge to keep everything, we are just completely overburdening the people of the future.
And I know that's a very wrong thing to say in a library, which is being dedicated to preserving that heritage in some ways.
But I would be about access. The books are not.
They're not reverential objects. They're not relics so that you can have something.
So, I mean, I would be about access. And yet,
rather than preservation of I am interested in why I'm actually really genuinely interested in why book destruction has become the red button.
Kind of image of liberalism and fascism and all those.
So interestingly, located in in books, books as objects.
So not not less not necessarily inevitable masses of cultural toys.
I'm definitely on the side of access, partly because books are things that need to be written.
And that's important, partly because one of the amazing things about books is that they do enjoy through time,
that the books that are around us now will be centuries time.
They'll have marks of that time and those moments of use.
And that's good. But also because of all of this, I mean, a crucial moment in that genre, I think,
is that it was the sixties in America, wasn't it, with people like Ed Ruscha.
They were making those books like In the Streets of Sunset Boulevard, the photo book.
And they were deliberately printed in high performance, basically the physically unremarkable stuff in some ways.
We didn't have the biggest library. So precious.
This is a very massive economy. And so in Origin is a strong group that were very committed to being democratic and to be multiple and cheap.
Now there are obviously lots of complications with that as they become collective and institutionalised.
And of these, these things become much more expensive to the complex collectable,
but in that they are about their way of using information and ideas that might be gathered in cheap books to the world.
So the things that people have access to. So yeah, I think it's been very you making this podcast and talking to a lot of the artists.
It made these books that I think that very much on that side as well.
And Mendoza even said the word co-authorship about the reader and changes that occurred to his works.
Once they become part of a collection like this where they're teaching, when they're being called up and read by a reader,
a researcher, and they seem very interested and on board with the changes that occur.
And some of these books that we're talking about all my life,
but don't describe the cheese because a lot is ever changing now that I can realise that it's true.
It's only when we have the conversation to this episode to give you a taste of the collection here at the Bodleian,
and that you'll join us for the next four episodes of Witness What We will be looking more closely for objects from the collection.
Thanks again to Chris Fletcher, Adam Smyth and Emma Smith for chatting to us in this episode and the team at
the Centre for the Study of the book for helping us put together book ness.
Back to Emma for a final thought about books and art and their changing place here at the library and in Oxford.
I love thinking about that moment when the Bodleian and the other museums in
Oxford divvied up what was their sphere of expertise and books became a category,
and fossils themselves became an art became a category.
And it's kind of really you see why that happens. It's the importance of intellectual.
It's a political moment and stuff, but it feels really good. So get away from that now and sort of push up the book as a more inclusive and say.