An exhibit entitled Rock, Paper, Scissors at the The Book as Art V.12, ended last month at the Decatur Public Library. Visiting the various installations reminded me of a quote from a book I just finished reading The Book Makers: A History of the Book in Eighteen Lives (2024) by Adam Smyth.
Smyth writes that in some cases book art may better represent the mind's non-linear associative wonderings. He quotes an experimental novelist and cantankerous man of letters B.S. Johnson whose book The Unfortunates was placed unbound in a box: "A better solution to the problem of conveying the mind's randomness than the imposed order of a bound book."
Here's a few books from the exhibit that made me wonder how books with their different designs can convey meaning beyond the pages:
A couple years ago at Book as Art, Vol. 10 there was even a better example of a book in a box from Dan Wood of Providence, Rhode Island.
Also in Rock, Paper, Scissors there was a table of books entitled Biography Unwritten. Book artist Toby Lee Greenberg created the biographies of inmates who were unjustly incarcerated for years before being found innocent. He writes a sentence or two about what their lives "might have been or what they missed." Instead of pages Greenberg has created a thin concrete cell block to represent the pages of their books. In the biography of Wilbert Lee, Greenberg writes "Missed twelve years of life, like pages being ripped from a book."
P.S. A slide portfolio of the entire exhibit can be found on this Decatur Alliance page. Also the Book Shopper website has a breakout of Books as Art as Books which has 42—count `em 42!—archival postings.
Comments