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Clifton Meador,
Ossining, New York. Anecdote of the Jar 1989, offset, 10
x 5.25", 11"wide fully opened
Anne Patterson,
Jersey City NJ. Kaleidosights, 1989, wood, brass, plexiglass,
photostats, 11.25" diameters 3.25" deep
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Invent a new word
Another final approach
from the "book" side of the controversy is to invent a new word.
Phillip Smith, a well know British book binder coined the term 'bookness."
In the 1970s, after reading in James Joyce's Ulysses of the "horseness
of horses" - the whatness of horses - he decided the phrase "the
whatness of the book" or "bookness" would make a more suitable term
than artists books.
Bookness: The qualities which have to do with a book. In its
simplest meaning the term covers the packaging of multiple planes
held together in fixed or variable sequence by some kind of hinging
mechanism, support, or container, associated with a visual/verbal
content called a text. The term should not strictly speaking include
pre-codex carriers of text such as the scroll or the clay tablet,
in fact nothing on a single leaf or planar surface such as a TV
screen, poster or hand-bill.
"Bookness" is however being stretched
to include forms which carry a digitalized or electronic text
such as a CD, a hard disk or a microchip, or miscellaneous forms
such as spirals of paper with continuous text, or pyramids, dodecahedrons
and other geometric multiplanar forms (which could also have text
inscribed on them). I would not describe all these things as having
the quality of bookness or being strictly covered by the definition.
A blank book is still a book, but a blank dodecahedron or unmarked
spiral of paper is not a book, it is a dodecahedron etc.
A text
is a text and not a book, but any other object one likes to imagine
may perhaps be its conveyance. A text can be inscribed on anything
but this does not make it a book, or have the quality of bookness,
even as a scroll retains its scrollness without any text on it.
A teddy bear with text on it is not a book! The book is not the
text, although it is traditionally associated with it, and these
two elements appear often to be mistaken for the same thing. The
book is the hinged multi-planar vehicle or substrate on which
texts, verbal, or tactile (the latter would include braille and
other relief or embossed effects, found objects, pop-ups) maybe
written, drawn, reproduced, printed or assembled.
Also included
in theses various posts were references to the Bible and Oxford English
Dictionary. One would not think that either of these could add much
openness or new thought to the debate, but I was quite surprised at
how the historical reference to the "books" of the Bible and definition
in the OED could expand our 21st-century concept of a book.
One cannot assume that the definition of a book, let alone an
Artist's Book, is understood by all, but indubitably the book
arts have infinitely expanded that definition. The definition
of a book (like the Duchampian definition of art itself) can now
mean any object which a book artist defines as a book! All the
usual criteria have been breached, infringed and transgressed.
The Oxford English Dictionary (O.E.D.) entry for 'book' is surprisingly
wide... Part of the long O.E.D. entry (running to over seven pages)
reads
[3. gen. A written or printed treatise or series of treatises,
occupying several sheets of paper or other substance fastened
together so as to compose a material whole. In this wide sense,
referring to all ages and countries, a book comprehends a treatise
written on any material (skin, parchment, papyrus, paper, cotton,silk,
palm leaves, bark, tablets of wood, ivory, slate, metal, etc)
put together in any portable form, e.g. that of a long roll, or
of separate leaves, hinged, strung, stitched, or pasted together.
]
We can thank those Christian
marketers of the early centuries of the Common Era, for repackaging
the "books" that contained their religious writings. Our word
for book refers to the amount of text that could easily fit on
a scroll. A scroll "is" a book. That's why biblical chapters are
called books. There were even earlier forms of the "book;" that's
so long ago that when people make those kinds of books today,
they are called artist's books.
- Nicholas G. Yeager, artist
Many responses also saw the validity to both the
"artists" and the "book" sides of the discussion:
I love books which surprise me, whose imaginative reach
thrills me and perhaps makes me see "book" in a way I haven't seen
it before. And if a creatively made book or book-like object does
so, I am willing to give it a lot of leeway in terms of its craft.
... When a book can be both well made and imaginatively powerful,
yes, that's the best it gets.
I call much of my work Book Objects
and as stretchy as they may get in their "book-ness," they are well-crafted,
often employing very traditional bench techniques. - Melissa
Jay Craig, director, Chicago Center for the Book
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