The “Books, Texts, and Images” Working Group recommends…
If you’d like to join our Zotero Group bibliography (which includes these and other resources) or to participate in our other activities, sign up here.
Join us in rereading Lawrence Weschler’s Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder in preparation for our working group’s visit to the Museum of Jurassic Technology on Friday, February 18, 2022 at 2pm.
Lisa Pon applauds Inscription: The Journal of Material Text – Theory, Practice, History.
Is anyone thinking about folds? See their call for submissions for their fall 2022 third issue. And check out their short film about their first issue on “beginnings” here.
Erica Camisa Morale on The Russian Graphosphere, 1450-1850 (2019) by Simon Franklin:
Simon Franklin’s study of the tradition of writing in Russian includes everything that is written—from road signs to store signs to the notes on pieces of paper. Ultimately, ephemera are the protagonists of this study, which traces the evolution of the ways of writing in Russia between 1450 and 1850. This is a crucial period in Russian history, when the transition from the “pre-modern” period to the modern takes place and in which the cultural world maintains increasingly closer contact with the West.
This text can arouse interesting discussions on the methodology and analysis conducted by Franklin, and on how these can be adapted to different subject matters of diverse national cultures or artistic spheres.
Text translated from Italian by Siyu Shen.
Veronica Peselmann on
Jennifer Quick (2018), Pasteup Pictures: Ed Ruscha’s Every Building on the Sunset Strip, The Art Bulletin, 100:2, 125-152.
It is an article about the historical circumstances of Ed Ruscha’s Artistsʼ Book production with particular focus on his famous Accordion Fold work Every Building on the Sunset Strip. Addressing the postwar commercial situation in Los Angeles, touching on the print shop and layout departments, the J. Quick highlights Ruscha’s artistic position between art and design working comprehensively on type design, and photo retouching. Introducing the term Pasteup as a total system to Ruscha’s work, the author stresses the hybrid character of his artists’ books, consisting of text, images, photographs, templates, mock-ups and experimental means of ‘shooting’ the stations along Sunset Boulevard.
The article highlights that working on Every Building of the Sunset Strip and other Artists’ Books, ask for an approach involving myriad aspects and their interaction: use of materials, apparatuses during production processes as well as modes of perception that not only touch on the visual sense but also on the haptic sense. While folding and turning the pages, the beholders reenact the movement of the passing buildings along the Boulevard.
Lisa Pon is rereading Susan Orlean, The Library Book (2018), in preparation for our Working Group’s visit to the LA Central Library on Friday, Oct 15, 2021 from 2:00-3:15pm. Sign up here.
Erin Maynes on
Robert Walser, Microscripts (reprint edition 2012):
This is a book about texts which consists of translations of almost thirty of Walser’s microscopic manuscripts the author wrote on scraps of discarded paper–the backs of page-a-day calendars or a business card or running up the margins and around the written words on a postcard. But in another sense, the book is about the text as a material object–a photo of each microscript accompanies the translated text that follows–and the assumptions we make about such objects. These were long thought to be written in an indecipherable code invented by Walser, a manifestation of his schizophrenia. But the “code” was cracked after the author’s death–they were written in a miniaturized form of German Kurrent–and the act of such painstaking transcription was found to be part of Walser’s writing process… “With the aid of my pencil, I was better able to play, to write, it seemed this revived my writerly enthusiasm.”