Book Spine Poetry

I recently discovered the art of Book Spine Poetry, the act of making poems out of book titles or at least the titles given on the spines of books. It's a relatively straightforward idea, but as an art or poetic form its rather playful, taking titles as ready-made poetic phrases and linking them together to create a new poetic object.

The master of book spine poetry is artist Nina Katchadourian, whose Sorted Books project has been ongoing nearly 20 years. The Sorted Books project began in 1993 and saw the artist arrange books from numerous lookings - private homes to public libraries and specialised books collections. Whilst the artist herself claims that "Taken as a while, the clusters from each sorting aim to examine that particular library's focus, idiosyncracies, and inconsistencies - a cross-section of that library's holdings", her work also producing some interesting literary results. Here are two of my favourites (my organisation of typed text):

Book spine poetry appears to be taking off on the web, perhaps because it seems to offer the same sort of authorly promise as web2.0 - it is an art everyone can do. Indeed, there are libraries in America holding Book Spine Poetry competitions. Another writer of Book Spine Poetry is cultural commentator and literary reviewer Maria Popova, who posted her attempts on her blog Brain Pickings. Again, two favourites:

Anyway, I thought I'd have a go at some Book Spine Poetry myself! If you're interested you can see my own Book Spine Poems on the next blog post here.

The Book That Can't Wait

Buenos Aires-based bookshop and publisher Eterna Cadencia (with the aid of marketing agency DRAFTFCB) have created a profoundly ephemeral literary object in the form of El Libro que No Puedo Esperar, or to translate that into English The Book That Can't Wait.

What makes The Book That Can't Wait so unique is that it has been printed using special ink which, once exposed to the air, will begin to disappear.


The book comes securely sealed, air-tight, but from the moment it is opened, the words will begin to vanish. Within two months, the fiction contained in The Book That Can't Wait will seem to be just that - a fiction - having completely disappeared, the book and its blank pages the only surviving remnants of the stories they once contained.



The Book That Can't Wait is actually a special edition of The Future is Not Ours: New Latin American Fiction, a collection of short stories by emerging Latin American Writers edited by Diego Trelles Paz. It seems that the motivation for the special edition was to raise awareness of new writers - to make reading their works a priority and to provide them with greater exposure. And on all accounts this seems to have worked! The special edition sold out and certainly had a media-buzz surrounding it. Moreover, the marketing campaign won three Gold and a Bronze Lion at Cannes 2012. Here's the promotional video:

As for me, I'm still getting my head around the idea. Both the publishers Eterna Candencia and the ad agency DRAFTFCB contextualise the design by reference to contemporary anxiety over the death of the book, the threat of extinction to the book as physical object created by digital technologies. The Book That Can't Wait certainly engages in a self-effacing debate about its own materiality and immateriality. Yet as a reader and someone who appreciates the book as artefact, I feel strangely torn. On one hand, the concept of The Book That Can't Wait is beautiful and its transience is surely at the heart of this. But I can't help thinking that in three months from purchase date when I find myself looking down at empty pages, I might feel somewhat cheated. For now, like the future pages of The Book That Can't Wait, I'm lost for words.




(With thanks to my friend Tom Stafford for bringing The Book That Can't Wait to my attention.  Visit his blog Idolect.) 

The landscape of the book

Just a quick post on another artist making books into sculptural works of art, Guy Laramee. His books works come in the form of two projects, Biblios and The Great Wall. Interestingly, Laramee conceptualises both projects through a story of civilisations, perhaps in a way that offers links to the work of altermodernist artist Charles Avery (see previous blog posts on Avery's The Islanders and Onomatopoeia).

Biblios is based around an ancient peoples called The Biblios. The Biblios invented words for the world around them, and so that they these words didn't die, they began to collect them in libraries. Moreover, the Biblios believed that words contained the spirit of the thing they designate.

The Biblios, as a people, die out, and according to the legend which Laramee writes, "It is generally agreed that Biblios dies under the weight of their knowledge". To read all of Laramee's commentary on Biblios, visit here.

The Great Wall, on the other hand, is about a civilisation from the future, a Chinese Empire of the 23rd Century keen to chronicle the histories of "The Great Panics" of the 21st and 22nd Centuries. The result was a vast encyclopaedia entitled 'The Great Wall'.

Laramee's work are intriguing objects, blending the bookwork as art, with landscape and fictional archaeology. Interestingly, Laramee's own artistic statement links his bookart projects to the supposed death of the book in the early 21st century. He goes on to say:

So I carve landscapes out of books and I paint Romantic landscapes. Mountains of disused knowledge return to what they really are: mountains. They erode a bit more and they become hills. Then they flatten and become fields where apparently nothing is happening. piles of obsolete encyclopaedias return to that which does not need to say anything, that which simple IS. Fogs and clouds erase everything we know, everything we think we are.

Altered Book Workshop

Last month, my friend Alice and I took ourselves along to an Altered Book Workshop, here in Sheffield hosted by the Creative Action Network. The idea behind the workshop was to explore the ways in which old or unwanted books can be transformed into art objects and sculptures. Anyone who reads this blog (and particularly has read the posts on the book-sculptures of  Isaac Salazar and Brian Dettmer) will know that I am interested in the material form of books and their creative potentialities. With this workshop just on the doorstep, it seemed like too good an opportunity to pass up! ...Time to get involved and have a go myself!

Charlie Hill, a Sheffield-based mixed media artist, was running the workshop and she began by showing us her own work in altered books as well as work by other altered book artists. Charlie introduced us to two artists in particular for inspiration.

The first was Su Blackwell (who incidentally is from Sheffield!). Her book-sculptures create intricate and complex scenes, often from the realms of a fairy tales and folklore. They really are beautiful delicate installation pieces - See for yourself:

Above: Top Left: 'The Extasie' (2006);

Bottom Left: 'The Baron in the Trees' (2011); Right: 'Hope' (2009)

What I wouldn't give to own one! ...and if you'd like to see more, there is a full gallery on her website.


The second artist was Nicholas Jones, an Australian sculpture. His work is much more about the the ways in which the pages of books can be folded or cut into in order to create new shapes and designs:

Above: Top Left, Bottom Left and Centre are taken from Jones'

'The Tower of Learning' exhibition at Pablo Fanque, Sydney, 2008;

Top right: 'The Blue Wave'; and Bottom Right comes from

'The Garden of Forking Paths' exhibition at Geelong Gallery, Victoria, 2009.

And if you'd like to see more of Nicholas Jones' work, he also has a gallery on his website.

Obviously, seeing these artists works, we had a lot to wonder at! Though I warn you now, this was a beginner's workshop, so don't expect to much! In the workshop, we learnt mostly about the different techniques for folding in order to create new shapes, revisioning the book as it were

This was my greatest achievement for the day, which I've decided to call 'leaves', playing on the pun of the pages themselves being leaves (homage to Mark Z. Danielewski, of course!):








And this is part of the process of folding, created by my friend Alice.







Dan Williamson was also at the workshop and he created three really good pieces, all of which can be seen on his lovely photo blog: 'This is not a refuge', 'donkey cabbages', and 'The Spring and the Egg'.

All in all, I really enjoyed the day. It made a nice change to be more creative!

Tree of Codes

Jonathan Safran Foer's latest literary offering, published in late 2010 by Visual Editions, is an astonishing experiment in book art.

When you first take Tree of Codes in your hands, it seems like any other paperback. When you open it, though, you find that the pages have literally been cut to pieces. But carefully so. You see, Tree of Codes is a 'die-cut book', each page a web of cut-out largely-rectangular shapes, precise gaping holes where you'd expect to find written text. So unusual is this novel that Visual Editions have made a video showing the public's reactions to the book:

A few words have been spared, and it is these word-islands that form the narrative, an evocative tale of a man's coming to terms with death and confrontation with life. Foer's book has in fact grown out of another book, Bruno Schulz's The Street of Crocodiles. Foer carved out his story from Schulz's, cutting most of the original and leaving the remaining resilient words in their original position on the page. Jewish-born Schulz did not survive the Second World War; his unpublished work is lost, cast from the pages of history. There is, therefore, a poignant irony to Foer's act of erasure.

Reading Tree of Codes is a delicate act. You must turn each page with fragile care. And as you read the text itself, which is deeply poetic in nature, words from pages-to-come intrude in the sentence you're reading, materialising through the holes from the depths of pages. Part-novel, part-sculpure, Tree of Codes is, if nothing else, an equisite artistic statement. It reminds us of the beauty of silence and empty space while its elegaic words speak with resonant voice. It enacts a history of loss while saluting a future poetics of form. As with conceptual art, you are likely either to love or hate this book, but there is no denying that Foer's Tree of Codes is at the cutting edge.

Would you read a 3D novel?

Artist and Designer Tristan Eaton has edited, or perhaps curated is a better word, a new book of retro 3D art. And when I say retro, we're talking the old lo-fi red-and-blue glasses, not more recent forays into 3D as seen in stereoscopic cinema.

Here's a sample image from the book: 'The Merchants of Cool' by Kevin Bourgeois.

(The Guardian has a gallery here if you'd like to see more.)

The book is simply a collection of 3D artworks by young contemporary artists exploring the form. Which isn't to belittle it - It looks great. But it did get me thinking about whether 3D is a possibility for literary fiction. I for one would love to see a book made like this, an experiment in taking the fictional and imaginative into 3D. But I suspect this is a pipe dream that would never be realised, and perhaps it would be more novelty than novel... Perhaps.

What do you think? Would you read a 3D novel?

More Altered BookArt Works

For those of you who enjoyed the previous post on books as sculptural works of art, feast your eyes on the work of Brian Dettmer who alters books, etching them into complex topographies.

There are obvious formal differences between the works of Brian Dettmer and Isaac Salazar, but it's still fascinating to witness just what a book can be.


Visit Brian Dettmer's website here; his flickr page here; and here's an interesting article from The Guardian.

The Book as Art: Reading the Sculpture

A fleeting Blog post: I just thought I'd share with you the book-art objects of Isaac Salazar.

Salazar transforms books into these beautiful sculptural forms. These works are less about the experience of reading books, but about books as a material form in themselves. Salazar's work shows us that the book, or the pages of books at least, are much more malleable than we might think. In other words, these sculptural forms make us see the book in a new light: Not as a work of literature, but an exciting art object in itself.

See more of Isaac Salazer's Books of Art collection here.