You Won't Believe This Incredible Art Edition Of James Joyce's Ulysses

by Stephen J. Gertz

James Joyce completed his novel, Ulysses, on October 30, 1921. Ninety years later, on October 30, 2011, Charlene Matthews, the Los Angeles-based book artist and bookbinder recently the subject of a profile in Studios magazine, began work on an extraordinary edition of the book, based upon Sylvia Beach's true first edition with all its typos included.

Two years later, on October 30, 2013, she completed it: the entire text of Ulysses - all of its approximately 265,000 words in eighteen episodes - transcribed by hand onto thirty-eight seven-foot tall, two-inch diameter poles: Ulysses as a landscape to physically move through; the novel as literary grove, Ulysses as trees of of life with language as fragrant, hallucinatory bark, and trunks reaching toward the sky.

Each pole has sixteen 'cels' comprised of four pages, a total of sixty-four pages per pole.  The first cel has the first line in it and then Matthews measured down 9" and wrote that line in the next cel and so on, with the last cel containing the last line on the pole. The whole totals thirty-eight poles.

I talked to Charlene Matthews about the piece, which I've observed in progress since she began. Our interview follows.

SJG: This project involved an extraordinary amount of work and time. What inspired you to begin?

CM: I had to do a sculptural piece for an art show Doug Harvey was doing at the Shoshanna Wayne Gallery.  So I wrote a J.G.Ballard short story (Say Goodbye to the Wind) on a pole I had in the back yard for years  which I hate to say was not very good.  I liked how it looked and I liked the idea of taking the words out of the book and putting them onto an object, I stayed with the pole.  I went through my book collection and found Ulysses.  Nothing else would do but IT, and I had never read it.

Key to the poles.

SJG: Did you have any idea when you began just how all-consuming it would turn-out to become?

CM: I knew the project would take me a while, I researched poles and pens and jumped in. As problems occurred I solved them, like how to write and turn the pole smoothly, how to write without twisting my back, how to exercise my hands to keep them from cramping, how to sand the pole just so to accommodate smooth writing.  The eventual  get-up I rigged was pretty amusing. I also began mapping the characters' movements on my walls.

All typos included, as well as flaws in the medium.

SJG: What is the over-riding theme here? What was/is your intent? In short (from a philistine perspective), what's the point?

CM: Initially I envisioned just a large group of poles standing around with writing on them.  But as I was writing, I had visions of the poles being exhibited in many ways, I am going to publish a small edition book of these drawings this year.  Some of them are pretty basic, most are pretty out there ( Irish Jig Dancers, energy windmills, mirrors etc.).

Also, as I was writing my eyes would look at my process and get memorized in the patterns made by the black pen letters on the wood grain, the letters moving around, the grain going up and down. I saw pictures of faces, and animals and odd formations.

The point?  I wanted to make something beautiful.  That is how I chose to spend my time at night.  I did have some very personal reasons for doing this, but they are moot.  It really is just my most current book art project.

Basically the book is all about sex.  I have A LOT to say about this.

SJG: It seems that the process must have in some way paralleled Bloom's journey, his a walk through Dublin, yours a walk through Joyce. Anything to that?

CM: It definitely felt like I was having a love affair with Joyce. 

SJG: You've read the book, a work of art in and of itself. You've turned it into a work of art in another medium. How has it changed your perspective on the book?

CM: As I was absorbing the story, I was also observing his style, and method of storytelling. I understood what was going on in his head as a story teller, writer and artist.  What he was trying to achieve in his Modernism.  This is when I knew that the book had more than a plot line, it had a picture line, the movements of everyone if they could be seen over head would draw out symbols/pictures.  As I was taking the words off the page, I was in this fourth dimension with Joyce.

Draft schematic plan for exhibition.

SJG: And for the viewer/reader, what is it you expect or hope from them? What do you want people to take away from the experience?

CM: What I want people to take away from seeing the poles is the magic of the hand written word, the beauty of handwriting.  The beauty of a handmade object only they can create, by hand writing.

SJG: Are you looking for or have you found an exhibition space for the piece? Any interest yet from galleries?

CM: I am talking to people about exhibiting them, and welcome any inquiries. Depending on the space will depend on how to show them.  Either anchored to the floor or hanging from the ceiling. All can be done.

Pole #38, with last line.

SJG: You said that "basically the book is all about sex.  I have A LOT to say about this." You can't declare that and not pay it off.

CM: Spoiler Alert! It covers every angle of human sexuality. One interesting point about the Ulysses obscenity trial in America is that the case was won the day after Prohibition was lifted.

•  •  •

The case was won on December 6, 1933. Prohibition ended on December 5, 1933 when the 21st Amendment to the U.S. Constitution repealing the 18th Amendment was ratified.

"...And what is cheese? Corpse of milk" - James Joyce, Ulysses . 

And what is Charlene Matthews' Ulysses? Copse of novel.

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Images courtesy of Charlene Matthews, with our thanks.
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The Artists' Book Manifesto of American Painting in the 1960s

by Stephen J. Gertz

Walasse Ting

Until the late 1950s, the creation of artists' books had been primarily an European phenomenon. But 1¢ Life, a collection of poems by Chinese-born American painter Walasse Ting (1929-2010), and published in 1964 with sixty-two lithographs housed within silk-screen printed boards, represents an early example of a shift to the U.S. for their production, an extravagant declaration their migration to, and presence in, the New World, a flag boldly planted to stake their claim.

"The book very quickly became the manifesto of a new generation of painters and the expression of the new pictorial research that they were engaged in."

Kiki O.K. [Kogelnik]

Although 1¢ Life was Ting's conception, it was painter Sam Francis who drove this huge project to its conclusion; he recruited the artists and organized their work. Francis also sought and received funding for the project and brought in Swiss publisher Eberhard W. Kornfeld. The works were then exhibited at the Kornfeld und Klipstein gallery in Bern.

Tom Wesselmann

Sam Francis

The participating artists represented a Who's Who of the contemporary art scene. In addition to works by Francis and Ting, the lithographs in 1¢ Life are by Alan Davie, Alfred Jensen, James Rosenquist, Pierre Alechinsky, Kimber Smith, Alfred Leslie, Antonio Saura, Kiki "O.K." Kolgelnik, Robert Indiana, Jean-Paul Riopelle, Karel Appel, Tom Wesselmann, Bram van Velde, Joan Mitchell, Allan Kaprow, Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, K.R.H. Sonderborg, Roy Lichtenstein, Oyvind Fahlström, Reinhoud d'Haese, Claes Oldenburg, Jim Dine, Mel Ramos, and Enrico Baj.

Robert Indian

The sixty-two lithographs (the images, heavily, although not exclusively, in the Pop idiom),  were created to accompany sixty-one of Ting's "raunchy pidgen English" poems based upon his observations of city life, snatches of street conversation, etc., i.e.:

Walasse Ting

Sun in my stomach
New moon in eyes
I want a hamburger
Loan me two dollars

Mel Ramos

In the poem above, Ting, who had ties to the Paris-based COBRA group of avant-garde artists, captures what could be a street person barking a command, startling,  a bit scary, a bit nuts, annoying, amusing and painful at the same time. Or, perhaps, a Pop snapshot  influenced by cartoonist E.C. Segar's popular character, J. Wellington Wimpy, the ground beef gourmand, Popeye the Sailor's gluttonous friend, and world-class mooch renowned for his 1/4 lb. entreaty to anyone he runs into, "I will gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today."  Or, that friend who's loaded but never has any cash. All the poem lacks is an appropriate coda:

Sam Francis

Parched is my throat

Thirsty my heart
I want an Orange Julius
Loan me 25 cents more

Thanks

See you later buddy

Roy Lichtenstein

Ting "wanted to publish the most international illustrated book, intended to illustrate his text, uniting tachisme, neo-dadaisme, pop art, and all other artistic movements.

Pierre Alechinsky

"The idea was born from global experience, close contact with culture, pseudo-culture, primitive existential worries, urban erotic and eastern wisdom. It was a Herculean task, for which only a Chinese would have been able to muster the perseverance" (publisher E. W. Kornfeld).

Andy Warhol

Blending Pop, abstract, and Conceptualist sensibilities "the pop artists formed the central core of the group. The book very quickly became the manifesto of a new generation of painters and the expression of the new pictorial research that they were engaged in...." {catalog excerpt from Gemini Fine Books & Arts, Ltd.).

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Cover by Walasse Ting and Roy Lichtenstein.

TING, Walasse. 1¢ Life. Edited by Sam Francis. Bern (E. Kornfeld), 1964. Trade edition, limited to 2000 copies, numbered in color stencil. Folio. 163, (11)pp. Sixty-two original color lithographs, including  thirty-six double-page, by Alan Davie (2), Alfred Jensen (3), Sam Francis (6), Walasse Ting (6), James Rosenquist, Pierre Alechinsky (5), Kimber Smith (6), Alfred Leslie (2), Antonio Saura, Kiki O.K. (2), Robert Indiana (2), Jean-Paul Riopelle (2), Karel Appel (5), Tom Wesselmann (2), Bram van Velde, Joan Mitchell, Allan Kaprow, Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, K.R.H. Sonderborg, Roy Lichtenstein, Oyvind Fahlström, Reinhoud, Claes Oldenburg (2), Jim Dine, Mel Ramos (2), Enrico Baj (2). 19 illus.  Lithography by Maurice Beaudet, typography by Georges Girard.

Cloth portfolio, silkscreened in color, designed by Ting. D.j. Slipcase.

A limited edition of 100 numbered copies signed by each artist was also issued.

Castleman p. 208f.; Manet to Hockney 135; Grolier Club 55; Bibliothèque Nationale: 50 livres illustrés depuis 1947, no. 32.

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Images courtesy of Ars Libri Ltd., currently offering a copy of 1¢ Life, with our thanks.

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A Book Is Not An X

by Stephen J. Gertz

Auerbach, Tauba. Cut-out book, interior.
From the exhibition, A Book Is Not An X.

Artist Tauba Auerbach is a polymath, her work spanning a wide variety of both traditional and non-traditional media encompassing everything from paintings and photographs, to prints, films, and musical instruments.

From August 12 through September 20, 2011 an exhibition of her new work, A Book Is Not An X, will be presented by booksellers John McWhinnie & Glenn Horowitz at Glenn Horowitz Bookseller, 87 Newtown Lane, East Hampton, NY.

Tauba Auerbach website homepage.

Since the very beginning of her artistic career Tauba Auerbach has been devoted to the creation of inventive artists’ books. Whatever the medium, Auerbach is drawn to patterns, orders, and systems, and her work frequently explores language, typography, mathematics, and other tools for communicating or recording information. Her methodology resembles that of scientific inquiry and the works themselves are often like thought experiments. What makes the work so compelling is the extraordinary formal clarity with which she renders ideas into images and objects.

In a 2010 Artforum review of German artist Carsten Nicolai’s book, Grid Index, Auerbach wrote that, “a book is an X-axis. The format is almost always linear; the content, bound in a prescribed order, marches single file.”

[2,3]
Six individual pop-up volumes
housed in a cloth slipcase.
Tauba Auerbach & Printed Matter, 2011

The title of the exhibition riffs on the first line of her review and hints that Auerbach’s impetus to create this body of work was a desire to assert a far more open-ended conception of a book. The notion of an axis remains in play, but is variously collapsed, rotated, or fractured.

Auerbach has created nine new works, each made in an edition of ten or fewer copies. The creation of these books, and indeed all of Auerbach’s recent work, has been driven by her interest in topology.  Topology is a branch of mathematics that inquires into the basic characteristics of surfaces and objects in order to understand the range of incarnations the form can take while still retaining its defining properties. Thus, each of these books is an experimental object, and a radical reconsideration of what a book may be.

CHAOS
With essays by Will Bradley, Brian Sholis, and Chris Jennings.
Artbook, 2009.

Each was conceived in order to uncover possibilities within the book form and as a way of seeing how form, once reinterpreted, could be used to contain or convey content. Several of the books rely on tomography (the practice of using cross-sections to visualize the internal structure of an object or volume) to transmit information, others re-imagine the binding and other structural elements of a book so that they become central to its meaning, still others further develop ideas that Auerbach first began to explore in creating a much anticipated series of pop-up books for Printed Matter. Altogether the exhibition demonstrates categorically that a book need not be merely “an X.” 

FOLDS
Sternberg Press, 2011.

Tauba Auerbach lives and works in New York City. She is represented by the Paula Cooper Gallery. Her first one-person museum exhibition opens this November at the Bergen Kunsthall in Norway.

Tauba Auerbach website landing page.
A name is not an X. But if you look closely...

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Header image courtesy of John McWhinnie. All others courtesy of Tauba Auerbach. Our thanks to both.

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The Bombshell Book Art of Werner Pfeiffer

By Nancy Mattoon

Explosive Subject: A "Book-Object,"
Created By Artist Werner Pfeiffer.
(All Images Courtesy of Cornell University Libraries.)

"The book is one of the most powerful weapons ever invented." This is the mantra of Artist Werner Pfeiffer, who has spent over forty years creating--and ironically destroying--books to prove their strength and importance.

Fold-Out Book #1.
Artist Pfeiffer says reading this book involves
"bursts of manipulating, arranging, feeling and touching."

Pfeiffer's childhood in Nazi Germany exposed him not only to censorship and book burnings, but also to the use of the written word as a tool to build a society based on hated, violence, and genocide. At the same time, as a boy Pfeiffer cherished books as "an escape from the harsh realities of a disintegrating world."

Difficult to Fit.

He became obsessed with the complexities of the book: an everyday object that could be a magnificent work of art; a symbol of enlightenment and learning that could spread intolerance and evil; a spiritual sanctuary that could carry the recipe for a living hell; a symbol of truth and a transmitter of lies. With his art he expresses every aspect of this amazingly conflicted cultural chameleon.

Fold-Out Book #2.
"Here the interaction is based on a visual language and
on the experience of manipulating elements into different settings."

Pfeiffer was born in Stuttgart in 1937. His boyhood home was obliterated by Allied bombing raids, and he was internally, if not externally, scarred by "the trauma of World War II and its tumultuous aftermath." He remembers his first schoolbooks were "leftovers" from the Nazi regime, "with words and sentences blackened out...chapters deleted and entire pages missing." Ideas which he had been taught six months before were worth dying for, were now concealed as so evil they were "unfit to be read about." Pfeiffer never forgot how the Third Reich used and abused the book. "The power of a book to spread free and unbridled thought," he learned, "renders it equally vulnerable...when political or religious fanatics are troubled by challenges to their orthodox rhetoric."

Original Chip.

As a young man, Pfeiffer discovered that, "With the passage of time I found myself ever more seduced by books, captivated by their content. But I became equally intrigued by their structure, their making, their décor, their design, their history, their politics." He enrolled in Stuttgart's Akademie der Bildenden Kunste, to study art and design, and found himself specializing in book arts.

One Of Three Flexgons That Make Up Abracadabra.
"A book about magic. Not the illusory trickery of a conjuror,
but the magic of an artist’s work."

In 1961 he emigrated to the United States, and spent a decade as a freelance designer and art director, building a portfolio of award-winning graphic and commercial art. In 1969 his hard work, talent, and creative devotion to typography and the written word, were recognized by the prestigious Pratt Institute, which named him Director of the Adlib Press, which produces limited edition artist books and letterpress publications for students and faculty. He subsequently became the head of Pratt's Book Arts program, and held both of these position until retiring in 2003.

Literary Salvo.

But despite the demands of his academic career, Pfeiffer continued to produce his own artist's book and what he came to call "book objects." As might be expected from a man with such a conflicted history with books, the two threads of his artistic work are diametrically opposed. "In creating my Book-Objects," he explains, "I deconstruct books, dismantle them and assemble whatever fragments remain into new composites. The opposite is true when I make Artist Books. Here I carefully plot, make thorough investigations, and spend plenty of time mapping out concepts to build new volumes from scratch." The unifying theme of both types of work is, of course, the inherent power of the book.

Woodcut From: The River.
"Structured as a long accordion fold (fully extended it measures 26½ feet),
the book echoes the rhythm and flow of a river."

Pfeiffer's Book-Objects are a modern take on the idea of the book as a vulnerable and imperiled technology. These "are made with real books. They are not casts, nor are they sculpted imitations. At its core each piece has bound, printed pages. Glued together and painstakingly covered with gesso, they are silenced and sealed for good. I practice this destruction, this obvious censorship, simply as metaphor. It is to visualize, to demonstrate, to provoke. For these acts of violence are not about the damage done to stacks of paper, to books. The objects are about the harm inflicted on the human spirit. The ropes, the nails, the clamps, the hooks and knifes are real as well. They are symbols of pain, of torture, of suppression which are inevitably brought on by the censor’s act."

Difficult Chapter.

By contrast, Werner Pfeiffer's artist books incorporate printing techniques that have been used in book production for centuries, including woodcuts, linoleum block-prints, lithographs, etchings, handset typography, and letterpress printing. He uses both handmade and archival quality papers, and cuts, sews, and decorates his fine bindings. Produced in limited editions of 10 to 50 copies, these works demonstrate the artist's respect for the book in its "elemental simplicity...deliberately low-tech, cumbersome and slow. It is private. It challenges the imagination. It is a conversation between the author and reader...a dialogue of minds."

Errantry.
A 27-foot-long canvas scroll housed in a bullet-shell casing,
"the text and images are set against a chronology
of war, conflict, and genocide in the 20th century. "

Cornell University Library’s Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections is the last stop for a traveling exhibition of Werner Pfeiffer's book art. Previously on display at Smith College, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Toronto, Werner Pfeiffer (censor, villain, provocateur, experimenter): Book-Objects and Artist Books, will be on view at the Hirshland Gallery of the Carl A. Kroch Library through February of 2011. An online exhibit featuring highlights of the show is available on the library's website.
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Genesis of a Book Artist: Booktryst Interviews Richard Minsky

by Stephen J. Gertz

Richard Minsky is considered to be the most influential book artist of his generation, a pioneer and innovator in the book arts. His critically acclaimed work is found in museums and private collections around the world; he has won many fellowships and awards. Booktryst has written about the breathtaking book art of Richard Minsky. 

FREEDOM OF CHOICE
Three Poems of Love and Death by Lucie Brock-Broido
Richard Minsky, 2009
73" x  26" x  24

We know that he got a printing press when he was only thirteen years old but his fascination with printing and books began much earlier than that. We recently asked him about his formative years, when he was initially captivated by printing at its most basic.

Booktryst: Prior to getting that printing press when you were thirteen you were strictly into rubber stamps.

RM: No, I just had a few sets of rubber stamps, mostly sets of letters. At the age of 10 I was given a Superior Cub Printing Press, a postcard size cylinder press that used rubber type, with rubber dies for the images. I don't have the same one, but here is a photo of the one I now own. It has a 1955 copyright on the Rotary Printer’s Journal that came with it. That has all kinds of information, from “What You Should Know About Type” to “Drumming Up Business.” The Cub Press has been around since at least the 1930’s. As you see, the type is similar in form to metal type:

You set it into slots one letter at a time, as you would compose foundry type, sort of like in a Multigraph:


Booktryst: After the initial attraction what kept you at it?

RM: The week after I got it my father died. He was a journalist, an editor, and on weekends I would go to his office and play with the Royal typewriters and some of the other equipment. I guess this replaced that activity.
 

Booktryst: At age thirteen you buy yourself a small, hand printing press. A gift? Did you save up for it?

RM: Sort of. I was given some savings bonds for my Bar Mitzvah. That year my mother died. My grandmother was my guardian jointly with the Guardianship Clerk of the Surrogate’s Court. There was some income from Social Security, but not enough to do anything but cover the basic expenses. At that point I figured it would be best to do something that I loved for the rest of my life, since it was likely to be short. The previous year I had Graphic Arts shop at Russell Sage Jr. High in Forest Hills, Queens, and was inspired by the teacher, Mr. Joseph Caputo.

5x8 Kelsey Model U
Table Top Platen Press

I decided to become a printer, cashed in my savings bonds, which yielded about $350, went to Zimmer Printing Supply on Beekman St. in Manhattan, and bought a 5x8 Kelsey hand press. A block away was Damon and Peets, another printer’s supplier that had used foundry type, and I got six California job cases filled with lead. They were heavy. Bank Gothic in three sizes, Copperplate Gothic in three sizes, Park Avenue, Typo Roman Shaded and Goudy Old Style.

My homeroom class became a 15% commission sales team, so everybody made money selling stationery, business cards, announcements, and the like.

Booktryst: Do you recall what you felt when transitioning from stamps to letterpress, aside from the practical differences?

RM: 
 I loved everything about it. The activity, the smell, the income.  I started building a muscle in my right forearm.

Booktryst: You seemed to have been completely absorbed by printing during  your teens. And then, in college, you change directions into another area of interest. What happened?

RM: 
 I discovered Daniel Gibson Knowlton in the basement of Brown University’s Rockefeller Library while in graduate school studying Economics. He was the University Bookbinder. Everything about what he did appealed to me, and I learned as much as I could from him.

Booktryst: And then you returned to printing. Again, what caused it?

RM: I never gave it up. In 1972 I opened a storefront printshop, bookbindery and art gallery in Forest Hills. There I had an 8x12 motorized Chandler and Price clamshell press, and two cabinets of foundry type, about 40 cases.  The Weiss family of fonts, with many sizes in Roman, Bold and Italic, Orplid and some other decorative fonts, Bodoni, Americana and more.


Booktryst: Your early bindings are beautiful yet not outside the tradition. When and why did you begin to experiment with bindings to move beyond popular conceptions of the art and craft?

RM: 1971.


Booktryst: There seems to have been a creative leap in your work. What motivated it?


 RM: Chance. In 1973 a client brought in a book for repair, Pettigrew’s History of Egyptian Mummies. I put it down on the counter on a yard of airplane linen I had just bought at Talas, the bookbinders’ supplier. It looked like it belonged there, so I tore the linen into strips and wrapped the book like a mummy.

Pettigrew's History of Egyptian Mummies
London, 1834
Bound by Minsky 1973
Linen, turquoise.
12" x 9"

Booktryst: Much of your work over the last twenty-five years has incorporated political themes. Do you have any plans to address the current political climate?

RM: Unfortunately the current political climate is no different, so my work of 30 years ago,   The Crisis of Democracy, is even more relevant today. The Bill of Rights set of ten works that I did 1998-2002 is fresher than ever. Nineteen Eighty-Four still speaks to people as the government watches everyone ever more closely. Today the Executive Branch asked Congress for legislation to allow wiretaps of the Internet. As though they weren’t already doing it!

Booktryst: What's the future of book arts, as you see it?

RM: It’s entering the mainstream. Last week I was at Albany Airport, and there is a book art exhibition installed there.

Booktryst: Any other thoughts, random or otherwise?

RM: It would be nice if your readers would buy my work. The price range is from under $30 for a trade book like The Art of American Book Covers 1875-1930  to $120,000 for The Bill of Rights, so there’s something for everyone. How about Freedom of Choice, a poetry book chained to an electric chair that comes with a shotgun, a sword and other deadly things? Look at everything on my website,  there are over 400 pages. 

And if you will be near New Haven this coming Tuesday, October 5, come to my talk at Yale at 1 pm! It’s free and there is a reception afterwards. You can stop in at the exhibition while you’re there. Click that last link—there is a free PDF exhibition catalog.


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The Breathtaking Book Art of Richard Minsky

FREEDOM OF CHOICE
Three Poems of Love and Death by Lucie Brock-Broido
Richard Minsky, 2009
73" x  26" x  24"

One day, once upon a time in 1960, young Richard Minsky confidently strode down the hallways of his junior high school, entered the guidance counselor's office, nodded to his advisor, pulled up a chair, and sat down with the aplomb, sangfroid, and radioactive self-assuredness usually associated with grown men who know what's what, who's who, and exactly where they're going.

"Well, Minsky," the counselor wearily exhaled, "what's going to become of you?"

And without a nanosecond necessary for reflection Richard Minsky, as if a proto-Anthony Robbins, recited a goal that had become his mantra:

"Fifty years from now I will be internationally acclaimed as the most gifted and influential book artist of my generation, and renowned as a scholar of bookbinding. My artist books and bindings will  often feature political themes and cry out for social justice and civil liberties. Museums and collectors will vie for my livres d'artiste and bindings. I will be shown in galleries throughout the world, and from August 2d through November 29th, 2010 Yale University will present a retrospective exhibition of my work!" 

The guidance counselor's eyes rolled to the heavens, rolled back to earth, and then the pastrami sandwich and sauerkraut he had for lunch two hours prior begged for help.

"Oh, boy," he refluxed, sourly. 

The Geography of Hunger
by Josue de Castro. New York, 1952
Bound by Minsky 1988
9" x 7" x 3"
"Friendly Plastic," acrylic, endpapers of food and dog food labels.

That tableau vivant, however imaginary, is surely the only explanation for an astonishing career that Yale University is now, indeed, celebrating with a wondrous and extraordinary retrospective exhibition, Material Meets Metaphor: A Half Century of Book Art by Richard Minsky, at its Robert B. Haas Family Arts Library.

But the fact that Richard Minsky began his own letterpress printing business when he was thirteen years old and has remained intensely focused on books and their creative possibilities as an object-medium for artistic expression may have had something to do with it.

A half-century later, his influence has been incalculable.

“Minsky’s work as an artist and as founder of The Center for Book Arts in New York changed the way people see and make books,” said Jae Jennifer Rossman, the Haas Family Arts Library’s Assistant Director for Special Collections.

The exhibition covers Minsky’s work from its genesis - a 1960 sample book, used when he started his printing business in 1960, through “Self-Portrait 2010,” a book that documents the evolution of a canvas, from pencil sketch through many layers of oil paint.

Self-Portrait
Deluxe Edition, limited to 5 copies
copy No. 5
9" x 12"

Many of Minsky's limited edition works will be on view in the exhibition, along with unique works that have become iconic in the world of book art. These include his 1975 binding of The Birds of North America and The Crisis of Democracy, bound in sheepskin, gold and barbed wire.

The Birds of North America, 1975.

The Crisis of Democracy
by Crozier, Huntington and Watanuki for the Trilateral Commission
New York University Press, 1975
Binding by Minsky 1980
Sheep, gold, barbed wire.
8 3/4" x 6" x 11"

Yale University Library acquired the Richard Minsky Archive in 2004. It includes maquettes, molds for castings, and correspondence, as well as holographic manuscripts and early versions of select works. It documents Minsky's exploration of printing technologies from the mimeograph and spirit duplicator to his early use of inkjet printing on handmade paper.

A Reliquary To Hold the Ashes of Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses.
From The Bill of Rights Limited Edition Set, The First Amendment, 2001."
.A slipcase containing:

Minsky fell off the path of the printing press and received a masters in economics. He began work toward a Ph.D. but could not resist the magic of books and print and so left the dismal science to return to and pursue his true muse, studying bookbinding in Providence, Rhode Island with master binder Daniel Gibson Knowlton.

,,,A burned copy of Rushdie's Satanic Verses.

NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR
by George Orwell
Secker & Warburg, London, 1949
First Edition
Binding by Minsky 2003-2006
7¾" x  5" x  2½" + base

The Philosophy of Umbrellas, an essay by Robert Louis Stevenson published as an umbrella.

Open...

...In slipcase.

Yale Installation set-up, July 29, 2010.
Photo: Richard Minsky

Yale Installation set-up, July 29, 2010.
Photo: Richard Minsky

 Minsky's artist books are amazing. His bindings are divine:

Sappho's Leap
A Novel
by Erica Jong

Norton, 2003
Bound by Minsky 2003
12" x 7" diameter

Chateau Guest Book, Normandy, France
Blank book of various vintage handmade papers and sheepskin parchment.
Designed and Bound by Minsky in 1994.
20" x 16"

Snakeskin Binding
Blank Book
Bound by Minsky 1988
18" x 14"
Inlaid snakeskin covers and doublures, handmade paper, linen endbands.
Collection of the Allan Stone Gallery

The Hamptons
by Susan P. Meisel and Ellen Harris
Harry N. Abrams, Inc. 2000
Bound by Minsky 2000
Acrylic, sand and shells from the Hamptons
Above: The book installed on its base. 11" x 15" x 11"

Pettigrew's History of Egyptian Mummies
London, 1834
Bound by Minsky 1973
Linen, turquoise.
12" x 9"

Minsky's deep and ongoing scholarship of bookbinding led to American  Decorated Publishers Bindings 1872-1929, an artist's book, an exhibition catalog, and an exploration of art history seen through publishers' book covers.

Above: the cover of the Limited Edition
Foil stamped Hahnemuhle Bugra-Butten paper wrapper

Typical of stamped bindings of the period, changes in the angle
of the light cause the stamping to illuminate in different ways.
The technique for creating the stamping die was developed by
Minsky from study of the bindings in this collection

Above: the same cover with different lighting.

Of this, what became an instant essential reference, Sue Allen, the author of many books and articles on publisher's bindings, and foremost authority on 19th century bindings, says: 

"Inside this book is gathered an astounding collection of turn-of-the-century bookcovers. Though beautifully produced, it is no mere coffee table book, but comes with full bibliographical descriptions. Grouped together under headings such as 'Automobiles' or 'Trees,' the covers play against each other in a dramatic way. It is as if you were privileged to go into a number of libraries and bookstores and lay one book beside another. In one leap Richard Minsky has put himself in the forefront of collectors and scholars of this period when each cover was a work of art."

On or around the day of his Bar Mitzvah in 1960, Richard Minsky put aside the rubber stamps of his childhood, bought a printing press, and became a man. 

Fifty years later, Richard Minsky is a national treasure.

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Images courtesy of Richard Minsky, and Jae Rossman of Yale, with our thanks.

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