This image is of the famous hand-marbled page of Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy, presented as an emblem of the ethos of his work. So far as I know, it was necessary for it to be redone in every individual copy in the book's initial printings, and if you browse Google Images, you will find many different resultant motley emblems.
Books as Art Objects
Liam Jenkins
Other urls found in this thread:
Andrew Scott
Another famous moment of subversion of the norms of the bookish medium which may be found in Tristram Shandy is the squiggle presented here, which was standardized across copies by way of a woodcut of the shape, for which Sterne paid five shillings. Sterne was extremely involved in the physical composition and visual presentation of the editions of his book published in his lifetime, obsessing over paper quality and type of print and arrangement of text and so on. Everything was done to his specifications; every em dash, every &c., every ****, every - - - - - - -.
Nicholas Garcia
William Blake's poetry and complementary illustrations fit nicely into this category.
Brody Parker
Comparable, in my eyes, is William Blake's illuminated editions of his Songs of Innocence and Experience. This was a direct physical interaction between the author and every individual iteration of his book which passed into readers' hands. The physicality of books was made use of to better frame the aesthetic experience of Blake's poetry. Books are things, and the best art must make creative use of the medium by which it is presented.
James Torres
I'm glad to see that somebody is on the same page as myself ( ). This observation is also true of illuminated manuscripts generally speaking, which were prevalent (at least among the scholarly and the wealthy) in medieval Europe. It feels as though it is different, but really it is only rarer; these books were singular things, not copies upon copies as is the modern publishing standard, but they were nonetheless books which had received close aesthetic attention and care, whose pages shouted love of the page as artistic medium, even if a rarity, an anomaly.
Jack Cruz
Such things put me in mind of avant-garde film which embraces the physicality of its medium, that a reel of film is an object that can be altered by or married to other objects, film being a stuff, not merely a slate upon which an image can implant itself. A simple demonstration of this (popular among lazy art majors) is the scratching of film. But Brakhage did it better in Mothlight, in which insect wings and other physical things were pressed onto film ( youtu.be
Ryder Ross
Not to mention McCall's clever film Line Describing a Cone: light as a kind of object, smoke as a kind of object, fog as a kind of object.
Nicholas Myers
This almost reminds me of microscopy. Pressing semi-transparent, thin objects against a slide and cover slip and viewing them under a microscope is reminiscent of that experience.
Sebastian Howard
So, now that I've outlined the topic of the thread, please recommend similar things.
Christian Wright
Whilst not a LITERAL example of the medium being treated as a means of expression, it certainly is a literary one. Here’s a passage from Wolfe’s The Shadow of the Torturer that you might enjoy, OP
"I was reading—or so I thought ... Yes, I recall it now—that little square of green and brown. I believe they dry rosemary there to put in pillows. I was sitting there, as I said, and had been for several watches, when it came to me that I was reading no longer. For some time I was hard-put to say what I had been doing. When I tried, I could only think of certain odors and textures and colors that seemed to have no connection with anything discussed in the volume I held. At last I realized that instead of reading it, I had been observing it as a physical object. The red I recalled came from the ribbon sewn to the headband so that I might mark my place. The that tickled my fingers still was that of the paper on which the book was printed. The smell in my nostrils was old leather, still bearing the traces of birch oil. It was only then, when I saw the books themselves, that I began to understand their care."
His grip on my shoulder tightened. "We have books here bound in the hides of echidnes, krakens, and beasts so long extinct “that those whose studies they are, are for the most part of the opinion that no trace of them survives unfossilized. We have books bound wholly in metals of unknown alloy, and books whose bindings are covered with thickset gems. We have books cased in perfumed woods shipped across the inconceivable gulf between creations—books doubly precious because no one on Urth can read them."
"We have books whose papers are matted of plants from which spring curious alkaloids, so that the reader, in turning their pages, is taken unaware by bizarre fantasies and chimeric dreams. Books whose pages are not paper at all, but delicate wafers of white jade, ivory, and shell; books too whose leaves are the desiccated leaves of unknown plants. Books we have also that are not books at all to the eye: scrolls and tablets and recordings on a hundred different substances. There is a cube of crystal here—though I can no longer tell you where—no larger than the ball of your thumb that contains more books than the library itself does. Though a harlot might dangle it from one ear for an ornament, there are not volumes enough in the world “to counterweight the other. All these I came to know, and I made safeguarding them my life's devotion. For seven years I busied myself with that; and then, just when the pressing and superficial problems of preservation were disposed of, and we were on the point of beginning the first general survey of the library since its foundation, my eyes began to gutter in their sockets. He who had given all books into my keeping made me blind so that I should know in whose keeping the keepers stand.”
Julian Lopez
Thank you user, that is lovely. I strongly identify with the sensory enjoyment of a book (any book) for the softness of its pages, the roughness of its cover, the scent of its age, the leap of its colors, the dance of its font, the shhppbbtt of its pageturn...I at one point noticed that certain genres of American book, particularly those of religious attitude, borrow the scarred (p?)leatheriness of a mass-produced Bible. I submit by way of example my Quran, my Bible, my ACIM, and my AA Big Book: all have the same texture, all feel the same, the Westernization of the Quran and the Bible-ization of ACIM and AA done specifically to lend religious association, to lend Biblical authority.
Cameron Bailey
This thread also cannot go without some mention of House of Leaves, which does not subvert or make creative use of the book as an object per se but makes creative use of the graphical or print element of reading, letters as shapes whose orientations, colorations, etc. can be manipulated. House of Leaves is not really original in this regard, being the grandchild of Tristram Shandy and being preceded in decades before it by a number of similar books, but it is an extreme case, and for on those grounds alone deserves at least a passing glance.
Aiden Lewis
I also recall somebody somewhere making a joke about an asterix signifying a cat's anus: *
Christian Morales
This image stirs in me a kind of unnameable pleasure for the aesthetic beauty of the time. There is nothing like this that can be produced as such in our modern day. Thank you for this. I will be back with more info.
~leopold
Kevin Lopez
I am also fond of the coarse brown paperbaglike material used in (some copies of?) Ram Dass' Be Here Now.
Wyatt Bennett
(((bump!)))
Aiden Roberts
>no mention of the Codex
Do you even Serafini?
Christopher Wright
For whatever reason I quite like the use of red ink on title pages in order to emphasise certain words or phrases. It's such a simple thing, and yet it distinguishes it more than it ought to at first glance. In my view 18th-century printing was the absolute height of the art in terms of its elevation of the printed word.
Chase Stewart
Maybe not exactly on topic, but Mallarmé's Un coup de dés (A throw of dices) is a poem where the verses have been arranged on the page so as to suggest the dynamic of a firework or a music concert.
Jonathan Taylor
this book get a lot of shit for being "gimmicky" but in my opinion it really is full of good ideas and execution
Dominic Cruz
I suppose it could be interesting as art, but not necessarily as reading material.
Jack Watson
There's a psalm in the Sidney Psalter arranged to resemble wings
Jaxon Phillips
probably Vonnegut
Jack Evans
I just checked the Everyman's Library edition I own and it's just a black rectangle with just some lines that makes it look spooky, but not actual a colored motley emblem. Very disappointed, it actually takes away much from the work. Any modern edition of good quality materials that actually prints it like in the original?
Samuel Evans
Hmm, I believe the Penguin edition just reprints in black and white a marbled page from a particular first edition.
Worth checking out is the Visual Editions version of Shandy, which is in part an update/reimagining by modern designers of the design quirks in the book; e.g., the black page is rather all the text of the book until that point printed superimposed on one page, becoming near monochromatic. Don't know what the marbled page is there tho
Ian Gray
.
Daniel Gutierrez
illuminated manuscripts nigga
Sebastian Foster
It’s not really art though is it, it’s decoration
Oliver Stewart
Is not all art naught but decoration?
Thomas Young
No. Decoration is mere ornament. In the case of Sterne and Blake, the drawings were integral to the written work, and also to the presentation and structure of the work.
Hunter Sullivan
14th C. Tuscan
Benjamin Howard
Lucas Thompson
I've got a single page from 1497 Koberger New Testament with rubricated initials & pic related badass watermark.
Grayson Young
how much did u pay for that and what else donyou have
Jackson Wilson
$2.00
Brayden Lewis
cum encrusted porn mags