The Century of Artists' Books. - book reviews

Afterimage, July-August, 1997 by Tom Trusky

In "Metaphor and Form," the last chapter of The Century of Artists' Books, Johanna Drucker recalls a scene in Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights (1847). The narrator, Mr. Lockwood, has discovered a jumble of books once belonging to Heathcliff's beloved Catherine Earnshaw and is surprised to discover Catherine made use of even unread volumes. Of Catherine's books, Bronte writes and Drucker quotes: "scarcely one chapter had escaped a pen and ink commentary -- at least the appearance of one -- covering every morsel of blank that the printer had left. Some were detached sentences; other parts took the form of a regular diary."

Not only does Bronte's story illustrate that the book, as Drucker phrases it, "has the potential to provide a private space for communication across vast spaces of time and geography," but it also illustrates how books engender, encourage and inspire -- much as Drucker's book has affected me. Not only have I been exhilarated, reading Drucker's witty and pioneering (not-quite) global history of artists' books, but I have also been unconsciously creating my very own biblio stegosaur; on the book's attractive green dust jacket and from the book's head, tail and fore edge protrude scores of little lemon-colored Post-it notes laden with my scribblings.

Many of my Post-its simply contain a list of numbers, reminders to pay heed to Drucker's invaluable endnotes that follow each of her 14 chapters. Often opinionated, Drucker's commentary notes are welcome respites from the world of Ibid. and Op. cit. Some Post-its draw attention to Drucker's main contentions. Drucker provides a definition of what a book is, noting the dominance -- "and with good reason, given its efficiency and functionality" -- of the codex. But what is an artist's book? It is not just any book in which an artist may have had a small or large hand, Drucker asserts. It is "an original work of art," albeit a one-of-a-kind or multiple edition. It is not a livre d'artiste or "fine [letterpress] printing," though an artist's book may be finely printed -- or finely mimeographed, Xeroxed, silkscreened or offset printed. According to Drucker, "artists' books are almost always self-conscious about the structure and meaning of the book as a form." Such books are animate, personified: "ultimately, an artist's book has to have some conviction, some soul, some reason to be and to be a book in order to succeed."

Drucker admits "various shaped books ... have found their way into the world of artists' books with faithful regularity -- polygons and fold-up works, boxes and accordion folds, scrolls, pop-up structures. and tunnel books," but endnotes herself, thusly: "I find many of these become gimmicky of form, except in the most whimsical or sophisticated works, but they are frequently big crowd pleasers and I will leave their detailed examination to someone more sympathetic to their virtues." Nevertheless, Drucker in no way excludes from her history eccentric (non-codex) book forms; for example, she perceptively analyzes Lucas Samaras's Book (1968), Clifton Meador's Book of Doom (1984), Scott McCarney's In Case of Emergency (1985), and numerous other brilliant biblio "oddities" which pass her whimsy and/or sophistication test, Drucker's gripe is not with oddball structure, per se, but with (would-be) book artists who employ a noncodex structure for its own sake. Pretenders, ignorant of the possibilities of relationships between form and content, produce mere novelties: Mood Rings, Scratch `n' Sniffs, Pet Rocks for the library.

Readers will find technical notes that detail printing processes and problems extremely useful. Drucker's first-hand experiences in printing, and her collaborations with printer/bookmaker Brad Freeman, provide her with a practical expertise we can trust as she explains the mysteries of "split fountains," "stripping" and "overprinting," as well as the economics of production.

In approximately the first third of her work, Drucker focuses on the evolution of artists' books, citing forerunners and predecessors such as William Blake and William Morris, Gelett Burgess and the often mistaken attribution of the French livres d'artistes, to books which are both manifestations and expansions of the twentieth century's major -isms, from Futurism, Constructivism, Dadaism, Surrealism and Lettrism through Deconstructionism. The remaining two-thirds of Century chart how books have functioned, internally, as visual forms, verbal explorations, narrative and non-narrative sequences and externally, as agents of social change, conceptual spaces and documentations.

One of the most irritating features of artists' books has been their unavailability. Lacking national or international distributors, even multiple edition offset titles have remained often either invisible or difficult to obtain, only from small presses or the artist, for example. Most people have not seen most artists' books and, therefore, have not been able to appreciate what they have not seen. Drucker addresses this problem in two ways.