Jules McGee-Russell
A Graduate Trainee Project
With the casual air of business as usual, my supervisor plucked several archive envelopes from the shelf. ‘I’ll show you some of these, these are interesting,’ he said, laying out several Livres d’Artiste from the Strachan Collection. Opening this handful of items during my first day of work unknowingly set me on a path of complete focus and devotion, for my entire trainee year.
Seeing these beautiful special collection items including Mario Prassinos’ The Raven was, as Walter Strachan said of his first experience with Livres d’Artiste, ‘a revelation’. I was captivated by the fine details of each print, the typography, the layout of the pages, how the text and image seemed to speak to each other. I wanted nothing more but to sit, absorbed in technically perfect ‘good pages’, and create my own poetry and artwork in response. Do people know about these? I thought, eyeing the Picasso, the Matisse, the Dalí, and all the other artists I had no reference point for yet.
I’m someone who believes knowledge and beauty are for everyone: for the people, for the public. Libraries are custodians, not gatekeepers. But I was stood in a Bodleian library, an incredible library that only privileged few have access to, in a room that only certain staff could enter. A barrier within a barrier, a bubble within a bubble. All these incredible items were here, just waiting to be seen. I have to show these to more people, I decided.
The next year of my life would be almost completely absorbed in this collection. Auditing it, organising it, and creating events and exhibits to share it with students and the wider Oxford community of poets and artists.
Who was Walter Strachan?
Walter J Strachan was a poet, French translator, teacher of modern languages, critic, and art connoisseur. He described his first experience viewing Livres d’Artiste at an exhibition in 1945 as ‘overwhelming’ and he became their passionate champion for the rest of his life.
He spent the following 35 years gathering his own personal collection and building relationships with the artists, printers, and publishers of Livres d’Artiste in his yearly spring vacation to Paris. Part of this collection was gifted to the Taylor Institution in 1987 following two exhibitions of his collection in 1963 and 1978 at the Ashmolean Museum. Currently housed in the Art, Archaeology and Ancient World Library, it includes complete books, ‘bonnes feuilles’ (‘good pages’, identified by printer and artist as ‘perfect’), ‘suites’, and proofs – many signed by the artist friends who made them. He was also a fan of owls, and many of these artist friends would gift him with various owl illustrations!
What are Livres d’Artiste?
A Livre d’Artiste is a limited-edition illustrated book, considered a precursor to the Artist’s Book. Prominent in 20th century Paris, they are not illustrated books in the way you would typically imagine them today. Rather than a coffee table art book with glossy pages of photography, or an illustrated novel printed in runs of thousands, each Livre d’Artiste is a piece of art in and of itself. Usually limited to 50-300 copies, each book is an ‘original’ directly overseen and executed by a painter, sculptor, or print-maker. Everything from the kind of paper to the colour of ink used is a creative decision made directly by the artist.
The artists who made Livre d’Artiste were not professional book illustrators either but influential, nationally or internationally-acclaimed artists in their fields. Most of the books are hand-set and use time-intensive meticulous techniques such as lithograph, etching, and mezzotint. Artists would create something completely their own, collaborate with their poet and book-maker friends to make them, or reimagine literature from past greats in their own way, often translating them into French.
Outreach Preparations
Many Bodleian libraries have a Graduate Trainee Library Assistant. During the yearlong post, we attend a series of training sessions together, write about our experiences on the trainee blog, and have the opportunity to undertake a project during the course of the year. Sometimes the project is set by the needs of the library, and sometimes, if you’re lucky, you can choose it for yourself as I did.
The centrepiece of my trainee project was the Myths, Beasts, Artist’s Books creative outreach day. After spending a few months getting acquainted with the collection, finding and fixing problems along the way, I started pulling together items I wanted to show.
After much excruciating shortlisting (my original “shortlist” was 150 items, around half the collection…), I eventually landed on 20 items including Livres d’Artiste from the Strachan Collection, Livres d’Artiste from other Taylorian special collections, and more modern Artist’s Books from the Weston’s special collections. The theme that revealed itself was fables, animals, beasts, and books that somehow muddied the waters of what it means to be a book or poem at all.
I included one of the Livres first shown to me: Prassinos’ The Raven, a reimagining of Poe’s most famous piece including strikingly geometric and characterful ravens. Other linchpin items included Bestiaire fabuleux. by Jean Lurçat, a mythological bestiary of creatures complete with calligramme poems; This Westward, a collaborative piece that can be unfurled into a semi-globe shape and reimagines the first circumnavigation of the earth; XIV Fables, a Livre by engraver Abram Krol which illustrates Jean de la Fontaine’s classic fables; and Abanico para los toros, a collection of prose poems in praise of bullfighting by Michel Leiris, illustrated with lithographs, linocuts, etchings, and engravings in colour and black by Gabriel Paris.
Alongside all the practicalities of arranging an outreach day, I also had to decide who exactly this event was for, and how I could reach them. As someone who never studied at Oxford, who prior to this job was working in public libraries, it was important to me that my event would in some small way tackle the town/gown divide. I wanted to show the items to people who would not have been able to see them otherwise, in an event that was free of charge and included art materials and refreshments.
I decided I wanted to reach practicing, non-beginner poets and artists, based in and around Oxford. I also prioritised those who were not already Oxford University members. To reach them, I focused on targeting community and charity email newsletters, word of mouth, and physically going to places to meet artists. This ended up working almost too well, as I had double the number of sign-ups as places available!
Myths, Beasts, Artist’s Books Creative Outreach Day
Myths, Beasts, Artist’s Books was a creative outreach day in two parts. In the morning, myself and a Rare Books Curator from the Weston introduced the special collections to the attendees. In the afternoon, I took the 11 poets and artists to the Bodleian Bibliographical Press, where they used the space and materials provided to create pieces inspired by the collections they saw.
The poets and artists made 5 pieces altogether, in small groups of two or three. They were grouped primarily in pairs of one poet and one artist, so they had the experience of working with words and art together, as is common in Livres d’Artiste. Their names were pulled randomly from a hat, but each group chimed so well together that it was as if they had collaborated before. After an initial hour or so of discussion and planning, a wonderfully meditative silence descended on the room, as everyone brought their creative visions to fruition. Seeing visual motifs from the special collections items emerge through energetic and focused collaboration between creatives was so rewarding.
The creatives were also offered an additional evening working in the Taylorian to finish their pieces, a letterpress workshop with Printer-in-Residence James Freemantle to make colophons for their work, and the opportunity to talk to the public about their pieces during an exhibition for Oxfordshire Artweeks (an initiative where artists display their works across Oxfordshire, for the public to visit). The artists were all wonderful, and seemed to get a lot from the experience based on the lovely feedback I received – the most common suggestion for improvement was to make the day even longer!
Creative Responses to the Collection
Halfway through organising the event, someone asked ‘What will you do with the artwork attendees make?’ I had decided from the outset that I wanted to exhibit the pieces (more on that later!), but where should they go afterwards?
I imagined a future where this event structure was used regularly to engage the public with our special collections, and how helpful it would be to have examples of items previously made. I considered how important it is to preserve artwork and creativity, and how challenging it is to capture those ‘book art’ works produced outside the formats of traditional publishing. I also looked around and remembered the Bodleian will be here in hundreds of years. It is completely astonishing to work in an institution with such a legacy of longevity, I can barely wrap my head around it. What could it mean to an artist, to know their work would be preserved with that longevity?
So, each piece made was donated to the Art, Archaeology and Ancient World Library under a Creative Commons license, and housed next to the Strachan Collection. This means the works are available to any reader or University member, to view and research, and they can be used to inspire further art in the future. I had support from our internal team at Osney to catalogue the items, and it was fascinating to learn more about cataloguing unusual bookish artworks.
If you’d like to see the works made in detail (and I hope you do!), I have created permanent online identifiers for each item, kindly hosted by the Sustainable Digital Scholarship online repository. There you will find a high-quality scanned pdf copy of each item, the artist statements in full, and a video of their pages being turned. Find the links to these below! Several of the book items made are very interactive, in particular Water, Water Everywhere and Whosebody, 68 Creaturely Pl. The physical items are also catalogued and requestable for use in library only via SOLO.
Created by artists E West, Oakley Hirst, Joey Birch. A queer, trans and disabled response to myths and beasts through the lens of place. The pages can be swapped and reversed to give the creatures different body parts, in the style of an ‘exquisite corpse.’
Created by poet Heer Nimavat and artist Claire Parker.
A visual and literary commentary on colonialism and its impact on ecologies. One page of poems and one double-sided reimagination of a map. One side representing the colourful perception of the sea, and the other representing the price paid by colonies.
Created by poet artists Deborah Jane Mason and Sarianne Durie.
6-page concertina booklet containing metaphors on Trump’s “destructive power and egotism”. Inspired by the artist’s book ‘American crow : report from quarantine’ by Gaylord Schanilec, and the Livre d’Artiste ‘XIV fables’ by Abram Krol.
Codex Bestiarius Draconis : The Beast Book of the Dragon
Created by artist Luca Hirst and poet Dr Joyce Datiles. A 16-page zine bestiary with 8 magical beast illustrations and poems.
Cat Arac The Art – Cataract Heart : in a state between reading and looking
Created collaboratively by poet Alexandra Muck and artist Helen Mary Ganly.
Exhibitions
Something I kept coming back to time and time again while organising this project, was the thought what do the artists get out of this?
Of course, the experience of meeting each other, seeing the collections, having fun, and creating something new, is always rewarding. But as I wanted to reach those who were in some way committed to poetry-writing or art-making (as a career or otherwise), it was especially important to me that the creatives themselves were getting uplifted through their participation.
With this in mind, I exhibited the work they made, first in the Bibliographical Press over two days of Artweeks, and then for a two-week exhibit in the Taylorian’s Voltaire Room. Some of the participating artists were more established, but for those who were earlier in their careers, I hope these exhibits also acted as a boost they can use to be exhibited again in the future.
During Artweeks, members of the public could see the work, turn pages, and speak to the artists who came along. I also used this opportunity to promote the poets and artists’ social media and websites. I wanted to give the attendees a chance to bring along friends and family to show off what they’d made, and to use this opportunity as another way to challenge the town/gown divide.
Then, after being enjoyably side-tracked researching how to safely display light-sensitive works in the Voltaire Room cases (including measuring the UV and lumen using a lux meter loaned from the Ashmolean), I put together the exhibition at the Taylorian. I placed the creative outcomes from the outreach event side-by-side with the special collections items that inspired them, including photos of the making in progress, artist statements, and photographs of the special collections I could not display physically. Several of the artists visited us to view this exhibition, and were thrilled to see their works on display.
A lovely side-effect of the event was that 83% of the attendees said they were interested in having a Bodleian Reader Card. If even one artist feels more welcome in the Bodleian due to my event, then that makes it a success in my eyes. I have even heard that one artist is potentially donating her Artist Books to the Bodleian, and I am so pleased to have made the Rare Books team aware of some fantastic local artists!
That’s all, folks!
All in all, I have thoroughly enjoyed working on my trainee project this year. Having the scope and freedom to design something like this myself, and the generous support of colleagues to make it a reality, has been incredible. I have learned about outreach, events planning, working with artists, cataloguing, conservation, and more. Perhaps in the future I will build my own collection of Artist’s Books, or even make one myself (with the extra benefit of finally justifying going on a bookbinding course). Regardless, this has been a year where I have proved how much I can achieve when I put my mind to it. I never would have anticipated that an off-the-cuff introduction to a handful of items would send me on such an interesting journey, but I am very glad they did.
Thank you to all the colleagues who gave me their time, expertise, and voluntary support. Thank you also to the poets and artists who gave me their open-hearted collaboration and skill, and to all the insightful and enthusiastic students who came along to my show-and-tell event. I couldn’t have done it without you!