by Emilia Osztafi, intern, Bodleian Rare Books section
Robert Bolick has been collecting artists’ books since 2012. His collection ‘Books on Books’ contains over 1200 items: artists’ books, livres d’artistes, altered books, book objects, prints and ephemera. He writes about individual pieces on his blog, books-on-books.com. A selection of over 150 works featured in the recent Bodleian exhibition curated by Robert, Alphabets Alive! (July 2023 to January 2024), and he is donating a large collection to the Bodleian, making artists’ books physically accessible to future readers. These are now being catalogued by the Bodleian Rare Books section.
I am an undergraduate studying English at Wadham College, Oxford, with a growing interest in book history, and currently the summer intern in the Bodleian Rare Books section. Here, I’m getting an insight into what librarians do – the behind-the-scenes of the Bodleian’s Department of Special Collections. It was fascinating to speak to Robert about the themes and implications of his collection.
The phrase ‘Books on Books’ speaks to a fundamental aspect of artists’ books: they interrogate the book. Some pieces play with the material form of books – binding, printing, typography – and the idea of the book. Others respond to text in experimental ways.
Artists’ books present interesting dilemmas for librarians. How do we catalogue a book whose pages have been glued shut? Should a box of cigarettes printed with text be considered a book?
Where a library would organize a collection by author of the text, Robert’s list prioritises the visual artist. Chaucer’s ABC is listed under F for Joyce Francis, the artist of the wood engraving on the title page and paper cover. Many artists’ books, as Robert says, are fundamentally about the relation of text to image, which is not just ‘text versus image’ but perhaps ‘text and image’ or even ‘text drives image’ or, conversely, ‘image drives text’.
What seems to be a simple learning tool for children – the alphabet book – alerts us that letters are not just text, but visual shapes which we must learn to read as text, and speak as sound. Experimenting with alphabets appeals to book artists like Kurt Schwitters, whose Die Scheuche Märchen [The Scare-Crow Fairy Tale] (1925) has letters jump out of their expected places to act out the sounds they might make.
This artist’s book, like many others in Robert’s collection, resembles illustrated children’s books. When I ask whether children should be able to use and enjoy the Books on Books, Robert is surprisingly generous. Although he would be careful giving ‘vigorous’ young readers books that are theoretically unique, he is less concerned when it comes to books in multiples, even limited editions. ‘I’m not too bothered if some of these works are damaged, or altered, in usage.’ This goes for all books, Robert says, even ‘rare books’. We shouldn’t forget that valuable items have indeed been touched, kissed, and doodled in by readers across time.
Protection and conservation are crucial concerns for libraries, as I learnt from my first week in the Bodleian Libraries Rare Books office, where I was tasked with calling up valuable and fragile first edition books to be taken off the open shelves in the University of Oxford’s libraries. Artists’ books often poke fun at the stereotypical collector’s fantasy of a ‘clean copy’, and the attempts of library conservators to keep a book in its original state. Tim Mosely’s The Book of Tears (2014) – a pun on tearing and crying – invites the reader to ‘make a tear in the pages of the book (or if you are a conservator a repair)’ and according to Mosely’s website, the ‘final state of the book is determined by the book’s owner’. A book that will be altered by its readers poses a practical problem for libraries. It also throws a fascinating light on the relationship between the book and the library in our culture.
In the Bodleian’s hands, items in the Books on Books collection will be available for scholars, teachers, and interested people to experience and enjoy. Reading rooms are, of course, quiet and controlled environments, but Robert finds that the Bodleian reading rooms still maintain some freedom to ‘let a book articulate itself’ by handling it, taking photos, and moving its parts.
Some books are just too large, or contain too many moveable parts, to be read seated in the library. TRAIANVS (2023), by the librarian and book artist Rutherford Witthus, enacts the Column of Trajan in a tall accordion book in a box, which slides open to reveal two secret books bound together and printed with an ABC.
In response to my probing question as to whether ‘to read’ is the right verb to convey the experience of larger installation pieces, Robert replies, yes. We can even ‘read’ architectural book art like Jeffrey Morin and Steven Ferlauto’s Sacred Space (2003) – a twelve-inch chapel, its glass walls printed with letters of the alphabet. Sacred Space encourages a kind of sacred reading practice, echoing centuries of meditative ritual in churches furnished with stained glass windows and stone carvings, telling scriptural stories. An essential part of ‘reading’ this piece is building the chapel, literally, from its glass panels.
A key theme of Books on Books is alterations, which can take different forms. Carving away physical chunks of Tristram Shandy, as Brian Dettmer (2014) does, is not the same as the erasure of words and phrases from pages, as in Jérémie Bennequin’s Erased Proust Writing (2016). Robert believes these artists are ‘saying different things, about the book, about the process of making and unmaking, and the process by which unmaking becomes making.’
Robert writes his blog posts for book artists, interested people, and people who ask him, ‘What do you mean, book art? What do you mean, book artist? What is that?!’ He hopes there will be further exhibitions and displays of his collection in the future, giving us the chance to hover and walk around the pieces, and circulating them beyond the reading room. Meanwhile the works are available for Bodleian Libraries readers (link to Admissions) and for visiting classes (link to CSB).
Artists’ books can be complicated, infused with philosophy and critical theory, and demanding us to decode them. But they are also a way of getting at these ideas, making them visible and real. Towards the end of our conversation, Robert says, ‘I find it really fascinating to grasp an otherwise impenetrable expression in the philosophy of aesthetics by simply looking at some aesthetic object made in response to that expression. “Oh, that’s what you’re trying to say. Why didn’t you say so in the first place?”‘
