Artist's Book Yearbook 2003-2005 - Book Arts - University of the ...

Size Matters
Dr Stephen Bury
One of the curiosities of 2002 publishing was
The Smallest Book in the World (Leipzig: Gestalten
Verlag) by the German typographer, Josua
Reichert – a 2.4 x 2.6 mm red leather bound
book of 26 pages of alphabetical exercises,
complete with wooden box and magnifying
glass. It connotes the masterworks of medieval
guild apprentices, those miniature stairs
leading nowhere, tongue-and-grooved with
minute precision, all form and no function,
obsessive even. Why, for example, have a
leather cover at all when it could not possibly
protect the contents? Contrast this with Irene
Chan’s The Book of the World (Ch’An Press,
2000). At 1” by 1” it is not as small as Reichert’s.
Nor does it claim the title of ‘smallest’: in fact,
the contrast of titles is suggestive – Reichert’s
book is the smallest in the world (at least for
the moment), whilst Chan’s book is ‘of the
world’ i.e. the whole world is contained in the
book. Chan’s point of departure is John
Dalton’s metaphor in his book on atomic
theory, A New System of Chemical Philosophy
(1808), in which he compares molecules and
atoms to words and letters. The Book of the World
extends this comparison, both the 26 letters of
the Roman alphabet and the 90 atoms are
combinable to make words and molecules, but
not all combinations are permitted. A silver
leperello structure holds the text, which
surmounts images on transparent paper of
Dalton’s ‘elastic fluid’ and gas. Both are
contained in a ‘bug box’, the naturalist’s small
clear container for samples – ants, moths,
beetles etc. – with the lid’s convex lens acting as
an inbuilt magnifying glass. This is multum in
parvo, the world in a grain of sand. The natural
world and the world of the imagination (where
the reader can forget him/herself in the
world/s created by the author together with the
reader) are continuously substituted one for
another. The simplicity in idea and execution
of Chan’s project stands in stark contrast to the
literally overwrought graphic design of the
so-called smallest book in the world.
Paradoxically, larger books are smaller. This
may require some explanation. When I taught
47
an artists’ books workshop at Chelsea School of
Art, I used to suggest that most things in the
seminar room could be made into a book – the
Venetian blinds, the doors etc. The Fluxus artist
and who was also closely involved with Dick
Higgins’s Something Else Press, Alison Knowles
constructed The Big Book (1966-8). This had 7
pages (including a fold-out one), a spine, a
copyright notice etc. - some of the defining
qualities of ‘a book’. But it was 8 feet tall, had a
table, telephone line and a grass tunnel to
sleep in, and it was meant to be a functional
living space. Our expectations of intimacy and
privacy from the bedroom or home are
undermined, subverted in this public,
transparent and collapsible (it literally did so
on tour in California) space/book.
Others have attempted an (almost) one-to-one
scale matching of the book to the world, or the
world to the book . Herr Mein in Lewis
Carroll’s Sylvie and Bruno concluded, first
published in 1893 boasts of his map on the
scale of a mile to a mile: “It has never been
spread out, yet. The farmers objected: they said
it would cover the whole country, and shut out
the sunlight! So we now use the country itself,
as its own map…it does nearly as well.” I am
also reminded of John Ruskin’s Examples, a
separately published illustrated appendix to
The Stones of Venice, double elephant folio sized
etchings of the ‘details’ of columns and facades
of Venetian palazzi and churches – in fact
‘details’ is probably the wrong word, as they are
life-size, the transference of the Venetian
city-scape, one by one, into a doomed book
project.
This literal translation of the world into book
underlies the 1966 project by Anthony
Earnshaw, Patrick Hughes, Swift and Page. The
450 ‘leaves’ of the book, The Sycamore Tree, in an
edition of four, consist of the impressions of
leaves from a specific sycamore tree in Leeds,
10-14 August 1966. Similarly, Herman de Vries
16m_: an essay (Bern: Lydia Megert, 1979), in
an edition of 50, takes that area of ground and
maps the findings and samples from different
spots. All these projects suggest that this
attempt to equate in a literal one to one way
the world and the book can only ever be
fragmentary: this type of ‘big book’ therefore
being potentially smaller than the little book.