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

The size of a book has important consequences
for the artist / author and reader relationship.
Verdi Yahooda’s The Dancer (London: Yahooda;
Coracle, 1984) is a 19cm (high) book with
photographs in a black imitation photographic
album. The book is wrapped in a sheet of black
binding cloth with black elasticated string (at
least I have always assumed that these were an
intended part of the book): there is a real sense
of intimacy as one unwraps the book and then
follows through a private photographic album,
looking at her deceased mother’s mementoes
kept in a box on the dressing table. The size of
the book insists on this one to one relationship
– you, the reader, have been privileged to see
inside this private cache, however factitious,
almost as if you are a voyeur. Anselm Kiefer’s
large and heavy lead-covered books are at the
other extreme: they require the help of several
assistants to turn the pages; you can only see
what somebody else has decided what you can
see – it is the page/spread as exhibition piece.
The ‘average size’ book lies in the terrain
between extremes. A sort of ergonomic – easy
to hold or carry, not too heavy, easily shelved
and retrieved – balance has been attained, a
sort of bourgeois equivalent to the easelpainting
that replaced large-scale tapestries and
paintings, the domain of kings and princes.
The large book is redolent of authority, power
and authority: it is the authorised text of the
Bible, lying on aquiline lecterns, read out by
clerics to the laity; it is the book of audit and
taxation – reinforcing Levi-Strauss’ equation of
writing and oppression; it is the atlas of
domination; it is the potlatch or symbol of
conspicuous consumption of the medieval lord
or rich merchant. One of the decisive moments
in the history of the book is the movement
away from speaking aloud – to an audience -
to ‘reading’ words, silently, privately, as an
individual. This was essential to the rise of the
novel and its own project of realism, a
recreation of the world in detail.
Perhaps one of ‘largest’ books is that one
detected by Paul Auster’s detective, Quinn, in
The City of Glass. Commissioned by the younger
Stillman afraid of what his father will do to him
on his release from gaol, Quinn follows the
elder Stillman’s perambulations through an
area of New York bounded by 110th and 72nd
48
Streets, picking up and examining found
objects, making notes in a red notebook.
Translating these wanderings over the days into
rough diagrams, Quinn, detects OWEROFBAB,
which given four earlier days, is inescapably,
THE TOWER OF BABEL. This is a gigantic
book, the world as book – but it can only exist
within the confines of Auster’s moderately sized
book. Multum in parvo.
Dr Stephen Bury
Head of European and American Collections,
The British Library