The following is an excerpt from Amaranth Borsuk’s The Book, part of the ‘Essential Knowledge’ Series from MIT Press. This chapter explores the various ways writers and artists for more than a hundred years have approached the book as an object and a structure that can be cut up and rearranged as early examples of ‘digital’ experimentation.

While we might presume the ability to rearrange a book’s parts is an affordance reserved for the digital realm, artists’ books showcase several historical forms that turn the book into a recombinant structure, allowing readers to create new juxtapositions within it. Such interactivity is present already in the accordion book, which, as an intermediate point between scroll and codex, allows readers to open one spread at a time or unfold several, seeing across the folds’ peaks and valleys to survey the text.

Sonia Delaunay, Blaise Cendrars, 1913, La prose du Transsibérien et de la Petite Jehanne de France, illustrated book with watercolor applied through pochoir and relief print on paper, 200 x 35.6 cm, Princeton University Art Museum. (Detail)

The ability to completely open this structure makes it especially useful for topographic work like Blaise Cendrars and Sonia Delaunay’s 1913 collaboration La Prose du Transsibérien et de la Petite Jehanne de France (The Prose of the Trans-Siberian and of Little Jehanne of France), a vertical cityscape of colorful pochoir paintings and poetry where the eye’s traversal of word and image suggest the simultaneity of a dark past and a vivid present for the poem’s speaker as he recalls a railroad journey from Moscow to Harbin during the Russian-Japanese war of 1905; or like Ruscha’s Every Building on the Sunset Strip, which allows a kind of armchair tourism across the Los Angeles landscape. The form lends itself to exhibition for this reason—we can see more of its contents at a glance than a codex if the accordion is stood on end and extended, revealing every peak and valley, front and back. When the accordion’s ends are attached to a cover, it creates a loop, potentially inviting us to start again. But the accordion need not be a linear or landscape experience. It also permits new juxtapositions by allowing readers to refold peaks into valleys and bring distant pages close to one another. Artists’ books in accordion form remind us that the book is, as Stewart notes, “Western culture’s first interactive medium.”

Every Building on the Sunset Strip

This recombinant quality of the book takes place not only across but within the page. The technique, in fact, appears in some of the earliest movable books, which use volvelles, turnable discs affixed to the page with a pin or piece of string, to facilitate calculation and navigation. The earliest volvelles, those of thirteenth-century Catalan mystic Ramon Lull, precede print, and the technique rose in prominence during the incunable period for its scholarly utility. The Regiomontanus Kalendarium (1476), for example, also included volvelles for astrological calculation. Another important recombinant tool appears in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in the form of flap books or turn-up books composed of a printed page with a sequence of flaps that alter the narrative each time the reader lifts a hinge. Also known as transformation books or Harlequinades, for the London pantomime figure they often depict, such eighteenth-century novelty books were among the first marketed to children (by London bookseller Robert Sayer around 1765) offering morals and lessons through the transformations they depicted. The harlequinade’s legacy continues in children’s mix-and-match books that use sliced pages and a spiral binding to allow one to swap a face’s features, create hybrid bodies, or otherwise interchange an image or text’s parts.

The recombinant form lends itself to text as well. French author Raymond Queneau (1903–1976), inspired by such childlike “têtes folles” and intrigued by the possibilities offered by a series of cut pages hinged along a spine, composed fourteen Petrarchan sonnets with the identical rhyme scheme, bound them, and sliced the lines apart. Published in 1961, Cent mille milliards de poèmes (One hundred thousand billion poems) offers the reader 1014 different poems, accessed by turning the lines one at a time to make new texts. To read them all, Queneau calculated, would take more than two hundred million years of devoted study. The work is thus a conceptual one but also offers a pleasurable reading experience borne of the novelty inherent in using the author’s text to generate new poems. No wonder, then, that this work is popular with coders, whose digital implementations enact its computational potential. Such remediations, however, lack the tactile pleasure of the interlocking strips that compose the book. They also cannot replicate the sense of potential made palpable by seeing these strips in front of you, lifting themselves away from the spine of the open book and fluttering apart.

Cent Mille Milliards de Poèmes

Queneau joined forces with a group of French writers in the 1960s who were interested in creating new literary forms based on scientific and mathematical principles, and this text is seminal to the movement. Dubbed Oulipo, short for Ouvoir de Littérature Potentielle (Workshop   of Potential Literature), the group pioneered constraint- based writing, which set up a rigid conceptual basis for the production of a work, but one that could yield any number of potential results. Cent mille milliardsis rife with potential, and the interactivity through which we  activate that potential, while it gives some agency to the reader, also highlights Queneau’s authorial genius. The task of com- posing interchangeable sonnets in the identical meter and rhyme scheme draws attention to his authorship, as does much Oulipo work, including Georges Perec’s La disparition (Editions Denoël, 1969), a novel composed without the letter “e” that provides a parable for the disappearance of millions of Jews, including the author’s own parents, during the Second World War; and Anne Garréta’s Sphinx (Grasset, 1986), which remains silent throughout about the gender of its protagonist. Members of Oulipo would go on to generate recombinant and computational poetry under the auspices of Alamo, short for Atelier de Litté- rature Assistée par la Mathématique et les Ordinateurs (Workshop for Literature Assisted by Mathematics and Computers), founded by Paul Braffort and Jacques Roubaud in 1981.

Such game-like recombinant texts are not limited to artists’ books, of course. Many of us enjoyed interactive books published for a mass audience in the 1970s and 1980s. These multisequential books, perhaps the best known being the Choose Your Own Adventure series, offered the reader a series of vignettes, each followed by a choice about what to do next. One path through the book led to the best of all possible endings, while the rest led to trouble, heartbreak, even death. These interactive books—while suggesting that there are many paths, but that we, like Robert Frost, cannot travel them and “be one traveller”—actually allowed readers to pursue them all, thanks to the ability to bookmark the choice point with a finger or slip of paper and read each of the potential outcomes before moving on. One such book, Inside UFO 54–40, took advantage of readers’ tendency to cheat by including a page spread inaccessible through any of the reading paths. To reach the miraculous planet Ultima it described, you had to break the rules.

The legacy of these multi-sequential books lives on in digital interactive fiction (IF), which was among the first game genres made possible by computing. IF, which can be presented on the web, in standalone apps, and even in print, presents readers with choices that alter their path through a work. Jason Shiga’s Meanwhile (2010), a graphic novel boasting 3,856 possible readings, uses a print analogue to hypertext: pipes that extend from a sequence of panels off the edge of the page to create a kind of tabbed thumb index by which one can leap to other points in the book. Designed to emulate what comic book artist and theorist Scott McCloud calls an “infinite canvas,” Meanwhile also exists as an app in which all potential paths are available in an interface that scrolls in every direction.

Meanwhile

Interactive books come in other game-like forms, including Mad Libs, storytelling dice and decks, and magnetic poetry. Publishers and book artists have used the deck of cards as another playful model for the book that can be sequenced by the reader. John Cage’s work with indeterminacy in the 1960s might be included among such works; as would French author Marc Saporta’s Composition No. 1 (Éditions du Seuil, 1961), a box of 150 leaves printed on only one side that the reader is instructed to shuffle at the outset; and B. S. Johnson’s The Unfortunates (Panther Books, 1969), whose opening and closing quires enclose twenty-five sections that may be read in any order. This bracketing method, in which the story’s opening and closing are set, was used by Robert Coover for “Heart Suit,” a story in McSweeney’s Issue 16 (May 2005) printed on fifteen oversized heart-suited cards including a title card and a joker providing the tale’s introduction and conclusion. Artist Christian Marclay, whose work focuses on found and appropriated materials, published a deck of cards called Shuffle in 2007 that, in Cagean fashion, presents the reader with seventy-five images of musical notation in situ (as a decorative element on mugs, jackets, murals, and the like), which are meant to be shuffled to create a playable score.

Artist Carolee Schneeman’s ABC—We Print Anything—In the Cards (1977) is seminal in this regard. Consisting of 158 colour-coded cards in a blue cloth box, the work was intended as a score that could be variously interpreted by the reader. Including dream and diary excerpts on yellow cards, quotes by characters A, B, and C (based on Schneeman; her soon-to-be ex, Anthony; and her new lover Bruce) on blue cards, and comments from friends on pink cards, the book suggests that as a relationship ends, it can feel as if every possibility were predetermined, or “in the cards.” “We print anything,” perhaps the slogan of a print shop or tabloid, tells us that this ABC, far from rudimentary schoolbook, is for an adult audience, and that it holds nothing back, just as Schneeman kept little off limits in her body art and performance work. Black-and-white photographic cards intersperse images of her nude body, her domestic space, and erotic artwork as if to reinforce the fact that the book lays all her cards on the table.

What happens, though, when a book is boxed and unbound? Do we still recognise it as a book? Of course we do; the box acts like a familiar slipcase for a hardbound book. It presents a rectilinear volume that can be arrayed on a bookshelf, and it contains the pages or cards that come together in its content. Yet, while it looks like a codex from outside, the moment we open the box something changes. These pages can be “turned” in that they can be flipped over, creating two stacks of loose sheets facing one another. Is the space between them properly an “opening” as one finds in a codex or accordion book? Yes. And no. In an accordion or codex, the author and designer have conceived of the opening and the interplay between the facing pages. In an unbound book, that interplay will be different each time it is read, since we can shuffle and reorder them at will. If the cards or pages are not numbered, then the order is truly left up to the reader, and perhaps even the orientation—the page can now be rotated (though in some cases, this will render its text illegible without a mirror or Blake’s skills).

Some of the loveliest works to play with this potentiality are Swiss-German poet Dieter Roth’s (born Karl Dietrich Roth, 1930–1998) series titled simply Bok (Book) from the late 1950s and early 1960s. Born in Germany, Roth’s parents sent him to Switzerland in 1943 for the duration of the war (his family reunited there in 1946) and there he trained as a graphic designer, met concrete poet Eugen Gomringer, and began experimenting with visual poems and artists’ books. When he moved to Reykjavik in 1957, Roth created his own small press, forlag ed., and began to issue books in a variety of cut-paper formats. Famously playful with book form, his first publication, Kinderbuch (Children’s Book), originated as a gift for his friend Claus Bremer’s son and consisted of twenty-eight 32 x 32 cm pages letterpress-printed with red, yellow, black, and blue circles and squares in a variety of arrangements and sizes. The spiral-bound book was produced in an edition of one hundred, twenty-five of which also had die-cut shapes, which would become a technique of great interest to him. That playful spirit continues in the schlitzbücher (slot-books) he began work on in 1959. These collections of loose cardstock pages, each around fifteen inches square with a smaller central square of hand-cut slots varying in width and orientation, have an immediately cheeky quality. Rather than titling them, each bok was given a number or double-letter designation. Minimalist in aesthetic, they consist of ten to twenty-four leaves of cardstock in two or three colors (black and white, red and blue, red and green, blue and orange, and in one case, red, green, and blue) encased in a portfolio. When stacked and turned by the reader, they alternately reveal and conceal portions of the pages below, creating a variety of optical effects and transformations. The portfolio format, here as in Blake’s illuminated prints, reminds us that our definition of the book cannot rely on formal qualities alone—a book’s meaning arises through use and through the apparatus set up to shape our interpretation of it.

Because they are unbound, each leaf of the slot-books can be oriented four ways (not all are symmetrically centred) as well as flipped, offering eight possible orientations for each sheet, which in turn are influenced by the arrangement of the pages below. These interactive works play with our notions of the book by presenting us with a space that references text (that central cut-out area evoking a prose block with ample margins), but that only becomes legible through flipping—rather than moving our eye to scan these lines, we move the page to make meaning from it. Though we can examine and appreciate an individual sheet as a work of op art, we must, in fact, look through it for juxtaposition with the page below, much as a single page of text gathers significance through its place in a book’s sequence. One such recombinant book has been remediated by generative artist The55 into a visual simulation that allows us to layer the pages to our heart’s content, illuminating the extent and variety possible in the work, which must be activated by a reader to generate meaning, since, after all, the pages contain no text.

The Book by Amaranth Borsuk
$15.95 TISBN: 9780262535410344 pp. | 5 in x 7 in21 b&w illus.

Available from MIT Press

As a publisher of short-run artist books, I often feel like each publication I make is being thrown into a forest. I run over, look around, repeatedly glance over my spreadsheet of sales, and wonder if it has made a sound. With the proliferation of e-books, blogs, and other (free) forms of online publishing, the activity of printing text and images onto paper and gluing them together into a money pit seems completely irrational. Nevertheless, I can’t seem to let go of my love for making books—and neither can many others.

Art books are a form of curating and sharing an artist’s work, and as printing becomes more accessible, there is a growing excitement in exploring this form and its possibilities. In the last few years, more and more art book fairs have popped up around the world. Printed Matter, a non-profit bookstore dedicated artist books, has been organizing the New York Art Book Fair annually since 2006, and the Los Angeles Art Book Fair since 2011, which together bring over 43,000 attendees each year. Their success has sparked in a worldwide interest in art books. From San Francisco, Detroit, Vancouver, Mexico City to Melbourne, Tokyo, and Dubai, more cities are organizing their own art book fairs, attesting to the form’s popularity. Clearly, print isn’t dead, and books aren’t going anywhere. But where is this growing desire to create and consume books coming from?

My own interest in creating publications lies in the book’s ability to promote and extend discourse. While that might be a bit obvious, for art it means taking an artist’s work out of the gallery or institution and bringing it into a more intimate space—one that is perhaps more permanent than an exhibition, lecture, or performance. As personal objects, books exist physically in space, and can be passed along, shared, and revisited again and again.

Much of my love for books, admittedly, is largely due to nostalgia. From the smell of books to the discoloration of aging paper, books have imprinted a sensorial experience in my memory—one of comfort. A study by linguist Naomi Baron found that when it comes to textbooks, “92 percent of college students prefer reading print books to e-readers,” citing one of the reasons as smell.

Different types of paper also have their own distinctive tactile qualities. You already know the feeling of a cheap sci-fi paperback: the paper is shitty, the ink seems like it’s going to rub off onto your fingers, but somehow, it’s still so wonderful. As Baron explains, “There really is a physical, tactile, kinesthetic component to reading.” Our bodies react to material and to touch. When we’re reading a book, it’s much more than just the information on the page.

If the textural and olfactory experiences of printed books are their only appeal, the forward-thinking and tech-savvy might find it an easy solution to translate the nostalgia of the printed form into digital media. Here, I’m imagining a version of Jinsoo An’s Project Nourished, a gastronomic experience in Virtual and Augmented Reality.

Project Nourished invites its users to eat a slice of algae jelly, placed in front of them, which appears in VR as a plate of steak, cake, or a piece of art. Additionally, an aromatic diffuser is triggered to shape the way the food tastes. An’s project allows us to imagine the future possibilities of VR/AR books: an array of VR texts appearing on otherwise empty pages in front of us. We could play with the textures of these pages, and as a final touch, the aromatic diffuser could release different smells (preferably the smell of old books). Ahh…

Anteism Publishing, based in Montreal, has already made the jump in bringing art books into AR with their new series AR•BOOK. While the books can be viewed on their own, readers are encouraged to interact with each page through AR•BOOK’s app.

In this format, artists can insert their work directly onto the page via AR, pushing the boundaries of the traditional publishing form. Still images become animated. Two-dimensional becomes three-dimensional. The interactivity of books via VR/AR is certainly an exciting development to observe, but at the same time, I’m not convinced.

My aversion to the VR/AR experience might place me as a “realist,” if we were in David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ, but to be clear, technology has actually helped pave the way for small presses to thrive. Digital printing options have made print-on-demand and short-run books possible. In thinking about technology’s relationship with books, it’s more than just the conversation between digital vs. print—it’s important to recognize how technology is changing the way books are being printed physically as well.

Most of the books at the art book fairs mentioned are short-run. The high-end publishers often market their books as limited editions, sometimes as art objects. Then, there are the self-funded, artist-run publishing projects that can’t afford to make more than a few copies. For the books I publish, I have never printed more than two hundred copies of each book, making it not even a small press, but tiny. While much of digital publishing aims to reach a wide audience—an audience that can be tracked and measured—much of the appeal of books, and art books, in particular, is precisely because they are produced in such limited quantities. If digital media wants to invite as many people as possible into the forest, small presses create exactly the opposite: it’s an experience you’re invited to stumble upon.

Part of the experience of books, beyond their tactile qualities, is how we discover them. There’s a pleasure in sifting through piles of books and finding a gem, much akin to a thrift store find or antique shop treasure. (It still gives me joy to have found an experimental electronic music album titled “Children’s Music for Adults, Volume 1” at the $1 section at Amoeba Records.) Art is often experienced similarly—performances occur in basements, exhibitions pop up at the observatory, installations transform architectural gems, and sculptures are peppered along the street. In this context, the discovery of a book is an experience in and of itself, separate from the book’s content, but nonetheless shaping our understanding, memory, and love for it.

The Internet is a medium for unpredictable discovery, which artists have embraced. In his Image Search series of lightbox work, artist Anthony Discenza recreates screenshots of google image searches.

The term he searches for isn’t disclosed, highlighting the puzzling results, which seem random in their juxtapositions and pairings. Discenza’s work evokes the horror of mass consumer culture, with images that seem contrived for commercial purposes. Because search results are constantly changing as new information is being uploaded, Discenza sees these works as photographs, capturing a specific moment in time.

On Twitter, there’s a community of folks making bots for artistic purposes. Tiny Star Field (@tiny_star_field) by Katie Rose Pipkin tweets out a random placement of symbols every three hours to form a star-filled night sky.

The Tiny Gallery (@thetinygallery) by Emma Winston tweets out a “gallery” with different emoji artwork and visitors inside. The works are computer-generated and created through unpredictability, giving a sense of joy and excitement in viewing each iteration whenever they pop up on our Twitter feed. Bots can be used to encourage discovery. The New York Public Library’s Twitter bots, NYPL Dogs (@nypl_dogs) and NYPL Cats (@nypl_cats) are connected to the library’s database. Four times a day, the accounts post a photograph from their public archives, marked with the word “dog” or “cat,” with the idea of leading individuals to use their physical collection as a resource.

There are so many aspects beyond a book’s content that make up the experience of the book. Instead of thinking about books as simply transmitting information that needs to reach a wide audience, we should think about the multi-dimensional properties of books that still make them so enjoyable. There’s a pleasure in the material and olfactory senses, and there’s also a great joy in discovering books in real life, haphazardly. For those in digital publishing, it’s worth considering those aspects, how they can be incorporated into the digital format, and ways of making discovery spontaneous and enjoyable beyond an overly curated App Store.

A version of this essay was first presented at Books in Browsers VII at the Gray Area Foundation for the Arts, San Francisco on November 4, 2016. Check out Vivian’s presentation here:

Hercules Editions is a London-based publisher of books that combine poetry and art and archival material. It emerged from a one-off creative collaboration between poet Tamar Yoseloff and designer Vici MacDonald and evolved into a small independent press.

We spoke with Tamar about how Hercules Editions came into being, her novel approach to publishing, and how she’s working to get poetry out of the ‘ghetto’.

Hercules Editions evolved out of a personal creative collaboration between you and Vici can you tell us a bit about that first project and the journey to becoming a publisher?

Vici and I are good friends, and so I know she is never without her camera. She has always photographed things that interest her, mainly shop fronts, ghost signs, urban detritus – things that interest me as well. One day I asked her if she would ever consider showing her photographs, and she was dismissive. She didn’t think anyone would be interested, the photos were just part of her personal archive as a graphic designer. I volunteered to write some poems to accompany them, just to see where it might go. I sifted through hundreds of photos, and selected ones that spoke to me in some way. I started to write these odd, sometimes quite irreverent sonnets to match the images, and we ended up with a set of 14 poems and 14 photos. I suggested we might think about making them into a book, which we decided to call Formerly (to suggest the fleeting nature the sites in the photographs, but also as a nod to the formal nature of the poems). But when we started looking for a publisher, we discovered the project fell between two stools – most poetry publishers were put off by the perceived expense of having to reproduce photographs, and publishers of photographic books weren’t that keen on the poetry! In the end, we had one publisher who might have been willing to take it on, but the project was so personal for us, and because Vici is a terrific designer, she had a very specific vision for the book. So we decided to publish it ourselves.

Once we decided we would self-publish, we had to come up with a name for our “press”. We both live in Lambeth, and Vici is right around the corner from the plaque that marks the site of William Blake’s house in Hercules Road. So we decided on Hercules Editions. Since Blake’s project was to combine poetry and image, we thought he was an appropriate guiding spirit, but it was also a bit of a joke, as Hercules Editions sounds so grandiose, and it was just the two of us making this funny little book!

We never expected to have the success we did. The book triggered two exhibitions of the photos and poems – one at the Poetry Café in Covent Garden, one at the Saison Poetry Library in the Royal Festival Hall – and it was shortlisted for the 2012 Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry. It’s now in it’s second printing.

After the success of Formerly, we felt we had located a niche, and so we decided to continue the press, with a view to publishing more books that would combine poetry and visual imagery.

What do you think sets you apart from other publishers?

Vici and I come to the project with very separate and specific skills. Vici has worked as magazine editor and art director, and she has an innate visual sense of how a book should look. For the first project, we were using her photographs, but she has worked with subsequent authors to generate imagery to compliment the poetry – not simply as illustration but as an integral part of the whole piece. I have been in the literary world for many years, so I know a lot of poets, and there were some great writers I was keen to work with. Also, both of us have had some experience in the art world, and we were interested in considering the books more as art objects, so each edition is limited to 300, and signed and numbered. We are obsessed with the materiality of the book – we want it to be a nice thing to own – but to be affordable as well as beautiful. We don’t want the books to stand alone either, and so we are programming events in venues that might not be immediately associated with poetry, such as Parasol Unit, the Black Cultural Archives and the Cinema Museum, as a way of broadening audience.

You receive some Arts Council funding but you also crowdfund on indiegogo for each book, why have you taken that route, and what has it enabled you to do?

The Arts Council encourage their clients to explore multiple ways of funding their projects, and so we considered crowdsourcing as a way of securing extra income. In this tough financial climate, many publishers are going the same route – it makes sense. The revenue we make from crowdsourcing is often earmarked for the sorts of things our ACE funding wouldn’t necessary cover, like launch events. We also find that the campaign creates a buzz around the book, it allows us to offer something more substantial to our readers, so that they feel they are more like patrons, and have an active role in each project.

Crowdfunding isn’t easy money by any means, can you give us your top tips for running a successful crowdfunding campaign for a book project?

We want to be realistic in our reach. We are not asking for huge sums, so people don’t feel burdened by a request for money, especially in these times of austerity. For each book, we offer quite specific perks. We are taking our model from the old days of fine arts subscription presses: for £20, patrons can have their names listed in the book; for £35, they are sent an additional signed poem not in the regular edition; and for £50, they are invited to an event in the presence of the author. For our last book, Ormonde by Hannah Lowe, we arranged tea with the author, and she brought along a number of original documents and photographs which formed the research for her book (which is about her father’s immigration to the UK from Jamaica). For our current publication, Silents, which presents poems inspired by early cinema, we will be arranging a screening of a film selected and introduced by Claire Crowther, the author. These events give our most generous patrons the opportunity to meet our authors, and for us to personally acknowledge their very generous and valuable support.

What do you think are the main challenges facing writers – and poets in particular – today?

The challenge is always how to sell books, how to get the material out to a wider audience. The Internet and social media are extremely valuable tools, and extend the reach of public events. I still feel that public events are the most exciting way of promoting poetry – there is nothing as exhilarating as seeing a great poet read his or her work live – but we also want to be able to broaden our scope to those outside of London. Poetry is always going to be a minority activity, so it is important to bring it into other spheres.

What next for Hercules?

As Vici and I are very much part-time, the press will always have a relatively modest output. We are still taking things on a project by project basis, but we are thinking about doing some larger-scale events in the future, perhaps a weekend-long arts festival, where we would invite visual artists, filmmakers, sound artists and musicians to participate. In the meantime, we are looking forward to the launch of Claire Crowther’s book Silents at the Cinema Museum (a wonderful hidden gem in London) on 21^st May.

You can find out more about Hercules Editions, and buy the books mentioned in this interview, on their website.

Hercules Editions is launching their new book, Silents by Claire Crowther, at the at the Cinema Museum, London on  Thursday 21st May.  All are welcome, but reservation is essential – details here.