The fate of the book is becoming more and more critical as digital replacements ingrain themselves deeper into our society. To me the possibility of the end of the book is a tragic one; I appreciate books as an object as much as I enjoy the stories and knowledge which they hold. I predominantly work with antiquarian books as they often show evidence of their own personal story, perhaps through an inscription on the cover or a drawing on a page which adds a new layer of narrative. The theme for each sculpture may be inspired by a number of things including the title, size, shape or cover of the book. I work with wire, wadding and strips of book pages to create the impression of the sculpture emerging from within a book.
Emma Taylor, From Within a Book
Ironic that Emma Taylor’s site had its main life on Facebook, to which one must subscribe to read the great number of comments on her bookworks. Her Tumblr website, however, displays many, if not all of her sculptures in the series From Within A Book, and in her posting of 29 March 2013 (here from the Wayback Machine), you can find reference to an article from the Cambridge News covering her work as displayed in the local shop Plurabelle Books.
Of course, the bookwork above (made from Poor Folk in Spain by Jan and Cora Gordon, published by Bodley Head in 1922) represents what appears to be a store clerk taking down a book but could just as easily be a housekeeper dusting the bookshelves (after all the chapter in which it appears is named “Verdolay — Housekeeping”). Why “of course”? Small sculpted books created “from within a book.” Tending and caring for the physical artifact by altering the physical artifact. (A touch more irony could have been had with the addition of a tiny computer, iPad or Kindle.)
One direction Ms Taylor’s craft may take to evolve further into art would be to recognize and reflect that the fate of the book and ebook are as likely intertwined and separate in many respects as have been those of the many forms the codex has taken — from incunabula to paperback, bookkeeping to fiction or reference to textbook.
Paratextual devices such as the manicule, footnote, running heads, etc., have their “analogues” in ereaders, ebooks and books-in-browsers such as navigational icons, hyperlinks, breadcrumb trails, etc. Through the W3C’s open annotation specification, even marginalia may be finding a place in the so-called digital replacement to the printed book. With the insights of Matthew Kirschenbaum and others into digital forensics, the digital replacement and its “perfect” copies may yet yield the “evidence of their own personal story.” And if “social reading” takes deep root in the individual reading experience, the reader’s relationship to the author (and vice versa) could be enriched by the reader-to-reader relationship in ways hard to articulate. Ways that will offer the book artist new opportunities to “make it new.”
View My Modern Met article here. 18 August 2019
Books On Books 