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| Program designed by Jenny Davis |
On February 2, 2016 the Grolier Club and Columbia University's Rare Book and Manuscript Library partnered to present a colloquium in connection with my exhibition Blooks: The Art of Books That Aren't. The colloquium was filmed and can be seen in its entirety by clicking on this link: https://vimeo.com/158427834
Speakers included (in this order) Mindell Dubansky (Preservation Librarian, Metropolitan Museum of Art), Lynn Festa (Associate Professor of English, Rutgers University), and Bruce and Lynn Heckman (collectors). Karla Nielsen of Columbia University, was moderator. This post includes the full content of Lynn Festa's inspiring talk on the relationship between books and blooks. I found it so interesting, I thought you would like to reading it and I thank Lynn for offering it to the About Blooks blog:
I want to talk today
both about “blooks” themselves, and about what “book-look objects” have to tell
us about the nature of the book: its properties as a material thing as well as
word-based text. What do “blooks” borrow from the book, on the one hand, and
what do they tell us about the nature of the book, on the other? Why choose to
fashion an object— whether a spruce-gum box, a sewing kit, a lunch box, or a
lighter— in the form of a book in the first place? Although objects shaped like other things are
not all that uncommon—chocolates and
candles and soaps come in all sorts of guises— the blook seems special.
In part, blooks are
special because books are not like
other things: they are both physical object and text, conjoining the material
and the immaterial, the shared world of language and the private world of thought,
sense, experience. Books are strange objects in that they recede into
invisibility when we read; the "blook" by contrast insists upon the
physical properties of the book in a way that makes its materiality an object
of contemplation. “Blooks” remind us of the power incarnated in the book’s— the
codex’s— very form, underscoring the ritual or social purposes that books
possess apart from being read. The
coffee-table book broadcasts a message about the status or refinement of its
possessor without being cracked; the book given as a high school prize declares
an honor without necessarily being devoured by its teen-aged recipient.
Blooks also remind
us of the more casual ways we employ books as material objects rather than
reading matter— as doorstops or paperweights, as coasters or barriers to an
unwanted conversation on the subway. That many blooks are closed books— offering the shape and mass of a wordless object— reminds
us that what we treasure in books is not always the allegedly superior value
incarnated in the text. We also love books as
things. The “blook” on these terms offers a revelation about bibliophilia,
about the love we bear towards this
particular copy of a book, as opposed to the story we love, and about the passion
and perversion of book collecting. Even
as the Freudian fetishist’s interest in the shoe lies in something other than
its purpose as a protection for feet, so too does the collector of books (as
well as, perhaps, the collector of blooks) treasure something that goes beyond
the so-called “proper” use of the book as a delivery system for language. Perhaps— countermanding the chiding of
countless generations of parents— what matters is not what’s inside, after all? The blook as a representation of the
book— with its lavish or cheap bindings, its ornate lettering or unadorned typeface—remind
us of the forms of value not associated with specifically literary merit that also inhere in the book. And why should
we denigrate these other values? The large number of book-objects that are
bibles, for example, reminds us of the role played by the Bible not just as
scripture, but also as a perdurable object that consolidates relationships or
communities through its presence as a material object— not despite but
precisely because of its obdurate materiality. Blooks— or at least some blooks— capitalize on this.
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| Holy Bible in stone. American, 19th c. |
And I say some blooks, because blooks, like books,
have genres, moving from the reverent sobriety of a stone-book Bible to the low
comedic value of the mass-produced electric-shock gag gift.
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| Exploding book, "World's Greatest Jokes by R. U. Laffin." American, Franco-American Novelty Co., New York, mid-20th c. |
Blooks thus alternately consecrate the
book— reaffirm its sanctity— and jest with it— cut its high seriousness
down to size. In the next few minutes, I want to offer readings of three kinds
of “blooks”— three possible ways of thinking about what they tell us about our
relation to books that might be roughly classed as the sentimental or
affective, as utilitarian, and as playful.
(This is by no means exhaustive, and for every statement I make there
will be a counterexample.)
First: the
sentimental or affective. “Blooks" toy with a kind of literalization of
the inward nature of the book and of our reading practices. On these terms, we
might read the book-object as a kind of allegory of reading. The hollowed-out book shape, for example,
literalizes the ways we think of reading as an activity involving depths and
insides: we dive into novels, we delve into texts, we talk about what’s in a book.
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| "Smoke and Ashes by Flame" smoking set. American, mid-20th c. |
A book repurposed as a secret
hiding place for keepsakes has much to tell us about the forms of interiority
and selfhood we associate with the book. Books, like blooks, offer passage to a
hidden inside. Although not all blooks open,
the pleasure of opening and finding things within— and here I cannot help but
think of the popularity of “unboxing videos” on youtube as a strange extension
of this pleasure— is part of what the blook promises. The discovery that
something is harbored within the blook thus echoes elements of the experience
of reading.
Blooks also
capitalize on the way books, as embodied language, exteriorize and make inner
feeling at least partially available to other minds. The book-shaped love tokens and sentimental
or memorial objects such as the spruce-gum boxes carved by lumbermen in the
North Woods or the stone books carved with the name of the recipient all are
exterior signs of inward emotion.
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| An American spruce gum box, 19th c. |
As
personal memento, keepsake, memorial, souvenir, or gift, these objects are vessels
for sentimental value. I want to focus on the anthracite book that commemorates
the death of the miner James Fagen at the age of 22.
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| Coal memorial book from Pennsylvania, 1897. |
This blook marks the
premature ending of a life with too few chapters. The fact that it can’t be
opened to be read— that it is a closed book in every sense— and the “muteness”
of the stone book— the “inert thingness” of the memorial— make this blook the
nonverbal expression of something— the grief of loss— that cannot,
perhaps, be brought to the level of language. Words cannot express
everything. The stone book that marks
this foreshortened life borrows from the permanence or solidity of stone to
suggest the enduring love towards the lost loved one and the promise of eternal
life, also invoked by the book’s inevitable reference to the bible. The emotion
that suffuses these objects makes the blook, like the book, a tool for
preserving and revivifying emotions about absent objects. Both blooks and books
give substance and form to the ephemerality of subjective feeling, experience,
thought. (One thing that does not come through from looking at the blooks in
the exhibition is the immense pleasure of holding them: the smoothness of the
wood, the texture of the grain the heft of the stone, the satisfying fit, snug
in the hand. These are tactile as well
as visual objects; they are meant to be held.)
If the sentimental
or affective “blooks” serve as objects of meditation or contemplation, what
should we make of their more utilitarian counterparts? What connections can be
made between the contents of certain blooks and the book form? The logic behind
housing writing materials, alphabet blocks, and a book repair kit (charmingly
titled “The Care and Feeding of Books”)
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| "Care and Feeding of Books" book repair kit. American, mid-20th c. |
in a book-shaped container is fairly
evident, to be sure, and the fact that blooks are often vessels for new or
emerging technologies— photographs, viewfinders, microscopes, cameras, and tape
recorders—suggests the ways the book-form acts as a mediator to buffer
technological change (as in “pages” and “folders” on our computers).
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| Crosley Book Radio. American, 1950s. |
Some
blooks— the game boards disguised as books, for example— are perhaps trying to
borrow from the relative prestige of the book to give idle pastimes greater
respectability.
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| Add caption |
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| "Milton's Poems" card set. American, mid 20th c. |
But other objects are
not so easily explained. One might, I guess, say that the incendiary content of
literature and the flammability of paper explains the book-shaped trench-art lighter
(and certainly the useful object crafted out of shell-casings and bullets
produces a reminder for the soldier of the civilized world of books, so distant
from the violence of war), but what about the sewing kit? Why put a sewing kit like the 1840s “the Gem”
in a book form?
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| "The Gem" small sewing kit. English, 1840s. |
Although part of the reason is decorative (a pretty, fashionable
case, easy to transport), another reason is perhaps to hide or camouflage the
object. A sewing kit in a book form allows work materials to be left out on a
table, and thus ready-to-hand for the kinds of minor repairs for which it is
intended, even as the book form disguises the invisible ubiquity of female
labor that underwrites domestic life. Perhaps the practical contents of these blooks
also serve as a reminder that “book smarts” need to be complemented with
practical know-how: the speculative “how-to” knowledge that reading a book about
tailoring might convey is replaced by the sewing-kit that enables one to mend a
shirt.
Although the sewing
kit blook disguises its contents, many blooks do, punningly, proclaim what they
ostensibly hide. The flask is nestled in
a blook labeled the Secrets of the
American Cup,
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| "Secrets of the American Cup" flask. American, 20th c. |
while the clothing brush is housed in Not So Dusty by Y.B. Untidy.
Here the blook form has recourse to language— to words— to suture the
relation between the book form and the blooks’ contents.
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| "Not So Dusty by Y. B. Untidy" clothes brush. American or English, 20th c. |
That so many blooks have punning titles is, I
think, a reflection of the fact that there is something oddly literalizing
about the blook. It arrests us on the material form of the book in much the
same way that the pun returns language to its most material form, as
sound. The pun plays with the sonic
similitude of words, much as the blook plays with the material likeness of the
book.
The importance of
puns indicates that all is not high seriousness in the world of blooks, and I
want to close with a few words about the sheer entertainment value and even
silliness of some blooks. The gag books in the exhibition— the folk-art trick
snake boxes from which a snake rises to strike the unwary Pandora,
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| Snake trick. American, 19th c. |
the
exploding books and the electric shock books— all entail a curious
materialization of reading: the serpent serves as a reminder that dangerous
things lie in books, while the shocks inflicted in opening a risqué cover literalize
the notion that we are reading something “very shocking” (offering a playfully
punitive response to the prurient desires that led one to open the book in the
first place). These blooks sport with the pleasure of being surprised or
perhaps, rather, with the pleasure of surprising someone else (the vague sadism
of many practical jokes). But they also play with the delight at illusionistic
trickery associated with trompe l’oeil, with the outward mimicry of a form that
turns out to be something else. Wherein lies the pleasure of being lured into
seeing a book in an object that is not
a book? I think the pleasure— and the profit—elicited by this fleeting mistake lies
in the toggle between one thing and another that alerts us to the enduring
relation we take to books. For in not
being a book, the book-look object offers us a glimpse of the many things that
we ask books to be.
