Opera Philosophica. Epistolae
[Philosophical Works. Letters]
Lucius Annaeus Seneca
Naples, Italy
1475

This is an imperfect copy of incunabulum Incunable is a Latin phrase that translates to 'from the cradle of printing'. This term is given to books that are printed between 1455 when Johannes Gutenberg completed the first hand press book the Gutenberg Bible with movable type up to 1500. These books are from the first 45 years of printing . This book has its original pigskin binding, with remains of ties still extant. Rubricated capitals in red and blue are found throughout the manuscript, with illustrations indications of provenance and additi onal cursive text in some margins and on endpapers . The printer was Bernardinus, de Colonia, active 1475-1478. Underlining and marginalia of a later date.

Paris Metro Affiches
Franticham [Francis Van Maele and Antic-ham]
Redfoxpress, Ireland
2011

The book is made up from torn posters from the Metro from Paris. Its large size consists of 20 screen prints, 2 original collages and 1 original poster, printed on recycled cattle feed paper sac ks, brought from Seoul, and the screen printed cover is made from a recycled truck tarpaulin.

A Dictionary Story
Sam Winston
London
2006

Winston rearranged the words in the dictionary to reflect on our understanding of them, and how the definitions of words interrupt our otherwise smooth reading experience. In a disintegration of convention, one side of the page is a narrative informed by the structure of the book, on the reverse, is a definition for each word in the narrative with the ty pography set adrift across the pages. Words, phrases and letters swell and shrink in a field of black and white text. The white space left between characters often meander like rivers and settle into ponds of blankness, while other pages see letters. "I am always trying to find new ways of slowing down the reader enough to get a sense of wonder about what's actually happening ... taking apart the reading experience to such a degree that it creates doubt about how it works. I usually do this by breaking down the form and structure of words or playing with grammatical rules" (Winston online).

Das Fall
Uta Schneider and Uwe Warnke
Berlin
1992

Letterpress, concertina, slipcase A double sided concertina on the subject of setting and falling and its implicit contradictions . The concept of the book explores Isaac Newton's law of universal gravitation which states th at the gravitational attraction between any two objects or bodies is directly proportional to the product of their masses and inv ersely proportional to the square of the distance between them.

Water Sculpture
Yoko Ono and Stefan Gunnesh
Liepzig
2019

Water Sculpture was the outcome of a creative intervention for Yoko Ono's exhibition PEACE IS POWER at MdbK in Leipzig. In 1971, Yoko Ono invited over a hundred people, artists, musicians, art critics, celebrities, and people from her own team, to give her containers, or ideas of containers. In the 2019 iteration of the Water Event, Gunnesh provided a book to which Ono added water. The water dissolved the pigments on the pages, turning the water black. The pages of the book then soaked up this black liquid obliterating the text in the process.

AlieNation / SepaRation
Maureen Cummins
U.S.A.
2019

Based on first person accounts of refugees / re settlers, Alienation / Separation is curated from a series of interviews that Cummins conducted with four families who collaborated on the Friends, Peace, Sanctuary project. She selected and collaged 48 excerpts to create the narrative arc. Bearing testament to individual points of view w hile speaking to the larger, epidemic experience of displacement, resettlement, and separation. The four volumes give the reader a visceral sense of separation. While interacting with the book, readers experience how frustrating it can be when even the most ordinary tasks and routines, such as reading a book, become a challenge. Cummins hopes that the e xperience of the reader/viewer is in part one of dislocation, alienation, and separation and that this experience opens an empathetic space for reading the accounts shared by the individuals she interviewed. As with the re settlers themselves, the books must be reunited in order to be understood and made whole.

Marias Story Vlug / Brand / Dood
Maureen De Jager
Helene Van Aswegen bookbinding
Grahamstown Makhanda
2014

Maria's Story comprises three hand bound books contained within a solander box. The passages of Afrikaans text in these books were transcribed verbatim from a handwritten memoir by Maria Anna de Jager, the artists great grandmother. The English translations are by her father, Johan de Jager. Maria was captured by British soldiers in August 1901, during the South African War, and detained in the Winburg Concentration Camp in the Free State. Here four of her children died of disease and malnourishment. Having barely survived her own illness, Maria was released in June 1902, after the surrender of the Boer forces, and reunited with her husband. The artist's grandfather, Moritz, was born shortly thereafter. Maria would have been an elderly lady and the war a seemingly distant memory - when she wrote her story in 1943. The immediacy of her memoir suggests a trauma relived almost daily.

Hilur
Cecilia Vicuna
Dartmouth Massachusetts
1997

The title Hilur is a neologism combining the Spanish "hilo," or "thread," with the English "lure." The scroll consists of text hand written by the artist in russet ink on Chinese writing paper with interleaving tissue. In the mid 1960s, the artist began creating precario us installations and basuritas objects composed of debris structures that disappear along with quipus an ancient Inca device for recording information, consisting of variously coloured threads knotted in different ways and other weaving metaphors. She called these works "Arte Precario", and they soon evolved into collective rituals and oral performances based on dissonant sound and the shamanic voice. The multi dimensional quality of these works allowed them to exist in many media and languages at once.

Alphabet
Paul Heimbach
Cologne
1990

Bound in newsprint, the portfolio contains: 26 frontispieces, (reduced by one letter that appears on the back), a booklet with the letters filtered out, a compilation, and a booklet for 26 letters in which the characters meet under altered proportions. Heimbach seems to be exploring the more complex notions of reading in meaning making suggested by James Joyce (Lerm-Hayes 2004).

Descent into the Maelstrom
Hinab in den Maelstrom
Stefan Gunnesch
Edgar Allan Poe
Leipzig
2021

The book and its structure is inspired by Edgar Allan Poe's short story A Descent into the Maelström. Between pp 37-49, the paper pages are cut in descending circles upon which the text spirals downward, getting lighter and smaller in font size as the pages progress, and thus, depicting a typographic maelstrom. The page numbering mimics this maelstrom using the top, bottom, left and right edges of the pages.

Balzaculator Color Code
La Comedie Humaine as Binary System for Balazacolytes
Angela Lorenz
Bologna
2013

This is an analog, proto computer to determine which characters created by Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850) appear in which stories or novels of The Human Comedy. In 1833 he realized the potential of weaving repeating characters throughout the works, to introduce familiarity i nto any scene and to eliminate the need to describe every figure anew. Of the thousands of characters, all appearing four or more times are here. The loom apparatus pays homage to French weaver and merchant Jacquard, whose innovations around the time of Balzac's birth constituted the first computer program: a series of punched cards to indicate a pattern to be woven automatically on a loom. The viewer places the punched card in front of any of the 179 repeating characters in the Balzaculator and coloured do ts will show the texts in which a character appears

Nothing Beside Remains
Daniel Mellis
Chicago, IL.
2007

This is an exploration of the physical presences of things now absent. The book is printed with ink on the printers fingers rather than on the type, thereby creating a record of her handling of the paper as it went through the press. Each page contains a blind impression of decades old standing type: indexes, train schedules, etc. Ink set off causes strange fingerprin t shaped areas to print. There are paragraphs both personal and imaginary: a mother with dementia, a photograph of an ancestor, The printed out carbon paper of the colophon allows the reader to leave their own traces through their handling of the book .

De Rekening
Nora Pauwels
John DeMerrit
San Francisco
2006

De Rekening is a work built upon an artist created system of fake writing used to mark the passing of time. Inspired by the anonymous entries in 19th Century ledgers and account books, De Rekening borrows its form and repetitive structure from those utilitarian yet evocative receptacles of time. The ruled lines in the book were mechanically drawn using a pen ruling machine at Golden Business Forms in West Burlington, Iowa, especially for this edition. Pen ruling was widely used in the 19th and early 20th Century in the ledger and account book trade; Golden Business Forms is one of the last purveyors of this technology.

Extremely loud and Incredibly Close
Jonathan Safran Foer
Houghton Mifflin Co. Boston, MA & New York
2005

The selected pages shown here are part of a chapter without paragraph breaks in one block of text. Here, Foer produces perhaps the most visually emotionally charged piece of human communication in contemporary fiction. Grandfather, Thomas Schell's stream of consciousness is a pour ing out of his heart to his dead son (also Thomas Schell, killed in the September 11 attacks in New York). Given Thomas's rapidly filling daybook, the text is literally pulled together in Thomas's breath taking attempt to explain what he must The overtyped text blocks (shown here) become a typographic index of his utter failure and the incomprehensibility of attempting, too late, to explain everything to a dead son and an alienated wife.

Nika
Anik Vinay
Vaucluse, France
2002

When closed it resembles a square wooden pillar, that opens into a leporello (accordion fold) structure of four, vertically tall 43 cm high triangular and hinged pieces of wood. The work presents an u npublished text by French philosopher and writer François Aubral which is translated into Spanish by Maria Teresa Marquez Blanc and English by Delia Morris. Although the structure of the book presents as a conventional codex for reading, the thin vertical silver on black paragraphs present a challenge for readers. The book's physicality draws attention to itself whilst reading the narrative of Nika's physical, emotional and spiritual experiences.

Iti Amotytoma Muxum
A manual for typography from Utopia
Romano Hänni
Basel
2020

Typographer Romano Hänni has been experimenting with unusual compositions of letter forms and symbols since the early 1980s. Creating things manually with the participation of all of the senses is very important to him. In this book, Romano states that he i s reprinting the original text of the Iti Amotytoma Muxum that arrived in England from Utopia in 1535. The book was purportedly soon "lost in the darkness of history" until 2019, when it was revealed to be in the Vatican Secret Archives. Hänni says that he was able to get possession of the book for a few weeks. Although not able to translate the mysterious lost language of Utopia, he was able to recreate the harmonious overall impression of the book with its deliberately used proportions and its classical a nd elementary typography. The book displays his mastery of symbols and letter forms beautifully and includes approximately 52 printing forms.

Writing by Drawing When Language Seeks Its Other
Andrea Bellini (curator)
Sarah Lombardi (curator)
Milan
2020

Scrivere Disegnando ("Writing by Drawing") is an exhibition about writing and its shadow. Its aim is to look back over a number of practices, from the early twentieth century to the present day, in which writing leaves the function of communication behind and moves into the sphere of the illegible and unspeakable. It sets out to explore the tension inherent in script, the way that it hovers between the genuinely semantic realm and the uncharted territory of mere arabesques, automatisms, repeated marks and scribbles. All of the works on view inhabit a vague terrain in which the act of writing is more about trying to say than saying itself more about potentialities of meaning than about signification (Giorgio Agamben). It is writing that has transcended communication, becoming a trace of existence and affirmation of self, but also an element of fancy, a metaphor for the mysterious weft of the world. The exhibition centers on this ancient human impulse to move past the communicative side of writing, toward the unfettered, absolute reclamation of the mark, with its wealth of imaginative possibilities.