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AbaB

Item date(s): 1984

Ken Campbell - (book artist)
Jim Birnie - (printed by)

Pages: unpaged (68pp)
Size: 342mm
Binding: Wooden boards cover; Slipcase - green
Technique: Letterpress
Inscription: Signed by the artist
Edition: #31/50

Type: Accordion fold

Place publication: Norwich, UK
Publisher: Artists Book

Additional notes:
Written and designed by Ken Campbell during his Brinkley Fellowship in the Department of Graphic Design at Norwich School of Art 1983-4.

Accordion fold on 100 gsm Heritage Rag, acid free, pasted onto wooden boards on first and last pages. Housed in a green slipcase.

The text flows, on four lines in three types, throughout the accordion.

First line in large uppercase blue:

Imagine an ocean Image an otion Imagine an ocean Imagine an otion Imagine an Ocean Imanine an otion. Imagin an otion Imagin an ocean

Second line:

Incomprehensible green letters

Third line in smaller uppercase brown:

A: "Think of a sea."

B: "You mean the letter?"

A: "No, an ocean made of paper,upon which sits an open book: made of galss. On the water in the book bobs a bottle made of paper. The ship, afloat upon the label, we name the Cutty Sark.

B: "Is that what you are going to do?"

A; "It just goot done."

Fourth line: the same as the third line in the same lower case green as the second line.

I wrote and artworked the book in three parallel and overlapping lines that run its length disregarding the concertina folds. The centre line records a conversation that took place between ‘A’ and ‘B’. It stands as a proposition for a piece of sculpture, and also floats whisky on ‘an ocean made of paper’. The other two lines help or hinder the progress of this notion: all three lines are in expanded or condensed woodletter forms deployed to assist this book’s stammering progress from left to right.

I had two cases of woodletter, of different printing heights: one Anglo-American, an extra fatfaced serif; the other Didot, a Continental sans serif, very condensed and beautiful. They were so different in their respective fatness and thinness that they represented the polar ends of type design. As an act of cussedness I thought to do a book that brings the two together and see what happens. A formal problem to run ragged the poetry to come. Then I thought of an ocean made of paper; ‘think of an ocean, think of a notion’. The text followed a conversation between ‘A’ (me) and ‘B’ (Bruce Brown, in brown). We were discussing Borgesian convolutions. We began thus: A: ‘Think of a sea.’ B: ‘You mean the letter?’ A: ‘No an ocean made of paper…’ The conversation continued and I wrote it down. This was the first time I had generated text for a specific book. Up to that point the books had been slim volumes of verse attempting to break out of that mould.

Ref: GB/14364