Secret Worlds Unfolding
Detail from Addition by Subtraction, a book where nothing becomes something, conceived by Evie Garfin Lisbon, Portugal, and worked on by Shirl Buss and Leslie Stone in Sausalito, CA. Check out more new photos on our Flickr stream or our Facebook group.
When opening a new book, I’ve always felt a flutter in my stomach, an eagerness at the prospect of gaining access to whatever lies between the pages, simultaneously propelled by my curiosity and respectful of the shadows that typically enfold its contents. Even with run-of-the-mill paperbacks, telephone books, users manuals, I find myself searching for some kind of spark–be it verbal, visual, textural or structural–that will connect me, the reader, to the person who wrote/compiled/designed/made the book. I read in constant pursuit of ignition.
Opening up the traveling books that have begun to trickle back to Crossett, then, is a show of fireworks for this humble reader. First, let’s talk material: there are books made of delicate tissue papers, books of rugged cardboard, books with bright drawings, books with postmodern minimalist text next to plastic-covered straight pins. Books whose covers are made of My Little Pony DVD boxes painted pink. Books with pages that are cut to let the light in. Books where there are no pages. Some of these books are complicated to open. Some won’t stay closed. Touching them is surprising and satisfying. In this way, every new ‘reader’ who opens a book creates his or her own relationship with its contents, becoming both a witness and a participant.
Each book, too, is a document of the sparks that already flew between collaborators. I invite you to continue what I’ve started, each bookmaker has said in his or her own voice. Some books have playful, mysteriously open-ended themes–see Bon Bons–and others, like The Alphabet Book, have more definitive guidelines. Whether each participant adds to a new page or alters a pre-existing contribution, my inner reader is delighted by the moments of entanglement that arise–sometimes it’s impossible to tell who has ‘authored’ what part of the book, whose handwriting is whose, where that strange green fabric (impersonating lettuce in Sandwich) came from. Ugliness is allowed, as is confusion. In our world of copyright law and clean typefaces, this type of book seems bizarre at first; but with the messiness and disorder of collaboration comes the kind of rare beauty that I crave as a reader.
Open up, I say to each book, knowing that it could just as easily lead me into a raucous Bacchanal as to a quiet reflective pool. And with the generous collective spirit of those who made it, it opens. Let the sparks fly.
