Sandstone Press

The book as an object

Posted by RLD on 12th July 2009

The book as an object of art has a long, not entirely honourable history.  The Book of Kells was illustrated, ‘illuminated’ as it was put, apparently on the Isle of Iona by Columban monks.  Tellingly, the melding of Christian and pre-Christian symbols could only come from a time when the new religion was making its peace with the old and absorbing it, an integrative rather than an outright imperial process.  By these means the Book was rendered not only religious but political and, by means of new colour technologies, beautiful.  The apparently decorative was also functional.

Technology dints on the practical and, through function, to the decorative and artistic.  One way or another we make marks on some material, agreeing that the marks are symbols for objects or actions, more sophisticatedly for sounds.  Right handedness has mattered until the most recent of times.

The earliest marks were made at some location between the Tigris and the Euphrates by hammers and chisels on stone and moved from right to left.  Given the predominance of right handedness this meant that the mason was not about to spall a surface layer of stone between the symbol being carved and the symbol just completed.  Writing on animal skins followed the invention of paint and the development of brushwork.  The brush being held below the line of work there was no more danger of smearing than there was of spalling.  Seeking their models in the world around them the new scribners moved the hand in different directions on following lines using a system known as boustrophedon, from bous meaning an ox.  This is to say the writing of the lines, and then their reading, took the line an ox takes as it ploughs a field.

With the arrival of pen and ink the system became untenable because, with the hand held close to the nib smears were inevitable on the return journey.  The hand thereafter moved from left to right on every line.  In the east they retained that right to left movement.  The payoff for this inconvenience was the accuracy that came with the time to think at the pause after every line, the highest attainment of language, to say it exactly, just so, and damn all metaphor.  Line after line took its own discrete meaning and the point of change was known as the verse, as in re-verse.  Poetry was born. 

The book as an object of art might be an illustrated one, with the greatest carrying the name of Pablo Picasso and – who were those writers again?  They might be popup books, or exercises in origami.  I attended a lecture on the subject once and learned that the new criteria of talentless art had arrived in the world of the book.  A folded serviette with the words ‘food’ or ‘main course’ rubber stamped on one side could be passed as an art book and fetch a price in the right stores, especially if accompanied by the right name.  Pablo would have laughed, at least I hope so.  I certainly did.

Our work so far has taken us, not into the book as an object of art (although I would like to go there), but into the book as a perfect object.  The book presented in the wholeness of its bookness is all the time form in service of the kernel idea, say ‘function’ if you like, with beauty as a natural development, found rather than created, not mere decoration or embellishment.  This is to say text, physical properties, covers and jackets, typesetting, photographic sections, all meet to make the book a singular, perfectly representative and unified expression.

The notion came to us, early on, of ‘direction’.  The author’s point of entry, the kernel, is the reader’s destination; from the cover image to the book in hand, from the smell of new opened pages through the type, into the text and narrative and finally, that moment shared by author and reader in their separate isolations, the idea, the kernel of its being.  There I will leave off for fear of banging on about its ‘soul’, but this is what I mean by ‘direction’, and all of our bookcraft is at its service.

Many skills go into it and all the marvels of modern technology; although all the marvels of modern technology are not greater than the hands of that stonemason in ancient Iraq.  The silence of discovery and the pureness of the idea are given their dues by the many trades and artists who serve to place them in a framework of attention, skill, and respect.  Gifted thus, no medium other than the book is at the same time so majestic and personal, no art beyond literature so all-embracing and understanding.

RLS IN LOVE: The love poetry of Robert Louis Stevenson will be released on Wednesday 15th July 2009.