





Getting there with the writing. I've got some sort of structure and flow layed out now, and it links in quite well with a research narrative about finding new 'cognitive' structures to aid understanding of the field, as I move from an overview towards an interior view. I've just written up the introductory remarks and I'm pushing towards getting the headings organised and just putting the relevent materials into them.
The structure itself has been a long time coming- and as implied it really has its roots in a developing notion of what the research is showing me. I wish I had more time to settle in the materials it's going to articulate though. I just hope it makes sense!


Phoenix (an Imprint of The Orion Publishing Group Ltd ) (2003), Paperback, 592 pages
Source: aesop's books from LibraryThing | 20 Nov 2009 | 12:37 pm 

Grove Press (1994), Paperback, 320 pages
Source: aesop's books from LibraryThing | 20 Nov 2009 | 12:37 pm 

Puffin Books (1974), Paperback, 144 pages
Source: aesop's books from LibraryThing | 20 Nov 2009 | 12:36 pm 

Vintage (2000), Edition: Reprint, Paperback, 320 pages
Source: aesop's books from LibraryThing | 20 Nov 2009 | 12:35 pm 

Penguin Books Ltd (1998), Paperback, 224 pages
Source: aesop's books from LibraryThing | 20 Nov 2009 | 12:35 pm 

Penguin (Non-Classics) (2000), Paperback, 256 pages
Source: aesop's books from LibraryThing | 20 Nov 2009 | 12:35 pm 













I'm working on a short piece of writing for the artists' books yearbook on ways to talk about artists' books. Here's a brief snapshot.
The one book everyone seems to have read about artists’ books, namely Johanna Drucker’s The Century of Artists Books, is open to readings that are less than helpful [regarding balancing the urge to define and the necessity for flexibility]. The book’s mission, to provide an identity for artists books and show how they’ve been important to almost every major art movement of the 20th Century, is highly successful. It’s too easy to read it and come away with the idea that one now has a pretty good idea of what artists’ books are. Drucker’s book is a bulwark for the identity of artists’ books. It is a critical foundation for making a claim that artists’ books are important. It’s too tempting simply to build on that foundation, I think. A different reading of the Century is of artists making books in concert with other processes, interests, forms and pursuits. Books are always a place where more than one thing, more than one role, is happening. They are always hybrids. If it’s the case the at the Century is the strongest case yet made for the identity of the artist’s book, it’s ironic that it also functions as a very compelling study of how that identity is always composed out of the shadows cast by other events and processes. It’s still true. The Century is an extremely useful survey, but its readers have often confused its function as a pedagogically- useful history with a functioning definition that they can use to talk about books in the present. If we learn one thing from the Century, it should be that the books it describes arise not from definitions, but from collisions of materials, people and technology.


Is it the end for quality non-fiction? | Books | The Guardian
In the late 1940s, the Better Books chain pioneered the idea of the bookshop as a bright and appealing space, "a social centre with a coffee bar, poetry readings and other literary events", notes Randall Stevenson in The Oxford English Literary History.The above quotation, from a recent article by Andy Beckett on the seeming decline of sections of the publishing industry was interesting to me because of a question I was recently asked myself:
"How do you think bookshops/galleries/specialist shops will adapt to distribute books produced using just digital media",asks a survey for the University of the West of England's AHRC research project 'what will be the canon for the artist's book in the 21st century?'. It was a question I found difficult to answer at the time, and still do. My attempts at answering it seemed to circle round something of the same attitude as in the first quote. The shops themselves would become more social centres than distribution points. I think that 'distribution' is the key problem. Like libraries, bookshops have to look beyond their original role as distributors. Distribution has been taken over by purely digital media, and by mail order. I do almost all my shopping except food shopping over the web. I almost never buy books on the street. (For two reasons: a- I work in a library, so um... ; b- they're almost invariably cheaper online.) The only exception is the occasional item from Fopp, who pick and choose interesting cheap things. Their sales strategy seems to be that of a cunningly packaged jumble sale, and it pretty much works. Returning to the point in hand, distribution isn't the thread to pull at here, I think. That's a lost battle.

A wind-miller has the duty to grind the meal so that the people living nearby can sell the produce they give him to grind and, indeed, so that they can earn their daily bread. Having had no wind to work with for weeks, and suddenly having some chance to do his work, he is tempted, even though he fears a storm. Should he risk the powerful machinery he is in charge of against the unknown? It may destroy him and the mill in the process.
In Turndust, I was able to use the windmill as a complex metaphor to discuss this in depth. Linguistically, wind-milling offers a range of interesting terminology that help give the writing texture and a specificity that helps me to distance the explicit description of visual events, cloaking them in language. Visually, the structure of the windmill itself is full of wood, beams, gears and a sense of a structure built to withstand enormous forces. A windmill is “built like a tank”. But the windmill also contains the means of its own destruction.

Every month I will feature an artists' book in this column. At the moment I am featuring my own. If you would like me to feature one of yours, with a very brief review/description, please get in touch.