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A Short History of the Moveable Book (ENGL 333)
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A Short History of the Moveable Book (ENGL 333)
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Lecture 2: A Short History of The Moveable BookJanuary 11th, 2023
Peter Haining, Moveable Books: An Illustrated History
This is the only history of the movable book as such.
● Its focus is on children’s books, largely pop-up books.
● Even though the moveable book includes authors such as Euclid, the founder of
geometrical analysis, the bias against tactile elements in the book has tended to relegate
the moveable book to works for children.
The livre d’artiste
An artist’s book or livre d’artiste is a book valued more for its form than for its content.
● These books are often handmade or published in limited numbers in order to emphasize
their distinction from “trade books” (published by a publisher that is not limited edition)
● One reading for the 20th century being an “art movement” is the rising dominance of the
book form. In the 21st century, the book recedes in importance (with laptops) but can be
remediated into other purposes (making the book into an artifact)
According to Johanna Drucker (The Century of Artists’ Books), the livre d’artiste is largely a
20th-century phenomenon.
● Artist’s books are almost always self-conscious about the structure and meaning of the
book as form (Drucker 4)
● As works that mark the transition from the traditional book to the “electric information
age book,” the artist’s book has been termed a form of “intermedia” (Drucker 9)
Drucker associates these books with sculpture because they emphasize tactile values rather than
the purely visual, abstract space of the traditional, content-oriented book.
Artists’ Books and the Avant-Garde
The visuality of a sentence becomes formalized as simply a pattern or illustration on a page.
Keith A. Smith, Structure of the Visual Book (1994)
Smith argues that binding is a key identifier of the book (if it isn’t bound, it’s a portfolio or
stack)
● In a fold book, the binding is mechanical.
● Bound at one point, a book is a fan.
● Bound at two points, a book is a blind.
Turning the Page is a physical movement.
● Turning pages reveal the order of viewing.
● It places the book into time.
● All visual books are conceptually one-picture books in as much as the total, not the
individual drawings or photographs, is of major importance.
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