yesterday, a serious-looking box arrived thru the post
with the words ‘Codex Foundation’ noted on the packing slip – it contained the
much-awaited Alchimie du Verbe project : a set of 26 signatures of & by 26 book artists from all over the
world, all hinging in one way & another, as stimulus or counter-stimulus, to
the poem by Arthur Rimbaud having this title – if one was looking for a
snapshot of the life & health of the book as a work of art, then this
collection has everything – most of it based on letterpress printing, but
others relying on linocut, wood-engraving, photography, digital printing, and
one work done solely as writing in pencil – a brilliant register of the spread
of bookish possibility, from the craft-based artisan at one end of the spectrum
to the wit of the conceptual artist at another end – to quote from Peter
Rutledge Koch’s introduction to the collection: “To celebrate the 10th anniversary of the CODEX Book Fair and
Symposium, the Codex Foundation commissioned 26 printers and book artists from
eight countries to contribute a single signature to a printers’ assembling and
exchange entitled Alchimie du Verbe. The
project, designed to support the work of the Foundation, is a compendium of the
printer’s art ranging from examples of fine press printing and typographic
experimentation to the avant garde – an assembling representative of the
collective genius of the CODEX International Book Fair.” –
my ‘favourites’ I will keep to myself, but I want to
list everyone here, and for the most part, googling their names will allow more
to be seen from each one (the order is purely alphabetic) : Walter Bachinski
& Janis Butler, Victoria Bean, Karen Bleitz, Carolee Campbell, Aaron
Cohick, Crispin Elsted, Nacho Gallardo, Martha Hellion, Sarah Horowitz, Mikhail
Karassik, Peter Rutledge Koch, Patricia Lagarde, Clemens-Tobias Lange, Alan
Loney, Peter Malutzki & Ines von Ketelhodt, Russell Maret, Rick Myers,
Didier Mutel, Robin Price, Harry Reese & Sandra Liddell Reese, Dmitry
Sayenko, Veronika Schapers, Gaylord Shanilec, Johannes Strugalla &
Francoise Despalles, Richard Wagener, Sam Winston –
for my own work in the project, I wrote & printed
a new poem with Rimbaud’s poem very much in mind – here’s the cover –
