Jacqueline Rush Lee book sculptures

Beautiful book sculptures and altered books by Jacqueline Rush Lee. Discovered via Sweet Station.

book art, part 2

I've discovered more wonderful book artists since I made my first post of book art by various artists. Here are some of my recent favorites.

 Above: "Eternity" by Míla Fürstová. Discovered via how to make a baby elephant float.

Unsure of title, by Louise Richardson. Via Imagine Gallery. I first learned of her work, and Imagine Gallery, via Ullabenulla.

Peat Stack by Joanne B. Kaar.

Seafarer's Log by Joanne B. Kaar.

Bird Book by Chela Metzger. Via f yeah book arts.

Wood Book by Lexi Hayman. I couldn't track down a source for this image, but I found it via f yeah book arts.

Edge Painting by Louisa Boyd. Via winterlief.

Forgotten Knowledge by Rachael Ashe on flickr.

Unsure of creator, found via poppytalk. 

Georgia Russell

Book arts! Paper-cutting! Bell jars! So much to love in the beautiful work of Georgia Russell.

Discovered via how to make a baby elephant float.

the Codex Seraphinianus (post 2 of 2)

 

After yesterday's post with my thoughts about The Codex Seraphinianus, I'm following up with a post of links I've collected regarding The Codex. And, of course, more pictures!

(A warning, though: I don't know about you, but I sometimes wish I didn't know very much about the book's origins and author. It's more mysterious that way, and that's its own fun.)

 

• An article from The Believer: How Mysterious is a Mysterious Text if the Author is Still Alive (And Emailing)?
• Serafini's Codex: An Alien Encyclopedia More info, images, and author information.
• Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, Orqwith, and the Codex Seraphinianus Discusses the Borges story in relation to the Codex, as well as similar ideas in comic books and other media. Some great quotations about the Codex and good links.
• Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius The Borges story in full. 
• This page is pretty strange. There's no html. It's a description of attempts to decipher several famous ciphers, including the Codex.
• Codex Seraphinianus - Links Another Codex link round-up. The rest of the site has some small images from the book, and short descriptions of the different sections. 
• The "Codex Seraphinianus" flickr tag. An okay place to find more images of the book, if you want. 
• Another post with a blogger's thoughts about the Codex, and some links.

the Codex Seraphinianus (post 1 of 2)

One day a few summers ago—when she and I were still spending summers at our parent's house—my sister called me into the dining room, telling me there was something awesome I needed to see on her computer.  The screen showed two pages of a high-quality scan of a book’s pages, showing row after row of bizarre, plantlike hybrids of bananas, grapes and radishes, roses and turnips, and walnuts and collards. Flipping through digital page after digital page revealed the flora, fauna, technology, cultures, and architecture of the imaginary world created by Italian architect-turned-surrealist Luigi Serafini in The Codex Seraphinianus. The illustrations, drawn in colored pencil, are accompanied by an indecipherable script. “Let me show you my favorite page,” she said, suddenly flipping through the pages quickly. We passed over a fish camouflaging itself as a submarine, analyses of the script’s components, and a diagram showing what must have been the anatomical parts of a streetlamp and the light it emits, before reaching, in the section on inventions, a contraption seemingly made from a combination of a cloud, a mobile, a rainbow, a set of wheels, and a series of propellers. “It’s a flying machine that draws rainbows,” my sister said, flipping to the next page, an illustration of the different patterns and formations you could fly the machine to draw rainbows in the sky.

After securing my own digital copy, I tried to find out as much as I could about the book. There isn’t much to find out. Having finally held, cuddled, and examined a hard copy belong to an acquaintance, the Codex remains as impenetrable as before. The book’s creator has remained silent on the topic since its publication in 1981. Attempts at using cryptography to decipher the script have failed. The only American edition, from 1983, has little to offer beyond a literal description of the contents.  

The book’s closest relative is The Voynich Manuscript, an illustrated manuscript discovered by rare book collector Wilfrid M. Voynich in 1912. Also as yet un-deciphered, The Voynich Manuscript has been attributed variously to Voynich himself and to Roger Bacon, a 15^th-century Franciscan friar. (I have a lengthy post on it here.) Like The Voynich Manuscript, the Codex is an artifact, a solid, object reminder of the power of books and paper. The entire book was drawn by hand. Copies are difficult to find, especially in the United States, and often prohibitively expensive.  The rarity of the book both in its creation and for viewers to obtain makes the content all the more precious.

Other than The Voynich Manuscript, the Codex’s closest relative is the encyclopedia of a world so imaginary that the encyclopedia itself doesn’t exist. At least, it doesn’t exist in the way that The Voynich Manuscript sits in the rare book library of Yale University, or copies of The Codex Seraphinianus can be ordered from Italian publishers for $1,165. This encyclopedia is A First Encylcopedia of Tlön, a book discovered by a character in the Luis Borges’s story “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.” “Now I held in my hands a vast methodical fragment of an unknown planet's entire history,” the speaker writes of the encyclopedia, “with its architecture and its playing cards, with the dread of its mythologies and the murmur of its languages, with its emperors and its seas, with its minerals and its birds and its fish, with its algebra and its fire, with its theological and metaphysical controversy.” This description could just as easily describe The Codex Seraphinianus. Both books meticulously and completely detail every aspect of their respective fictional worlds. Without spoiling the story for anyone who hasn’t read it, let me share this anecdote: once I was trying to convince a friend with a linguistics hobby to read “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” and I told her, “Anna, in this story, instead of describing reality, words become reality.” (She quickly checked Borges out of our school’s library after that.)

I wrote about the Codex when I was applying to become an art major in college and had to write about a piece of art that inspired me. My essay also included a passage on The Voynich Manuscript, Mud Pies and Other Recipes, and Gnomes by Huygen and Poortvliet. (All posts tagged "self-contained book worlds": one of my favorite artistic concepts ever.)

After showing her my digital copy, one of my favorite professors, Laura Battle, bought a copy for the department and even taught an advanced drawing class called Codex. The class was, roughly, about book-making and world-building, though different students took these concepts in varied directions, from series of paintings, to a deck of cards, to a fiber construction filled with pockets and sensory objects. My book of spells, one of my favorite pieces I've made, was my final project for this class.

I've posted images from the Codex extensively on my tumblr. I also have a ton of links saved about it. Tomorrow I'll have another post, with more images from the book, and a collection of my favorite Codex-related-links.

Gnomes by Rien Poortvliet and Wil Huygen

Gnomes by Wil Huygen, illustrated by Rien Poortvliet, has been one of my favorite books for a long time. I love the style of watercolor, the handwriting, the diagrams, and the scientific field guide style. It was hard to pick which spreads to scan!

decemberists dictionary

It's been a number of months now since I made this dictionary of Decemberists' words for a friend. I kept putting off posting it until I knew it had reached him in New York, and then I got distracted. I made it this summer while I was fiddling around with Adobe InDesign. The Decemberists theme was a good excuse to use tons of over-the-top fonts, and it was a fun way to practice the software. It would be fun to case it in someday (that is, "cover" it with a bookboard and bookcloth cover or case), though it's really only pamphlet sized. 

mud pies and other recipes

Mud Pies and Other Recipes, by Marjorie Winslow and illustrated by Erik Blegvad, is one of my favorite books from my childhood. It encapsulates so much of what I love! Children's books and charming illustrations and children's imaginations; it's a fictional, self-contained artifact, almost like the Voynich Manuscript; and it's in the format of a recipe book (and I mean, I love cooking, I love recipes, and I used a similar format for my book of spells project). 

Images via vintage books my kid loves, a delightful blog I've added to my blogroll after seeing the cover reblogged on myaloysius' tumblr. 

the Voynich Manuscript

The Voynich manuscript is a mysterious, undeciphered illustrated book. It is thought to have been written between 1450 and 1520. The Voynich manuscript has been the object of intense study by many professional and amateur cryptographers, including some top American and British codebreakers of World War II fame (all of whom failed to decrypt a single word).

I love this book visually, as well as the mystery surrounding it. If it's a hoax, it's an incredibly marvelous one, and a wonderful example of early book art. Whether the text is a real language or cipher or gibberish, it's gorgeous, and took a creative mind to invent. 

The book is mostly arranged into sections. Except for the last section, which contains only text, almost every page contains at least one illustration. The sections are  more or less:

·       Herbal

·       Astronomical

·       Biological

·       Cosmological

·       Pharmaceutical

·       Recipes 

Content:

·       By current estimates, the book originally had 272 pages.

·       About 240 vellum pages remain today, and gaps in the page numbering (which seems to be later than the text) indicate that several pages were already missing by the time that Voynich acquired it.

·       A quill pen was used for the text and figure outlines, and colored paint was applied to the figures, possibly at a later date.

·       There is strong evidence that at one point in time the pages of the book were rearranged into a different order.

  

The text:

·       Definitely written from left to right, with a slightly ragged right margin.

·       Longer sections are broken into paragraphs, sometimes with "bullets" on the left margin. There is no obvious punctuation.

·       The ductus (the speed, care, and cursiveness with which the letters are written) flows smoothly, suggesting that the scribe understood what he was writing when it was written; the manuscript does not give the impression that each character had to be calculated before being inked onto the page.

·       Consists of over 170,000 discrete glyphs. An alphabet with 20–30 glyphs would account for virtually all of the text; the exceptions are a few dozen rarer characters that occur only once or twice each.

·       Spaces divide the text into about 35,000 "words" of varying length.

·       Statistical analysis of the text reveals patterns similar to those of natural languages.

·       On the other hand, the Voynich manuscript's "language" is quite unlike European languages in several aspects. Firstly, there are practically no words comprising more than ten glyphs, yet there are also few one- or two-letter words. The distribution of letters within the word is also rather peculiar: some characters only occur at the beginning of a word, some only at the end, and some always in the middle section – an arrangement found in Semitic alphabets but not in the Latin or Cyrillic alphabets (with the exception of the Greek letters Beta and Sigma).

·       The text seems to be more repetitive than typical European languages; there are instances where the same common word appears up to three times in a row. Words that differ only by one letter also repeat with unusual frequency.

·       There are a few words in the manuscript written in a seemingly Latin, but ultimately illegible, script. However, it is not known whether these bits of Latin script were part of the original text, or were added at a later time.

Suspected origins:

·       Roger Bacon, as suggested by Voynich and Newbold, and suggested by some later historians. Since then, this idea has been largely rejected.

·       A Cathar cult of Isis followers, as suggested by Levitov, but later completely disproven.

·       A coded almanac by Anthony Askham, as suggested by L.C. Strong. The name of Askham derives from his decryption of the manuscript, which seems complete except that it depends heavily on a correct reading of the characters in the text and does not account for repeated words

·       A hoax by John Dee and/or Edward Kelly, associates of Roger Bacon, as suggested by many, though this has been shown to be a historical impossibility.

·       An early form of a synthetic language, as suggested by Friedman and Tiltman. This cannot be disproved.

·       An early attempt to convert Chinese (or a related language) to an alphabetic script. This theory is based on certain peculiar text statistics and is by no means disproved, but there is difficulty with the fact that the entire manuscript has a Western European look. A specific connection with any specific oriental language has also not yet been proposed.

·       A modern fake by Wilfrid Voynich. Disproved by the recent discovery of earlier references to the manuscript.

·       Jacobus Sinapius, whose signature seemed to appear in a reproduction of the first page of the Voynich manuscript, taken by Voynich. However, that writing does not match Jacobus's signature. Also, the chemicals applied by Voynich have so degraded the vellum that hardly a trace of the signature can be seen today; thus there is also the suspicion that the signature was fabricated by Voynich in order to strengthen the Roger Bacon theory.

·       A fake by Jan Marci as a political move to discredit an opponent. Not sure of the status of this idea.

·       Raphael Mnishovsky, the friend of Marci who was the reputed source of Bacon's story, was himself a cryptographer (among many other things), and apparently invented a cipher which he claimed was uncrackable. This has led to the theory that he produced the Voynich manuscript as a practical demonstration of his cipher. However, there is no definite evidence for this theory.

These images are from the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library of Yale University, where they've posted scans of every single page. 

Some more Voynich-related links / my sources: a Scientific American article on the book, and how it may be no more than gibberish; a site on attempts to decrypt the text (among other ciphers); a thorough historical chronology and analysis; a general historical overview of the manuscript and its possible origins; further analysis, and a weird bit on how one of the drawings looks exactly like the Andromeda Galaxy; and an xkcd comic parodying the book (and dungeons and dragons).