Embodying Bookness: Reading as Material Act

Abstract

Despite containing many highly original creative investigations into the relations between narrative language, typography, and book form, Johanna Drucker’s artist’s books have received little critical attention. With the help of her own statements about books represented, annotated, and mapped in Artists’ Books Online, I will look at her work as an outstanding aesthetic experiment in linking narrativity in language to narrativity in codex forms. Her poetic exploration of the materiality of the printed codex is based upon a large set of self-reflexive operations. As material investigations of the possibilities of print layout and narrativity, they show an impressive cultural and technical mastery. She has assimilated many print traditions, from modernist and postmodernist poetics to the popular press and the history of printing. Mostly self-produced in limited editions, her works cover a wide range of production techniques, including letterpress, off-set, etching, and digital printing. In her stylistic and technical repertoire, one finds collage, drawing, illustration, calligraphy, poetry, fictional prose, and different styles of experimental typography. Typographical design is usually work-specific (and sometimes even page-specific), from typeface choice and paper selection to page layout and binding format.