Do books matter anymore? It was hard not to think about this question on recent visits to the Cantor Arts Center to see The Art of the Book in California: Five Contemporary Presses, through August 28, 2011, and the San Jose Museum of Art to ponder The Bible Illuminated: R. Crumb’s Book of Genesis, through September 25. During the week I attended these shows, Borders announced it would finally shutter its doors. A few days later, a movie based on a book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2, sold roughly half-a-billion bucks in tickets worldwide.
Clearly we prefer noisy spectacles to clean, well-lighted places where we’re invited to curl up with a good book. On the other hand, I’ve read more books in the past couple of years than at any time in my life, but I have a Kindle to thank for that. Sorry, Borders; sorry Kepler’s, Cody’s and all the other independent bookstores either hanging by a thread or already gone. Print is dead.
No doubt the artists and printers represented at the Cantor would take issue with this statement, but they have the luxury of not having to concern themselves with mere cultural trends, let alone selling their work on a mass retail scale. These presses typically produce less than 100 copies of their hand-bound, hand-set, elaborately packaged books, whose pages are called leaves by people in the know. At best, their books are works of art, more like sculpture than prints even though they are printed. At worst, they are precious, insignificant indulgences.
Turkey Press, “The Standard,” 1997, Stanford Library Special Collections.
The Cantor show, which is beautifully presented — with the exception of a distracting video that drones on endlessly from one corner of the gallery — gives us a bit of both. On the plus side there are pieces like 33 1/3: Off the Record which consists of LP-shaped rubbings, prints, drawings, and paintings by Harry Reese of Turkey Press. As with many books in the show, the binding on this one is designed so pages can be removed and framed like traditional works of art. Also by Reese is a marvelously Duchampian work called The Standard, whose glowing gold box encases a slender vertical book, plus a rat trap.