Bibliographic Imaginaries

Alain Resnais, Toute la mémoire du monde (1956; 20 minute film about the Bibliothèque nationale): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i0RVSZ_yDjs

• end of film: "And now the book marches on toward an imaginary boundary more significant in its life than passing through the looking glass. It’s no longer the same book. Before, it was part of a universal, abstract, indifferent memory where all books were equal and together basked in attention as tenderly distant as that shown by God to men. Here it’s been picked out, preferred over others. Here it’s indispensable to its reader, torn from its galaxy to feed these paper-crunching pseudo-insects, irreparably different from true insects in that each is bound to its own distinct concern. Astrophysics, physiology, theology, taxonomy, philology, cosmology, mechanics, logic, poetics, technology. Here we glimpse a future in which all mysteries are solved…when this and other universes offer up their keys to us. And this will come about simply because these readers, each working on his slice of universal memory, will have laid the fragments of a single secret end to end. Perhaps a secret bearing the beautiful name of 'happiness'."

Russian Constructivists

• El Lissitzky: "the handmade UNOVIS Miscellany, issued in two copies in March–April 1920,[24] and containing his manifesto on book art: "the book enters the skull through the eye not the ear therefore the pathways the waves move at much greater speed and with more intensity. if i (sic) can only sing through my mouth with a book i (sic) can show myself in various guises."" (from Wikipedia); see Vitebsk: The Life of Art, pg 122

Nunberg, The Future of the Book (1996)

Borges, "The Library of Babel" (duh)

Johanna Drucker, A Century of Artists' Books: "the artist’s book is the quintessential 20th-century art form. Artists’ books appear in every major movement in art and literature and have provided a unique means of realizing works within all of the many avant-garde, experimental, and independent groups whose contributions have defined the shape of 20th century artistic activity."

Waldek Węgrzyn, Elektrobiblioteka/Electrolibrary -- book interface with built-in electronics: http://info.elektrobiblioteka.net/?lang=en&img1=1&img2=1

The Feverish Library exhibit: http://www.petzel.com/exhibitions/2012-09-06_the-feverish-library/

Library as Incubator project: http://www.libraryasincubatorproject.org/?page_id=9

synesthetic books -- poetry/art; early examples

• Blaise Cendrars (text) and Sonia Delaunay (artwork) - La Prose du Transsibérien (1913)
  • http://www.bl.uk/onlinegallery/features/breakingtherules/btrtranssiberienz.html
  • Sonia met Blaise through Apollinaire
  • theory of simultaneity -- colors next to each other create movement and rhythm that matches movement of the poem; "first simultaneous book"
  • 12 different fonts
  • full edition would have reached height of Eiffel Tower
• Guy Debord and Asger Jorn, Memoires, sandpaper cover
  • "Thus the moment was ripe for our hero [Debord] to write his Mémoires, which was done with the grating effect of broken glass – a book of love bound in sandpaper, which destroys your pocket as well as entire shelves in your library, a nice reminder of the time past that refuses to end and distresses everyone with its obstinate presence." -- Asger Jorn
  • http://www.virose.pt/vector/b_13/nolle.html
• Kandinsky, Klänge
  • original images online at MOMA: http://www.moma.org/collection/browse_results.php?SHR&tag=vo26560&UC=1&sort_order=5
  • English translation, can check out through Internet Archive: https://archive.org/stream/isbn_9780300026641#page/120/mode/2up