Wim Delvoye | Fifty Disasters of the 20th Century

Wim Delvoye

Fifty Disasters of the 20th Century

Antwerp, Belgium: Editions Carine Rot, 1990 - 1992

32 x 28.5 x 5.5 cm.

Edition of 25 [+ 4 AP] signed, titled, numbered and dated copies

Never one to shy away from scatalogical humour, Wim Delvoye’s Fifty Disasters of the 20th Century brings to mind Yoko Ono’s film Bottoms (whose script reads "String bottoms together in place of signatures for petition of peace”) and Andy Warhol’s Death and Disaster series. The two-ring binder houses fifty photocopies of asses - of the rowdy seated on the copier office party variety -  purportedly representing twentieth century disasters. 

The work is produced by Editions Carine Rot, the French Fashion editor’s imprint best known for their  Lawrence Weiner publications. 

Ian Roy | Astrid, Aghast

Ian Roy

Astrid, Aghast

Sackville, Canada: Gaspereau Press, 2026

208 pp., 20 x 13.5 x 1.7 cm., softcover

Edition size unknown

Last month Gaspereau Press launched its first title since moving to Sackville, New Brunswick, under new ownership. 

Founded almost thirty years ago in 1997 by Andrew Steeves and Gary Dunfield in Wolfville, Nova Scotia, Gaspereau Press took pride in doing everything in house: editorial, publicity, sales, distribution, design, typesetting, printing, and binding.

“You can’t say I’m alienated from my labour,” Steeves told The Walrus magazine, “I’ve touched every book.”

This artisanal boutique approach to publishing is responsible for much of the acclaim the press has received over the years, but also led to perhaps the most infamous and controversial tale in their storied history.

Johanna Skibsrud’s book The Sentimentalists - a debut novel, published in an edition of 800 copies by Gaspereau - was nominated for the prestigious Giller Prize, in 2010. This is typically the lottery ticket that publishers wait a lifetime for - the kind of attention that can lead to a financial windfall and help keep the lights on. 

But the press was not interested in upscaling their production. The hand-made operation could not handle more than a thousand books a week, and made it known. 

“We got here because we make nice books,” Dunfield said. “The independent book stores, most of them understand that very clearly. They like our books, most of them can pick our books out blindfolded because we make nice books, and that’s our reputation. And a year from now this will have blown over … and we’ll still make nice books and the bookstores will still like them. So why would we change that? That’s what we do. We got here because that’s what we do. And our future is to keep on doing that.”

Then The Sentimentalists - viewed by many as the ‘dark horse’ nominee - won the award. The fifty-thousand dollar prize is typically accompanied by a huge sales bump, known as The Giller Effect. Random House and other big publishers offered to print large quantities of the novel, to help meet demand. When Gaspereau waited a few days to mull the offers over, they were vilified in the press. 

"Pretentious. Antediluvian. Mean-spirited," wrote Tasha Kheiriddin in the National Post, accusing them of sabotage. The Globe and Mail wondered if “perhaps some grudging admiration is due to anyone who hews to a principle” and ran the misleading headline "Author's angst grows over unavailability of Giller winner.” Toronto Life declared “Public denied award-winning book by territorial East Coast publisher.” 

Ultimately, Gaspereau sub-licensed the book to Douglas & McIntyre, who produced a trade edition 

which shipped 30,000 copies ten days after the prize was announced. It retailed for $19.99, ten dollars cheaper than the hand-made Gaspereau Press version, which still racked up 4000 orders. 

Gaspereau gave up the foreign rights to the novel completely. 

The pair weathered the storm and the iconoclastic approach helped cement the legacy of the press that operates by its own rules. They operated together for another fifteen years, until Dunfield announced his intention to retire and they started looking for a succession plan. 

Keagan Hawthorne is a poet and proprietor of Hardscrabble Press, a micropress that shared many of same principles as Gaspereau. He was chosen to succeed Steeves and Dunfield, and has been working closely with the pair long before the transition. The Hardscrabble Press ­will be folded into the larger Gaspereau publishing program and Hawthorne will strive to maintain the approach of his retiring predecessors. 

He shares the pair’s love of letter-pressed covers and their notion of the book as a beautiful object, and brings an indefatigable work ethic. He has also secured one of the most iconic buildings in town to house the press (not sure if this is public knowledge yet)

“Above all else I remain committed to the values that for me, as a  long-time reader and lover of these books, exemplify everything that  Gaspereau Press stands for: great design, careful attention to the  details of production, and a commitment to literature that reminds us of  who we are, and what we have the potential to become,” he wrote on the Gaspereau website. 

At the standing-room-only launch for Astrid, Aghast, Hawthorne introduced its author while carrying his young daughter in his arms, who infectiously giggled into the microphone at every opportunity. He described the manuscript as one of the most exciting pieces of mail he had ever received. 

The book is available for $28.95, from Gaspereau Press, here. 

"The stories in Astrid, Aghast are by turns funny, poignant, magical, and humane. Two public-library workers fall in love with each other’s foibles while stuck in an elevator. A young boy stumbles upon a bucket of eels that stirs up family memories he’d rather forget. A solitary entomologist tries to make sense of a life filled with pianos and beetles. Ian Roy takes us on journeys through a world that is like our own, but not quite: a taxi driver falls in love with his car-jacker; an old man claims he can fly—and can, or almost.

This remarkable collection is understated, often slyly humorous, and peopled by characters so finely-drawn each one seems as familiar as they do strange.”

- press release

Susan Rothenberg | Bear Skin Rug

Susan Rothenberg

Bear Skin Rug 

Zurich, Switzerland: Parkett, 1995

5 x 30 x 33 cm.

Edition of 70 signed and numbered copies

A synthetic latex work cast by Art Foundry in Santa Fé, for Parker Magazine #43. The artists’s signature is incised with the date and the work is date stamped. 

“Susan Rothenberg always outlines, structures, isolates emotion. She has transformed the sounding-board of painting into a sound shape. … Breathing is metaphorically taken out of the painting and transferred to the subject matter. The painting is condensation, condensed in the subject matter, but the subject matter is not the prime mover of the painting. It joins the painting at the juncture of idea, immense feeling, and the necessity of painting.” 

- Jean-Christophe Ammann, Parkett No. 43, 1995

Enzo Mari

Enzo Mari was born on this day in 1932. 

Nelson Ball | Round Table

Nelson Ball

Round Table

Toronto, Canada: Letters Bookshop, 1996

[16 pp], 14 cm., staple-bound

Edition of 225 numbered copies [+ 8 lettered proofs]

The final of sixty-two TWOBITTER publications, released by Letters Bookshop in Toronto, from 1985 to 1996. Other authors in the series include Charles Bukowski, Victor Coleman, jw curry, Douglas Fetherling, Ron Giii, bpNichol, Michael Ondaatje, and numerous others [see below image].

Nelson Ball (1942 – 2019) was a Canadian poet, editor, publisher, and bookseller. He published approximately 50 books during his lifetime, as well as dozens of leaflets and pieces of small press ephemera. Ball was married to artist, writer, and publisher Barbara Caruso until his 2019 death by medically assisted suicide.

Claude Closky | The 365 Days of 1991 Classified by Size

Claude Closky

The 365 Days of 1991 Classified by Size

Paris, France: Self-published, 1992

[14] pp.m 21 x 15 cm., softcover

Edition of 100

Ranging from the shortest (Friday the fifth of July) to the longest (Wednesday the twenty-seventh of November) this slim volume categorizes every date the year by the length of the sentence describing it. 

Micah Lexier | I am Born

Micah Lexier

I am Born

Brescia, Italy: Tonini Editore, 2026

64 pp., 11.5 x 16.5 cm., softcover

Edition of 100

Last month Micah Lexier released his second book with the Italian imprint Tonini Editore. Both are small, bare-bone, minimal works, yet also strangely cinematic. 

The first is Autobiography, from 2022. It first appears to be entirely blank, part of a long lineage of blank conceptual artist books. The title suggests it might owe a debt to Piero Manzoni's Life and Works from 1963, which is also an entirely blank book. Closer inspection reveals that the pages of Autobiography are perforated. 

No stranger to the fetishization of printing techniques, Lexier could simply be celebrating the perforation for perforations' sake, or the circle and the hole, which have increasingly featured in his work of late. 

But given the dominant recurring theme of life-lived vs life still-to-come in Lexier’s practice, I’m inclined to see the pages akin to a wall calendar, which can be torn off and discarded. Specifically, the now-lampshaded trope from cinema, where calendar pages fall like autumn leaves to suggest the passing of time, in films like I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, The Man They Could Not Hang, Phantom of the Paradise, and countless others. 

I am Born shares a size, page count and sensibility with Autobiography. But rather than blank, the book is entirely comprised of entirely of numbers - beginning on the front cover, continuing on the endpapers and throughout, and ending on the verso. The only colophon information is contained on the outer spine. 

The first number is 1, and the final is 11,520.

The book is clearly an homage to previous artists’ publications that utilized grids of numbers, perhaps most famously Stanley Brouwn’s 1 step-100000 steps from 1972 [see below], as well as the non-art book A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates [see previous post]. 

On Kawara’s One Million Years, from 1999 [see post, here] and Claude Closky’s satirical Three Thousand Four Hundred and Fifteen Friday the 13ths and The 365 Days of 1991 Classified By Size [see next post] are clearer precedents, as they count dates.  

The numbers in Lexier’s book are years, and all are printed the same, in grey. The lone exception is 1960, the year of Lexier’s birth, which is printed in black.

The impulse to identify your existence on a larger timeline might be viewed either as a self-aggrandizing or humbling gesture: seeing oneself as part of something much larger. It brings to mind the Sequoia Forest sequence in Vertigo where James Stewart and Kim Novak stand in front of a redwood cross-section showing its growth history by date and she points out when she was born [see below].  

With almost two thousand years before the protagonist enters the book, I’m also reminded of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne. Published from 1759 to 1767, in nine volumes, the novel purports to be a memoir, but the narrator digresses to such an extent that the books begin with the story of his conception and Shandy is not even born until the third volume. 

I am Born is available from the publisher, for €25.00, here. 

A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates

RAND Corporation

A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates

New York City, USA: The Free Press, 1955

400 pp., 27.4 x 19.8 x 7.6 cm., hardcover

Edition size unknown

About twenty years ago, I curated an exhibition called Infinity Etc., at Mercer Union. The show featured works by Claude Closky, Martin Creed, Germaine Koh, Kelly Mark, Jonathan Monk, Daniel Olson, and Lee Ranaldo. 

I included this book by the RAND Corporation think-tank as a kind of curatorial readymade. Outside of the exhibition proper, it sat on a shelf alongside the guest book, for viewers to casually flip through before or after visiting the show. 

Unbeknownst me to me (until a few weeks ago), it had already been signed as a readymade artwork by James Lee Byars. 

The book is a collection of random figures and is considered an important 20th century work in the field of statistics and random numbers. Today, print-on-demand reprints sell for upwards of a hundred dollars (despite online number generators being commonplace). 

The project began as early as 1947 with an electronic simulation of a roulette wheel attached to a computer, the results of which were then carefully filtered and tested before being used to generate the table. In addition to being available in book form, one could also order the numbers on a series of punch cards.

Reportedly, when A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates was first indexed by New York Public Library it was erroneously listed under the heading of "Psychology."

"Early in the course of research at The RAND Corporation a demand arose for random numbers; these were needed to solve problems of various kinds by experimental probability procedures, which have come to be called Monte Carlo methods. Many of the applications required a large supply of random digits or normal deviates of high quality, and the tables presented here were produced to meet those requirements. 

[...]

The random digits in this book were produced by rerandomization of a basic table generated by an electronic roulette wheel. Briefly, a random frequency pulse source, providing on the average about 100,000 pulses per second, was gated about once per second by a constant frequency pulse. Pulse standardization circuits passed the pulses through a 5-place binary counter. In principle the machine was a 32-place roulette wheel which made, on the average, about 3000 revolutions per trial and produced one number per second. A binary-to-decimal converter was used which converted 20 of the 32 numbers (the other twelve were discarded) and retained only the final digit of two-digit numbers; this final digit was fed into an IBM punch to produce finally a punched card table of random digits."

- Introduction to the 2001 Reissue

Forthcoming

 

Carsten Höller and Attilio Maranzano | “Memory” Game

Carsten Höller and Attilio Maranzano

“Memory” Game

Paris, France: GunGallery and Air de Paris, 2012

[124] pp., 11.3 × 16.5 × 21.2 cm., loose leaves

Edition of 350 signed and numbered copies

This deliberately confounding memory game was released on the occasion of the exhibition Carsten Höller and Attilio Maranzano: Memory at GunGallery, Stockholm, in 2012. The limited edition comprises sixty-two printed cards that each reproduce one of thirty-one photographs by Attilio Maranzano of an Italian amusement park on one side, and another of Maranzano’s photos on the reverse—but manipulated by Carsten Höller to resemble a drunkenly viewed version of the original. To play the game, participants place all of the images by one of the artists face down on a table. They then take turns flipping over two cards at a time in order to find a match. The object is to collect the most matches, but since the “backs” of the cards are not identical, as in the traditional children’s memory game, it’s disorienting and doubly hard to remember where each image has been placed.

The work is available from the Gagosian shop, here, for $385 US. 

Richard Tuttle: Sprengel Museum Hannover

 

[Richard Tuttle]

Richard Tuttle: Sprengel Museum Hannover

Hannover, Germany: Sprengel Museum, 1990

22.5 x 22.5 cm., boxed work

Edition size unknown

A cardboard box containing several different bookworks, designed as an exhibition catalogue for a show held from June 6th to August 19th, 1990. 

The contents include Richard Tuttle: Einleitung, an exhibition catalogue published in conjunction with show held at Galerie Schmela, Dusseldorf, January 12th - February 28th, 1990; Richard Tuttle, an exhibition catalogue accompanying a show held at Sprengel Museum Hannover, June 6th - August 19th, 1990; the artist’s book Richard Tuttle: Notes for Sleep Time; the accordion fold book System of Color; and a screenprint mounted on board.