THE WORD MADE FLESH
Signed second edition of book artist and scholar Johanna Drucker's ode to "the beauty and expressive capability of type."
Fine in like jacket.
Price: $350.00
THE WORD MADE FLESH
"The format of this work invokes a reference to the carmina figurata of the Renaissance -- works in which a sacred image was picked out in red letters against a field of black type so that a holy figure could be seen and meditated on in the process of reading. The technique is reversed here, with the red field of small type serving as a background in which large, black letters are arranged like figures on the red ground." — WHEN WILL THE BOOK BE DONE?
WORD MADE FLESH is a typographic tour-de-force that beautifully foregrounds the materiality of the text. As Marjorie Perloff has said of this work: "Unlike the avant-garde artist's book of the early century, Drucker's doesn't boast a single illustration, a single pictorial equivalent to the text. Rather, it is the alphabet itself that is made flesh, the letter being seen in all of its visual potential." The first edition was handmade in a run of only 50 copies in 1989; this limited edition facsimile was created from copy number 50 of that run. A beautiful copy of a surprisingly uncommon edition.
Read more: Marjorie Perloff, Radical Artifice; When Will The Book Be Done?: Granary's Books, pp. 69-9; Druckworks 20.
The Object
(New York): (Granary Books), (1996). 10.5'' x 12.25''. Publisher's original plain brown boards in jacket letterpressed by the artist. [52] pages printed rectos only. One of 500 unnumbered copies. Though not called for, this copy signed by Drucker at the colophon. Bright, clean, and sharp overall.
The Fine Print
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