Books On Books

  Grasping the Nettle is the second work in a series called representation by touch that offers the results of Tim Mosely's ongoing studio research into the relationship between touch and sight / the haptic and the optic. His drive to draw us into involving touch in our reception and evaluation of art has its roots in a long tradition of concern that Western society has become too ocularcentric for a whole-bodied appreciation of art. If the artist's aim is to express how the world touches us (as Cézanne put it), a full appreciation of art requires all the senses.   For more on Grasping the Nettle and views of Directed Smooth Space and The Book of Tears , go to  http://books-on-books.com/2024/06/08/books-on-books-collection-tim-mosely/ .

Some time before his death in 1979, the collector Lessing J. Rosenwald brought The Dialogues of Creatures Moralised  to the attention of Claire Van Vliet of Janus Press. She had hoped to publish a few themed selections from it (landscapes with illustrations of her own and minerals with images from Edna Andrade). Helen Siegl’s Herball with its eleven selected images, however, is the only one to appear. More here .

 On 25 June 2020, book artist Chris Ruston read Hart Crane's "At Melville's Tomb" (1926). As the Covid pandemic swept over the UK and the world, Crane's poem paced with her along the Thames Estuary at Southend-on-Sea, and the result was the four works below, now in the Books On Books Collection. To view these works and others, click here : http://books-on-books.com/2024/08/20/books-on-books-collection-chris-ruston-ii/. Often beneath the wave, wide from this ledge The dice of drowned men’s bones he saw bequeath An embassy. Their numbers as he watched, Beat on the dusty shore and were obscured. And wrecks passed without sound of bells, The calyx of death’s bounty giving back A scattered chapter, livid hieroglyph, The portent wound in corridors of shells. Then in the circuit calm of one vast coil, Its lashings charmed and malice reconciled, Frosted eyes there were that lifted altars; And silent answers crept across the stars. Compass, quadrant and sextant contrive No...

 The Paris-based publishers Les Trois Ourses announced that Katsumi Komagata died on 29 March 2024. Although the Bologna Children's Book Fair responded quickly with a memorial on 8 April, it is strange that no significant obituary has yet appeared for such a major figure in the book arts, children's books and artists' books. Fortunately there is extensive biographical information on the site of his publishing firm One Stroke . Piece of Mind (2022), one of his last limited edition works, becomes all the more treasured. More on the work and others can be found here  : http://books-on-books.com/2024/08/16/books-on-books-collection-katsumi-komagata-ii/.