Book Arts

Reading both Writing Machines by N. Kathryn Hayles and Johanna Drucker's Century of Artist Books was quite eye opening to me because it made me think immediately of William Blake, whose internet archive was the other link on the assignment website. I had first encountered Blake in high school and loved his style of poetry and it’s similarity to early English romanticism such as Wordsworth. To me, the illustrations had always seemed archaic, as if that was a common thing in books in that day; at least, that was my assumption. What I always believed to be unique about it was that William Blake was the one doing both the writing and the illustrating. However, in reading Drucker’s book, I see that the genre is exactly that, a separate genre of artist’s books that has not gone away. Looking at Blake’s work through the lens of an artist book provides some great fresh insights into his composition and style. Now, instead of looking at the illustrations as just some funny pictures that Blake drew in the margins, I see them more as paintings and read them as conscious of the medium that they are in, one of the defining characteristics of an artist book. For example, Object 3 in the The Song of Los, one of my favorite works by Blake, shows signs that the words were written onto the page at the same time that the illustrations were drawn. It seems that the illustrations at the top of the page were made first and then Blake began writing and composing the text. Of course, I realize that he could have come up with the text first and separately, but what is important here is that he took into account the illustrations on the page, and then wrote around them, at least for that first stanza. In a sense, it could be said that he was “painting” the words onto the page, that is, they are themselves an illustration. William Blake was not really writing a book as much as making a piece of art and taking into account the media that he had: the page, the text, and the paintings he came up with as illustrations. Truly, the work is beautiful in itself and could be taken as a series of paintings, a series of individual objects, which is how the online archive presents it. Object 1 of The Song of Los, for example, is just a painting and quite a fantastic one at that, but that’s exactly how it could stand. The single “object” could be a stand-alone painting entitled The Song of Los. Every subsequent object has writing on it but also could stand alone because the writing is perfectly autonomous with only loose ties to any of the other objects. Certainly, this is evidence of Blake strongly taking into account his medium and the final product itself being conscious of the fact that it is a “book.”