EMBELLISHMENTS

(How much does it hurt to be silly?)

 

Is that introduction true or did I embellish it to suit who I think I am… or did I write it to impress the people attending this conference?

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(…it doesn’t really matter how long your life has been, your C.V.’s got to be short).

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In 1950, Cecil B DeMille led a witch hunt against the Directors Guild in Hollywood during which he tried to purge it according to the unprincipals of Joseph McCarthy and The House of Unamerican Activities.  His main target was Joseph Mankiewicz.  At the Beverly Hills Hotel, DeMille raged against Jews and Communists, until John Ford, who hadn’t said a word up to that point, got up and said in that sparse American frontier-speak I’m John Ford.  I make Westerns and proceeded to shred DeMille…well, I’d like to adopt my own version of John Wayne stance and say I’m Peter Lyssiotis.  I make books.

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I’d like to ask you 4 questions:

* You get so pissed off at that wonky table that you grab a thin paperback version of Orwell’s Animal Farm from the bookshelf and wedge it under the offending leg… now, does the deeply etched square on the cover amount to an embellishment because visually, it may represent the fenced-in farm the author tells us is Soviet Russia?

* Is it wrong to use that large monograph which accompanies the latest Picasso Blockbuster – and which you’ll never read – as a cutting board because your kids have borrowed your Jamie Oliver cutting board and left you now with a shredded version of Guernica – symbolic perhaps, of the Spanish Civil War and the atrocities of Franco’s falange?

* Does placing flowers between the pages of Daniel Defoe’s  The Journal of a Plague Year become an embellishment because once they leave a ghosted image of the stem and petals which give the narrative of the plague an image from Nature to bounce off?

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Can you really understand what a book is, if you haven’t made one?

 

I don’t have a dissertation to road test; an academic position to fortify; or a theory to promote or even a job to defend so I’ll try not to follow the usual narrative in this presentation…

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There will only be fragments; 

because fragments are the language of our times – in a world which exploded sometime back – at Hiroshima, Nagasaki, The Bikini Atoll, at Maralinga and Harrisburg, 3 Mile Island, Chernobyl, Fukushima… we’re living through how many wars this minute in the Americas; Africa; in Asia; in the Middle East in Europe?.  Someone worked out that between Hitler’s rise to power and Stalin’s death – a span of only 20 years, 100 million people were slaughtered in wars…

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So how do we wake up in one piece with a record like that perched on our bedside tables?… we do… but we wake up in pieces more often than not…

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Artist/Illustrated Books are well-placed to make something out of these fragments because they EXIST IN THE CRACKS between the visual arts and writing… they can cope/work with the fragments because in the space between the fragments other worlds exist; but what they can’t do – is stitch all the broken bits together. 

 Nonetheless we keep craving coherence…

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even though Boy Genius, Mark Zuckerberg commands us, and his employees to… move fast and break things.

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– First Rule of Book Club –

(Not everyone has taste, but all of us have stories to tell.)

 

It’s through STORIES that we shape meaning

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and at each telling

at each reading

at each writing

we embellish these stories…

if we neglect our stories and stop telling them, then they will die – and once they die – we wont remember who we are or why we’re here. 

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UNEMBELLISHED both we and our stories rot.

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Would THE CODEX survive?  Probably – but it would fade into a beige dullness

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… and in this, it’s much the same as our LIVES 

and our LANGUAGE 

(both of which are married to the book.)

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Time to forage:  

What would we be left with if our speaking and writing remained unembellished?  Both things would be much poorer: look at our Australian version of English… had the convicts not ripped English off Britain’s tit and embellished it with their slang – called flash language – then fair dinkum we might still be speaking real English – which wouldn’t be bonza at all.

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Also consider how much our language has been enhanced by BLACK VERNACULAR English… its embellishments have speeded standard English’s move into the moral arena…

listen to Martin Luther King’s swooping cadences then

listen to Samuel Jackson in Pulp Fiction…

     see if you forget the words but latch on to the sound.

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Good.  

Let’s forage some more…

What would happen to our singing if songs weren’t embellished? … like language and books, TIME would have strangled them a long time ago.

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For example, we can listen to over 400 recorded versions of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah… all different…all the same…all embellished by the singer’s vision of what the song means:

there’s Leonard Cohen’s Hebrew hymn;

there’s Jeff Buckley’s ecstatic sexual reading;

there’s K.D. Lang’s anthem;

And John Cale’s version with its dark nod to Dylan Thomas’ Under Milkwood.

 

MAKING BOOKS,  EMBELLISHING them as well as READING them, is about DRIFTING.

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The embellishments we add to the codex should guide our drifting – if they don’t, then they’re just decoration – and faced with decoration, we abandon drifting and just GAWK.

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Flaubert told us that stupidity is characterized by wanting to draw conclusions, to come up with definitive answers which close an issue, permanently…

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so I would never want to codify the embellishments that are there for anyone to use in making a book.

– Second Rule of Book Club – 

let’s keep ourselves and our books open to the element of surprise.

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The book is an abiding and permanent mystery into which we drop the contradictions of our living… 

how often have you come across the plot of your own life in a book?

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… and know that BOOKS BEGAT BOOKS – just as writing always happens in the shadow of reading.

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Books are an excuse to re-imagine our lives and to imagine the lives of others… they’re a way to come to some reckoning with the people around us and a way of getting to know ourselves and the stories we might tell together… and as such they are a part

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antidote to the fragments which surround us.

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Remember Mallarme told us that life exists to end in a book.

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Ready to forage, again?

When whisky is transferred to casks and sealed, a small part of it evaporates – but that’s o.k… it’s part of the process – it’s called the angels’ share.  Something like that happens every time I set out to make a book.  I say to myself: You’ve been making books for 40 years; you’re good to go way out there – in the name of William Blake – embellish the living daylights out of this!  

But by the time I get to the making the book has called my bluff, my rampant intentions evaporate – carried off by the same angels which accompany whiskey vapour.

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– Third Rule of Book Club – 

(The book can take whatever life dishes out)

 

Just facing a blank page makes you WANT to make some use of it; 

 

White is humble – it never presumes to tell you the whole story.  

 

empty things we’re told, don’t like a vacuum:

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WRONG: because there is something already there… 

there’s COLOUR: ranging from snowy white to deep cream…

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WRONG: because paper has a SURFACE ranging from mirror-like gloss to dead matt.

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WRONG: because the blank sheet has FEEL/TOOTH – smooth, to bumpy/layed, to almost hairy.

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The blank page invites us to take a plunge; to fall inside ourselves – without a parachute…

and the drop into WHITE CHAOS can be frightening:

because once we disappear into it, we have to accept that we may well end up at the very edge of FORGETFULNESS.

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– Fourth Rule of Book Club –

(the codex gives us some embellishments for free)

 

Let’s forage around a few embellishments that come for free – that are INHERENT to the book.

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The book itself may be an embellishment… How?

Well, I think of Anna Akhhmatova composing that spare, dissident masterpiece Requiem which records the horror of Yezhov and how she memorized and carried the poem in her head to avoid writing it on paper because of Stalin and his thugs… this tells us something about the importance of poetry and its absolute necessity.

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Does BANNING/BURNING a book embellish it? … it does add something to it, doesn’t it?  Look at Germany in the 30’s – and the rise of the Nazis; look at China under Mao; and his Great Leap Forward. 

and Greece in the 70’s under the Colonels when debate was imprisonment.

Aristophanes’ Lysistrata was banned by both the Nazis and the Colonels. ….I’m claiming direct descent.   

You know the list: War and Peace, Das Kapital, All Quiet on The Western Front, Metamorphosis etc.  You know the authors: Sophocles, Satre, Mark Twain, Gorki, Pinter etc.

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But can you say:

I’m working on a book which I hope will be embellished by a banned sticker or burnt in a bonfire by a mob?  Should we ask Galileo, D.H. Lawrence or Martin Luther?  Or Salman Rushdie. Or Michel Houellebecq? 

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Is banning/burning books an embellishment or a piece of POLITICAL THEATRE?  Does it matter?  In both instances books are weathervanes because you can be sure once THEY start burning/banning books THEY will start jailing and burning people, too.

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Irrespective, banning/burning certainly embellishes a book because it invests it with a halo.

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Can the way a book is DISTRIBUTED embellish it?  

Here I’m thinking of writers like Ehrenburg, Eugenia Ginzburg, Solzhenitsyn, Pasternak and Bulgakov, whose manuscripts were copied and passed around secretly… and in Poland during the 80’s anonymous hands would slip a text under a person’s door at night.  Or more recently Yang Jisheng’s Tombstone which was banned on mainland China.  These are SAMIZDAT moments for the book.

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Is TRANSLATION a form of embellishment?

 We know exact translation is impossible… so between the original text and its translation, it must be an embellishment which bridges the gap.

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Can PROVENANCE be an embellishment?

And is there a phrase which carries more cultural capital than: When I was in Paris?  Well, when I was in Paris I visited Brancusi’s reconstructed studio… there was the workshop, the sculptures; his 2 1/4 inch square black and white photographs of the sculptures; the curtained off bedroom and the kitchen where I saw a copy of Leger’s illustrated book Le Circque on a stool; and there on its cover were coffee-puddles -the brown circular imprints of Brancusi’s cups.  Did I imagine it?  No; the label told me that the Big Roumanian used the book as a coffee coaster (- does this take us to the beginning of this presentation?)  

Anyway, like Bogart and Ingrid Bergman I’ll always have Paris, but I’ll also have this unresolved question:  If I had the dollars and the choice of either buying Brancusi’s copy of Le Cirque or a pristine copy from Ursus Books for around $50,000(US) – which would I choose?  

But it’s undisputable isn’t it, PROVENANCE lends a book an aura…

Time to forage again… 

last year 2 Australians uncovered what they reckoned was one of Stalin’s wine cellars – once the wine is auctioned off will collectors be buying wine or a bit of Stalin?

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DOES THE PRICE OF A BOOK embellish it?  Can the label A SAFE INVESTMENT be a book’s crowning embellishment?

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Can RARITY embellish a book?  (Check out how sought after even pages of the Guttenberg Bible are…)

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Does who WROTE the book embellish it?  

O.k.; this could be an iffy moment:

What if a couple of the BIG LADS say Christ and Mohammed for instance had written their own account of their lives, would we have more cause to believe their story?

(At this point Christopher Hitchens’ ghost will materialize and ask why God only appears to illiterates.)

– Fifth Rule of Book Club –

(The more heads, the better to embellish with)

 

Working with other people – collaborating – in the making of a book speeds up embellishment because:  in committing collaboration you’re ACCEPTING an add on to yourself and

you’re likely to trot out more outlandish ideas not only to test them, but also to test and impress the other person.

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Some of the great collaborations might include:

James Agee & Walker Evans in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

Laurel & Hardy

Marvin Gaye & Tammi Terrell

Dennis Lillie & Jeff Thompson

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Even if you think you’re NOT collaborating with another person – you’re inevitably collaborating with HISTORY, because remember BOOKS BEGAT BOOKS.

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2 book artists who illustrate this point in a very practical way are Oliver Chardin & Adam Bromberg who have adopted a hermit crab approach to book making by choosing to live in books other than their own.  In one instance they chose to live in the Bible and pasted into it contemporary images of displacement and war – next to/over the existing text.  ( might the Koran be next?)

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Collaboration is something like those porous European borders we see in what was Yugoslavia/Soviet Union or what has become the blurred line between combatants and civilians. 

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The point of collaboration is not to colonize someone else, but rather to see if you have the courage to neuter your moves and be willing to engage in a true partnership.

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– Sixth & Seventh Rule of Book Club – 

– (I get to embellish AND talk about it.)

 

At this point I’d like to forage among my own books and tell the story of : 

 

GUARDING BONES.  Here I’d rather use the work embroider rather than embellish because our 84-year-old neighbour is a passionate quilter.  She makes quilts in the same way I make my collages/photo montages – by cutting out and  assembling different bits of cloth then joining them up into a single piece.  She cuts & sews.  I  cut and glue.  This book began when I saw a display of Margaret’s quilts and when I made the connection between text & textile.  The textiles have been hand and machine sewn on Magnani paper and the text, hand-written, on paper or cloth…TOUCH is at the core of this book… the touch we want to impart to someone who’s no longer there to accept it… the book makes that hopeless attempt to resurrect my dead father or to make that connection which you yearn for, only after it’s too late.  I don’t  believe there’s  a single reading but the red cloth is lifeblood, the black is mourning, the visible stitching, a naked wish for reconciliation and the wobbly bits of thread, the hankering for coherence/stability.  Why the embellishment of a Coptic binding?  Faith must have something to do with it…Copts stack their books one on top of the other: flat in the same way a body is laid flat in a coffin- a kind of acknowledgement for another persecuted group – especially in Egypt – but also I think the exposed spine aesthetically suits what’s going on inside – and finally, I hadn’t used such a binding before – and it was time.

A GARDENER AT MIDNIGHT

There’s a story about Harry Dean Stanton which, if we take it in, will grant us our graduating degree from the School of Embellishment.  Harry Dean was a bit part actor in Hollywood) until Wim Wenders gave him the lead in Paris Texas… at that moment Harry Dean knew he was out of his depth… confusion…so he visited Jack Nicholson who told him not to panic because the costume and make-up departments would do the trick.   Nicholson’s advice was to let the clothes and make up do the acting… the story telling.

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An example of how that might work can be seen if we take a quick look at how 

A GARDENER AT MIDNIGHT is dressed…  Let’s look at the cover… because there is a bevy of 18th and 19th Century bells & whistles there; raised bands on the spine; its size (once a librarian identified it as an elephant folio)  I began to love it even more; 1/2 Moroccan goat leather; gold tooling; the desert red and desert sky blue cloth.

… I’d like to think that I’ve clued in the reader even before they open the book.

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BRIDGE

Is a collaboration with George Matoulas. George and I are great fans of the publisher Teriade who encouraged both the visual artists and writers he worked with to hand-write their texts – we see it for example in Matisse’s book Jazz and in Picasso & Reverdy’s Chants de Morts… a handwritten text tells the reader they’re in a private or personal space.     (Notice how one language starts where the other one ends-as a continuum, rather than having the origianal text on the left hand page and the translation on the right)

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To forage, one more time:

Emily Dickinson wrote by hand; usually on scraps of papers with a text full of dashes and a zany sense of punctuation and spacing.  She was easily offended by uniformity and for that reason  she disliked having her work published… so

can anyone make any claim to have read Dickinson until they’ve at least seen facsimiles of the originals…?

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Are PAGE NUMBERS

    useful or an embellishment?  I’ve never been a fan… I take my cue from B.S. Johnson’s unpaginated and unbound book The Unfortunates where each page is boxed and loose and can be read in any order and still make sense… I’d expect such a move from a French writer but not from an English author.  Respect!

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Up until I’d made THE ELDER PAINTS AN ICON with Petr Herel,

I had all my books bound. When we were getting to the end of our collaboration I asked Petr who we’d get to bind the book; his response, in a dark, thick Czech accent which stretched way back to Kafka said:… bloody bindings – like a coffin –  I immediately became a believer so the book was boxed in the tradition of Vollard, Skira, Teriade and the rest.

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This brings us to BOXES… which take their cue from Europe, especially turn of the century France…

     UNREPENTANT is a homage to the poet Yiannis Ritsos 

and rests in a box designed and made by Nicholas Pounder… the grey box refers back to the rocky uninhabited islands where in 70’s Greece the Colonels imprisoned those who opposed them.  The front endpaper is black for mourning and the back endpaper is Communist red and playing against all this, is the pure white, textured title page whose feel and look spell out HOPE… each page is interleaved with tissue paper, so when the pages are turned there’s the bonus of something like a sound track…

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USING COLOUR

Colour always means something:

RED can mean; the Soviet Union; lifeblood; Communism; Revolution (think of the poster of Che on the wall of your student digs)

BLACK can mean; mourning; Anarchism (a lot of black in Paris in May 1968); Death; depression

GREEN can mean; the environment; Gadaffi’s green book; the Iranian Revolution; the Green Book which provided blacks in America with a guide of where it was safe to travel and stay in God’s own country.

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So colour directs our reading – and colours don’t run     away from meaning.

A SERIES OF LITTLE RED BOOKS

All with a hard-headed political line… my guide here is John Heartfield who from the chaos of 40’s Germany told me to use photography as a weapon… so it’s all propaganda – but propaganda always on the side of the angels. It’s in here that the BODY COUNT blows out…..now let the argument begin.

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Why Red?  Maybe Mao?  No, the real driver were the Gideons. During primary school the Gideons would visit on the first day of each school year and give each kid a Gideon’s Bible – The New Testament… and the pimply, red cover stayed with me.  The Gideons also did a sweep of motels.

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So far there are 4 little red books in the series and I’ve embellished each with its own bookmark.

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(Foraging again, 

I did find a spoke in the wheel of colour because during Mao’s Great Leap Forward citizens were expected to stop at the green traffic light and go on the red.)

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One can embellish the codex by fashioning it into an ACCORDION – which, when unfolded will open into a single long sheet – like a scroll… I thought about it, once, but never committed… however I have used the embellishment of the fold; where 2 pages became 4 in:

 

LEAF

because I was determined I wouldn’t let the current digital technology and cost limit/ undermine the book I’d already made in my head…

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But there is La Prose du Transsiberien, et de la Petite Jehanne de France… a colloaboration between Blaise Cendrars & Sonia Delaunay not only was this the first example of abstract art in book form, it unfolded into a 2 metre high obect and if the whole edition was placed end to end it would have measured in at the same height as the Eiffel Tower.

(2 things:  

that sort of thinking doesn’t come cheap; 

and it’s impossible to go up against it.)

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USE OF PAPERS

Each paper has its own feel.

 

THE HARMED CIRCLE

was made in response to the A.I.D.S. epidemic.  A friend I wanted to work with and who had the lead in You’re A Good Man, Charlie Brown took ill, the illness became a cold, which became flu, which became A.I.D.S., which became death.  This is an album – remember the album – and how it did all the heavy lifting of our past; of our memories?  I wanted the paper to have the feel of parched, dead skin and Arches was perfect for that… and the images are montages mostly sourced from magazines, which at the time, were just waking up to the buying power of the pink dollar.

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EYEWITNESS

 

USING DRAWING & PAINT

which are not printed or reproduced but applied directly to the pages of the book; so

each copy in the edition is in fact unique.

 

3 of us collaborated here – so there was no option but to assume the embellishment position.  Monica Oppen created the slipcase and binding… the featured stitching refers to prisoners sewing their lips to make a point of not having a voice; the dried blood points to the beatings and the vertical lines are symbolic of prison bars – the number?  Remember David Hicks?

 

Theo Strasser hand-painted the abstract markings and I wrote the text.

 

Theo and I printed the images and headlines using what was being featured in newspapers at the time of Shocks & Awe.

(None of this, of course, is intended to congratulate Monica, Theo or myself, but rather it’s meant to praise the Mitchell Library whose curators included Eyewitness in the One Hundred exhibition (2010) which spotlighted the Library’s 100 most treasured acquisitions).

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USE OF ENDPAPERS:

 

these act as the prelude to the story – even before the title page does its work.

 

WHY:  A PLAY FOR 2 VOICES

 

sure the human form is there, but not in a real sense – the people have been disappeared and are visible only as thermal images seen through the night vision sights of a gun.

 

THE USE OF TITLES

 

for the painter, Robert Rauschenberg, the title was:

… the last layer of colour

 

and I reckon he’s right

and I reckon some of my titles are all right, too.

 

A GARDENER AT MIDNIGHT

WHAT THE MOON LET ME SEE

THE SHADOWS WE LEAVE BEHIND

3 CHEERS FOR CIVILIZATION

GUARDING BONES

(If only an established writer, lets say Thomas Keneally or Helen Garner had titles like this, I’m sure they’d double their sales; and get Netflix deals as well)

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The ideal response to these books is for the reader to think they’re looking but to be open to being flipped and finding instead, they’ve been journeying/travelling.

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it’s embellishments such a these which prevent THE CODEX from sinking into the self-congratulatory swamp… where paintings and most mass-produced books live) … book artists have prevented the CODEX from developing arthritis and eventually rigor-mortis… they are the people who renew interest in the book and re-awaken the desire for them

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– The Eighth Rule of Book Club –

(Never go a bridge too far)

 

MARGINALIA

do embellish a book… they can be a record of boredom, distraction or total immersion.  When I was making What She Wants with Urszula Dawkins and we were nearing the end I suggested we FAKE some marginalia.  I’d just read that Grahame Greene’s library had sold for big dollars – its value wasn’t so much in the books dedicated to Greene or his first editions, but rather it was in what Greene had written in the margins of books.

Most people know that FAKING is a no, no…, but I was determined.  I looked at Urszula’s text, found the sweet spots and wrote in pencil things like:

Room of One’s Own?  

     Love this bit & so would Germaine; 

     very Gertrude Stienish!!!  With 3 exclamation marks for emphasis.  

     Then she sorted through my images and wrote in pencil:

German expressionism!!!  Also with 3 exclamation marks 

     Caspar David Friedrich was here; 

     Margitte/Bosch?

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FAIL, FAIL AGAIN, FAIL WORSE to misquote Sam Beckett… 

time to forage again… reading through the 2 volumes of Beckett’s letters I was impressed by the very detailed ANNOTATIONS.

– which are another embellishment… and they added to the Beckett story because they told me on returning to Ireland via London in 1945, Customs seized the manuscript of WATT because they figured it contained coded messages to the enemy – why else would anyone write like that?  

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– Ninth Rule of Book Club –

(Never say Look at me!  Look at me!  Look!)

 

When a person ORNAMENTS/DECORATES something, they presume someone else is watching and waiting to be amazed.  Boy George said it years ago when he & Culture Club sang about kissing to be clever.

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Embellishments shouldn’t be window-dressing… although there’s always that temptation, isn’t there?

 

like those syrupy Greek sweets or French nouvelle cuisine… where embellishment can at first lick seem so yummy, but in the end all you end up with is a gut-ache in the brain.

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I have seen the best books of my generation:

sculpted into shapes

 (if it comes to shapes I prefer Arnott’s Savoury Shapes)…

arranged to look like furniture cut into letters of the alphabet

made into walls to close off doorways and turned upside down, suspended and made to look like the wings of birds.

 

Not for me;

though I have to acknowledge Marta Minujin who re-built The Parthenon during Documenta 14… her building blocks were banned books.

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The Age newspaper recently told me I could commission a BOOK STYLIST to curate my books.  Could we justifiably say such a move would embellish a library – and even YOURSELF ONCE YOUR BOOKS WERE:

 

colour co-ordinated

arranged according to size

or separated into countries of origin.

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Ornamentation may also be achieved by establishing a brand name which as Philip Roth tells us, can become celebrity; witness: 

 

P.G. Wodenhouse’s bungling upper-crust Englishman.  

Salvador Dali’s soft watches

Elvis’s snarl/hips (make your own choice)

Robert Mapplethorpe’s dicks

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As a book-artist I don’t think you should be sucked into a signature move.

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THE END

(I make books.)

 

WHO ARE YOU GOING TO CALL

in the face of 

     the fragmentation of collapsing empires

war creeping up from the end of your street

and the imploding of seemingly permanent barriers of class, gender & racial privilege?

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IT’S THE TIME FOR A HERO

& THE CODEX IS UP FOR IT

… but like every other hero, 

it steps gingerly between the lines of self-destruction

and self-dramatization.

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I was born twice

to steal a line from Jeffery Eugenides:

the first time to a Mum in a Greek Cypriot village and the second time the minute I entered a book.

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Hunter S. Thompson, the guru of Gonzo Journalism described what he was doing as:

… trying to learn how to fly while falling…

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and each time I get to making a book, it’s that feeling, exactly … and though I haven’t yet learnt HOW TO FLY long distances, I’ve become really good at FALLING and I’ve learnt that falling is the first and most important skill, in a lot of things – and now I’m learning how to fall without breaking (as well as how to break once I’ve slipped and fallen.)

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MAKING BOOKS has been a way of getting to know the world & myself – and of knowing what I know.

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BY MAKING BOOKS I get to reassure myself – in the same way that whistling in the dark re-assures me.

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MAKING THESE BOOKS gives me another glimpse of what it’s like to be stranded, (but that’s o.k. because I know these books are also my rescue party.)

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HAVING MADE THESE BOOKS doesn’t mean they have finally figured out what they want to become.

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BY MAKING THESE BOOKS I know I have somewhere to record my stories; especially those which I can’t bear to even tell myself.

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MAKING THESE BOOKS convinces me that standard – issue/established authors have NO idea… they get on the codex the same way I get a tram, a bus, a train, a taxi… they piggy-back on the codex while dreaming of reviews and top 10’s at the end of the year

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BY MAKING THESE BOOKS I’ve understood how they demand time… and if we acknowledge that the final end point of progress is to colonise our thinking, then books – with their demands on our time and with their ability to apply the handbrake at the very moment history is telling us to rush, then they  might be     just might be      the grains of sand which cause the machine to malfunction or doubt itself…

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MAKING THESE BOOKS gives me the privilege of putting Art made by human hand directly into the hands of another person.

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These books are on a MISSION to herald the coming of THE PERFECT BOOK

and 

the perfect book will sing…

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AND

it’s the libraries and librarians who with their understanding and acquisition of these books, in their editions of 5/10/20 copies

 

AND

groups and societies such as this one which keep these books in a space which acknowledges their relevance and ensures their circulation…

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… it may be a roll of the dice BUT 

as Marianne Faithful tells us on her album Broken English… danger is a great joy.