Philip Harvey
Quite uninformed about the meaning of the term
‘metafiction’, my daughter recently converted a book on this subject into an
art object. The book was duplicate and probably lying about the place waiting
to be turned into a paper pyramid. With scrupulous attention to margins and
edges, she folded in each of the 95 leaves (10 opening pages + 176 numbered
pages + 4 end pages) of ‘Metaficton : the Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious
Fiction’ by Patricia Waugh (Methuen, 1984, ISBN 0-416-32640-4 (Pbk.)) one
weekend, as the spirit moved her. The cover was removed. Title page and back
fly-leaf were fixed together with a silver pin and she even did something very
quirky, leaving one leaf (pp. 5-6) unfolded so it quivered in the air. This act
was much too unself-conscious to be called either craft or art: she did it
because she felt like it. I am the person who calls it an art object. Here is
my daughter’s booktree (her word) of an old paperback on metafiction. It is
chance that she chose this particular book, though the irony of the final
object would not be lost on academics who make a living out of teaching
metafiction. She creates these things because she feels like it, so booktrees
can be found around our house, and even in the garden. Lisa Occhipinti, in her
book ‘The Repurposed Library’ calls this kind of creation a “pleated
sculpture”.
BRIDGET HARVEY
Occhipinti’s book itself comes in for criticism of its own
in David Pearson’s Foxcroft Lecture. “What we need to do … is recognise that
the areas where [books’] key value lies is changing, and we should give much
more attention to books as material objects, rather than as words on pages. If
we don’t, there is a threat that a different kind of approach to books as
objects may take hold.”
Pearson then talks about finding the Occhipinti book in the
British Library Bookshop. He says: “It’s all about taking orphaned and outdated
books and turning them into sculptures, decorations, or useful household
objects – a hanging mirror, a lampshade, narrative vases.” One can hear him
shudder as he announces that this phenomenon is “taking off”, and continues
ominously: “There is going to be a lot more discarding of books going on in the
wake of digitisation, and a growing questioning of the necessity for ongoing
investment in big physical libraries. If we don’t generate a broad recognition
of these different kinds of cultural values and unique qualities that can be
found among our books and collections, the wrong books will get turned into
lampshades.”
Personally, I don’t take Lisa Occhipinti’s book so
seriously. It (‘The Repurposed Library : 33 Craft Projects that give old Books
new Life. Stewart, Tabori & Chang, 2011, ISBN 978-1-58479-909-2) is an
innocent, even innocuous, example of the literature on the books arts. If
anything it should be classified under home decoration, not book arts, as her
main interest is, as Pearson says, to turn books into mobiles, clocks, locket
boxes, and other domestic objects. She even turns books into switch plates and
fireplace screens. At any moment one expects the classic whisky flask secreted
in a hollowed out encyclopedia. Most of the thirty-three craft ideas use the
book as base material, they are not pretending to make statements or leave us
thinking.
David Pearson’s indignation reveals a contradiction in his
argument. If we live in a world of expendable books in their millions, now that
digital has taken over, is it not surprising that Occhipinti book craft will
escalate? What to do with all this old stuff just lying around? Almost anything
is up for repurposing. But meanwhile Pearson’s own arguments for sequestering
books in select libraries with limited access are themselves a case of
inutility that defies the purpose for which the book was made in the first
place. His anxiety about the “wrong books” being made into craft objects is
hardly helpful if he espouses that they instead be put into collections where
they cannot be accessed, there to languish in obscurity, the fulfilment of
Anthony Powell’s dictum, “Books do furnish a room.”
Thus do we find ourselves, between the excess that justifies
artists and craftspeople to convert books into something else, and the scarcity
that could turn what was once dime a dozen into something that millions of
dollars cannot retrieve. Somewhere between these two extremes exists the
discernment of the knowledgeable librarian.
BRIDGET HARVEY
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