Calle's seminal 1979 series of people sleeping in her bed: now in English

In one of Sophie Calle's first artistic experiments, she invited friends, acquaintances and strangers to sleep in her bed. Twenty-seven people agreed, among them a baker, a babysitter, an actor, a journalist, a seamstress, a trumpet player and three painters. Calle photographed them awake and asleep, secretly recording any private conversations once the door closed. She served each a meal, and, if they agreed, she subjected them to a questionnaire that probed their personal predilections, habits and dreams as well as their interpretations of the act of sleeping in her bed: a curiosity, a game, an artwork, or--as Calle intended it--a job. The result, comprising her first exhibition in 1979, was a grid of 198 photographs and short texts.
Unlike the original installation, this artist's book version of The Sleepers contains not only all the photographs and captions but also her engrossing, novellalike narrative, untranslated until now. From the single, liminal mise-en-scène of her bedroom, Calle reports in text and photos, as if in real time, as sleepers arrive, talk, sleep, eat and leave. Their acute and sometimes startling, sometimes endearing particularities merge into something almost like an eight-day-long dream. Many seeds of Calle's subsequent works are embedded in The Sleepers: her exacting and transgressive methods of investigation, her cultivation of intimacy and remove, and her unrelenting curiosity. In this work, as she observes the sleepers, they observe her too--with reciprocal candor. The Sleepers, clothbound and pillow-like, unfolds as it opens, inviting the reader to join the others in Calle's bed.

A forensic conceptualist's inventory of the ordinary and extraordinary lives in a Venetian hotel

In 1981 Sophie Calle took a job as a chambermaid for the Hotel C in Venice, Italy. Stashing her camera and tape recorder in her mop bucket, she not only cleans and tidies, but sorts through the evidence of the hotel guests' lives. Assigned 12 rooms on the fourth floor, she surveys the state of the guests' bedding, their books, newspapers and postcards, perfumes and cologne, traveling clothes and costumes for Carnival. She methodically photographs the contents of closets and suitcases, examining the detritus in the rubbish bin and the toiletries arranged on the washbasin. She discovers their birth dates and blood types, diary entries, letters from and photographs of lovers and family. She eavesdrops on arguments and love-making. She retrieves a pair of shoes from the wastebasket and takes two chocolates from a neglected box of sweets, while leaving behind stashes of money, pills and jewelry. Her thievery is the eye of the camera, observing the details that were not meant for her, or us, to see.
The Hotel now manifests as a book for the first time in English (it was previously included in the book Double Game). Collaborating with the artist on a new design that features enhanced and larger photographs, and pays specific attention to the beauty of the book as an object, Siglio is releasing its third book authored by Calle, after The Address Book (2012) and Suite Vénitienne (2015).
Sophie Calle (born 1953) is an internationally renowned artist whose controversial works often fuse conceptual art and Oulipo-like constraints, investigatory methods and the plundering of autobiography. The Whitechapel Gallery in London organized a retrospective in 2009, and her work has been shown at the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Hayward Gallery and Serpentine, London; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, among others. She lives and works in Paris.

Calle's first artist's book documents her pursuit of one man through the streets of Venice

After following strangers on the streets in Paris for months, photographing them and notating their movements, Sophie Calle ran into a man at an opening whom she had followed earlier that day. During the course of our conversation, he told me he was planning an imminent trip to Venice. I decided to follow him, she writes at the beginning of Suite Vénitienne, her first artist's book and the crucible of her inimitable fusion of investigatory methods, fictional constructs, the plundering of real life and the composition of self. Over the course of almost two weeks in Venice, Calle notates, in time-stamped entries, her surveillance of Henri B., as well as her own emotions as she seeks, finds and follows him through the labyrinthine streets of Venice. Her investigation is both methodical (calling every hotel, visiting the police station) and arbitrary (sometimes following a stranger--a flower delivery boy, for instance--hoping someone might lead her to him). This Siglio reissue is a completely new iteration of Suite Vénitienne (first published in 1988 and long out of print), designed in collaboration with Calle to be the definitive English-language edition. Printed on Japanese paper with a die-cut cover and gilded edges, this beautiful new Siglio edition allows readers to devour this crucial and compelling work.

Sophie Calle (born 1953) is an internationally renowned artist whose controversial works explore the tensions between the observed, the reported, the secret and the unsaid. She has mounted solo shows at major museums around the world and represented France at the Venice Biennale in 2007. Her most recent US exhibition was the acclaimed Rachel, Monique at the Episcopal Church of the Heavenly Rest in Manhattan in 2014.

The Address Book, a key and controversial work in Sophie Calle's oeuvre, lies at the epicenter of many layers of reality and fiction. Having found a lost address book on the street in Paris, Calle copied the pages before returning it anonymously to its owner. She then embarked on a search to come to know this stranger by contacting listed individuals--in essence, following him through the map of his acquaintances. Originally published as a serial in the newspaper Lib ration over the course of one month, her incisive written accounts with friends, family and colleagues, juxtaposed with photographs, yield vivid subjective impressions of the address book's owner, Pierre D., while also suggesting ever more complicated stories as information is parsed and withheld by the people she encounters. Collaged through a multitude of details--from the banal to the luminous, this fragile and strangely intimate portrait of Pierre D. is a prism through which to see the desire for, and the elusivity of, knowledge. Upon learning of this work and its publication in the newspaper, Pierre D. expressed his anger, and Calle agreed not to republish the work until after his death. Until then, The Address Book had only been described in English--as the work of the character Maria Turner, whom Paul Auster based on Calle in his novel Leviathan; and in Double Game, Calle's monograph which converses with Auster's novel. This is the first trade publication in English of The Address Book (Gemini G.E.L. in Los Angeles released a suite of lithographs modeled on the original tabloid pages from Lib ration in an edition of 24). The book has the physical weight and feel of an actual address book with a new design of text and images which allow the story to unfold and be savored by the reader.

A revelatory volume on an occluded genre of Indian art, Tantra Song is a convergence of East and West, the spiritual and the aesthetic, the ancient and the modern

This collection of rare, abstract Tantra drawings was conceived when the French poet Franck Andr Jamme stumbled on a small catalogue of Tantric art at a Paris bookseller's stall. The volume included writings by Octavio Paz and Henri Michaux, and Jamme became fascinated by the images' affinity with modern art and poetry. He read voraciously and even journeyed to India, searching in vain for Tantric practitioners, until a bus accident on the road to Jaipur sent him home to France with serious injuries. When he returned a few years later, he met a soothsayer who proclaimed that Jamme had now paid sufficient tribute to the goddess Shakti and required him to take a vow: he must visit the tantrikas alone or only in the company of a loved one. Since then, Jamme has gained extraordinary access to very private communities of adepts and their intensely beautiful works. These contemporary, anonymous drawings from Rajasthan are unlike the more familiar strands of Tantric art--the geometric yantras, or erotic illustrations of the Kama Sutra. The progeny of seventeenth-century illustrated religious treatises, these drawings have evolved into a distinct visual lexicon designed to awaken heightened states of consciousness and are imbued with specific spiritual meanings (e.g. spirals and arrows for energy, an inverted triangle for Shakti). A revelatory volume on this occluded genre of Indian art, Tantra Song is a convergence of east and west, the spiritual and the aesthetic, the ancient and the modern.

Franck Andr Jamme is the author of more than a dozen volumes of poetry. His translated workds (by John Ashbery, Charles Borkuis, David Kelley and others) include New Exercises, Another Silent Attack, The Recitation of Forgetting and Extracts of the Life of a Beetle. He has collaborated on books with a number of artists including Philippe Favier, Suzan Frecon, Acharya Vyakul and Hanns Schimansk. A specialist in Art Brut, Tantric and tribal art of India, he has participated in exhibitions at Centre Pompidou, Beaux-Art de Paris and The Drawing Center, among others.

A revered classic of 1970s New York conceptualism, Bernadette Mayer's Memory synthesizes writing and photography in this prescient emotional science project

A New York Times Book Review 2020 holiday gift guide pick

In July 1971, Bernadette Mayer embarked on an experiment: for one month she shot a roll of 35mm film each day and kept a journal. The result was a conceptual work that investigates the nature of memory, its surfaces, textures and material. Memory is both monumental in scope (over 1,100 photographs, two hundred pages of text and six hours of audio recording) and a groundbreaking work by a poet who is widely regarded as one of the most innovative experimental writers of her generation. Presaging Mayer's durational, constraint-based diaristic works of poetry, it also evinces her extraordinary--and often unheralded--contribution to conceptual art.

Mayer has called Memory an emotional science project, but it is far from confessional. This boldly experimental record follows the poet's eye as she traverses early morning into night, as quotidian minutiae metamorphose into the lyrical, as her stream of consciousness becomes incantatory. In text and image, Mayer constructs the mercurial consciousness of the present moment from which memory is--as she says--always there, to be entered, like the world of dreams or an ongoing TV show.

This publication brings together the full sequence of images and text for the first time in book form, making space for a work that has been legendary but mostly invisible. Originally exhibited in 1972 by pioneering gallerist Holly Solomon, it was not shown again in its entirety until 2016 at the Poetry Foundation in Chicago and then again in 2017 in New York City at the CANADA Gallery. The text was published without the photographs in 1975 by North Atlantic Books in an edition that has long been out of print.

Bernadette Mayer (born 1945) is the author of over 30 books, including the acclaimed Midwinter Day (1982), a book-length poem written during a single day in Lenox, Massachusetts, The Desires of Mothers to Please Others in Letters (1994) and Work and Days (2016), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Associated with the New York School as well as the Language poets, Mayer has also been an influential teacher and editor. In the art world, she is best known for her collaboration with Vito Acconci as editors of the influential mimeographed magazine 0 TO 9.

A revelatory anthology of poems, experimental prose and previously unpublished work by Madeline Gins, the transdisciplinary writer-artist-thinker famed for her Reversible Destiny architecture

Poet, philosopher, speculative architect and transdisciplinary artist, Madeline Gins is well known for her collaborations with her husband, the artist Arakawa, on the experimental architectural project Reversible Destiny, in which they sought to arrest mortality by transforming the built environment. Yet, her own writings--in the form of poetry, essays, experimental prose and philosophical inquiries--represent her most visionary and transformative work. Like Gertrude Stein before her, Gins transfigures grammar and liberates words. Like her contemporaries in conceptual art, her writing is attuned to the energized, collaborative space between reader and page.

The Saddest Thing Is That I Have Had to Use Words: A Madeline Gins Reader is a revelatory anthology, edited and with an introduction by the writer and critic Lucy Ives. It brings never-before-published poems and essays together with a complete facsimile reproduction of Gins' 1969 masterpiece, WORD RAIN (or A Discursive Introduction to the Intimate Philosophical Investigations of G, R, E, T, A, G, A, R, B, O, It Says), along with substantial excerpts from her two later books What the President Will Say and Do!! (1984) and Helen Keller or Arakawa (1994). Long out of print or unpublished, Gins' poems and prose form a powerful corpus of experimental literature, one which is sure to upend existing narratives of American poetics at the close of the 20th century.

Born in the Bronx and long a resident of New York City, Madeline Gins (1941-2014) participated in experimental artistic and literary movements of the 1960s and '70s before developing a collaborative practice as a philosopher and architect. Alongside her own writing, Gins collaborated with her husband, the artist Arakawa, on a theory of procedural architecture, an endeavor to create buildings and environments that would prevent human death.

Grief emphatic, grief redeeming, grief protacted, grief abraded all intertwine in this funny, prickly memoir. -David Denby, The New Yorker

With fearlessness and grace, Bough Down reports from deep inside the maelstrom of grief. In this profoundly beautiful and intensely moving lament, artist and writer Karen Green conjures the inscrutable space of love and loss, clarity and contradiction, sense and madness. She summons memory and the machination of the interior mind with the emotional acuity of music as she charts her passage through the devastation of her husband's suicide. In crystalline fragments of text, Green's voice is paradoxically confessional and non-confessional: moments in her journey are devastating but also luminous, exacting in sensation but also ambiguous and layered in meaning. Her world is haunted by the unnameable, and yet she renders that world with poetic precision in her struggle to make sense of not only of death but of living. In counterpoint, tiny visual collages punctuate the text, each made of salvaged language and scraps of the material world--pages torn from books, bits of paper refuse, drawings and photographs, old postage stamps and the albums which classify them. Each collage--and the creative act of making it--evinces the reassembling of life. A breathtaking lyric elegy, Bough Down uses music and silence, color and its absence, authority of experience and the doubt that trembles at its center to fulfill a humane artistic vision. This is a lapidary, keenly observed work, awash with the honesty of an open heart.

Fifteen years of Joe Brainard's illustrated appropriation of classic comic strip character, Nancy

From 1963 to 1978, Joe Brainard created more than 100 artworks that appropriated the classic comic strip character Nancy and sent her into a variety of astonishing situations. The Nancy Book is the first collection of Brainard's Nancy texts, drawings, collages and paintings, with full page reproductions of more than 50 works, several of which have never been exhibited or published before.

A biography by Nicole Rudick told in Saint Phalle's own words, assembled from rare and unseen materials

Known best for her exuberant, often large-scale sculptural works that celebrate the abundance and complexity of female desire, imagination and creativity, Niki de Saint Phalle viewed making art as a ritual, a performance--a process connecting life to art. This unconventional, illuminated biography, told in the first person in Saint Phalle's voice and her own hand, dilates large and small moments in Saint Phalle's life which she sometimes reveals with great candor, at other times carefully unwinding her secrets. Nicole Rudick, in a kind of collaboration with the artist, has assembled a gorgeous and detailed mosaic of Saint Phalle's visual and textual works from a trove of paintings, drawings, sketches and writings, many previously unpublished or long unavailable, that trace her mistakes and successes, her passions and her radical sense of joy. Saint Phalle's invocation--her bringing to life--writes Rudick, is an apt summation of the overlap of Saint Phalle's life and art: both a bringing into existence and a bringing to bear. These are visions from the frontiers of consciousness.

Born in France, Niki de Saint Phalle (1930-2002) was raised in New York and began making art at age 23, pursuing a revelatory vision informed both by the monumental works of Antonin Gaudí and the Facteur Cheval, and by aspects of her own life. In addition to her Tirs (shooting paintings) and Nanas and her celebrated large-scale projects--including the Stravinsky Fountain at the Centre Pompidou, Golem in Jerusalem and the Tarot Garden in Tuscany--Saint Phalle produced writing and works on paper that delve into her own biography: childhood and her break with her family, marriage to Harry Mathews, motherhood, a long collaborative relationship with Jean Tinguely, numerous health crises and her late, productive years in Southern California. Saint Phalle has most recently been the subject of retrospectives at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, in 2015, and at MoMA P.S.1, in 2021.

Nicole Rudick is a critic and an editor. Her writing on art, literature and comics has been published in the New York Review of Books, the New York Times, the New Yorker, Artforum and elsewhere. She was managing editor of the Paris Review for nearly a decade. She is the editor, most recently, of a new edition of Gary Panter's legendary comic Jimbo: Adventures in Paradise (New York Review Comics, 2021).

Over 16 years, beginning in 1965, John Cage compiled anecdotes, observations and koanlike tales, originally typing everything on an IBM Selectric and using chance methods to determine the formatting of texts that twist down each page. The Siglio edition preserves the graphic effects, but, more important, it gives a sense of the company he kept during these years--Marcel Duchamp, R. Buckminster Fuller, D.T. Suzuki--and of his passionate feeling about a world locked in a state of perpetual warfare. Cage has a reputation for being a Zen-inspired wit. He was also much more, an intensely engaged moral thinker. -Holland Cotter, New York Times

Now available in an expanded paperback edition, Diary registers Cage's assessment of the times in which he lived as well as his often uncanny portents about the world we live in now. With a great sense of play as well as purpose, Cage traverses vast territory, from the domestic minutiae of everyday life to ideas about how to feed the world. He used chance operations to determine not only the word count and the application of various typefaces but also the number of letters per line, the patterns of indentation, and--in the case of Part Three, originally published by Something Else Press--color. The unusual visual variances on the page become almost musical as language takes on a physical and aural presence.

While Cage used chance operations to expand the possibilities of creating and shaping his work beyond the limitations of individual taste, Diary nonetheless accumulates into a complex reflection of Cage's sensibilities as a thinker and citizen of the world, illuminating his social and political awareness, as well as his idealism and sense of humor: it becomes an oblique but indelible portrait of one the most influential figures of the 20th-century American avant-garde.

Collecting all eight parts into a single volume, coeditors Joe Biel and Richard Kraft also used chance operations to render the entire text in various combinations of red and blue (used by Dick Higgins and Alison Knowles for Part Three) as well as to apply a single set of 18 fonts to the entire work. In the editors' note, Kraft and Biel elucidate the procedure of chance operations and demonstrate its application, giving readers a rare opportunity to see how the text is transformed.

This expanded paperback edition reproduces the 2015 hardback edition, with a new essay by mycologist and Cage aficionado David Rose and, most important, an addendum that includes many facsimile pages of Cage's handwritten notebook of a ninth part in progress, bringing the reader into compelling proximity to Cage's process and the raw material from which Diary was made.

A new edition of artist-poet Cecilia Vicu a's artist's book on the politics of the sea

Beginning and ending at the edge of the ocean at the sacred mouth of the Aconcagua River, About to Happen serves as a lament as well as love letter to the sea. In this artist's book, Chilean-born artist and poet Cecilia Vicu a weaves personal and ancestral memory while summoning the collective power to confront the economic disparities and environmental crises of the 21st century.

Collecting the detritus that washes up on shore, Vicu a assembles out of the refuse tiny precarios and basuritas--little sculptures held together with nothing more than string and wire, which she sometimes makes as offerings to be reclaimed by the sea.

About to Happen traces a decades-long practice that has refused categorical distinctions and thrived within the confluences of conceptual art, land art, feminist art, performance and poetry. Vicu a's nuanced visual poetics--operating fluidly between concept and craft, text and textile--transforms the discarded into the elemental, paying acute attention to the displaced, the marginalized and the forgotten.

From the author of Bough Down, a found, collaged and lovingly amended inquiry into how women disappear

Artist and writer Karen Green's second book originated in a search for a woman who had vanished: her Aunt Constance whom Green knew only from a few family photos and keepsakes. In her absence, Green has constructed an elliptical arrangement of artifacts from an untold life. In this rescued history, Green imagines for her aunt a childhood in which she is bold, reckless, perspicacious, mischievous; an adolescence ripe with desire and scarred by violation and loss; and an adulthood in which she strives to sing above the incessant din of violence.

Constance--one half of a sister duo put to work performing as musical prodigies in the dirt-poor town of Oil City, Pennsylvania. during the Great Depression--escapes as a teenager to the USO and tours a ravaged Italy during World War II. Soon after she returns to an unsparing life in New York City, she disappears. Green traces her dissolution in a deftly composed trove of letters Constance writes to her beloved sister and those she receives from dozens of men smitten by her stage persona, along with her drawings, collages and altered photographs.

Though told mostly from Constance's point of view, Frail Sister is also haunted by the voices of the transient, the absent and the dead. The letters (a few real, many invented) expose not only the quotidian reality of war but also the ubiquitous brutality it throws into relief.

Nimble, darkly funny and poignant, Frail Sister is possessed by the disappeared, giving voice to the voiceless, bringing into a focus a life disintegrating at every edge.

Dick Higgins and his Something Else Press epitomized the riotous art of the '60s

There are few art-world figures as influential--and as little known--as Dick Higgins (1938-98), cofounder of Fluxus, polyartist, poet, scholar, theorist, composer, performer and, not least, the publisher of the legendary Something Else Press. In 1965 he restored the term intermedia to the English language, giving it new dimension to recognize the dissolution of boundaries between traditional modes of art-making and the open field for new forms that cannot be compartmentalized. His own contributions to intermedia are many--as a participant and instigator of happenings, as writer and composer straddling traditional and vanguard forms, among others--but it was Something Else Press (1963-74) that redefined how the book could inhabit that energized, in-between space.

Something Else Press was as much a critical statement and radical experiment as it was a collection of books by some of the most luminary artists and writers of the 20th century: Gertrude Stein, John Cage, Ray Johnson, Dieter Roth, Bern Porter, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Emmett Williams, Robert Filliou, and George Brecht, among many others. Along with his Great Bear Pamphlet series and the Something Else newsletter, Higgins exploited and subverted conventional book production and marketing strategies to get unconventional and avant-garde works into the hands of new and often unsuspecting readers.

Edited by Granary Books publisher Steve Clay and Fluxus artist Ken Friedman, this judiciously curated and indispensable compendium of essays, theoretical writings and narrative prose dives deep into the ever-influential ideas that Higgins explored in theory and practice. Clay and Friedman have chosen works that illuminate Higgins' voracious intellectual appetite, encyclopedic body of knowledge and playful yet rigorous experimentation in a selection that includes many writings long out of print or difficult to find.

Felix Gonzalez-Torres' text reveries on the intersections of the historical and the personal, gathered for the first time in this elegant clothbound volume

Felix Gonzalez-Torres (1957-96) is one of the most significant artists to have emerged in the 1980s. An artist whose beautiful, restrained and often mutable works are abundant in compelling contradictions, Gonzalez-Torres was committed to a democratic form of art informed as much by the aesthetic and conceptual as by politics. His work challenges authority and our obeisance to it, dissolves the delineations between public and private, and creates a rich, open field into which the viewer is invited to complete works with her own inferences, imagination, and actions.

The photostats are a series of fixed works with white text on black fields framed behind glass to create a reflective surface bringing the viewers' reflection into the work. Made at the height of the AIDS crisis, these profoundly suggestive lists of political, cultural, and historical references disrupt hierarchies of information and linear chronology, asking how we receive and prioritize information, how we remember and forget, and how we continuously create new meaning. The photostats also recall the screens (the television, and now the computer) which furiously deliver information from which we must parse substance from surface and choose what to assimilate and what to reject.

This elegant volume is a discrete space in which to closely read the photostats with sustained attention: it opens from both sides, reproducing the framed photostats as objects on one, and from the other, details of the texts can be read as writing. In between the two, original writings by M nica de la Torre and Ann Lauterbach, explore adjacent territories, signaling the multiple entry points for understanding the works.

This gemlike Ray Johnson book celebrates his friendship with writer and logophile William S. Wilson in pictures and words

A New York Times critics' pick Best Art Books 2020

Dubbed Ray Johnson's Boswell, writer and logophile William S. Wilson was one of legendary artist Ray Johnson's closest friends and biggest champions. He was also perhaps Johnson's most trusted poetic muse and synthesizer of referents and references. The influence was mutual: throughout their lifelong friendship, begun when both men were in their twenties, writer and artist challenged and enriched one another's work.

Published on the occasion of the exhibition of Ray Johnson works from Wilson's archive at the Art Institute of Chicago, Frog Pond Splash embodies the energy, expansiveness and motion of their work and their friendship. Editor Elizabeth Zuba has selected short, perspicacious texts by Wilson (from both published and unpublished writings) and collage works by Johnson to create juxtapositions that do not explicate or illustrate; rather, they form a loose collage-like letter of works and writings that are less bound than assembled, allowing the reader to put the pieces together, to respond, to add to and return to the way Johnson required of his correspondents and fellow travelers.

Taking its title from Wilson's haiku equivalence of Johnson's process, Frog Pond Splash is a small book but many things: a collage-like homage to their friendship, a treasure chest of prismatic correspondances, as well as an unusual portrait of the disappearing, fractured Johnson through Wilson's words. Zuba's nuanced selection and arrangement of images and texts in this sumptuous little volume honors Johnson's open system (which rejected closed and consistent meanings, codes and symbols) in its open, associative, and intimate playfulness.

A gorgeous book object engaging New Orleans' multilayered histories of race, art and politics, from the acclaimed Turner Prize winner

Convening polyphonous voices from past and present, I Will Keep My Soul is an orchestral layering of photography, historical documents, poetry and interviews, rooted in the history, geography and community of New Orleans. In this tactile artist's book, UK-based artist Helen Cammock (born 1970) traverses the city, rendering her observations and encounters into texts and images that reveal its invisible histories. These sequences are woven with correspondence and photographs from the Amistad Research Center that evince artist Elizabeth Catlett's struggle for agency and support during her 1976 commission to create a bronze monument to Louis Armstrong in Congo Square--a place laden with histories of both oppression and celebration. Cammock interlaces more archival materials--newspaper clippings, instructions for activists, a 19th-century book on Creole slave songs--to articulate the long struggle for civil rights. I Will Keep My Soul is a uniquely American story of art and activism, culture and capital, being and belonging.

The San Francisco artist Jess (1923-2004) has for decades been known to cognoscenti as an inventive and sophisticated master of the collage aesthetic. Recently however, his works are receiving fresh attention from a younger generation attuned to Jess' interests in myth, narrative and appropriation. Jess used images taken from sources ranging from Dick Tracy to D rer, from a Beatles bubblegum card to medical textbook drawings, from 1887 Scientific American line engravings to frames from George Herriman's Krazy Kat. In reexamining myth through a synthesis of art and literature, Jess' work remains a crucial assemblage of the meanings of our time. This volume brings to light collages, collage books, word poems and altered comics that have been largely inaccessible or unavailable since their making. Originally published in small editions and hard-to-find journals, or made as one-off artist's books, these works demonstrate the full range of Jess's extraordinary verbal and visual play. Several of Jess's surreal comic-strip manipulations, Tricky Cad (1954-1959), are reproduced for the first time in their entirety, as are others such as Ben Big Bolt and Nance that have never before been published. The book also includes a group of complex wraparound book covers, several unpublished collage poems, and two artist's books never before reproduced in full: From Force of Habit, a fantastic tale which plays with the pages of a Swedish cult sci-fi novel, and When a Young Lad Dreams of Manhood, a homoerotic paean (and naughty parody) of the priapic urge. A facsimile reproduction of the 20-page collage masterpiece O is included as a separate booklet, and the book sports a dustjacket that folds out into a poster-size collage.

A sumptuous facsimile of a vertiginous artist's book from the founder of the mail-art movement

Long out of print and unavailable to wider audiences, The Paper Snake is an essential work in Ray Johnson's oeuvre and the second title published by Dick Higgins' Something Else Press, in 1965. Johnson describes the book as all my writings, rubbings, plays, things that I had mailed to [Higgins] or brought to him in cardboard boxes or shoved under his door, or left in his sink, or whatever, over a period of years. A vertiginous, mind-bending artist's book, The Paper Snake was far ahead of its time. In his essay The Hatching of the Paper Snake, Higgins says: I was fascinated by the way that the small works which Ray Johnson used to send through the mail seemed so rooted in their moment and their context and yet somehow they seemed to acquire new and larger meaning as time went along ... Since a book is a more permanent body than a mailing piece or even than our own physical ones, I could not help wondering what it would be like to make a new body for Johnson's ideas as a sort of love letter or time capsule for the future. A collection of letters, little plays, tid-bits, collages and drawings, The Paper Snake connects disparate elements to unbed fixed relationships and forge new systems of meaning by means of scissors, paste and the American postal system.

Ray Johnson (1927-1995) blurred the boundaries of life and art, of authorship and intimacy. Correspondence is the defining character of all of Johnson's work, particularly his mail art. Intended to be read, to be received, to be corresponded with, his letters (usually both image and textual in character) were folded and delivered to an individual reader, to be opened and read, again and again. Johnson's correspondence includes letter to friends William S. Wilson, Dick Higgins, Richard Lippold, Toby Spiselman, Joseph Cornell, Yoko Ono, Nam June Paik, Robert Motherwell, Eleanor Antin, Germaine Green, Lynda Benglis, Arakawa and Madeline Gins, Christo, Billy Name, Jim Rosenquist and Albert M. Fine, among many others. The subjects of his correspondence ranged from the New York avant-garde (Cage, Johns, de Kooning, Duchamp) to filmmakers such as John Waters, philosophers such as Jacques Derrida and writers such as Gertrude Stein and Marianne Moore. This collection of more than 200 selected letters and writings--most of which are previously unpublished--opens a new view into the sprawling, multiplicitous nature of Johnson's art, revealing not only how he created relationships, glyphs and puzzles in connecting words, phrases, people and ideas, but also something about the elusive Johnson himself. In a 1995 article in The New York Times, Roberta Smith wrote: Make room for Ray Johnson, whose place in history has been only vaguely defined. Johnson's beguiling, challenging art has an exquisite clarity and emotional intensity that makes it much more than simply a remarkable mirror of its time, although it is that, too.