Gill Partington is a fellow at the Institute of English Studies, University of London. She is working on a book about the unconventional history of the page.
Notes on contributors from ‘Fuck You’, Vol. 5, No. 5 (December 1963).
In August 1975, residents of Columbus, Ohio found something strange stuffed under their car windscreen wipers – a single sheet of typescript, which consisted of what looked at first glance like a series of small ads:
FOUND: Photo album with family snapshots, left eye cut out of each person...
The Wittockiana museum has a slight air of mystery. Deep in suburban Brussels, crouching discreetly behind ramparts of greenery, it’s an elegant but inscrutable concrete and glass bunker. By the entrance, a monumental carved book the size of a tombstone provides a clue to what’s inside. It’s a research library as well as a museum of book arts and bookbinding, founded by the bibliophile Michel Wittock. There are displays of fine bindings, rare fonts and a room full of antique rattles. The main space is currently given over to an exhibition of blank pages, empty books and ‘publications made of silence’ . This minimal theme is given a maximalist treatment, with nearly two hundred books on show that – in one way or another – are all about absence.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets, a pamphlet of just 48 pages, was once the holy grail of book collectors. Copies that came to light were, to quote one biographer, ‘literally worth … more than their weight in gold’: at auction on Madison Avenue in 1930 one fetched $1250 (around $23,000 in today’s money). The book’s value was due not only to its...
The problem with owning an invisible book is that it’s hard to lay your hands on it when you need it. This I know from experience, having recently searched the bookshelves at length for mine, which I bought several years ago from its creator and author, Elisabeth Tonnard. It cost €0, and I have an invoice as proof of purchase. It was one of a limited edition of a hundred,...
In 1988 the veteran conductor Nicolas Slonimsky, having built a career on the most experimental of repertoires, sat at the piano to record a ditty about a constipation remedy. The music was his, but he had lifted the words – verbatim – from an advertisement that had appeared many years earlier in the Saturday Evening Post. ‘Children cry for Castoria!’ Slonimsky...
Read anywhere with the London Review of Books app, available now from the App Store for Apple devices, Google Play for Android devices and Amazon for your Kindle Fire.
For highlights from the latest issue, our archive and the blog, as well as news, events and exclusive promotions.