The kinds of books I like

What books do I like and why? I like books that testify to the human condition – its hopes and dreams, its failures and laments, its joys and its pains. Its dedication and its dilettantism. Its tension between decadent indulgence and its monastic restraint. Above all, I value books that embody a pursuit for the transcendent. This can be through its content, its materials, or even its design. A handful of books which illustrate these ideals:

Medieval manuscript and early modern printed versions of the Bible, especially commentaries like the Glossa Ordinaria. The Glossa Ordinaria in particular is often panned as an example of medieval rigidity, of the triumph of doctrine over spirit, gloss over scripture – this attitude even existed in the medieval period! I would rather see it as a manifestation of Psalm 1, which declares that he is blessed who meditates on God's teaching day and night. For the reality is that we see that people are engaging with these texts when they write in their copies, they may have agreed or disagreed with the commentators – but above all a gloss reminds the reader constantly that they are not alone in the pursuit of this teaching – there is a luminous tradition of honest and dedicated engagement which they are inheriting by parsing both the scripture as well as the gloss for the nuances of their meaning.

Incunabula, early European printed books (before 1500), fit into this paradigm as well. Many of the incunabula which survive today were already well-known, established texts – for the most part, it is less the texts and more the story of their existence in print that attracts me to incunabula and subsequent early printing. Early printing in Europe, while not completely replacing the manuscript tradition, bloomed with incredible speed and achieved such high level of craft so quickly that it is hard not to be amazed at their feats. This will make intuitive sense to anyone who has ever dipped their toes into letterpress printing: to set a forme with not just a lack of instruction, but probably experimental, retrofitted or improvised and always unstandardized equipment would be inconceivable to me. The printers of the incunabula had to discover and invent a new craft, establish the rules of typography and design, and even today many designers who have only one job (page design) are unable to surpass the skill of these first printers. We could perhaps see a new advance in communication on par with printing in the medium of the computer, but I have yet to see anything beyond experimental work which manages to transcend the fundamental constraint of the printed book's dependence on immutable typographic form in communicating information.

The same intensity and desperation to create something new out of nothing is evident in early gay literature – some of which continues today, and probably started in the mid 1800s, but really picked up a century later. There is a tension between respectability/assimilation on the one hand, and a desire to react against norms and create new realities. Often, these new realities expressed themselves in erotic, sexual, and even downright pornographic ways. But like I say – it is sexuality, after all. Something like Boyd McDonald's Straight to Hell embodies the latter, and his commitment to capturing the stories of homosexual mens' desperate desires for connection and pleasure in an environment that somehow both decried and denied the full existence of those desires at the same time.

A final example is Peter Koch, self-described "Artist/Collaborationist, Designer/Printer, and Publisher ... Archeologist of the Book, Book Architect, Book as Object [Sculptor], Retrieved Dream Objects, Text Transmission Objects, Typographer/Printer to the Ur-text Project, [urban] Cowboy Surrealist" (Exhibit Catalog at the Houghton Library, Harvard, 1995). As a modern letterpress printer, he made me really believe that the physical embodiment of a work can elevate a work's thought provoking nature to new heights. The crude brutality of his Diogenes: Defictions suits the aphorisms about him which have been handed down. At the other extreme, the austere perfection of his Fragments of Parmenides illustrates the plain directness of his thought in a way that does it unique justice. The sublimity of Koch's printing stems from his ability to use printing and type to point really into a text, and thus to let that text express itself from the inside out. For this book, he went so far as to commission a typeface, Parmenides Greek, especially for the task. This is no small commitment, and what would appear on the surface to be a mark of excess really seems to be the only possibility once the ink on the page meets the eye. Nothing is masked, only accentuated by Koch's design and presswork – and with only a handful of fragments to work with, every detail counts. It is this expression of the idea from the inside out that I hope my work will achieve, in whatever form it may end up taking. Unfortunately, it is not easy to do so: he warned me in an email which I will never forget, "THE CRAFT IS NOT EASY" – on the bright side, I have time to get there.