April / May 2010

With a small delay, and also with a small satisfaction, I'd like to announce, that Hasa Rapasa won neither any prize nor even a honorary mention at the 50^th competition for the most beautiful book of he year organised by PTWK. Discussing their choices at the meeting with the participants the jury said they didn't understand at all what was the point of this book and why it looked so bizarre. We proposed they should simply read the book to understand it, but the jury replied sharply they did not read the books submitted to the competition. Further conversation, as well as any attempts to explain the rules of magic-and-bizarre geometry (the book has a shape of pentagonal trapezium) had no sense at all.
An interesting fact: discussing the book which presented the collection of unique colour diapositives taken in Jewish ghetto during World War II, the jury explained that this book was only mentioned, not prized, because the pictures had been taken by a German and Jews in these pictures were smiling.

December 2009

I noticed that my books had been transforming surprisingly. With no doubt some of these transformations are caused by technical conditions – I use better machines which are more skilful. Myself, I am more skilful, too – at least I hope so.
Here is the book which has right now a form of a wall calendar. Before it had a form of a sand-glass bicodex, and in the beginning it had had a form of monstrous leporello (a paper accordion made of 365 leaves is really monstrously unhandy) – but the essence of this book remains intact: its structure... day part and night part... number of pages and the layout of every page... all stories it contains..... And here is another book: in the beginning it had been a set of loose rectangular paper sheets, then it was a square triangle, now it is a pentagonal trapezium – but the essence of this book remains intact: its structure... this mysterious, magic geometry... all stories it contains, although pages have been redesigned, but each one is still a puzzle composed of the same pieces..... Are they still the same books or maybe they are now new books which should have new titles? Or maybe they like to change clothes? Or maybe they keep metamorphosing: they had been like larvae, then they were like pupae, now they are like imagos? ...... All the time the problem of identity tormenting every being with the lack of solution: everyday I am somebody else yet I am still myself ....... Whereas some of my books do not transform, nothing has been changed in them since the very beginning. Maybe they were born old, old and mature? Maybe paper butterflies emerged from my head, flew out of my hands at once and ready?

November 2009

Oxford. Brookes University. UK Fine Press Book Fair. For the fourth time. But after a few years break. Nevertheless once again I had the stand number 55. I was not forgotten. It was nice. Very nice. Many people I knew – now much older and more grey. Many people who knew my books and didn't forget them. As usually many conversations, a lot of talking. It's a pity (little bit) there was not as much purchasing as talking.... well, you can't have everything. And as usually a lot of doubts: is it really the right place for my books? in fact they are not pressed fine, they are not letterpressed, they are printed just nice..... It seems they would feel much better, or even the best, at the Semantic Press Book Fair. However so far nobody has organised such fair.

September 2009

I haven't been writing for quite long. This can mean there was nothing I could write about, nothing interesting and worth my attention happen in the secret life of my books. Or there were so many events I had no time to write. Or both. Or neither this nor that.
On April 1, 2009, Krystyna registered LIBERATORIUM as a normal publishing house. An excellent date. The best coincidence I could imagine. You need to be really a fool to set up a publishing house right now and right here. But maybe madness is the only method to succeed. From our point of view there's nothing mad in it. Well, just some chaos will be transformed into order and some order into chaos. The books will get ISBN numbers. New gorgeous machines bought for the EU grant will give us a chance to print faster, better and cheaper – the prizes of the books will decrease to a reasonable level, although it is a sheer madness to expect that people will start to buy things they don't need at all. The whole studio and the library will be moved upstairs, to the attic, and the living room downstairs will at last become a living room... Besides, nothing will change. The books will remain crazy labyrinths, they will be like they are in my visions and dreams, not like the people want them to be – unless the people want my books to be just like the are in my visions and dreams ..... Well, I can't help it. The world is like it is, not like the people imagine and expect it to be, or would like it to be. And this is how it is with my books. Must be like that since my books are but next parts of NONDESCRIPTION OF THE WORLD, and nondescription is not a description, it is being like something that is to be described....

October 2008

I have found my very first book. Probably I shouldn't use the word “book”, but I don't know how I can call it, how I can label it. “Text” is not the right word, either. It is something more than a text. IT. Well, IT is a tale about time flowing, maybe about travelling too, so a bit more than twenty pages of typescript have been seamed on the top, like a calendar hanging on a wall usually is bound. The construction referring to a wall calendar probably was to be a metaphor of time passing by – with no doubt there was another reason: the text flows more smoothly when the pages can be turned topward, when my eyesight doesn't have to jump from the bottom of the just read page to the top of the page which will just be read, when the line is not cut brutally by turning page leftward. Just a sheer intuition prompting: if life is flowing, if time is flowing, then a tale should be flowing too ....... That is why the left margin is not straight - I wanted my text to look like water in a stream – both banks were to be covered by dense bushes of drawings, but my brother couldn't draw anything, so they are naked and barren. He said he couldn't draw anything because he could draw only when he was guided and led by his hand – any commission, and even my request was a kind of commission, used to destroy this very subtle relation - I understood him very well so I didn't insist ........ This was happening in late autumn of 1976.
Later IT was presented to my aunt who WAS WRITING. She had already published a small collection of short stories. The aunt read IT and said she didn't know how to judge IT, because she didn't know what IT was. If she knew what IT was she would know what could be said about IT. For example, if IT was an essay she would criticise IT as an essay using the suitable criteria. Alas, I couldn't help my aunt, because I didn't know what IT was either. Now, after so many years, I also don't know what IT is, and writing frankly I'm not so much interested in finding it out. Everybody can see what IT is. IT is what IT is, that's all ...... Well, probably I won't be brave enough to read IT now. But maybe IT is just what I will use in the future to make a book: an old text written by myself many years ago placed in the centre of the page – the page size A4 or maybe bigger to have large margins around the body text giving enough room for various commentaries – so these commentaries will be a bit like the bushes full of fantastic creatures my brother once didn't draw - - - just me-old reading SOMETHING written by me-young - - written as if by somebody else, by a stranger, by an author not well known to me - - - anyway, me-old and me-young, we are not the same person, are we? - - - - - - -

October 2008

Krosno. The Public Library. I am presenting, displaying, exhibiting, demonstrating, explaining, telling, performing, showing. My books and hypertexts. For almost two hours. I can see two dozens of listeners (mainly various library workers, I suppose) are neither tired nor bored - I don't suspect they can pretend in such a perfect way. Your books, they are fascinating, aren't they? but how can we catalogue them? - says the head of the library. Yes, that's a problem, however such books make a librarian's life fascinating, don't they? - say I.

September 2008

Płock. The Art Gallery. I display Road Non-signs. I can display nothing else because all my books are imprisoned in the white room with semitransparent walls. We printed Polish non-signs with the plotter and they are the size of normal road signs. They hang in a row. They fake a road (I wanted them to fake a town, but there was not enough space on the mezzanine). Or maybe they do not fake. At the end of this fake-not-fake road near the wall there is a chair and a table and the book is on it. A road to the book – or something like that. Or a road from the book. No – to the book, with no doubt to the book, because the stairs to the mezzanine are at the other end of the row ....... An enthusiastic man approaches me and says he's an actor and the non-signs can be and should be performed on the stage, absolutely, what a fantastic monodrama this will be, he can see the props, stage design, whole performance, he can hear these texts swarming and whirling in a frustrated driver's head ...... I didn't say: no. I did say: we shall see. Working on this book I didn't think of a frustrated driver. Well, I didn't want a frustrated driver to be the main topic – a frustrated driver could be hardly visible somewhere in the background. This work was to belong to those never ending dissertations on a picture superiority over a word or vice versa.

September 2008

Kielce. The Public Library. A brand new building. A very big and very empty space which is supposed to be a store in the future but now is a kind of temporary art gallery. I make a smaller room in the centre – to give visitors a chance to sit down comfortably in the armchair or at the desk, take a book from the shelf and read. I use semitransparent white material for the walls. I cut squares 90x90 cm and on each square I write one letter with white crayon. They make a sentence which can be read while walking around the room:

Forty six letters, seven spaces and two squares lacking for the entrance. There can't be more. That's good. Nothing more is needed. Is there anything more I have to write about? ....... I was to write one sentence more. A very long one. On the floor. Close to the walls. It would run all around the hall. It would tell something about an empty wall, a blank wall. Or about the most important moment in this long and tortuous process of book making, when what fills my mind must get out of it and appear somehow on a sheet of paper or on sheet of something else ....... But I didn't write it. Because of various reasons. Maybe that's better. Since this very moment is not the most important one. It is as important as any other moment. Well, maybe it is more intangible and elusive than the others. Like falling asleep is.

After the opening a library worker who helped me a little to assemble my room approached me and said: I really do admire you – wow, making such things in such times... (He meant my books, not the exhibition itself.) He could add: and in such a country – but he did not. While myself I could answer: It's not that bad – both the country and the times could have been much worse. But I said nothing. We went out. We left the emptiness in the gallery. Let it whisper and shine silently.

>>>

January 2008

Gdynia. „The Second Book Revolution”. The conference. Why „revolution”? Why „the second”? I don't know. Well, this is not a good reason to be upset and worried. Titles and names can be strange. My lecture (if it was a lecture) had a strange title, too. Very strange. MAKING TEXT A SIGN. MAKING SIGN A TEXT. What a bizarre thing it was. I wanted to tell something about relations between text and sign. I wanted also to present my recent book – Road Nonsigns. Of course, what I was telling was not exactly what I had prepared and expected to tell. This is usual that what I tell is not exactly what I want to tell. Frankly writing I shouldn't have opened my mouth. I should have shown page by page on the big screen behind me. Maybe it would have been better if I had clicked through Emeryk – maybe a hypertext would have been perceived as more revolutionary than a signtext. But I didn't do that. I was to read a lot in the train but I only snoozed a lot. A gale could pushed me into the see but it didn't. So, it was not that bad in Gdynia. And I found some new ideas for Liberland. However the most important was an illumination. Yes. I experienced an illumination. I had brought there ten wooden slats almost two meters long to hang on them ten nonsings (A2 size) and thus transform a part of the lecturing hall into a road-like path. Afterwards I didn't know what I had to do with them. I was walking along the street like a primitive hunter carrying a spear or javelin. The wind was roaring, rain was slashing. Rage and despair. And suddenly an illumination: neither a spear nor a javelin I'm carrying in my hand but side faces of the boxes for my books! For five years I have been cutting them out off large pieces of plywood – always askew and twisted – what a toil! rage and despair! - and I can just buy slants! - slants can have different sizes and they are always smooth and even - - - - - I needed five years and five hundred kilometres to get this idea! A revolutionary idea! This is going to be a real revolution! Next revolution of my books!

December 2007

For two months several dozen books made myself will be displayed in glass cases in the main hall of the National Library in Warsaw: shut, open, folded, unfolded... Is there any better place for books? Yes. Certainly yes. The reader's hands.

September/November 2007

It happened what had to happen, because nothing else could happen and I would be extremely naive expecting anything else to happen. When in spring 2005 End of the World according to Emeryk had been released on CD I was wandering which bookshop's shelf one could find it on. There was no hypertext novel shelf in any bookshop here for nobody had written and published hypertext in Poland until then. And now my curiosity has been satisfied. An audiobook shelf has appeared lately. And there, to my utmost surprise, although I shouldn't be surprised at all, I found Emeryk. Of course not in every bookshop, only in very few – in majority of bookshops it is not available. In the biggest online bookshop one can find Emeryk among audiobooks, too. So, hypertext lovers and hunters had almost no chances to find it. However, we don't need to bother about it. There are almost no hypertext lovers and hunters here. That's why enitre Emeryk can be found in Liberatory since now on.

July 20, 2007

My friends were reading aloud my books in the BWA Art Gallery in Kielce. At night. Frankly writing I shouldn't have accepted the proposition, because all my books are banned from being read aloud. The reasons of aloud reading ban are obvious and clear and don't need any explanations. However I said yes for I thought it would be a chance to show my books were after all for reading although with no doubt other than aloud. Many people are convinced my books can only be looked at, because they are unreadable at all.

May 2007

I have changed LIBRO2N. I transformed leporelloes into codices. Now the book is more handy. A friend of mine who got recently the leporello version informed me that he had succeded to open and unfold the book, However he mentioned nothing whether he had succeded to fold and shut the book. I'm sure he will succede. He is a great book lover, so he will read it carefully and carefully will fold and shut it.

May 7, 2007

The City Library in Krosno. Me on one side of the barricade – two or three dozens of teen pupils on the other. The barricade of books, liberature and hypertext. I'm telling them stories about something they don't know and I don't blame them for it – where and how could they learn about it? I'm telling them about things they don't want to learn about because these are absolutely useless things and this is more difficult and annoying. I can only hope that many years later one of them, to his or her utmost surprise and horror, will wish to find the answer for this tricky question: can sharp and angular things be described with round letters?

April 25, 2007

Edinburgh World Heritage. 5 Charlotte Square. Two hours long presentation of Liberatory. Very good response, even enthusiastic. So enthusiastic that nobody will think of making something more. For example to make a new edition of Sienkiewicza Street (the day before The Demarco European Art Foundation purchased the last copy). Or to proliferate any other of my books absolutely not miraculously. Myself I still have not enough courage to ask. Anyway, the situation is much better than, for example, the lack of enthusiasm or perfunctory commendations for politeness sake or indifference and disgust.
Books are supposed to live their own lives. If so, they should take care of their business themselves. But it may happen they simply don't like to push themselves forward too much. What then?

April 2007

Bristol Artist's Book Event. In fact I shouldn't have been there – my books are not artist's book. My books are writer's books. However, so far I haven't heard about any writer's books event, what seems quite strange since there are quite many writers' books. Nevertheless my presence here is not unjustified – in fact I am also a bit of an artist; sometimes I make a drawing. I could really easily take part in any musician's book event. Unfortunately such events occur even more seldom than writer's book events... It's nice to meet good old friends whom I haven't seen for a couple of years. Very nice. I wonder if books have such friends, too. It's nice to see some new places. I have never been in Bristol before. I wonder if the books are pleased, too. I wonder if they can see the same as I can. I wonder if my eyes are their eyes - not necessarily it must as it could seem.

January 2007

I took my books from Białko Art Gallery and Ha!Art book store back home. They spent there enough time, I think really enough. They already experienced what they were to experience. They were already seen by those ones who were to see them. And who was to buy one or two of them has already done so. Quite likely. At least I think so. There is always some hesitation and uncertainty: maybe just the very next day somebody came and wanted to purchase all books? Well, if so he or she would be determined enough to contact me while nothing like that happened. So now the books will travel a bit. And relax at home.

October 27, 2006

I am in a gallery of contemporary art in the town where I was born. This is to be the beginning of a collection presenting the achievements of various artists living in this region. Among many pictures hanging on the walls I can see two my books. They are imprisoned in tight show cases. They could easily hang on the walls of a musuem of Nature among various butterflies and other bizarre flying creatures. Maybe it would be better... The showcases have been made specially for my books and they are neat and nice - the books look pretty. However this seems the most awful fate books can experience.

October 14, 2006

I'm telling about my Treatise on Pageography at the IALS IV Conference [Institute of English Philology, The Jagiellonian University of Cracow]. Just telling – not lecturing. And even this “just telling” is transforming gradually into “just showing my books”. As usually. It could seem my presence among philologists, theoreticians, researches and academics has no sense – we are on two sides of a barricade. It could seem so, but it should not – this barricade is made of books that I (non)write and they (non)read.

September 2006

Nondescription of the world continued...
After a few years break again in the Book Art Museum in Łódź. An exhibition-reading-room. Tidy, precise, clear, without anything unnecessary. And I succeeded to complete my new book: LIBRO2N. I almost completed it - the CD with pictures was not ready, but I don't suspect any visitor to be so inquisitive. Well, to mislead a visitor's attention I hung on the walls the prints showing how the Norblin gamadelt was created.

September 14, 2006

I show my books at the Library in Płock. I talk for almost two hours. Like mad. Can't shut my mouth up. I keep promising not to talk and tell since I'm fed up with this constant explaining why I make so bizarre books and why they are so very few and then I talk like a wind-up toy. A few listeners buy End of the world according to Emeryk. They are going to wander through the wilderness of hypertext. It may happen the intentions will suffice. They look like people who wouldn't replace easily the noise of turned pages with the clicking sounds. However the look may be quite confusing. They may be daredevils and madmen in disguise of ordinary citizens.

Summer 2006

Andrzej Metzger second hand book shop in Kielce. The shop window. Notes. Sketches. Copy-books. Manuscripts. Typescripts. Old type-writers. My first dot-matrix printer. My first inkjet printer... An attempt to show the process of book making. Well, to show just a scrap of this process - I couldn't unmount my head and put it there... Also an attempt to show the relations between technology and the ultimate shape of a work... Yes. Just some attempts. Nothing but attempts. Indicating the problem. Drawing the curtain a little bit back. And I had to place there shelves with my books. And I had to hang there the explaining-complicating texts. And I had to put in the background some drawings. The shop window is not so big. But it is astonishingly deep. Really and metaphorically.

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