(Some Day). Text by Hans Reichenbach
New York: ZET Amsterdam (1991). Hofstra, Sjoerd. Folio, approximately. 9-1/2 in. 12-1/2 in. 19 unnumbered pagespp., containing two pop-up spreads.Gray printed cloth, in slipcase. Mixed media, illustrations of tumbling book shelves, screen printed in colors, with underlying text in blind. One of 20 numbered copies, with two A.P. All of Hofstra's highly limited editions are out of print; many are in museum and institutional collections, including the Library of Congress, the National Gallery of Art, New York Public Library, the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, and the Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris. Item #32883
Pages [3-12] on double leaves. Pages [13-18] on multiple thicknesses of paper; sliding pop-up flaps attached to p. [15] and [17]. Text on p. [11] and [13], printed in blind, and text on p. [15], printed partly in blind, superimposed on the illustrations./ Illustrated with 7 prints, being successive portions of a double-page column screenprint depicting a bookshelf with books falling from the right-hand side. Page [4-5] have only the extreme left-hand portion of the print, while p. [16-17] have only the extreme right-hand portion, on sliding pop-up flap attached to p. [17]. Screenprinted border at top and bottom throughout./ Binding: Publisher's gray cloth, with screenprinted illustration on front cover depicting an empty bookshelf. Issued in a matching slipcase.
Artist's book by the Dutch artist Sjoerd Hofstra, in which he calls into question the traditional nature of a book, through his choice of text, illustrations, printing style, page design, and book structure. Conventional narrative and physical structures are sabotaged by the increasingly fragmented arrangement of the pages, which begin as two-dimensional (linear), and become more and more three-dimensional (spatial) through paper engineering. The continuity of text is also disrupted by printing some parts in black, other parts in blind, and arranging lines of text outside the boundaries of the page so that they spill over onto subsequent pages. On a visual level, the screenprint illustrations of books in a bookcase become more and more fragmented as well--some pages contain only a small sliver of illustration. The orderly linear arrangement of the books on the shelves is destroyed as the books tumble from the shelves into chaos. Finally, the text by Hans Reichenbach on the fragmentation of personal identity into multiple selves mirrors the disorder of the book's structure.
Price: $5,000.00