And here are a few books I've made, and some I've destroyed, all in the name of art....
With Adam Smyth and Dennis Duncan I run 39 Step Press, a printing collective based in Oxfordshire. We're all interested in mistakes and accident, which is lucky because we're not very proficient so they happen a lot. It's really hard to get the letters the right way round. Our latest effort, Very Like a Whale, is a response to Herman Melville's Moby Dick and is on show in the Bodleian Library, Oxford. Read more on our website.
In 2018 I was accepted on the Printing Matter book art residency in Iceland, at Skaftfell gallery and workshop. I spent my time printing unpronouncible poems involving Icelandic type, and unreadable poems with morse code.
I also spent ages making a complicated concertina book full of holes that I grew to hate. On the last night I drunkenly threw it in the fjord. In retrospect this is now a performance piece. Here are some photos of it swimming back sadly in my direction, pointing an accusing paper finger at me.
When I got back to London, I put the other copy I'd made in the garden, where it was first buried in snow then rained on. All of this it survived, until some foxcubs got hold of it and ripped it to shreds.
I spent Summer 2016 in New Haven, Connecticut at the Yale Center for British Art, looking at unconventional book formats. Having looked at hundreds of odd shaped books, I amassed a pile of library slips, which I then made into the most conventional looking book I could imagine, complete with marbled end papers and cloth binding.
I participated in a fun project organised by the artists Nicola Dale and Michael Hampton, which involved doctoring a book and passing it on. I overlaid the pages of my copy with image of me reading it, handling it, writing on it and drinking tea over it. It's a kind of record of reading in real time.
In 2014 Adam Smyth and I edited a volume on Book Destruction. Which we took to the Whitechapel Gallery Artists Book Fair. I sawed it in half and drilled holes in it, which was surprisingly hard work, but what else are you going to do with a book about book destruction? There's a nice circularity in that the cover image is a altered book by Nicola Dale.
