Embodied Language: The Book as Craft and Concept

PETER RUTLEDGE KOCH
EMBODIED LANGUAGE

The Book as Craft and Concept
Four essays on art and magic

“The distinguishing characteristic of a book we call “magical” is the presence of an aura that excites the imagination and imparts a sense of mystery. I am not here referring to grimoires or books about magic, but rather to books that exhibit a palpable radiance emanating from the work itself, books made of magic — magical books.”

EMBODIED LANGUAGE The Book as Craft and Concept is a collection of four essays that distill fifty+ years of Koch’s thinking and practice in the printing arts, poetry, and aesthetics. The essays trace the history and formation of a unique field – the “auratic” Gesamptkunstwerk or total book – through a concept of Craft that has evolved for several thousand years within the Neoplatonic tradition, and the book as metaphysical instrument (via Mallarmé) in the modern world.

The philosopher Gaston Bachelard warned us in The Poetics of Reverie that “hands dream” and in extraordinary times like ours, the active principle of the artist and the poet is to employ the creative imagination in the struggle to constitute itself. These four pieces were written to “essay a thought,” describe the emergence of a metaphysical paradigm, and illuminate the book as a work of art and magic.

By inviting the Book as an artform into the open, Koch supplies a context for the work he most admires. Evoking the philosophical foundations of his mentors, William Everson, Adrian Wilson, Sandra Kirshenbaum, and Jack Stauffacher, Koch proceeds to describe the works of his contemporaries, Carolee Campbell, Clemens-Tobias Lange, Russell Maret, and Veronica Schaepers, that illustrate his thesis of the “Third Stream Book,” a concept that borrows heavily from an essay by Kirshenbaum describing the “printer’s book” as the form that offers the most authentic expression of the book as a total work of art.