Introduction to Styles of Collecting, Styles of The Book,
MICHAEL JOSEPH
It is my pleasure to introduce this year's panel, organized by Constance Woo, a good
friend of the New Jersey Book Arts Symposium. Since Constance will begin by
articulating the issues that the guests on our distinguished panel will be kicking around, I
will preface my individual introductions with only a terse general introductory comment.
The title of this year's symposium, Styles of Collecting, Styles of the Book, concludes
with a trailing superfluous comma. The inspiration for this grammatical solecism was the
realization that collecting books and creating books are in some senses reciprocal rather
than linear. Alfred H. Barr once said, "Each generation creates art. It also discovers art."
It seems to me that making and collecting are reflexive acts within the larger process of
discovery.
Writing about ghosts in an op ed. that appeared in last Friday's New York Times, our
friend Phillip Pullman, said "Everything about the act of writing fiction is an exercise of
absolute and despotic power. There's no point in deploring this, or wishing it were all
nicer and kinder, or gentle and caring and inclusive. It's a tyranny, and that's that." And,
he also wrote, "Democracy comes in at a later stage, when we start reading. Reading is
democratic all the way through."
Without even thinking about it we know that Philip may also be talking about art:
Everything about the act of art making is an exercise of absolute and despotic power,
while viewing art is democratic all the way through. So, where on this continuum can we
place collectors? Do they wield despotic power over artists through their arbitrary and
ruthless selection process? Or, are they ultimate democratists, taking one thing then
another, embodying a kind of amiable wit as they cultivate their own whimsical and
slope-edged gardens? Are they carnivores or herbivores?
Along with the panelists I am now about to introduce there are of course other
distinguished collectors in our midst. My friend Bill Dane, of the Newark Public Library-samples of whose collection we will get to see this afternoon--my colleague, Lynn
Mullins, whose collection decorates the walls of this very library, to name just two. I
invite them and others of you to join into the discussion that will ensue after the panelists
have delivered their remarks. By coincidence, in the same book review from which I
lifted Alfred Barr's comment on discovering art (Michael Kimmelman's review of Sybil
Gordon Kantor's biography of Barr), I also found a wonderfully apposite comment by
John Cotton Dana, the namesake of this meeting space and, indeed this whole library,
and, in many ways, a collecting exemplar. About Dana, Kimmelman says "Kantor
mentions John Cotton Dana at the Newark Museum, who deserves even more attention
than she gives him. A populists courting a wide audience for modernism, Dana exhibited
everyday objects from the five-and-ten. 'The genius and skill which have gone into the
adornment and perfecting of familiar household objects,' Dana wrote, should 'receive the
same recognition as do now the genius and skill of painting in oils'"
The spirit of Dana's remark chimes with the spirit of modernism, and in this one regard,
postmodernism, viz, the belief that art is not inherent in any specific set of objects,
techniques, materials, or subject matter. In that sense, Dana's evocation of "the genius and
skill which have gone into the adornment and perfecting" of the familiar (and I am
putting the familiar in italics to suggest there is more to the familiar than meets the eye)
may be considered a home truth if not the founding faith of artists making books.
Michael Joseph
November, 2004