My essay “The Meta-Experience of Errata Editions ‘Books on Books’ Set One” takes a hard and humourous look at the recently-published explorations of iconic photobooks.

The essay is available in its entirety at the Journal of Artists’ Books website, but here’s an excerpt:

The page layout of the series is sensible yet jarring: the page spreads of the original books are reproduced smaller than the pages of the book-on-book itself. A white border surrounds the images of the original page spreads. This is eminently practical as the Books on Books are all the same size (7 by 9.5 inches) and the originals they commemorate are not. Thus Killip’s In Flagrante, a more typical photobook size (11 ¾ x 9 ¾ inches) fills most of the spread, while Ristelhueber’s Fait (smaller but taller and narrower at 6 ¾ x 4 ¼ inches) floats in a pool of white with a 2 inch border on the book’s fore-edge. But this is only the case when one opening of the original is reproduced within one opening of the Errata Edition; some openings are reproduced 4-up to an opening (two openings on one page). The visual effect of this layout is not unlike the old schoolboy trick of clandestinely hiding an issue of “The Amazing Spider-Man” behind a wider, taller textbook.

Read the rest at JAB Online!