— Louis Lüthi. On the Self-Reflexive Page II. Illustrated throughout. 298,[4] pp. [Amsterdam: Roma Publications, 2021]. Pictured at right.
I pulled this from a shelf at IRIS, a nice bookstore in Montclair that just celebrated one year as an open shop. I remembered the title from a decade ago and was curious to see what the new iteration would hold. The emphasis is similar, reflections on pages in literature that perform in a different mood than prose text, from Laurence Stern’s Tristram Shandy (1759-67) to Walter Benjamin, André Breton, Harry Mathews, Donald Barthelme, and other recent writers. This new edition, with different images of marbled pages from Tristram Shandy for its covers, is much expanded, with more examples of pages : black, blank, drawing, document, photography, and text pages; and the essay is more discursive and takes in a wider scope of material than in the first edition (at left, above), which I had grabbed at a Printed Matter art book fair in the autumn of 2012 and noted here , with a visual nod to the allusions to Tristram Shandy that anchor the book. The 2010 edition is a book of 128 numbered pages, followed by a concise, unpaginated essay of 32 pages (including notes and bibliography).
The first edition included a loose leaf, a Prière d’inserer or “review slip” :
This reminded me of the playful review slip found in the S.P. copies of Raymond Queneau’s Exercices de Style (1947), which prints one of the exercices in the book :
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