Ilse Aichinger, Fünf Vorschläge
This collage book represented an unusual experience over the course of several years, because I did not finish the collages
for all twelve copies of the 1996 edition at once. I had printed all of the texts and completely bound the edition, but the pages for the collages remained blank for the time being. I only added the collages gradually, over several years, to one copy at a time. The first three copies were finished relatively quickly. Once they had been sold and there was no further demand, I lost interest in the book. It was a few more years before a collector ordered a copy because he had seen the book in an old brochure. So I was forced to collage another copy, and I took a skeptical look at my own finished copy, which I had used as a model for the collages. Amazingly, I was able to pick up the thread of the project again, even though it had broken off years earlier. It was still fun making the 25 collages. In most cases I still had plenty of material, which I had mainly found in magazines, or else it was easy to replenish over time. Thus more copies were created over the years, but always only one at a time (essentially, collage on demand); afterward, there was always a fairly long break before the next order. It is interesting that I always liked the latest copies more than the earlier ones, which I remembered vaguely but could not use as a comparison, since they were now part of various collections and thus hard to access. I only had the first copy, the one I had kept for myself, and I wasn’t satisfied with some of its collages anymore. I felt like the new ones were more convincing, despite the long intervals. After all, the collages were always supposed to be experiments, proposals in keeping with Aichinger’s text. There were five collage proposals for each of her five literary proposals: from the Dame im grauen Kleid mit einem roten Kragen daran (lady in a gray dress with a red collar on it) to the kleiner Edison (little Edison), about which it
is concluded, Vielleicht nehmen wir den. (Maybe we’ll take that one).
48 pages, Zerkall mould-made paper, hand-set, letterpress printed, cloth-over-board with collage, 25.3 x 36 cm,
9 print-numbered and signed copies, and 3 artist copies (in terms of the 25 collages each copy is different). Lahnstein 1996. (Text is in the original German, an English translation can be added on extra sheet.)