RAZZLE-DAZZLE
The book is made of a wide range of materials: handmade paper, cheap paper, transparent paper, colored mould-made paper, Chromolux gloss paper, packing paper, plastic film, sheets from old books. These are printed in a wide range of colors, using woodcuts and linocuts, polymer plates and wood engravings. One double spread features a digitally printed photograph. This wild confusion of materials also features diverse texts, hand-set in all kinds of typefaces, in varying sizes. Most of the texts come from important works of world literature, for instance
Goethe’s "Faust" or
Lewis Carroll’s "Alice in Wonderland". There are also some poems by
Clemens Brentano,
Emily Dickinson and
Walther von der Vogelweide, to name a few. However, the texts are short – a poem or the start of a novel (always in the original language), for instance
Cervantes’ "El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha":
“En un lugar de la Mancha, de cuyo nombre no quiero acordarme.” The beginning and ending passages of
Collodi’s "Le Avventure di Pinocchio" are used. His famous novel runs through the entire book on an imaginary level, ending on page 71 with:
“Com’ero buffo, quand’ero burattino! e come ora son contento di essere diventato un ragazzino perbene!” Using classic literature is nothing new in the field of book arts – on the contrary. This is where it is presented with a relatively sophisticated level of design, whether it is typographical or illustrated. Such editions are read fairly rarely; after all, the quality of the texts is already well known, for the most part. That was not my approach. The ironic first motto that introduces the book, in which I address the reader directly (from the
Beatles’ "Paperback Writer") –
“Dear Sir or Madam will you read my book? It took me years to write, will you take a look?” – indicates this. In fact, it was partly my goal to encourage the book’s viewer to read the texts. Embedded in the
Razzle-Dazzle show of the book, the various texts, typefaces, papers and images were supposed to come across as various numbers in a “book cabaret”. This is highlighted by the second introductory motto, from the
Beatles song
Sgt. Pepper’s "Lonely Hearts Club Band":
We hope you will enjoy the show. Sit back and let the evening go, and it was my intention right from the start. I consulted American friends about the title, what they associated with the term
Razzle-Dazzle, and received a wide variety of responses. One convincing response came in 2013 (two years after I had finished the book) from James H. Spohrer, the librarian for the Germanic Collection at Doe Library at UC Berkeley. He gave me a copy of the Contra Costa Marketplace Magazine. The free publication, which mainly consisted of ads for restaurants, dentists and plastic surgeons, also included the following short article:
A Razzle Dazzle Show. A performance by the Pinole Valley High School Chorus, directed by Mark Flanigan, head of the Pinole Valley High School Music Department at the Retired Teachers December Luncheon. Terrel Henderson, a student, choreographed the women’s choral. This group
Razzled Dazzled the folks at the luncheon. Everyone had a great time. That was more or less the spirit in which my book was created. I hope the selected texts speak for themselves, for instance
Emily Dickinson’s poem, which fittingly is the last text in the book:
Finding is the first Act
The second, loss,
Third, Expedition for the “Golden Fleece”
Fourth, no Discovery –
Fifth, no crew –
Finally, no Golden Fleece –
Jason, sham, too –
84 pages, various papers, hand-set, letterpress printed, cloth-over-board in 3 color variants, 15 x 24 cm,
50 numbered and signed copies. Flörsheim 2011.