Hans Christian Andersen, Die Stopfnadel
As often in Andersen’s fairy tales,
Die Stopfnadel (The Darning Needle) relates the experiences of everyday objects as parables for human behavior. To illustrate this story, I used items from my letterpress workshop: typesetting materials, zinc plates, brass rules, wire, linocuts. In addition, I used various collage materials – found material, for instance from fashion catalogues, but also a scrap of an original Frankfurter Postzeitung, a newspaper published in 1852, (during Andersen’s lifetime). For the darning needle itself, which appears on every page, I used an English line (a brass rule that narrows to a point at each end). It first appears on the front end paper, surrounded by blue Parentheses to set it apart from a mass of similar darning needles. On the front cover, it appears as the original needle. When the darning needle breaks while patching an old slipper, her career as a darning needle comes to an end. The kitchen maid tucks the needle into her apron. Now the needle believes herself to be something quite special, a breast-pin. But she falls down the drain and is washed into the gutter with the dishwater. On page 14, you see the needle’s involuntary tailspin. Her fall ends in the gutter, where the darning needle meets all kinds of “personalities”, for instance a shard from a bottle, which she thinks is a diamond. The darning needle tells the shard about her life, describing the five fingers that were only employed to hold her. She introduces the individual fingers: the thumb, who stands first in the rank and has only one joint in his back. Sweet-tooth, who dips himself into foods both sweet and sour and points to the sun and the moon (or the page number). Longman, who looks out over the heads of the others. Gold-band, with a golden ring around his waist. And the smallest of all, little Playman, who does nothing at all and is proud of it. The darning needle also talks about her plunge into the sink (we are reminded of the involuntary, whirling fall on page 14). In her tale, she idealizes the fall; in the illustration, it becomes a perfect dive into the inverted A of the drain (Ausguß in German).
“They were boasters, and boasters they will remain; and therefore I left them,”
says the darning needle. We can, if we wish, flip back to page 14 and remind ourselves of the real circumstances of her involuntary fall.
I must mention one other important aspect of the book: the typeface. Ernst Schneidler’s Legende (designed in the 1930s) played almost no role in the book art scene of the 1980s (at least in Germany). Although I adopted it in various sizes from the inventory of the Lahnstein printing shop, I had no use for it before then either. But for the darning-needle book, it turned out to be the appropriate typeface.
48 pages, grey mould-made paper, hand-set, letterpress printed, cloth-over-board with embedded needle, 15 x 23 cm,
135 numbered and signed copies. Lahnstein 1985.