Introducing the masterpiece
I want to tell you about the printing of a masterpiece. It is a book
that I had wanted to print for a long time. The chances are you will
never see it. The edition is of only 26 copies, lettered A through to
Z, by hand, in the best calligraphic style. The price per copy is of
course astronomically high yet, by some perversity of my nature, none
of them are being offered for sale.
It is a great book, but I am aware that this is ambiguous. For not only
is the text a great text - it consists after all of a number of entries
about Nothingness in the Notebooks
of Leonardo da Vinci - but the book itself, the thing that you would
hold in your hands, is also a masterpiece; a great piece of
book-making. You will of course say I boast, and you will be right. But
I can no more deny the extraordinary nature of what I have in my hands
than I can deny that all my previous books seem mediocre by comparison.
Hand-set types, hand-made paper, printing by hand, binding by hand -
all these suggest a certain luxury, an excess, yes, even a kind of
indulgence, in themselves. But none of them can explain why this
particular book is such a work of unexpected genius. While my
reputation is such that I am expected to print well, no one I believe
would ever have guessed that such a masterpiece could have come from my
hands, my heart, my thought, my craft, my sheer vanity.
Before me, on my desk, the book, or one copy of it (they are all
slightly different because hand-printing cannot always be exact from
copy to copy) lies open - and flat. If there is any challenge I would
love to see taken up by the commercial book manufacturing industry, it
is that of making a paperback that will lie flat on the table or desk
before you, and not close up or shut down when you reach for your
coffee. Here however is pleasure, sensual and intellectual pleasure, in
this small philosophical excursion into the meaning of Nothingness, and
a kind of erotic playfulness in the relations between the inks, the
paper, the types, and the pictures on the page. No, pages. We talk
about ‘the printed page’; but what we always see on opening
a book is two pages, never just one, even if one of them is apparently
blank. That white space is still part of the whole picture and
experience of opening a book or turning a page. The two-page or
double-page spread, it is called, and it is a pity that this small
piece of language is not more widely used or even just made available
to those who avowedly love books and like to talk about them.
Of course, the book you are reading is not the book I made.
Description, moreover, is no substitute for handling the real thing. It
isn’t that the book you are holding is not a ‘real
thing’ - it certainly cost you something, even if a trip to the
library. Yet I am going to describe the book I made, and the whole
process of making it. For I want to convey something of what I have
come to understand about being in the world as a creative person.
‘Being in the world’ is an odd sort of phrase (as if we
could possibly not be there) but what I like about it is that it
encompasses everything - us, the world, and both together. Yet the
scattered notes on Nothingness in Leonardo da Vinci’s Notebooks
act as a kind of tease. They lead you right to the edge of
understanding what he is trying to get clear about, and then you are
left high and dry as the sheer difficulty of talking about something
that no one has ever seen or experienced makes itself felt. So this
book, the one you are reading, will wander all about the place in
trying to say things that strike me as being important, or interesting,
or ‘how true!’, or just plainly expressive of what I or
anyone might observe, think, feel, or already know about the wonder
that is a book, a great book, a masterpiece.