Library of Artistic Print on Demand: Collection and Research

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After the National Library, now on view at [Villa Stuck](https://tinyurl.com/bdza4yjn) to Sept. 15.


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Schmidt

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“A few seconds after Andreas Schmidt published his book *The Americans* on February 10, 2011 at 04:26 PST, he took his first screen shot of what was to become his book called *Just Published*, a book of 760 Blurb book covers. In 2009, Blurb created and shipped more than 1.2 million books and Schmidt’s peculiar addition to the ocean of self-published books shows a selection of books, which would otherwise have been forgotten by the short-lived memory of the internet.

Schmidt produced a ‘snapshot’ of Blurb’s output and re-presented this information in a Blurb book in order to preserve a small section of the wave of self-published titles in a printed document—a kind of contemporary critical analysis of the flux of photography, the internet and the cross-overs into printed matter” (blurb on Blurb).

There is a follow-up story, posted on Blurb’s sales page under the heading “Open Call”: “When this book was first published in April 2011, a single individual whose book cover was used amongst 760 other book covers in *Just Published* contacted Blurb customer service and complained about copyright infringement. Blurb subsequently removed *Just Published* from their server. Instead of arguing that the usage of Thumbnail size pictures of book covers, readily available on the internet, falls under ‘fair use,’ the cover in question has been blacked out in this new version, published August 2011, and the artist decided to openly ask anyone whose book is included and who does not want his/her work featured in *Just Published*, to contact him and the book cover will be treated likewise.” A similar reference can also be found in the book itself.

The first edition is limited to 100 copies.

(partially) censored

limited edition

18.0 x 18.0 cm / 7" x 7" (Small Square)

photobook

hardcover

unpaginated

color

perfect bound

documentation / archiving

found material

Blurb

print-on-demand

scale

platforms / companies

publishing / distribution

Just Published

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Giulia Ciliberto's website

Silvio Lorusso's website

Lorusso

Ciliberto

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The presentation of this two-volume blank work on Giulia Ciliberto and Silvio Lorusso’s websites is introduced with the following famous quote from Ulises Carrión: “The most beautiful and perfect book in the world is a book with only blank pages, in the same way that the most complete language is that which lies beyond all that the words of a man can say” (Ulises Carrión, “The New Art of Making Books,” 1975).

Apart from the pursuit of aesthetics and perfection, their work has another objective, as the blurb reveals: “Print on Demand technology allows to make a book without the intermediation of a publisher, setting autonomously size, amount of pages and price. *Blank on Demand* is an experiment that aims to probe the limits imposed by this production process. The two volumes constituting the project are produced through the self-publishing platform Lulu.com. The volumes’ formats correspond respectively to the maximum and minimum dimensions currently available for the print; similarly, page amount and price are set according to the limit values allowed by the platform. The two volumes are completely blank, except for the presence of the ISBN code. The experiment investigates the influence of the current technological context on the materiality of the book object” (blurb on Lulu).

The resulting two volumes are a 10.8 x 17.5 cm paperback, forty pages long and priced at €5.44; and a 15.2 x 22.99 cm hardcover, 740 pages long and priced at €999,999.99. This pair of books—that, considering their price, will probably never be ordered and printed in their entirety—becomes the sum of the technical and formal conditions for publishing on print-on-demand platforms. The project still allows its authors a small triumph over the opaque print-on-demand machinery, because the complete automatization of production will most probably lead to the absurd situation that a book with empty white pages, on which nothing is printed, is also unnecessarily sent through the printing machines: “We were particularly fascinated by the idea of paper sheets going through all the complex print machinery without any purpose” (Silvio Lorusso, “Print-on-Demand. The Radical Potential of Networked Standardisation”). 

For our library, we only purchased the paperback version, for obvious reasons. The fact that the hardback version is likely to forever remain a printed work in potentialis, and is thus manifested more as an artistic idea than as a physical object, does not make it pointless at all: “These are works that cannot or should not be printed but insist on printedness—even if only imagined—all the same” (Sophie Seita, “Thinking the Unprintable”). The evidence that the hardback version saw the light of day and was printed at least once is provided by a photo of the shipping certificate from Lulu and the artist’s proof. 

The two artists’ accounts have been blocked by Lulu. The paperback version is now available again, as they re-uploaded it specifically for our library via a newly created account.

open edition

no longer available 

multiple editions

isbn

15.2 x 22.9 cm / 6'' x 9'' (US Trade)

10.8 x 17.5 cm / 4.25" x 6.875" (Pocket Book)

artist’s book / bookwork

artistic research

blank pages

paperback

study / analysis

pricing

constraint

Lulu

standard / default

economy / labor

book / book design

Blank on Demand

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Artist website

Interview with Eric Doeringer on Sol LeWitt

La Bibliotheque Fantastique

Doeringer

This series is part of Eric Doeringer’s Copycat Publications imprint that specializes in artist’s books “after” contemporary artists like Ed Ruscha, John Baldessari, and Sol LeWitt. Here he appropriates LeWitt’s *The Location of Lines* (1974), in which each double-page spread juxtaposes a line (each positioned differently) with an instruction for how to position it. The first instruction reads, “A line from the midpoint of the left side to the center of the page.” The fact that the text becomes more complex and longer throughout the book shows the irreconcilable medial difference between writing and image. 

Doeringer adopts this concept 1:1, but executes it several times on all book formats that Lulu offers as standard. The content is always the same, only the paper and the drawn lines differ, as they have to be adapted to the respective format. This highlights site-specificity as an essential feature of LeWitt’s works, which also characterizes his famous *Wall Drawings*. These are conceived as works in situ: they likewise exist in the form of instructions that are executed over and over again, in different places, on walls of different sizes and factures, and by different people, with each execution inevitably turning out a little differently: “Each individual, being unique, if given the same instructions would understand them differently and would carry them out differently. […] Even if the same draftsman followed the same plan twice, there would be two different works of art. No one can do the same thing twice” (Sol LeWitt, “Doing Wall Drawings”). 

Doeringer congenially transfers this form of variability in the execution of an idea to the medium of the book when he prints the same book in a series of eight different formats. But even all the copies of the same format differ from each other, because in contrast to traditional edition printing, with print-on-demand, each copy is unique. After all, each print job is executed at a different time, on a different press, and potentially at a different production site; inaccuracies, material changes, and production errors are not uncommon. 

Therefore, Doeringer’s series does not simply constitute a copy, even if the name of his imprint Copycat might suggest that; he innovatively combines LeWitt’s artistic approach with new reproduction techniques and now brings it to perfection in the printed medium as well. In his “defense,” Doeringer quotes from an interview with LeWitt on his home page: In response to the question “How would you feel if someone executed a wall drawing of yours without permission but with care to follow the instructions and in an appropriate site?,” the latter replies: “OK… It would be authentic [and] it would be a compliment” (Eric Doeringer, website).

Doeringer has produced two other versions: one in US Letter format for the Artists’ Books Cooperative collection [*AaBbCc*](https://apod.li/aa-bb-cc) and one in DIN A5 format for Antoine Lefevbre's La Bibliotheque Fantastique, an artist-run print-on-demand platform, with the freely downloadable books designed to be printed on a home printer. 

Doeringer sells his books via his home page and Lulu as well as in his Etsy store. From the original eight version, only seven are still available in the following dimensions: 
- *The Location Of Lines (Pocket Format)*: 10.8 x 17.5 cm / 4.25" x 6.875" 
- *The Location Of Lines (A5 Format)*: 14.8 x 21.0 cm / 5.83" x 8.27" 
- *The Location Of Lines (US Trade Format)*: 15.2 x 22.9 cm / 6" x 9" 
- *The Location Of Lines (Small Square Format)*: 19.0 x 19.0 cm / 7.5" x 7.5" 
- *The Location Of Lines (Square Format)*: 21.6 x 21.6 cm / 8.5" x 8.5" 
- *The Location Of Lines (US Letter Format)*: 21.6 x 27.9 cm / 8.5" x 11"
- *The Location Of Lines (Landscape Format)*: 22.9 x 17.8 cm / 9" x 7". 


multiple versions / multiple cover variants

black-and-white

versioning / seriality

appropriation

reenactment

Copycat Publications

authorship

canon

The Location of Lines

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Kate Armstrong’s *Medium* is a conceptual reading and update of Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore’s collaborative book *The Medium is the Massage* from 1967, that first introduced McLuhan’s text *The Medium is the Message* to a greater public. Taking one spread each from this publication, Armstrong algorithmically searched the internet for pictures with matching compositional features. From the results, she picked three images (with minor deviations) that were then placed on pages following the depiction of the initial spread. By this, *Medium* is an enhanced reproduction of *The Medium is the Massage*, blown up to triple the size, as well as an extension of its conceptual and theoretical approach to the digital age. The peculiar, rather large, square format of Armstrong’s book also goes back to McLuhan and Fiore’s publication as it is the closest approximation to the size of its spreads, which also leads to a visual enhancement of the source. 

The book was commissioned for the exhibition “Medium_Massage 2.0: an infinite inventory” for the McLuhan100 Festival, Toronto. The ISBN in the book is indicated by 978-0-9878354-0-6, the barcode on the back cover by 5800069978372.

Medium