Bibliographer: Nicholas Mayo

In my experience of both making and reading descriptive bibliographies, what felt most lacking was not the feeling one gets after finishing a novel or even the aura and smell of opening it. Instead, I lost that moment of impression (and/or judgement), the sense one has of a work when one first encounters it. When people judged Munster village by its cover, what could that have been like? Was it immediately classed as an elitist text by its clean, sparse title page? Or, did it seem intriguing in its awareness of materiality?
Its interest in the white of the page and its intrigue in a place "Munster Village" (rather than the peoples we often see at the center of titles) may have equally generated curiosity and judgement, and it is this mix of feelings and impressions I searched for in my work on this bibliography. I wondered, what in more recent times evokes such questions of materiality, space, and authorship? Put more explicitly, how could I get into the mind of a denizen at Robson and Co's bookstore? Can one feel dumbstruck and denunciatory?
Additionally, descriptive bibliographies seemed to lack exactly what I hope to provoke through the juxtaposition of my 9 images. Concerned more with legibility, these text-based bibliographies seek to summarize the specifics of a novel's form so as to make the most "important" and "salient" elements of that form easily accessible. By placing novel title pages from the 1770s with Minimalist Art works from the 1960s, I intend to generate questions about materiality. Minimalism in the Art world of the 60s was a movement that self consciously sought to contrast the concern with authorship and subjectivity of its conceptual predecessor, Abstract Expressionism. Indeed, theartstory.org writes, "The new art favored the cool over the "dramatic": their sculptures were frequently fabricated from industrial materials and emphasized anonymity over the expressive excess of Abstract Expressionism." It is this intersection and tension between anonymity (as found through materiality) and the very idea novels began with, exemplarity. I am interested in how the novel, as a self consciously defined genre of fiction, reckons with this tension, not in its content but rather in its material form.
The final three images are headers from some of todays most popular blogs centered around our contemporary manifestation of minimalism (a life philosophy that--broadly put--seeks happiness through a decluttering, both figuratively and literally, of the lives made in consumerist societies, in which items and actions not offering immediate emotional or financial benefit are superfluous, and thus need be discarded). It is the most experimental part of my bibliography, but I was curious to see what question or thoughts such an odd juxtaposition could create. Despite the jumps in time, can we trace a line through these three sets of minimalism? Is their continuity in their concern for materiality? Is their continuity in their interest in exemplarity?

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