Artist and designer Ben Denzer (see 20 Slices of American Cheese) compiled the poems of the New York-based writer Sidney Offit (1928- ) into a chapbook that defamiliarizes the spatial mechanics of opening and reading a book by experimenting with paper folds and page order. Looking at first glance like a piece of ephemera from everyday life, a gatefold promotional pamphlet with a stapled binding that one might receive in the mail or pick up at a gallery or museum, this book is in fact a hand-bound paper puzzle.
Through the simple maneuver of using pamphlet stitch to create a binding for folded leaves of paper along each end of the trifold cover, the book turns reading into a multi-directional experience. The codex model of reading from front to back or back to front is disrupted; Denzer’s numbering system necessitates reading pages from one end to another in order to proceed sequentially. Each page turn becomes an act of unfolding or unwrapping in order to reach the last poem, which is placed on the center panel. Closing the book necessitates an act of layering each page from opposite ends on top of the other to return the pages to their original order.
Such structural quirks and witticisms make one even more aware of the actions made possible by the standard modern book format, including the random access it allows, as opposed to the sequential access (akin to a scroll) necessitated by the gatefold structure of Denzer’s book. Herein lies the paradox of this artist’s book: the playfulness of its inventive structure calls attention to the fixed conventions of the modern codex format while at the same revealing the inherent flexibility of its structure.