Books as Aesthetic Objects
Collection

Cendrillon

Inside the front cover a folded sheet reveals the artist’s symbols: for the fireplace and ashes, there is a stylized fireplace surround with an ashy gray interior; for Cinderella herself, a curvaceous blue figure eight in a circle; and most elegantly, for the Prince... READ MORE

Cuba

An elegant cloth-covered clamshell box contains a big book and a little book each with its own nest and lift-ribbon. The big book is a triumph of immediacy: a record of an ‘officially sanctioned’ visit the artists took to Havana, Cuba, in 2003, Johanna Drucker with her pen, Brad Freeman with his camera.
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Department Store Book

A whole sub-set of books in the Jaffe Collection might be entitled World of Women, because there are books in the collection that refer specifically to women’s lives and women’s interests.READ MORE

Domestic Science

According to the artist, “Domestic Science is any of the following: the study of functional objects as symbols of human conditions, the contribution of place to meaning.... READ MORE

Dreambook I

Virginia Stearns’s powerful collages and painting paradoxically portray the evanescence of dreams... READ MORE

Eclectic Geometric

I once heard Martha Stewart say that ‘K’ was an awkward center letter in a monogram, but unfortunately I have no choice. Perhaps if she had seen the ‘K’ Russell Maret designed, she would better appreciate a gorgeous ‘K,’ standing alone. READ MORE

Foss

From the website of Vamp and Tramp, Booksellers, LLC: "This mossy [colored] boxed set contains accordion books featuring four ... READ MORE

Fragments of a Dream

Part of the magic and the mystery of a collection of books is trying to understand what draws an artist, a poet, a man to make a book, not knowing where it will find a home, or who will see it. READ MORE

Ge'ez Bible

Ethiopianhistory.com tells us that “Ge’ez is to Ethiopia as Latin is to the west. Ge’ez, like Latin, was not used as a spoken language for a very long time. But like Latin, Ge’ez is the precursor of Ethiopia’s three major Semitic languages.” READ MORE

God's Man

A book of 139 wood engravings with no words, Gods’ Man reflects the collector Arthur Jaffe’s early interest in woodcuts, beginning with acquisitions of works by Leonard Baskin and the book that may be the Collection’s best-known bibliographic treasure, the Cranach Press Hamlet... READ MORE

Greed

“Remember, remember, the fifth of November….”, was a poem, or ditty, created to remember the plot of Guy Fawkes to blow up the King of England and the Parliament. In a similar vein, Greed by Claire Van Vliet of Janus Press, is a work of art meant to remind us of a significant time much closer to the lives of Americans... READ MORE

Inheritance

An elegant cloth-covered clamshell box contains a big book and a little book each with its own nest and lift-ribbon. The big book is a triumph of immediacy: a record of an ‘officially sanctioned’ visit the artists took to Havana, Cuba, in 2003, Johanna Drucker with her pen, Brad Freeman with his camera. READ MORE