If your Face­book news feed looks any­thing like mine, you wake up each morn­ing to a stream of not just food snap­shots and self­ies but pic­tures of books, whether stacked up, dumped into a pile, or arranged neat­ly on shelves. Why do we post dig­i­tal pho­tos of our print­ed mat­ter? Almost cer­tain­ly for the same rea­son we do any­thing on social media: to send a mes­sage about our­selves. We want to tell our friends who we are, or who we think we are, but not in so many words, or rather not in so few; a few of the books we’ve read (or intend to read), care­ful­ly select­ed and arranged, does the job. But what if, instead of assem­bling a self-por­trait through books, some­one else entered your per­son­al library and did it for you?

Artist Nina Katchadouri­an (she of, among many oth­er endeav­ors, the air­plane-bath­room 17th-cen­tu­ry Flem­ish por­trai­ture) recent­ly took on that task in the Lawrence, Kansas home of famous­ly hard-liv­ing and furi­ous­ly cre­ative beat writer William S. Bur­roughs. She did it as part of her long-run­ning Sort­ed Books project, in which, in her words, “I sort through a col­lec­tion of books, pull par­tic­u­lar titles, and even­tu­al­ly group the books into clus­ters so that the titles can be read in sequence.

The final results are shown either as pho­tographs of the book clus­ters or as the actu­al stacks them­selves, often shown on the shelves of the library they came from. Tak­en as a whole, the clus­ters are a cross-sec­tion of that library’s hold­ings that reflect that par­tic­u­lar library’s focus, idio­syn­crasies, and incon­sis­ten­cies.”

Kansas Cut-Up, the Bur­roughs chap­ter of Sort­ed Books, fea­tures such arrange­ments as How Did Sex Begin? / Unin­vit­ed Guests / Human Error, Mem­oirs of a Bas­tard Angel / A Night of Seri­ous Drink­ing / A Lit­tle Orig­i­nal Sin, and Amer­i­can Diplo­ma­cy / Phys­i­cal Inter­ro­ga­tion Tech­niques / In the Secret State. Thom Robin­son of the Euro­pean Beat Stud­ies Net­work describes Bur­roughs’ book col­lec­tion as “a selec­tion of large­ly Euro­pean works whose con­tents include para­noia, the­o­ries of lan­guage, pseu­do­science, mor­dant humour and drugs: in ret­ro­spect, it’s easy to imag­ine the own­er of such an idio­syn­crat­ic library pro­duc­ing the melange of Naked Lunch. Per­haps for this rea­son, it seems hard to resist reorder­ing the books which Bur­roughs owned in 1944 in order to empha­sise the most recog­nis­able ele­ments of the lat­er Bur­roughs per­sona.”

Some­times Katchadouri­an seems to do just that and some­times she does­n’t, but her method of book-sort­ing, which she explains in the episode of John and Sarah Green’s series The Art Assign­ment at the top of the post, bears more than a lit­tle resem­blance to Bur­roughs’ own “cut-up” method of lit­er­ary com­po­si­tion. “Take a page,” as Bur­roughs him­self explained it. “Now cut down the mid­dle and cross the mid­dle. You have four sec­tions: 1 2 3 4 … one two three four. Now rearrange the sec­tions plac­ing sec­tion four with sec­tion one and sec­tion two with sec­tion three. And you have a new page. Some­times it says much the same thing. Some­times some­thing quite dif­fer­ent.” And just as a rearranged book can speak in a new and strange voice, so can a rearranged library.

via Austin Kleon’s newslet­ter (which you should sub­scribe to here)

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Art Assign­ment: Learn About Art & the Cre­ative Process in a New Web Series by John & Sarah Green

How to Jump­start Your Cre­ative Process with William S. Bur­roughs’ Cut-Up Tech­nique

The 321 Books in David Fos­ter Wallace’s Per­son­al Library: From Blood Merid­i­an to Con­fes­sions of an Unlike­ly Body­builder

115 Books on Lena Dun­ham & Miran­da July’s Book­shelves at Home (Plus a Bonus Short Play)

Dis­cov­er the 1126 Books in John Cage’s Per­son­al Library: Fou­cault, Joyce, Wittgen­stein, Vir­ginia Woolf, Buck­min­ster Fuller & More

The 430 Books in Mar­i­lyn Monroe’s Library: How Many Have You Read?

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

On can­vas and paper, Sal­vador Dalí cre­at­ed appar­ent­ly non­sen­si­cal real­i­ties that nev­er­the­less oper­at­ed accord­ing to log­ic all their own; in writ­ing, Lewis Car­roll, author of Alice’s Adven­tures in Won­der­land, did the very same. It thus only makes sense, despite their dif­fer­ences in nation­al­i­ty and sen­si­bil­i­ty as well as their bare­ly over­lap­ping life spans, that their artis­tic worlds — one with its grotesque­ly mis­shapen objects, obscure sym­bols, and haunt­ing­ly emp­ty vis­tas, the oth­er full of word­play, whim­sy, and math­e­mat­ics — would one day col­lide. It hap­pened in 1969, when an edi­tor at Ran­dom House com­mis­sioned the mas­ter sur­re­al­ist to cre­ate illus­tra­tions for an exclu­sive edi­tion of Car­rol­l’s time­less sto­ry for the house­’s book-of-the-month club.

“Dalí cre­at­ed twelve heli­ogravures — a fron­tispiece, which he signed in every copy from the edi­tion, and one illus­tra­tion for each chap­ter of the book,” writes Brain Pick­ings’ Maria Popo­va. “For more than half a cen­tu­ry, this unusu­al yet organ­ic cross-pol­li­na­tion of genius remained an almost myth­ic arti­fact, reserved for col­lec­tors and schol­ars,” until Prince­ton Uni­ver­si­ty Press saw fit to reprint it for Alice’s Adven­tures in Won­der­land’s 150th anniver­sary (much as Taschen recent­ly reis­sued Dalí’s bizarre cook­book Les Din­ers de Gala).  Sweet­en­ing the deal still fur­ther, they’ve includ­ed essays by math­e­mati­cian and Dalí col­lab­o­ra­tor Thomas Ban­choff as well as Lewis Car­roll Soci­ety of North Amer­i­ca pres­i­dent Mark Burstein.

“Although the out­ra­geous­ness of Rev­erend Charles Lutwidge Dodg­son, who came up with the pen name Lewis Car­roll in 1856, was limned with­in a con­ven­tion­al fairy tale,” writes Burstein, “the sur­re­al­ists delib­er­ate­ly sought out­rage and provo­ca­tion in their art and lives and ques­tioned the nature of real­i­ty. For both Car­roll and the sur­re­al­ists, what some call mad­ness could be per­ceived by oth­ers as wis­dom.” He describes sur­re­al­is­m’s ini­tial objec­tive as mak­ing “acces­si­ble to art the realms of the uncon­scious, the irra­tional, and the imag­i­nary, and its influ­ence soon went far beyond the visu­al arts and lit­er­a­ture, embrac­ing music, film, the­ater, phi­los­o­phy, and pop­u­lar cul­ture. As have the Alice books.” And with so many realms of the uncon­scious, the irra­tional, and the imag­i­nary left to explore, this inter­sec­tion of Car­roll and Dalí’s dif­fer­ent yet com­pat­i­ble meth­ods of explo­ration should hold more appeal than ever.

You can find copies of the Prince­ton reis­sue of Dalí’s Alice’s Adven­tures in Won­der­land here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Tarot Card Deck Designed by Sal­vador Dalí

Sal­vador Dalí’s 1973 Cook­book Gets Reis­sued: Sur­re­al­ist Art Meets Haute Cui­sine

Sal­vador Dalí’s Avant-Garde Christ­mas Cards

Behold Lewis Carroll’s Orig­i­nal Hand­writ­ten & Illus­trat­ed Man­u­script for Alice’s Adven­tures in Won­der­land (1864)

See Ralph Steadman’s Twist­ed Illus­tra­tions of Alice’s Adven­tures in Won­der­land on the Story’s 150th Anniver­sary

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

We think of Johannes Gutenberg’s print­ing press (cir­ca 1440) to have begun the era of the print­ed book, since his inven­tion allowed for mass pro­duc­tion of books on a scale unheard of before. But we must date the inven­tion of print­ing itself much earlier—nearly 600 years earlier—to the Chi­nese method of xylog­ra­phy, a form of wood­block print­ing. Also used in Japan and Korea, this ele­gant method allowed for the repro­duc­tion of hun­dreds of books from the 9th cen­tu­ry to the time of Guten­berg, most of them Bud­dhist texts cre­at­ed by monks. In the 11th cen­tu­ry, writes Eliz­a­beth Paler­mo at Live Sci­ence, a Chi­nese peas­ant named Bi Sheng (Pi Sheng) devel­oped the world’s first mov­able type.” The tech­nol­o­gy may have also arisen inde­pen­dent­ly in the 14th cen­tu­ry Yuan Dynasty and in Korea around the same time.

Despite these inno­va­tions, xylog­ra­phy remained the pri­ma­ry method of print­ing in Asia. The “daunt­ing task” of cast­ing the thou­sands of char­ac­ters in Chi­nese, Japan­ese, and Kore­an “may have made wood­blocks seem like a more effi­cient option for print­ing these lan­guages.” This still-labor-inten­sive process pro­duced books and illus­tra­tions for sev­er­al cen­turies, a good many of them incred­i­ble works of art in their own right.

In 1633, a Chi­nese print­er named Hu Zhengyan invent­ed a tech­nique known as douban, a form of poly­chrome xylog­ra­phy that led to the cre­ation of the world’s old­est mul­ti­col­or print­ed book, Shi zhu zhai shu hua pu (Man­u­al of Cal­lig­ra­phy and Paint­ing), con­tain­ing, per­haps, writes Cam­bridge Uni­ver­si­ty Library, “the most beau­ti­ful set of prints ever made.” And now thanks to Cam­bridge, the man­u­al has been care­ful­ly dig­i­tized and made avail­able online.

Pub­lished by Hu Zhengyan’s Ten Bam­boo Stu­dio in Nan­jiang, this man­u­al for teach­ers con­tains 138 pages of mul­ti­col­or prints by fifty dif­fer­ent artists and cal­lig­ra­phers and 250 pages of accom­pa­ny­ing text. “The method” that pro­duced the stun­ning arti­fact “involves the use of mul­ti­ple print­ing blocks which suc­ces­sive­ly apply dif­fer­ent coloured inks to the paper to repro­duce the effect of water­colour paint­ing.” Kept untouched in Cambridge’s “most secure vaults,” the book was unsealed for the first time just a cou­ple years ago. “What sur­prised us,” remarked Charles Aylmer, head of the Library’s Chi­nese Depart­ment, “was the amaz­ing fresh­ness of the images, as if they had nev­er been looked at for over 300 years.”

The 17th cen­tu­ry copy is “unique in being com­plete, in per­fect con­di­tion and in its orig­i­nal bind­ing.” (Anoth­er, incom­plete, copy was acquired in 2014 by the Hunt­ing­ton Library in San Mari­no, CA.) The book con­tains many “detailed instruc­tions on brush tech­niques,” writes CNN, “but its phe­nom­e­nal beau­ty has meant from the out­set that it has held a greater posi­tion” than oth­er such man­u­als. Like anoth­er gor­geous mul­ti­col­or paint­ing text­book, the Man­u­al of the Mus­tard Seed Gar­den, made in 1679, this text had a sig­nif­i­cant impact on the arts in both Chi­na and Japan, “where it inspired a whole new branch of print­ing.”

Con­sid­ered “one of the most his­tor­i­cal­ly and artis­ti­cal­ly impor­tant illus­trat­ed books of 17th cen­tu­ry Chi­nese wood­block art,” notes Liesl Brad­ner at the L.A. Times, Hu Zhengyan’s text reflects a time when lit­er­a­cy lev­els were ris­ing. Along with them came “increas­ing con­sumer demand for the print­ed word and images, which ush­ered in a gold­en era of Chi­nese pic­to­r­i­al paint­ing.” You can page through dig­i­tal scans of the entire book, from cov­er to cov­er, at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cambridge’s Dig­i­tal Library. Note: There are 388 pages in total. Click on the arrows at the top of this page to move through the text.

via MetaFil­ter

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Behold the Mas­ter­piece by Japan’s Last Great Wood­block Artist: View Online Tsukio­ka Yoshitoshi’s One Hun­dred Aspects of the Moon (1885)

Down­load 2,500 Beau­ti­ful Wood­block Prints and Draw­ings by Japan­ese Mas­ters (1600–1915)

An Epic Retelling of the Great Chi­nese Nov­el Romance of the Three King­doms: 110 Free Episodes and Count­ing

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness