In anticipation of Chapter 13 of the When Words Collide festival, and an opportunity to display and discuss some examples of altered book art while I’m there, I wanted to post a little post about a work I made based off of one of my favourite books, Griffin & Sabine by Nick Bantock.

Arguably the catalyst to a life and career spent studying the book as object, Griffin & Sabine is a book told in postcards, an epistolary novel of literal epistles… or at least facsimiles of them.

First published in 1991 by Raincoast Books, Griffin & Sabine was the first in what became a series of seven books, as well as audiobook versions of the first three books on cassette tape and a digital version issued on CD-ROM but that’s a story for a different day.

The original Griffin & Sabine ends with a breaking of the illusion of reading the actual letters, a breaking of the fourth wall, with a blank page on which is typeset the intrusion of a heretofore unseen or even acknowledged narrator, who tells us that “These postcards and letters were found pinned to the ceiling of the otherwise empty studio of Griffin Moss. Griffin Moss is missing.”

I can’t remember the exact moment I first thought to myself, hmm, what would that have been like, to actually find these postcards and letters as individual objects? And then perhaps having them unpinned and spread out on a table, out of order, disconnected, a broken narrative?

I know I started wondering pretty early on, but it wasn’t until I’d started down the road of cutting up books for art that it occurred to me to actually see. And so one day I just did… picked up a copy on sale at a used bookstore and brought it home.

Long story short, the postcards and letters now sit on my desk and hang from my ceiling, the cards and letters penned by the more grounded character reaching up for the cards of the more mysterious character slowly spinning above.

And as I sit at my desk with these cards in constant slow motion, just on the edges of my vision, I’m reminded of the several other copies of the book that I’ve picked up over the years, sitting in a patient pile at the foot of my desk, waiting to be transformed. I wonder what the next creation might be?

Happy exploring!

– Winston