Resources

A bibliography is coming soon.

In the meantime, why not read:

Jorge Luis Borges, “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” in which Menard painstakingly produces a copy of fragments of the Hidalgo’s 17th-century novel, identical in word and matter, but “infinitely richer.”

George Perec’s Life: A User’s Manual (1978), in which a wealthy Englishman attempts to spend a life transforming a ream of Whatman paper back into itself, but fears he will be thwarted by a fiendishly competitive maker of jigsaw puzzles.

Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler (1979), in which Silas Flannery plans to copy Crime and Punishment, word for word, and page for page.

Or check out:

A printer’s collective in Oxfordshire in 2018 recreated the black page from Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, volume 1.  They discuss it here: https://www.39steppress.co.uk/alas-poor-yorick

The Sterne Trust in 2010 commissioned 169 artists to create motley emblems of their work, in homage to Sterne’s page.  See it here: https://emblemofmywork169.blogspot.com/

Since at least 1925, Tristram Shandy has been attractive to prestige presses, creating lavish editions of Sterne’s novel to be owned as art objects.  The most recent of these is discussed here: https://www.foliosociety.com/usa/blog/this-folio-life-recreating-one-of-literatures-most-imaginative-books

In 2018, Emily Friedman mottled a few emblems as a classroom exercise, using modern materials and techniques.  Her discussion of the experiment is here: https://hcommons.org/deposits/view/hc:32408/CONTENT/emily-friedman_ts-marbling_js.pdf/