Fake Books: Their Secrets Under Cover
Mindell Dubansky’s romance with fake books began nearly two decades ago at a Manhattan flea market, where she picked up a small volume carved from a piece of coal and bearing the name of a young man who had died in a mining accident in 1897.
“An electric charge of grief went through my entire body,” Ms. Dubansky, the longtime preservation librarian at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, recalled.
A light bulb also went off in her head. Sensing an unexplored territory, Ms. Dubansky set out to map the contours of the world of fake books, eventually amassing about 600 made from stone, wax, straw, wood, soap, plastic, glass and other materials. She even coined a term for them: “blooks,” short for “book-look.”
Some 200 items from her collection went on display last month at the Grolier Club in Manhattan, a temple to books, where they will remain through March 12. The exhibition, “Blooks: The Art of Books That Aren’t,” appears to be the first of its kind in the United States.
Most exhibitions at the Grolier, whose grand library holds more than 100,000 volumes with real pages and sometimes spectacular fine bindings, don’t include items like Secret Sam’s Spy Dictionary, a 1960s toy that lets users photograph enemies with a camera hidden inside a fake tome that also shoots plastic bullets out of its spine.
To Ms. Dubanksy, the larger goal of the show is to have fake books accepted as a real part of biblio-history.
“I see blooks as a parallel to book history, but I’ve had trouble getting people to take them seriously because of the association with kitsch,” she said.
She finds it easy to look for deeper meaning. “People have a real love of the book as an object,” she said. “But what is that connection about? Why do we feel a need to live with books, to have them around? I figured that if I could eliminate the text and collect objects made to mimic the form of books, I could figure that out a little better.”
While it can be hard to establish a clear history of blooks, they may have existed as long as the codex itself. There were elaborate medieval reliquaries shaped like books, as well as items like a book-shaped beer keg Ms. Dubansky saw described in an old text.
From the beginning, “it was humble objects and fine objects mixed together,” she said.
The Grolier show ranges chronologically from an 18th- century wooden volume that opens up into an altar (apparently used by Roman Catholics, Ms. Dubansky said) to a purple plastic children’s toy from the mid-1990s called a Polly Pocket. The objects are arranged in categories — religion, commemoration, photography, food, toys, grooming and so on — forming what she calls a tentative taxonomy of blooks. It’s hard not to be charmed by the emotional intensity, inventiveness and sometimes sheer whimsy of the items in the chockablock display cases. But don’t get Ms. Dubansky, a conservator and expert in historic bindings, started on the current vogue for books that have been sliced, sawed, shredded, blowtorched and otherwise mutilated on their way to becoming new works of art.
“I hate this wholesale destruction of books that’s going on, this altered-books craze,” Ms. Dubansky said. “I’ve seen so many beautiful books that have been damaged on Etsy. They could just make blooks instead!”