A beautiful big book

I Wonder

At about nine inches by nine inches it looks and feels like an old holy book, but it was published for the first time in 2010 — so it’s confusing. The detail and the craftsmanship is mind boggling but most of all, it is beautiful. There are 14 chapters with titles as grand as Honour and The Politics of Ornament, to the weird chapter entitled Assembling Two IKEA Bookshelves.

It is difficult to begin but before you know it, you can’t stop. You read not from the beginning, but from where something catches your eye. I began on page 146, Memory 1: Photography, a chapter on found photographs bought at a garage sale in Marian Bantjes’ hometown of Saskatoon in Canada. She works on these with paint or Photoshop, old photos of people she doesn’t know, and will never meet; photographs of two boys, Ronnie and Sheldy (their names are inscribed on the reverse).

These are images of two young strangers that she has become acquainted with and went on to know and love. They became part of her own history, so much so, that if her house burnt down she would save these pictures rather than her own family photos.

Other chapters touch such disparate subjects as memory, her mother’s kitchen notebooks or Santa as an icon, but they are all are interesting or peculiar. Bantjes wants her work to seen by novelists, scientists, playwrights, doctors, philanthropists, babysitters — all of these people will take something from what they see or read and maybe turn it into something else. This is her success.

It is an illuminated manuscript for the 21st century — A Book of Kells, a colourful Koran — and the detail is staggering. There are 14 pages in the chapter called Honour where each page has very wide borders decorated with pasta shapes. These are not ‘step and repeated’ patterns on a computer; these pages are individually crafted by hand with thousands of every kind of pasta shape imaginable — highbrow baroque borders in lowbrow macaroni. It is difficult to read the words, because your eye is drawn to the borders and each border is unique, but reading the words and loving the meaning almost surpasses the visual impact. The book works on two levels — you can almost read it separately with both sides of your brain.

Who is Marian Bantjes? A Google search confirms that, yes, she is brilliant but a bit of a lunatic too — one of those genius lunatics that make this world a better place. Graphic designer Stefan Sagmeister says her work is his “favourite example of beauty facilitating the communication of meaning”.

She is an outsider, but a popular outsider who has designed the cover of The Creative View and is a regular in Wallpaper magazine and the Guardian newspaper. She began life as a typesetter and after 10 years working as a graphic designer and then became a graphic artist.

She is a seductive force. In her own words, she is “seeding the imagination of the populace” — which suggests she’s not very shy either.

Not everyone will get Bantjes’ work. I can understand how some people would find it far too ornamental, too self indulgent, too irritating and in places hard to read.

In one chapter The Alphabet: A Critique she goes through each letter of the alphabet: “the lower-case ‘d’ is just a rip-off of the ‘b’’’. On the lowercase ‘n’ she says “it’s half an ‘m’ and only half as nice”. But she has a soft spot for the ‘X’, “you know why illiterates sign their name with an X? Because it’s perfect, that’s why. Two strokes, which give the illusion of four ...”

It’s no wonder that Bantjes includes a quote by George Bernard Shaw towards the end of her book.

“There is nothing on earth more exquisite than a bonny book, with well-placed columns of rich black writing in beautiful borders, and illuminated pictures cunningly inset. But nowadays, instead of looking at books, people read them.”

Shaw wrote this nearly 100 years ago, maybe it’s time to start looking at books again.