Anne Welsh
Anne Welsh is Lecturer in Library and Information Studies at University College London, where she teaches the core Cataloguing module in the MA Library and Information Studies (MA LIS) and the optional module on Historical Bibliography in the MA LIS, MA Digital Humanities and MA Early Modern Studies. Currently on sabbatical, she is completing research on the poet Walter de la Mare and his Working Library and writing books on Cataloguing and Bibliography. Practical Cataloguing (Facet, 2012; Neal Shuman, 2012) is a core text on cataloguing courses worldwide. She has a small, but growing, personal collection of mass-produced artists’ books, and is interested in them not only as works of art, but as important challenges to the way we order and structure knowledge in the modern library environment. A Humument has featured not only in her modules at UCL, but in her training sessions and seminars for the Art Libraries Society UK and Ireland (2012 and 2015) and the National Acquisitions Group (2015).
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/dis/people/annewelsh
“For the Bibliographers of UCL”: A Humument and the Lessons It Teaches 21st Century Librarians
In 2012, I was fortunate enough to meet Tom Phillips at his exhibition at the Book Art Bookshop in Hoxton. Signing my copy of A Humument, (5th ed., 2012), he declared himself surprised that it features in the MA Library and Information Studies, and wrote an inscription, “For the Bibliographers of UCL.” He wondered what his work, originally envisioned to prove that he could make Art from anything – even an old Victorian novel – can teach librarians.
This paper highlights the many lessons that are intrinsic to a mass-produced artist’s book that also exists as a series of prints, USB with audio recording, web app, celestial and terrestrial globes, and a skull, and which Phillips refers to himself as “a work in progress” and “Gesamtkunstwerk.”
Artists’ books often challenge the boundaries of the book form. As bibliographers, we can cite Gaskell, A New Introduction to Bibliography (1995) : “All documents, manuscript and printed, are the bibliographer’s province; and it may be added that the aims and procedures of bibliography apply not only to written and printed books, but also to any document, disc, tape or film where reproduction is involved and variant versions may result.” This paper explores what A Humument means with regard to the core concepts of ‘variant versions’, ‘the edition’, the ‘ideal copy’ and ‘the Work’.
We consider Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (IFLA, 1998) and whether its implementation through new international code Resource Description and Access facilitates easier discovery of the full range of the artist’s work and Mallock’s (1892) novel which formed its canvas.
Finally, we question how Gaskell’s (1995) assertion that “Bibliography’s overriding responsibility must be to determine a text in its most accurate form” can be applied to a work with which the artist has been engaged since 1966 and which he continues to create, recreate and innovate today.
This paper highlights the many lessons that are intrinsic to a mass-produced artist’s book that also exists as a series of prints, USB with audio recording, web app, celestial and terrestrial globes, and a skull, and which Phillips refers to himself as “a work in progress” and “Gesamtkunstwerk.”
Artists’ books often challenge the boundaries of the book form. As bibliographers, we can cite Gaskell, A New Introduction to Bibliography (1995) : “All documents, manuscript and printed, are the bibliographer’s province; and it may be added that the aims and procedures of bibliography apply not only to written and printed books, but also to any document, disc, tape or film where reproduction is involved and variant versions may result.” This paper explores what A Humument means with regard to the core concepts of ‘variant versions’, ‘the edition’, the ‘ideal copy’ and ‘the Work’.
We consider Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (IFLA, 1998) and whether its implementation through new international code Resource Description and Access facilitates easier discovery of the full range of the artist’s work and Mallock’s (1892) novel which formed its canvas.
Finally, we question how Gaskell’s (1995) assertion that “Bibliography’s overriding responsibility must be to determine a text in its most accurate form” can be applied to a work with which the artist has been engaged since 1966 and which he continues to create, recreate and innovate today.