Existential Textuality

Abstract

Engagement in the Form of a Letterpress Book, John Crombie's So "Existential Textuality: Engagement in the Form of a Letterpress Book" examines the work of English writer and book artist, John Crombie. In So, his combinatory narrative of cyclical romance, Crombie integrates typographical and literary composition, physical and narrative structure, letterpress and linguistic materiality to address the fundamental givens of existence: mortality and consciousness, freedom and contingency, subjectivity and temporality. The ‘book’ as both a finite and an interactive format gives rise, in the typographic schema of So, to a view of language, stories and life itself as sets of possibilities and events, the significance of which derives from choice and sequence. The implicated reader of So’s multi-linear tale may flirt with notions of authorship, yet in her hands, the codex enacts, typography writes and design tells, as every movement and surface of Crombie’s work becomes reflective of the meanings that inhere in the very form of a printed book.