Pages, slabs, and shadows.

Books do not need to be beautiful objects to be cherished. Many indispensable books on my shelf were in poor condition when I brought them home from the shop. The publishers who put out the cheap yellow-page paperbacks that rocked my world and set my course when I was a child didn’t give much consideration to font, printing, or paper stock. All that mattered was readability. Could I open it fast, close it up quick, and chuck it in my bag when I was done? If anybody at the publishing company was making design decisions, those were their objectives. Any impediment to or distraction from the reading experience was unwelcome. They took it for granted that everything that mattered was inside the book.

Lately, the art book has been presented as an intervention in a perceived crisis of print. A gorgeous package might make people care about books again (did people stop caring about books?) and maybe even stop to read them. Vendors at events like the Jersey Art Book Fair take it for granted that the way their book looks and feels deserves just as much consideration as what the book contains. Never mind that if the reader is noticing design decisions, it is almost certain that she is not as lost in the story, or in the sheer act of reading, as she ought to be. It is as if we’ve been told that the make and model of the wardrobe to Narnia is as crucial as Narnia itself.

Regardless of its marketing wisdom, this feels downright insecure. Many bookmakers no longer trust that their stories will draw notice, or hold attention, or keep us moving from sentence to sentence, or retain the power to pull us into another universe. Presentations at the JABF were about what we’ve lost: wetlands, folktales, newspapers, concentration. It is exactly that sense of uncertainty — that existential peril, and pervasive feeling of cultural endangerment — that makes the Jersey Art Book Fair as compelling as it is. We who love print, and stories, and reading, want to protect and celebrate those who’ve armored their stories so elaborately against a hostile world.

Mana Contemporary (888 Newark Ave,.) the host of the JABF, participated in this rear-guard action on behalf of print with two shows salient to the Fair’s tacit themes and objectives. “The Z Factor,” a celebration of the works of graphic artist, illustrator, novelist and Mana tenant Cheryl Gross, centered on drawings of Umons, the imaginary race of post-gender humanoids who were the heroes of her 2014 work of speculative fiction. Mana showed us the Umons but did not share the book — as if to say that the soul of Gross’s artistry and ideology is present in the images, rather than in the text or even in the manner in which the images interact with the text.

“Open Book(s),” the second show, is an audacious collection of thirty experiments that take the bound book as a jumping-off point — and boy, do they jump far. It’s a sumptuous show, with illuminated pieces on bare wooden slabs that seem to levitate at waist-level, with each artwork presented as exquisitely as an omakase offering at a sushi counter. It’s a reverent show, filled with respect for the awesome transportive power of these cloth and paper vehicles for thoughts, arguments, and stories. And ultimately, it’s a heartbreaking show, because none of these books can be picked up and read.

Artifacts and relics from the Age of Print: our age.

There are plenty of words in “Open Book(s).” Usually, though, those words tease more than they reveal. Curators Ysabel Pinyol Blasi of Monira Gallery and Mana Contemporary director Kele McComsey understand coy beauty — bookish beauty — and they see print as a vehicle for mystery, secrets, and confessions. That mystery is hidden between quivering lines and tucked under the cardboard covers. It’s hinted at but never fully elucidated by fifteen artists willing to pull apart the book and stick it back together at oblique angles. Together, they’ve created a gorgeous, imaginative, frequently haunting exhibition that pushes for a broader understanding of the many conduits through which the meaning of a book can reach us. If you’re primarily a viewer, you might find this radical remix from bookmakers a relief.

If you’re a reader, though, these books may strike you as considerably less accessible than the ones you’re accustomed to. They also come freighted with uncomfortable reminders of the ways in which contemporary publishers, indie and otherwise, interact with us in 2025. Potent, parsimonious words by Rujuta Rao, for instance, haven’t been shared as much as they’ve been leaked. “On Solidary Viewership” strings her story across a thick deck of sharp black flashcards. Three of them are readable; the rest of them, maybe a hundred of them, have been fastened together by an industrial clamp. This acts as a visual metaphor for the relationship between the narrator and an older and more powerful addressee. Yet the cards we can see are tantalizing, filled with words and phrases designed to heighten interest in her tale. They’re hooks, designed to intrigue, even as the rest of the story is locked away from all but those authorized to turn the handle.

Similarly, Jean Wolff renders her texts open-ended by cutting circular wormholes into the pages. The mutilated paragraphs of the “Holey Book” aren’t completely illegible: they’re half there and half missing, and you’re invited to supply your own phrases, Mad Libs-style, or simply stand back and appreciate the aesthetic of pages and ink as they stack up, one by one, in a diagonal 3-D slash into the depths of the volume. Like Rao’s work, Wolff’s rearrangement enlivens an object that seems otherwise inert. Before it was cut up, would anybody have bothered to pick this dusty old thing up off of its shelf? Doesn’t this invasive treatment knock something dormant out of pages that would otherwise have slept in the dustiest aisles of the library?

The "Holey Book." Photo by Fresco Cerdas.

Other pieces in the show crouch in a defensive posture. In “Paradox of Intolerance,” John O’Connor makes a fortress out of paper and pencil, twisting his blown-apart book into the shape of an infinity symbol. The colors are cheery, but the artist’s carefully lettered suggestion that tolerance and intolerance form a closed loop isn’t a happy one. Like many of the artifacts in “Open Book(s),” it seems to have been created in the breach after the breakdown of discourse. “There Are Many Questions,” a piece by Amy Wilson that’s as much like a work of textile art as it is a page from an experimental book, tells a fragmented story about the persistent effects of childhood trauma. Wilson spells it out in tiny letters that make it seem like she’s whispering to herself. It’s interrogative, but the asker has given up on the possibility of anybody answering, or even listening. The urge to write is undermined by a lingering suspicion that nobody cares.

This all comes to a head in Ana Paula Cordeiro’s “Body of Evidence,” a pressure cooker of quotes, national insignias, old photographs and screen prints of New York City, and reflections of the artist’s experience as an immigrant in an unwelcoming society. It’s too fissile to be a compendium or a log, and too focused to be a scrapbook; instead, it sits there like things retrieved from a fire, begging to be thumbed through and engaged with, but threatening to fall to pieces in the hands of anybody who tries.

Print in a late technological age, these pieces argue, is constantly at risk of getting overwritten: by design, by the furious pace of events, by sheer chance. Twentieth century cohesion is gone, replaced by the logic of agglomeration, experience collection, life-logging, and a looseleaf feel. The fragility of text is ferociously literalized in Kelly Driscoll’s luminous, slightly terrifying “Fragments of Light 2,” a book with pages made of glass. The artist has used a laser to cut the poetry of Rumi into transparent sheets that sit atop each other like the steps of a ziggurat. No work of print art has ever looked more like an architect’s model. None faces danger with such pride.

Driscoll’s piece is flanked on either side by “Cocoa,” a glass box and talisman forged for the protection of a gay beach community, and Colleen Topping’s “Egg/Tiny,” five symbol-heavy prints with melting text paired with dried flowers so frail that it feels like a heavy breath could scatter them to dust. On this back table, the curators give us the book at the end of the line: made of brittle material, heavy with the desiccating effect of the ages, untouchable, pages unturnable, unstable and practically unreadable.

Renate Aller's stark and desolate "Pascua." Photo by Fresco Cerdas

Jersey City gallerygoers may be reminded of the “Founders Day” show at EONTA Space, an electrifying installation in which Lauren Farber turned her blade, and her saw, and her torch on a stack of books, and reassembled them in great piles, pyres, and archways. Farber, like the circle-cutting Jean Wolff, seemed driven by a desire to impose her will on books before they could impress any ideas on her. Violent refashioning of the library felt like a way of seizing control over a bound and typeset adversary. The near-clinical reassembly of books in the Mana show — combined with the cool, controlled atmosphere of the floating slabs and precise illumination — couldn’t be farther from the unchecked fury that Farber directed at her bookshelves. While there’s sadness about things lost here, there’s no malice in “Open Book(s).” Some of these experimentalists even attain the emotional neutrality common in laboratory conditions.

Well... in the first room, anyway. In the back chamber of the galleries dedicated to “Open Book(s),” the levitating wood platforms are gone, and pieces are placed directly on the floor. It’s an appropriately earthy setting for the work of Ann Messner, a sculptor and conceptual artist with an urgent message and a broad, if dim, view of the world.“The Atlases 2023-24” is an installation within the exhibition — a tough-minded global survey paired with a demolition of the maps between hardcovers.

Wolff cut into her “Holey Book” with surgical precision and a light touch; Messner counters with a brutal excavation. Not content to make them impossible to read, she’s also made them a bear to open. She’s dug into her atlases, stained them with tar, tied them down like the giants they are, masticated the paper she’s extracted from their middles, and set the balls of pulp next to the cavities they’ve been torn from.

We’ve ripped the planet to shreds, Messner is telling us, and the spiked footprints of the human race have trampled the geographical markers we once counted on to orient ourselves. War and resource extraction have crushed cohesion, scrambled the roads, upended the landscape. Linear cohesion is a lie we’re telling ourselves, and there’s no point in pretending we can capture our turbulent reality between hardcovers. If we’re being honest, we’d admit we’re lost, and we’d put the book away for good.

Poor fractured atlas: Ann Messner's world vision.

Fair enough. The old maps may be exhausted. Books may indeed be outdated tech. Nevertheless, it’s worth remembering that eight hundred million of them were sold in 2024. We might take issue with the things those books are about, but their existence is a rude fact. To some visionaries, books might seem like a relic of a fading era in need of radical reimagining, but to most readers, they’re the same as they’ve ever been.This is not a dying industry; it isn’t even one in trouble. It’s cool that visual artists, curators, and Art Book fair-runners are so concerned about print. That demonstrates true cross-medium compassion. But take it from an inveterate reader: no demon is coming for our books. Don’t worry about print. Print’s not going anywhere.

(How do you get into MANA Contemporary to see the show? Well, that’s a very good question. MANA is, without a doubt, one of the most impressive art institutions in the New Jersey metropolitan area, and it would be better recognized as such if it kept regular hours. As it stands, if you can’t get to MANA for the official opening of Cheryl Gross's show on Wednesday, March 5 at 5 p.m., your best bet is to schedule a private tour. Or you could wait for MANA to get it together to open more regularly. It has to happen. The staff there puts on great shows, and great shows deserve to be seen — often.)

Tris McCall regularly writes about visual art (and other topics) for NJArts.net, Jersey City Times, and other independent publications. He's also written for the Newark Star-Ledger, Jersey Beat, the Jersey City Reporter, the Jersey Journal, the Jersey City Independent, Inside Jersey, and New Jersey dot com. He also writes about things that have no relevance to New Jersey. Not today, though.

Eye Level is an online journal dedicated to visual art in Jersey City, New Jersey. A new review will appear every Tuesday morning at 8 a.m., and there'll be intermittent commentaries posted to the site in between those reviews.

Eye Level is made possible by an Andy Warhol Arts Writers Grant.