Martha Lea UK
Subject Red Acted
Original book title: The Paper Palace

Concept Before receiving The Paper Palace, I'd never read it, nor have I yet, not in any real chronological fashion, despite spending many hours working on the book and looking at the text. My relationship with this book is almost like the one you might have if you read a book over a stranger's shoulder on a very long train journey, and every time they put the book down, they skipped forward a few pages or went back a few chapters. This has been quite deliberate. I didn't want to know what the story was about in any great detail at first. I am also intrigued by the fact that we can read a book very intensely and come away hardly remembering any full sentences from it. I wanted to see what would become of the story, if I picked out random sentences. Would there still be a narrative, or would it be a crazy muddle. It seems that subconsciously, I have been trying to make sense of the text as I have gone on through the pages, despite a determination to keep it random. My criteria for the sentences seem to have been descriptions: people, atmosphere, small details. Sentences which mention the rarity of bread rolls with soup; grey flannels flopping around knees like grandma's shopping bag. Outdated phrases. Popsy. Shekels. Vitaglass. The wrong class to be born into. Antipodean. At first I didn't want to disturb the integrity of the original text, but simply to draw the eye to the edges of the paper with the red of the lifted sentences. But spending so much time with the text inevitably provoked further treatment. The concept of making each section of the book into a separate volume is taken from the subject of the original novel: A newspaper hack investigates an ex Communist Party member's past. A lot of the main character's time is spent searching in dusty archives. Much of the information on his subject remains secret or is destroyed. Construction After removing the hard cover, the exposed spine was pasted with methyl cellulose glue to soften the old animal glue which was then carefully scraped clean and free of old binding materials. The sections were then pulled slowly, having first cut the threads. Each separated page was typed around the edges in red ink using a 'Silver Reed 100' manual typewriter. Each section of the book was then stitched with linen thread into individual volumes and worked on to obscure the original text, each volume being treated in a slightly different way. There is a gradual deepening of opacity to the method of obliteration, from the first volume's text being covered with semi-transparent Japanese paper, lightly fixed in place, to the last volume's text being brushed out line by line using black ink. Volume five's text is inked over in red, rubber stamped on each page, and permanently closed using linen tape and sealing wax. The seals are made using a two-shilling piece and a sixpence in circulation at the time of the novel's publication. The additional volume, number eleven, is a 'newspaper' typed manually onto brown japanese tissue using the random selections first typed in red on the novel's pages. This is now the 'official' version of the text for this bookwork which is itself, further reduced. Its cover is deep red Harmatan goatskin, tooled freehand in gold leaf. The lining paper is by Judd Street, from an original Edward Bawden design for London Transport, 1935. The file box housing the collection of eleven volumes is covered using a waxy paper, 'Mineraux', and the same Judd Street lining paper as before. The original leather label from the novel was carefully soaked and lifted from the spine before being glued to the front right corner of the file box; it was then tooled freehand in gold leaf to obscure the original title and author's name.The tapes used to tie volume five, eleven, and the file box are linen bookbinding tapes. Each volume can be identified by its own identification label, typed with volume number, title of work; date of work and artist's name on the reverse.Volume one is signed and dated by the artist on page 3. The original flyleaf of volume one is signed, 'N Stirk', in blue ballpoint by a previous owner.

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