In his 1896 essay, “The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered,” the architect Louis Sullivan coined the phrase “form ever follows function.” Sullivan believed that the form, or exterior expression of a building, should respond to its interior functions, allowing the building’s purpose to dictate its design. In other words, the best designs are ones that respond to an object’s intended function.
This concept can be applied to countless categories of usable objects, including books! It’s easy to suppose that all books look alike — after all, almost all of them have spines, covers, and pages. However, when you start categorizing books by their function, you will notice how certain book formats and materials directly correlate to their intended use. Even without a title on the spine or cover, you can often identify what category a book belongs to based on its format and material construction alone.
Essentially, you can judge a book by its cover.
The Parameters of Our Research
The Encyclopedia of the Anomalous Book provides well-researched documentation on these unique book forms for book historians, archivists, curators, students, museum professionals, and anyone interested in book history. Each entry in the Encyclopedia includes an overview of the anomalous book, a glossary of terms pertinent to the book, a diagram of the book’s design or construction, and an annotated bibliography.
Entries in the Encyclopedia explore anomalous book forms from the past 300 years of human history, or roughly the 1680s to 1980s. We chose this timeframe because it corresponds to the most easily recognized book form, the codex. In book history circles, a codex refers to a squarish or rectangular form made up of pages that must be manipulated to access information. It is typically bound along one edge (usually the left in Western civilizations). Thus, most books as we understand them today are codices.
We seek to avoid broad categories or genres, such as “cookbooks” or “children’s books.” Instead, we narrow those broad categories down to specific types of books, like church cookbooks or alphabet books, for example. We’re interested in a wide variety of anomalous books, including:
- Account books
- Autograph albums
- Baby books
- Books bound in human skin
- Books with material didactics (e.g. movable parts, before/after flaps)
- Coffee table books
- Diaries
- Dictionaries
- DIY Books from the 1960s-1980s (e.g. Foxfire, the Whole Earth Catalog)
- Instruction manuals (drawing, sewing, etc.)
- Mail-order catalogs (e.g. Sears catalog)
- Pattern books (e.g. architecture, costume, furniture, etc.)
- Penmanship manuals
- Pocket guides or Field guides
- Publishers’ dummies
- Road atlases
- Sample books (e.g. wood, textile or dye sample books)
- Scratch ‘n Sniff Books
- Shape-note songbooks
- Sticker books
- Telephone directories, aka phone books
- Tunnel books
- Zines
Once you think about it, you will start to recognize anomalous books everywhere!
Our History
The Encyclopedia of the Anomalous Book grew out of WPAMC’s Book Connoisseurship block, a three-week intensive on book history led by Emily Guthrie, Director of the Winterthur Research Library, during the Fall 2020 semester. Historically, WPAMC fellows would complete appraisal reports on books held in the Library’s collection. However, due to the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic, fellows were unable to spend the requisite time on-site to complete such reports safely. Creativity was called for.
Ms. Guthrie came up with the idea that fellows could virtually research what she called “anomalous books,” or books whose forms respond to their function in unique ways. Winterthur’s collections include quite a few such books. As such, some fellows were able to obtain hands-on experience assessing historical book forms (observing social distancing protocols, of course). The resulting projects from the WPAMC Class of 2022 formed the foundation of our Encyclopedia.
We hope to continue adding entries to the Encyclopedia as future WPAMC scholars complete their Book Connoisseurship block in the years to come. So, watch this space!
