Jack and Betty Forever / Veronika Schapers; Yoshinori Shimizu

Identifier:FA.B106.1818

Dimensions:48 p. ; 16.5 x 19 cm (6.5 x 7.5 inches)

Publication dates:2005

Subjects: artists' books, letterpress printing

Description:Edition 9 of 35. Double pamphlets sewn together in light grey-blue softcover boards; signed and dated by the artist in September, 2005. Letterpress printed by zinc-cliches and linocut on notebook paper with various lines and grids. Text in English and Japanese. Accompanied by a CD in a grey booklet with old recordings from the textbook "Revised Jack and Betty." The book and the CD are housed in a slipcase pasted with green cover from store bought Japanese notebooks. "Jack & Betty - in the fifties and sixties a whole generation of Japanese learned English by using this textbook. In his short story, Shimizu describes what has happened to Jack and Betty thirty years after they graduated from school. ...For this book I collected Japanese notebooks with different lines and grids. Checkered and vertical lined ones for the Japanese characters, horizontal lined ones for the alphabet. The text was originally published in Japanese 1991 by Kodansha. I printed the Japanese version on paper with western lines and the Englishversion on paper for Japanese characters. As the English and Japanese way of reading differ (English: left - right, Japanese: right - left) the book has two beginnings: the English text starts in "front", the Japanese in the "back". Both of them meet in the middle with the imprint..." -- Veronika Schapers (http://booklyn.org/archive/index.php/Detail/Object/Show/object_id/50# )