[THE DISSOLUTION OF GENRE BOUNDARIES, OR HOW WASTE PAPER IS TURNED INTO BOOKS AND BOOKS ARE TURNED INTO SAUSAGES] bok 3a

Reykjavík: forlag ed [the publishers are Einar Bragi and Dieter Roth], 1961. Square octavo (17.2 × 18.5 cm). Original limp cardboard binding with printed title label and handwritten signature and dedication; approx. 300 leaves. The handwritten dedication reads "eine hand hackt die andere ab (pestalozzi)" (one hand chops off the other, pestalozzi). The binding is slightly toned; else very good. One of only about 50 copies actually manufactured; according to Dobke and Roth, the 200 copies noted by Roth on the title page were far from being reached.

"Bok 3a" marks the beginning of a series of books in which Roth brings printed matter that usually circulates outside this medium into book form. In "bok 3a," Roth compiled pages from an Icelandic daily newspaper. He trimmed the pages to the appropriate size for the book, regardless of the text, and bound them together with adhesive binding. No two volumes are alike, as the pages that were available at the time were used for each volume. For the copy on offer here, he seems to have been provided with a stack of prints of a single gathering from the printer, so that the gathering repeats continuously. As in a music composition, certain structures, images, and themes reappear again and again as you leaf through the pages, only to disappear again into a sea of lead. Roth continued the series of accumulation books with bok 3b and bok 3d, which he filled with pages from children's comics and coloring books, punching holes of various sizes in them to create peepholes through which scenes from other pages can be seen. The series was completed with "bok 3c," which was made from makeready sheets used by printers to prepare and align the colors on the printing press before printing.

For Roth, a happening and Fluxus artist, engaging with print media was no trivial matter. After graduating from high school, he began a four-year apprenticeship as a commercial artist and then took private lessons at the School of Arts and Crafts with Swiss graphic designer and typographer Eugen Jordi. Roth began his artistic work when he was unable to find employment as a graphic designer after completing his apprenticeship and earned his living as a laborer on construction sites. An influential encounter was that with Eugen Gomringer and Marcel Wyss, with whom he founded the magazine Spirale, which published nine issues between 1953 and 1964. At the same time, Roth met Daniel Spoeri and created his first food sculptures. When he moved to Iceland with his wife in 1957, he was rejected by the local graphic design association. Together with Einar Bragi, he founded the publishing house "forlag ed," where both published their respective artist books. In addition to his freelance artistic work, he also worked regularly as a commercial artist for companies. His interest not only in food scraps but also in printing scraps is evident not only in book format. In the same year as the book offered here, he also created his first "literature sausages", for which Roth processed finely chopped novels and daily newspapers together with spices and fat in sausage casings. (Cf. Ina Jessen, AKL XCIX, p. 482)

Dobke p. 155; Roth/Mayer (books an graphics part 1) 11.

As of September 2025, no copies located worldwide via KVK, OCLC; we know of only one copy in North American institutions.