Several people commented and wrote me that the mix and match books I wrote about last week are rooted in the Exquisite Corpse game played by the Surrealists in the 20’s. Bonnie Baker enlisted over 26 artists to contribute a page to the book The Body Revisited (that’s one picture to the left). I like that the style of each contribution is radically different.
The people at Idiot Books have a very elaborate version, with ten stories and matching illustrations able to recombine into 10,000 different combinations. This one doesn’t follow the rule of most exquisite corpses: that each participant is unaware of what the others have contributed. But it’s quite a feat to get all the stories and illustrations to coordinate.
Poets.org has directions for a text-based version of the game. Instead of drawing a head, torso, feet, players contribute parts of sentences. Say the first gives a adjective, second a noun, third a verb, fourth a adjective, fifth a noun. Here’s the resulting poem of such a game:

Slung trousers melt in a roseate box.
A broken calendar oscillates like sunny tin.
The craven linden growls swimmingly. Blowfish.
A glittering roof slaps at crazy ephemera.

Last Sunday I saw an exhibit of pages from the hand-written, hand-illuminated Saint John’s Bible at the New Mexico History Museum here in Santa Fe. It’s a glorious exhibit, and it’s been traveling around the US, so if you have a chance to see it I highly recommend it. The website for the bible has information on how it was conceived and made, and in this section you can see many more pages than you can at the exhibitions.
I went on a docent tour of the exhibit, and I’m going to go back again to take more time to see the pages. There were three things I found most interesting:
In a sort of reversal of technology, the main calligrapher first developed a computer font of the scripts that would be used for the text. He then used it to layout the pages, size the text and define line breaks. The scribes worked from these layouts when doing the handwork.
The illuminations are very contemporary, both in feel and subject matter. The Old Testament is full of fire and brimstone, and there are references to the holocaust and other genocides of the 20th century. As the website explains “Throughout The Saint John’s Bible you’ll see the signs of our times. Strands of DNA are woven into the illumination of the ‘Genealogy of Christ.’ The Twin Towers in New York appear in the illumination of Luke’s parables. Satellite photos of the Ganges River Delta and photos from the Hubble telescope were used to depict Creation. In Acts, ‘To the Ends of the Earth’ includes the first vision of earth as seen from space.”
And lastly, how did they deal with mistakes? Since the pages are parchment, wrong letters can be removed with a scalpel. A missing line means the page needs to be rewritten, but sometimes that’s not feasible. So the calligrapher uses a “signe-de-renvoi” or a “sign of return”. It’s a graphic symbol marking the place where a correction or insertion is made, and pointing, as well, to the missing text. For the Saint John’s Bible, they use a bird, whose beak points to the error (apparently they also used 2 other animals, but I couldn’t find any examples). Below is a page with such a signe-de-renvoi in the left column.

As I embark on my prompt challenge, I’ve been taking note of interesting book structures that I can use. I’m not sure if this one has a name, other than “mix and match.” Each page is cut into 3 parts, horizontally, so that new pages can be composed by the reader. Most examples I’ve seen build new creatures from a head, torso and legs/feet.
The one to the left is called Build Your Own President and they say “Let your fingers do the voting. Flip the panels of this mix-and-match book to create your own presidential candidate from the smoldering wreckage of the current field. Combine Perry’s great hair with Newt’s humility and Bachmann’s progressive social policies. 1,000 possibilities in total. Just don’t expect to find a good one.”
There’s also an online version {first seen on boing-boing}