Night-flight

Description

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s international bestselling novel Night-flight comes to life in Mary Reynolds’s inventive binding. She encased the book in a night-blue cover and included one of Marcel Duchamp’s rotorelief designs on the endpapers. Duchamp’s rotoreliefs were a series of inventively printed discs designed to create optical illustions when spun on a turntable. This one, titled Corolles, features a spiral motif that evokes a sense of vertigo, foreshadowing the moment in the novel in which a pilot gets lost in a cyclone.

Although the bookbinding’s design is simpler than Reynolds’s other creations, it nonetheless conjures a sense of unease. Readers might feel as if they’re falling through the cover’s indigo night only to be swept up in the typhoon of Duchamp’s spinning optical illusion.

Night-flight

Mary Reynolds

Published 1932; rebound 1935-1942

Accession Number

273560

Medium

Full navy, vegetable-tanned sheepskin; endpapers of trial proofs for Marcel Duchamp's 1935 cover of Minotaure

Dimensions

H.: 17 cm (6 3/4 in.)

Classification

book

Museum

The Art Institute of Chicago

Chicago, United States

Credit Line

Mary Reynolds Collection, Ryerson & Burnham Libraries, Art Institute of Chicago