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