Foolish man. You cannot turn me into a phantom because you are frightened. You do not dismiss a muse at whim. If you will not join me—then I will come to you.
Feel free to leave your guess in the comments…
With the pages of book four of this trilogy (yes, it’s one of those) now having passed through my greedy fingers, I am reminded how incredibly inspiring, intriguing, and engaging this author’s work is. When I read the first three books five years ago, I enjoyed them, but now I am experiencing this series with different eyes (in some sense, literally), and I am blown away.
No other collection of works I have read have provided me with such profound multi-sensory pleasure. (Hey, get ’yer mind out of the gutter; I didn’t mean that.)
I will certainly blog about this after I have read book six (and most likely start re-re-reading book one). In fact, I have already noticed this artist’s “ephemeral” influence starting to creep into the mock-ups for this site’s evolutionary redesign.
Griffin & Sabine, one of the first two (I forget the titles). Probably the first one, but I won’t swear to it.
I would love to see a Nick-Bantok-inspired site. Have you read his autobiography? I strongly recommend it.
Did you read the next trilogy (which I was less enamoured of)?
I was about to guess Star Wars but WA’s comment showed my ignorance of sci-fi.
You are quite correct, wolfangel. The quote is from the end of the first one and in the dust jacket of the second (Sabine’s Notebook). I have just started Alexandria, the second book of the second trilogy. All six books came in an exquisite wooden case.
I agree with you about the second trilogy not being as good. One thing for me—I felt as if Matthew and Isabella were intruding on my intimate voyeuristic relationship with Griffin and Sabine (or Griffin/Sabine).
Nick Bantock’s autobiography is on order from Amazon, as is his new “how to” book.
The first “found objects” that I will incorporate into the site redesign are some pages out of a passport from the SFR of Yugoslavia. A young Sarajevan boy stole it from his father’s possessions and sold it to me for a few Deutschmarks.
Ah, I take it that you have not yet discovered the Griffin & Sabine series, Michelle. I would highly recommend the next time that you are in a bookstore, grab book one off the shelf, curl up in a chair, and start flipping through it. By the time you get a few pages in, and you pull out Sabine’s folded letter from the charmingly decorated envelope, you’ll be hooked.
I have recently become fascinated by the idea of correspondence as art (and art as correspondence) due to a few threads in my life that recently became tangled.
In fact, the intro to his “how to” book poses a query that I was quite recently wondering about—“I can’t make up my mind if mail art has to pass through the post in order to make it ‘official.’”
The books aren’t science fiction, really. They’re quite something: fascinating, really.
For years after reading them I wanted a correspondence like that. (I still do, a bit, of course.)