Dear members and friends,
The International Vladimir Nabokov Society is delighted to announce a new online exhibition: Fiction Under Cover: Rebinding Nabokov’s Books.
Nabokov’s fiction is preoccupied with its own making. His novels are populated by writers, editors and commentators who reshape the texts they handle, and his narratives frequently extend into forewords, indexes and annotations, drawing attention to the book as a material object. Led by Siggy Frank (University of Nottingham), the project takes this interest in the physical book as its starting point, in a collaboration between the University of Nottingham and Designer Bookbinders UK. Ten Fellows and Licentiates of Designer Bookbinders have each produced unique bindings for Nabokov’s works, twelve in all, ranging from Mary and The Defense through Lolita, Pnin and Pale Fire to Ada, with two very different responses to Speak, Memory.
A few things to look out for: Mark Cockram’s Pale Fire is covered in palimpsest parchment, old writing scraped away so that faint traces still show through, a nice echo of poem and commentary competing for the same page. Glenn Malkin’s Pnin is built around Pnin’s spectacles, which give glimpses of the very book he is trapped in, and competing library call numbers that would file the novel under either American or Russian literature. Sue Doggett’s Lolita comes in a box labelled not Lolita but Dolores, held in place with an entomologist’s pin.
Each binding has its own page with photographs and the binder’s statement on how they approached the text. Several have also been digitised as 3D models by Matt Davies at Nottingham’s Digital Transformations Hub, so you can turn them round, open them up and look at endpapers and boxes in detail. That also raises some interesting questions about what happens to a book when it becomes a digital object.
Check out the center panel of TheNabokovian.org home page for details and links to the pages (including their future home in the menu).
The project was funded by the University of Nottingham and the AHRC. The IVNS is pleased to give it a virtual home. Please do share it with anyone who might enjoy it.
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