De Magia Liberorum

There are a number of memories of books from my childhood that stand out to me with a clarity of impression, as if they were almost mystical experiences. I remember reading the part in Voyage of the Dawn Treader when Lucy discovers Coriakin’s Book of Incantations; I was absolutely capitivated by the description of this magic book, with its crisp pages and rich illuminations that seemed to move and come to life. I recall the furtive excitement of Ged opening the forbidden spell book in Ogion’s hut and deciphering the ancient runes in The Wizard of Earthsea. I vividly remember being altogether unfamiliar with Tolkien’s work and stumbling by accident across the 50^th anniversary edition of The Hobbit in the library, holding my breath when I pulled that gold leather bound book off the shelf with its playful green runes running along the edges of the cover, and feeling like I had myself discovered some ancient and magical tome from another world. And indeed I had.

The mystical sense of the otherworldy quality of books, or at least the potential they had to possess this quality, has pervaded my life ever since I was a child. They can be so much more than a merely material collection of pages and illustrations, and I mean this about the physical object itself, not just the stories or ideas they contain. I am convinced there is something like a perfect form of “book” in a Platonic sense, that subsists in higher or different realms. I believe the scribes of old perceived this, and so pursued ever greater efforts to bring this into our material realm as they crafted masterworks like the Book of Kells or the Black Hours of Bruge or the Aberdeen Bestiary or the Tres Riches Heures du Duc de Berry and so many others. There is an unquestionable aesthetic excellence, for sure, but works like these seem to be imbued with something even more, something of a spiritual nature. They are like talismans, material items that are consciously charged with energetic quality from beyond the material realm. A book crafted in pursuance of this ideal can become a kind of portal or gateway, not merely to the imagination as they’re well-known to be, but perhaps even to the soul.

Whether it was Plato proposing a metaphysical realm of forms that undergirded material reality, or Jung proposing a psychic realm of archetypes that undergird the symbols by which we experience reality, the thread of otherworldly substructure to this world has run through the Western consciousness for as long as we’ve been writing things down. The stories we tell exist on some other layer of reality; the myths and epics and scriptures we pass down bring these realms into contact with our own. The books we make to contain those stories can do the same; like magic talismans, they can even more powerfully instantiate and materialize the higher realms into the mundane, connecting eye and hand more deeply with heart and imagination. The mechanization of printing and book manufacturing has tended towards a dessication and stripping of this otherworldly quality from our books, but it has not removed it entirely. We still catch glimpses of it from time to time, and some visionary creatives have continued the spiritual tradition of craftsmanship and bookarts even into the mechanical and digital ages, figures like William Morris, Owen Jones, Grailey Hewitt, Donald Jackson, and even Jung himself with his Red Book. This is the spirit that animates my work; by craft and creativity, and by deep immersion in the book arts of the more enchanted ages past, I hope to engage in this great work myself. When I’m undertaking projects like illuminating the Beowulf epic or hand-writing the Psalms, I feel it like a call to a mystical craft, a spiritual handiwork, to build the material portals out of paper, ink, paint, and leather ever more closely aligned to their Platonic forms, so that my children and those that come after can discover these realms with the same delight and thrill that I had as a boy, and feel all the more certain that they are not alone, but are fellow travelers and creators in an endlessly variated and enchanted cosmos.