Unreadable Books

One of my ongoing threads of research and exploration stems from a project I began around Lyme Park, a National Trust property near Stockport. I did some research into the Legh family who lived there, and went to the Greater Manchester Archive where I found some fascinating maps and letters. Amongst these was a letter from 1685 written to Sir Richard Legh by Mabell Brooke, appealing for his help. At the end of the letter she begged him in a rather sad postscript to burn it - which he obviously didn’t as I was reading it over 300 years later. I wondered how she would have felt to know a stranger was reading her words… and I thought about all the things I write that I would not like to be read. So it became an exploration of all the ways that a book might be made unreadable… the physical sewing together of pages, the way a book is bound to hide the words in the spine, the shredding or cutting of pages. I took inspiration from the place too, from those often overlooked little details of domestic mending. I noticed that there were holes in some of the fabric lampshades which had been repaired by sewing scraps of lace of the holes; I drew and painted these shapes in my sketchbook. These then became prints for the covers of my unreadable books.