A process of investigation. The curators researched the history of books with holes in them. Questions they asked included: What does it mean to claim that a hole is central to the physical form of the book? What political and ethical questions are at stake when an artist cuts through, or shoots, the codex? What can these holes tell us about the nature of the book? Allen Ginsberg wrote in ‘Holy, Holy, Holy’ (1955): ‘The world is holy! The soul is holy! The skin is holy! The nose is holy!... Everything is holy!’ Books, too, can be surprisingly hol(e)y. Their holes are often not aberrations or quirks so much as integral features. The material text has historically been riddled with them: needle holes made in order to stitch pages together; or tunnels made by bookworms and other pests; or pinpricks added by medieval scribes to mark out the layout of a manuscript page; or, in parchment works, large irregular gaps as a result of flaws in the animal hide.

Leading to new insights. The new insights were shared in an exhibition, a film and a journal which was launched at the exhibition. The research interrogated the history of holes in the codex across two centuries. Holy, Holy, Holy presents a library of 20th and 21st -century books with holes – some intentional and some not; some playful and productive; some destructive and obscuring. On display will be a richly varied and international collection of titles, including books for children such as Katsumi Komagata’s What color? (1991), and Peter Newell’s The HOLE Book (1908), which invites readers to ‘open the book and follow the HOLE’; Scott Blake’s Hole Punch Flipbook #1 (2020) that puts holes in motion; Lucio Fontana’s perforated covers; Dieter Roth’s iconic die-cut volumes and South African artist Kendell Geers’ Point Blank (2004), an edition of 1,030 blank books with each copy shot at point blank range. In addition, we presented specially commissioned works by Carolyn Thompson and David Bellingham, and a special preview of Inscription issue 2.

Effectively shared. The research was disseminated through the one-month exhibition at the London gallery, with the film online and openly accessible through vimeo (https://vimeo.com/689203596) and with student engagement workshops - visiting undergraduate graphic design students from Kingston University. The exhibition received a three-paragraph review in the Times Literary Supplement.