Richard Zauft
Sudbury, MA
https://www.richardzaufteditions.com/
EIDOLON
2024
Letterpress printed book
13.125 x 9.3 x 1
Artist Statement
THE HANDMADE BOOK IS AN ORCHESTRATED OBJECT that every viewer will experience differently. Each encounter is a unique event that is filtered through the lens of one’s culture, life experience, and the prevailing climate. My goal is to create a fusion of abstract ideas and physical interpretation that reveals new meaning through material and form.
Through a process of continual experimentation and revision, I strive to integrate all the design elements (typography, image, materials, color, texture, page design and sequence, structure, and weight) to serve the book’s content in harmony and balance. The final orchestration, with sensitivity and restraint, should reveal new intellectual insights for the reader, amplified by the sensual dimension that only a handmade book can impart.
…….
The Eidolon, as described by Homer in The Illiad as a spirit-double and messenger of a once living person, fascinated numerous nineteenth-century era poets. Their romantic conceptions of the Eidolon as a reincarnated being of mysterious and inexplicable transmutation paralleled the Spiritualist Movement interests in mediums and séances of the time. As literature and poetry pivoted toward the terrain of nature and internal emotion, the Eidolon was invoked as a terrible and fearsome entity encountered in the wild and in one’s dreams.
The evolution of the Eidolon can be traced from a desperate and pleading ghost, into a vengeful and irresistible force embodied in Achilles’ wrath, into a malevolent wraith that haunted both the woods and the mind. The quest to find out more about these allied concepts is what compelled me to undertake this project.
Starting with, and following various definitions of an Eidolon compiled through numerous references, I divided the book into four chapters. The Invocation (chapter one) is the conversation from The Illiad. The Summoning (chapter two) nd The Possession (chapter three) are the deconstructed, reconstructed, and reordered writings of selected poets that invoked the attributes of the Eidolon. The Reckoning (chapter four) is my account of a nightmare encounter with my own Eidolon. The attempt of this staging, and the trajectory of this entirely new narrative, is to provide a deeper nd more comprehensive understanding of the Eidolon as a powerful and eternal force that may be recalled at anytime through one‘s own misdeeds and misjudgments.
The physical expression of this book centers on the concept of the spirit visiting the physical world. This is demonstrated through the translucency of the plexiglass covers and the Japanese paper – both yield only a partial view of the text on the other side. The goatskin binding is a medieval style that contrasts starkly with the modern plexiglass covers. These disparate materials were chosen to help amplify this ancient tale brought forward to modern times. Readers will notice that every page is designed with text running between the lines of other text. This text treatment represents the spiritual that resides within the corporeal, as the Eidolon resides in the body. Last, the voices of the Eidolon, and its victims, are presented through six different text treatments. In this modern day Greek chorus, the text fades away, is obscured, or is a cacophony of overlapping voices. The Eidolon thus resides everywhere and nowhere at the same time.