Innovative Formats
The shape of the objects Granary publishes fit, extend, and complement the writing on the pages—heightening an aesthetic of surprise, drawing attention to writing as texture, or foregrounding the book as intermediary between creator and reader. As one of the pages of Nine Sentences on Friendship reads, “I want you to come to one sentence at a time / that it might be a gift from me to you.”
When the writing surface becomes more than mere substrate, and decisions about how the words unfold in space become a driving force of the project, it allows writing to occupy new and unexpected planes. The accordion folds of the Celan poems create a special form of facing page translation and the book as landscape in Buzz Spector’s A Passage translate Jabès’s ideas into sculpture. See also the transparent pages of Oaths? Questions? and the accordion book The Lake.