Elisabeth Tonnard - The Invisible Book is a book produced in limited edition at the affordable price of €0. It will work as a digital book too, on any platform. The edition is limited to 100 copies (neither numbered nor signed)

Elisabeth Tonnard, The Invisible Book. 2012.

elisabethtonnard.com/works/the-invisible-book/

The Invisible Book is a book produced in limited edition at the affordable price of €0. It will work as a digital book too, on any platform. The edition is limited to 100 copies (neither numbered nor signed).
This is a product without a single fault, available at the lowest price possible. The book was made as a reaction to both the trend of decreasing booksales and the trend of increasing expectations from audiences.
Published by Elisabeth Tonnard, Leerdam, April 2012.

The book’s first edition was sold out on the day of its release. A second edition became available in June 2012. It too was limited to 100 copies, neither numbered nor signed, but all made to perfection and available at the price of €0. Order the book by sending me an email, and note that it will not be possible to buy more than one copy. If you would like to order more copies or prefer to obtain copies of the first edition, follow this link to the German site of Ebay, where artist Joachim Schmid is occasionally offering for sale the first edition copies he bought immediately after the launch of the book (note the auctions are not always up).
The book is included in the collections of Erfgoedbibliotheek Hendrik Conscience (Antwerp), the International Center of Photography (NY) and the Tate Library (London) where you can go and attempt to see it. The book was shortlisted in the 2013 Artists’ Books of the Moment Award, Art Gallery of York University, Canada.
In order to shed some light on the nebulous history of The Invisible Book, a set of visible postcards was published in August 2013. From an early discussion about the book in 1654, to Robert Walser’s sterling 1925 review and Diane Simpson’s legendary marathon reading in 1980, discover some of the highlights in the book’s history through this set of six cards. The set is priced at € 5 plus shipping and available in my webshop. Or order by email.



Ah, my love, the glory of works which have been lost for ever, of treatises which today are mere titles, of libraries which burned down, of statues which were demolished! How blessed with absurdity are the artists who set fire to a beautiful work! Or the artists who could have made a beautiful work but deliberately made it ordinary! Or the great poets of silence who, knowing they were capable of witing an absolutely perfect work, preferred to crown it with the decision never to write it. (For an imperfect work, it makes no difference.) How much more beautiful the Mona Lisa would be if we couldn’t see it! And if someone were to rob it just to burn it, what an artist he would be, even greater than the one who painted it! Why is art beautiful? Because it is useless. Why is life ugly? Because it’s all aims, objectives and intentions. All of its roads are for going from one point to another. If only we could have a road connecting a place no one ever leaves from to a place where no one goes! If only someone would devote his life to building a road from the middle of one field to the middle of another – a road that would be useful if extended at each end, but that would sublimely remain as only the middle stretch of a road! - Fernando Pessoa, from The Book of Disquiet


A while ago I bought an invisible book. Or at least I think I did. It’s hard to tell. I certainly got a confirmation email from its author and creator, the artist Elisabeth Tonnard, advising me that it had been sent and acknowledging my payment of €0. This seems like a shrewd investment: my book is one of a limited edition of 100 (neither signed nor numbered) and, as Tonnard’s website says, it is ‘a product without a single fault, available at the lowest price possible’. To make the transaction a little more concrete I also ordered the set of (visible) postcards accompanying the work. Highlights in the History of ‘The Invisible Book’ includes pictures of the book’s early underwater testing in the Galapagos Islands, its acclaimed 1962 exhibition at the New York Public Library, and the undisclosed facility where the original manuscript has been kept since the 1870s, although ‘some say it is no longer there’. Digital technology has allowed a migration of text away from the physical page, onto screens and into the less tangible realms of cyberspace and digital storage. (Where exactly are the words you are reading now?) But this separation of writing and paper has not ushered in the End of the Book, as once predicted. In the age of its supposed technological obsolescence, the book has become something rich and strange, emerging in all its papery singularity. A recent reissue of the 19th-century pulp novel Revelations of a Lady Detective reproduces not only the original paperback cover, but its worn and creased edges. A facsimile of the 1893 cover of the Adventures of Sherlock Holmes appears on greeting cards and merchandise, complete with water damage and mould. The minutiae of paper manufacture, typefaces, bindings and library shelving were once of interest only in the musty corners of book history; there is now a wealth of academic research, conferences and publications on ‘the material text’. In No Medium, Craig Dworkin goes still further in shifting the page from background to foreground, identifying a canon of non-texts, works composed only of blank space: the empty fictional journal Nudisme, brandished in the opening scenes of Cocteau’s Orphée; the unused ream of typing paper ‘published’ by Aram Saroyan in 1968, and the de Kooning drawing painstakingly erased by Robert Rauschenberg. Paper here is not a mere support, medium or conduit, but a distinct object with qualities, substance and meaning in its own right. There are other artists and writers who explore these meanings, practising a perverse kind of writing, or perhaps unwriting, in which the creative act involves not inscription but erasure, blankness and redaction. Dworkin’s sometime collaborator, Nick Thurston, has produced an edition of Maurice Blanchot’s Space of Literature, in which Blanchot’s words have been entirely excised, and the text consists only of Thurston’s marginal notes. The book is certainly not dead, but it is having something of an identity crisis. If it conventionally comprised both written word and physical page, what happens when we separate the two? Precisely what – and where – is a book? Does its essence lie in its content or its form? Like the Cheshire Cat, the book’s vanishing acts and reappearances are unpredictable and partial. It can exist as text without physical pages, or as pages with no text. Just how far we can extend this series of subtractions is a question posed by Tonnard’s invisible book. She seems to push them to their logical – and yet deeply illogical – conclusion. Her book has neither text nor pages. I can’t read it or put it on the shelf. But perhaps it isn’t such an anomaly: I often buy books I don’t read, and some of them exist only in the non-space of my computer hard drive. Tonnard’s book isn’t non-existent or imaginary. Just invisible. - Gill Partington