Inscription: the Journal of Material Text – Theory, Practice, History launched in 2020, edited by Simon Morris, Gill Partington and Adam Smyth, and published by the artist’s book imprint www.informationasmaterial.org in partnership with Leeds Beckett University. It’s been described by the Times Literary Supplement as ‘a shot in the arm for academic publishing’ – ‘each issue is a dizzying experiment … charged with an infectiously nerdy sense of play, and … also a home for serious, leading-edge research and writing.’
Inscription brings together the critical, historical, theoretical and creative, and features work by practitioners – book artists, printmakers and writers – alongside academic discussion. Its focus is not just on the meanings and uses of the codex book, but also the nature of writing surfaces, the process of mark marking and printing. The journal’s theoretically aware, trans-historical and cross-disciplinary breaks with the conventions of academic ghettoization, creating connections between bibliography, the artist’s book, and media theory, enabling new conversations and unexpected juxtapositions. As an object, Inscription redefines what a journal can be: each edition is a formally innovative multi-media artefact, featuring a guest artist-in-residence and poet-in-residence.
Issue six of Inscription considers the possibilities of cuts/tears (or cuts-slash-tears).
Why tear or cut written texts? What do these actions signify? What balance of engagement and disavowal do they imply? Are they part of reading, or its violent opposite? What does cutting have to do with books?
There have always been readers ready to snip, excise and rearrange the contents of their books. The modern phenomenon of scrapbooking has its precursors in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when fans of extra-illustration would ‘Grangerise’ their books – slicing open bindings, cutting out images from other sources, tipping additions in to augment the book. A book had become a thing to cut up, as much as an object to preserve or read. And while in London in 1962, Joe Orton and Kenneth Halliwell were infamously sent to prison for cutting out and reusing images from library books to often filthy and hilarious effect, the practice of collage has a rich and varied history. It is found not just in the Dadaist experimentation of Hannah Höch, for example, but in the seventeenth-century Gospel harmonies of the Ferrar family at Little Gidding, where the female members of the extended family community cut out and rearranged biblical text and images. Was this devotional reading, or book destruction? Earlier too, medieval scribes and manuscript-makers cut-out and glued-in pieces cut from other manuscripts, such as historiated initials: the knife a crucial tool of text-making. Some books even asked to be cut up. Peter Apian’s Instrument Buch (1533) invited readers to cut out and assemble its paper diagrams and tools. Children’s books from the eighteenth century onwards encouraged child readers to snip out letters of the alphabet or animal drawings, and to cut out models, scenes, figures; to take the page to pieces for the purpose of play. Books for children today (much more than books for adults) sustain this inventive, remake-it-all-materiality: the book in a child’s hands is always a radical object. Artists books, knowingly or unknowingly taking a cue from children’s books, have experimented with cutting, too. Dieter Roth’s circular die-cut holes in found comic books (bok 3b; bok3d, 1961) and Brian Dettmer’s precision scalpel-work (Brave New World, 2008) both excavate the page so that we look through rather than at it. And in more mundane ways, the print world of newspapers and magazines has always been full of prompts to tear out coupons or to cut-out-and-keep posters. Today, even in the age of screen reading, we still encounter daily instructions (‘tear along dotted line’; ‘cut here to open’), as we deal with the parcels that land with a thud as a result of our digital clicking. As long as there is paper and text, there is always the possibility to cut, rip, tear, excise, and fragment.
(From Folger Z43.A3 P3 1588 Copy 2 Cage, sig. G7v)
We invite contributions approaching this theme from any angle and in any historical period.
Topics may include:
- Histories of collage, cut-up poetry, and other experimental forms
- Print histories of digital remix culture
- Histories of scrapbooking, Grangerising, and books designed for cutting up and rearranging
- Cutting as opposed to tearing: What are the differences? Is one more violent and visceral than the other?
- Censorship and repression
- Cutting and literary drafts; cutting and theatrical prompt books
- Cutting and tearing in ideologically-charged moments (for example, during the European Reformation)
- Technologies of cutting: histories of machine die-cutting, scissors, scalpels, knives
- Cutting as editing, redacting, abridging and Bowdlerising text
- ‘Tears’ as crying/weeping, as well as cutting. What are we to make of this pun?
The submission process has two stages:
Potential authors should submit a 400-word proposal, with a brief CV, by 1 March 2025. The editors will respond.
Completed articles, if requested of 5-8,000 words should be submitted by 31 August 2025, for publication in spring 2026.
Authors are encouraged to include images with their text but images selected must be high resolution (.jpg or .tiff) and copyright permissions must be obtained by the author prior to the submission deadline. All contributions will be double blind peer reviewed, and material will be available for Open Access.
Contributions or expressions of interest should be emailed to the editors at Inscriptionthejournal@gmail.com. Follow Inscription @inscription_jnl and @inscriptionjournal.bsky.social. To find out more, and to purchase a copy of the current edition, please visit https://inscriptionjournal.com/how-to-buy.
