A matter of a letter
By: written, designed, printed, and bound by Radosław Nowakowski
Contributors: Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here Artists' Books Collection (Columbia University. Rare Book and Manuscript Library); Al-Mutanabbi Street Coalition
Publisher: Liberatorium
Published: 2014
Place of publication: Bodzentyn, Poland]
Language: eng
Number of pages: 12
Copyright date: 2014
Subjects: Violence; Pictorial works; Booksellers and bookselling; Bombings; Iraq War, 2003-2011; Protest movements; Books and reading in art; Intellectual life; Social conditions; Censorship; Terrorism in art; In art; War and civilization; Vehicle bombs; Visual literature; Specimens; Polish Concrete poetry; Artists' books; Al-Mutanabbi Street Coalition
Description: This collection supports and promotes awareness to the important mission and framework of the Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here Coalition's focus on the lasting power of the written word and the arts in support of the free expression of ideas, the preservation of shared cultural spaces, and the importance of responding to attacks, both overt and subtle, on artists, writers, and academics working under oppressive regimes or in zones of conflict, despite the destruction of that literary/cultural content.

"Radosław Nowakowski is a writer, translator, musician, designer, and publisher. He studied architecture at the Technical University in Krakow. Instead of building houses, he has been building books since the end of the 1970s. Everything that is needed to create a book he does by himself: writing, translating, editing, designing, making layouts, drawings and typefaces, printing, binding. So far, he has created almost thirty titles - books of various shapes, sizes, and constructions - nearly one thousand copies altogether. All editions are open, each book is signed and dated. For twenty years, he has been living in a village at the foot of The Bald Mountains in central Poland. Together with his wife, Nowakowski runs a small press labelled Liberatorium"--The Vamp & Tramp website (viewed July 13, 2015)

"My mother was thirteen when Germans attacked Poland in September, 1939, and started World War II. She was living in a small town where her father was a headmaster of a grammar school. They had a house, and she often told me stories about a big library in it, full of books that seemed to her mysterious and so precious. When the front line was approaching the town, the whole family escaped. They came back after a couple of days, and found their house completely ruined. A bomb hit it, and in a second, all books collected by my grandpa turned into ashes. His library disappeared. Decades later my library appeared; I guess it is much bigger that the one he had. Libraries are phoenixes, no doubt. So are books. Unfortunately people are not. 'A Matter of a letter' refers to the very common and fundamental process of iteration, multiplication, and accumulation of small, unnoticeable changes, like press errors or DNA mutations, which can cause various effects, sometimes dwarfish, sometimes monstrous, sometimes positive, sometimes negative, but always surprising and hardly predictable, doesn't matter if made consciously or unconsciously. This work seems to be much closer to concrete poetry than my other books and maybe it will be the beginning of a new series. An error which will provoke an unexpected result. Nevertheless, any result will be but the next part of the constant and endless non-description of the world"--The Vamp & Tramp website (viewed July 13, 2015)

Radosław Nowakowski is a writer, traveler, translator and musician in the band, Ossian. Most of his books are written in three languages: Polish, English and Esperanto. His books have been presented at exhibitions in several countries; they are also in the collections of numerous renowned libraries of the world.
Notes: Medium: Digital printing; saddle-stitch (staple) binding.

On March 5th, 2007, a car bomb exploded on al-Mutanabbi Street in Baghdad. Al-Mutanabbi Street is located in a mixed Shia-Sunni area. More than 30 people were killed and more than 100 wounded. Al-Mutanabbi Street, the historic center of Baghdad bookselling, holds bookstores and outdoor bookstalls, cafes, stationery shops, and even tea and tobacco shops. It has been the longstanding heart and soul of the Baghdad literary and intellectual community for centuries. In response to the attack, a San Francisco poet and bookseller, Beau Beausoleil, rallied a community of international artists and writers to produce a collection of letterpress-printed broadsides (poster-like works on paper), artists' books (unique works of art in book form), and an anthology of writing, all focused on expressing solidarity with Iraqi booksellers, writers and readers. The coalition of contributing artists calls itself Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here Coalition.

Gift; Beau Beausoleil; 2019-2020.