Oh! cet echo. Palindrome. Scharniere.

Essen.: Self-published., 1963. Original red card wrappers, with printed title label pasted to front cover. Hole-punched along right edge as issued and bound in the Japanese style with two red rubber bands.. (29.8 x 21 cm).. Initial text leaf + 16 black-and-white plates + final leaf reproducing poem by C.C. Caspari entitled ‘liest seil’. All leaves printed rectos only. The rare first edition of André Thomkins’ first artist’s book. Published in an edition of 100 copies, signed in pencil by Thomkins underneath the printed colophon on the inside front cover. Early in his career, Thomkins looked at and listened to words to see if their letters would yield a puzzle or an anagram, if one word occurs in several languages, or if a sentence might be read backwords as a palindrome. Without committing himself exclusively to the dry methods of linguistics and concrete poetry, he playfully, inventively exploited their procedures, concocted a “polyglot word machine,” and instilled word and sentence with values that do not encourage a logical reading. Thus, beginning with the title, Thomkins begins his first book with a list of such quirky palindromes: ‘red liberal klare bilder’, or ‘ein ego genie’ and ‘las solo kolossal’. Just as Thomkins’ inventive handling of letters and words is manifest in numerous palindromes, the same mirrored theory was to apply to his drawings of the period. ‘Oh! cet echo’ consists almost entirely of hors-texte reproductions of Thomkins’ early ‘Scharniere’ drawings, with the images hinged along a central vertical axis reminiscent of the Rorschach inkblot principle. (WorldCat lists only 4 copies in Europe, with none held by North American institutions).