Convergence: The Furnace and MoMA

My first memory of Franklin Furnace is of a set of teeth. These glistening fangs belonged not to Martha Wilson but to her dog, possibly a German shepherd, who greeted me somewhat ahead of Martha when I dropped by Franklin Street in April 1977. I was in New York for a week-long interview for the position of Director of the Library at The Museum of Modern Art. I must have arrived at the Furnace at a quiet time, or before the scheduled opening hours, hence the fierce greeting. But Martha restrained the beast and invited me in.

Back in London, England, I had already been involved with artist books increasingly since 1972—buying them for the Chelsea School of Art Library, writing about them for Studio International and other magazines, and being involved in exhibitions for the British Council and the Arts Council of Great Britain. Thus my antennae were sensitive to any mention of artist books in the media. In 1976 or 1977 I read somewhere about the establishment of Franklin Furnace in New York and wrote for information. By the time I got to New York, Franklin Furnace and Printed Matter, the other new artist books organization, were on my list of places to visit.

I eventually settled in Manhattan in November of 1977, and within a few weeks had set up the beginnings of the Artist Book Collection at the MoMA Library and ordered my first titles from Printed Matter bookstore. There seemed to be no reason to defer to the existence of the Franklin Furnace Archive at that time since, to my mind, not only was the Furnace still a fledgling, but the material that could fall under the rubric of "artist books" was an essential part of any library that wished to document contemporary art. I also had no sense of competing with the Furnace: as far as I was concerned, the more institutions collecting artist books the better. Let a hundred flowers bloom.

After my first brief acquaintance with Martha—and her dog—I saw more of her in New York, both casually and at more formal occasions such as a panel entitled "Artists' Books & Beyond" at the Furnace in May 1978.¹ Then in October 1978 I was asked to speak at the annual meeting of the somewhat anarchic Associated Art Publishers (AAP) in Chicago and spent several days hanging out with Martha and our hosts Conrad Gleber and Gail Rubini.² So Martha and I became fully aware of each other's intentions and progress in building our two collections. I also spent time at the Furnace viewing exhibitions of books and other art forms, as well as attending some performances. In addition Martha would sometimes invite me down to see a book exhibition and meet with the artist whose work was on display.

My view of Martha Wilson's collection was that she had looser criteria for artist books than I did. Her attitude appeared to be that if an artist called something a book it was a book, whereas I generally considered that an artist book had to actually be a book (or more likely a pamphlet) that utilized the familiar codex format in which pages are fixed in a sequence, as with any paperback. In addition I usually wanted to see a commitment to multiplication and to dissemination and therefore looked for works in editions of at least a hundred. (To my mind books that were unique or printed in limited editions negated Gutenberg and the whole significance of the printing press, and also created artificially rare commodities.) Martha seemed to be more laidback about all these factors. Another difference between the two collections was that Martha had the wonderful bonus of plugging into artists' networks across many countries, and sometimes hooking into the mail-art community.³ She thereby freely acquired very diverse material that was outside the scope of the bookselling world, which was the common route for The Museum of Modern Art Library, although MoMa frequently included among their sources specialist booksellers such as Printed Matter. The MoMA Library also had the funds to...