Notebook #41, 1977

A facsimile of a single composition book kept by Paul Thek (1933–1988) in 1977, published on the artist's own terms: Thek counted the more than one hundred notebooks he left at his death as artworks in themselves, not as preparation for them.

Reproduced page for page in color across 144 pages, the notebook holds watercolors, diary entries, poetry, correspondence, lists, scribbles and sketches, alongside the long, meticulous transcriptions of philosophers and theologians that Thek copied out by hand. The binding reproduces the marbled green Mead cover and its Square Deal / Composition label at close to the original 9¾ × 7½ inches, banded in kraft paper. The edition behaves less like a monograph than like the object it copies, and it records the daily texture of a practice that otherwise survives largely in fragments.

Thek was a central and famously uncommercial figure of the post-1960s New York generation, known for the wax-and-Plexiglas Technological Reliquaries, the effigy The Tomb, and the large collaborative environments he built across Europe through the 1970s. Much of that installation work was dispersed or destroyed, and his reputation was rebuilt largely posthumously, above all by the 2010 Whitney retrospective Diver. The notebooks are the most continuous surviving body of his work, which gives an edition like this unusual weight in the literature.