
Cover to Cover
- Publisher
- Primary Information / Light Industry
- Year
- 2020
- ISBN
- 978-1-7344897-1-2
- Specifications
- Paperback
7 x 9 in
316 pages
Facsimile of the 1975 edition from the Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design
Co-published with Light Industry
Managing editor James Hoff
Managing designer Rick Myers
Michael Snow's classic artist book Cover to Cover, long an out-of-print rarity, is available again in a facsimile edition from Light Industry and Primary Information. Composed entirely of photographs in narrative sequence, it reads like a book made by a filmmaker; Snow himself called it a quasi-movie, built on a precise recto-verso montage. Each page shows one moment from one perspective on the front and from the diametrically opposite angle on the back, sometimes pivoting between interior and exterior spaces, and a picture may show the surroundings of the camera or be a photograph of a photograph. Midway through, the scene is inverted and the volume must be turned upside down to be seen right side up, a study in simultaneity that lets the viewer enter the work from either end. It first appeared in 1975, in a series overseen by Kasper König and later Benjamin H.D. Buchloh. The cover is a black-and-white photograph of a paneled door with a latch, and the pages shown online include a curtained window with plants, a hand, a brick wall and a figure in a checked shirt upside down.