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Your mind will wander while you examine Ely’s works for him, that’s the point. The impression lingers: All these words we’ve created need context to have any meaning at all – otherwise, this vaunted language of ours is just scratches on a cave wall.Ī second impression sneaks in as well: If Ely were in a prog rock band - he plays guitar religiously - Concertina Guard Coptic W/ Birds would be a kickass album name. The immediate thought: What the hell does that mean? On other pages, Latin letters are written out or stamped onto the page or tooled in gold leaf, but here, the lone recognizable symbols appear, in English, at the bottom left. Because the markings look simultaneously Egyptian, Chinese and completely extraterrestrial, the mind immediately assumes them to be writing in some kind of language. “Especially the way he’s interwoven a visual narrative of Egypt and all the topography with the idea of bookbinding.”īut before you feel comfortable with the piece and its meaning, look closer. “Both because of its scale and its complexity, there’s something really magnificent about it,” he says. Whole numbers and fractions sit next to angles.įor Ben Mitchell, curator of art at the Northwest Museum of Art & Culture, Binding the Book is a personal favorite. Over the top of this richly painted scene are pen marks: lines connecting points, circles overlaid on top of one another in a way that half-creates a pentagon in their midst. The book appears to hover in a gauzy, light blue ether. Pen- and pencil-drawn pyramids stand in front of a watercolor wash of sky and rest on a half-bound book.

Open the cover of Binding the Book: Flight Into Egypt, an Ely manuscript from 1985, and turn 12 pages. “They could be as paintings on a wall,” he says, gesturing to an unfinished book’s pages spread akimbo across his desk, “but there is something tremendously effective about this dynamic.”

The desire to create atlases of the mind and space that could stand on a shelf in a collector’s home alongside atlases of the ancient world has been driving him ever since. “I became really aware that the atlas form would be the springboard - the point of departure - for everything I needed to deal with.”Ītlases, from antiquity to the present day, tend to be huge and are often ornately decorated. And then, in 1975, he realized that he wanted to make a particular kind of book. “It was things like Heinlein’s Rocket Ship Galileo - about some guys getting a surplus rocket and going to the moon.”Įly first consciously realized he wanted to make books while pursuing a degree in design and printmaking at Western Washington University in 1971. “The science fiction that was of greatest interest was not so much about the problems humans are going to face in the future if there’s a plague or a war or whatever,” he says. That one of Swift’s bookish inventions, the Taser, would become a real weapon in the ’70s only added to the magical idea, in Ely’s mind, that fiction could lead to fact. He devoured books about the fictional character Tom Swift, a nerdy version of the Hardy Boys, who sets about inventing incredible things and then using them to solve problems. Other uses for nuclear energy (other than blowing people up) and things like jet propulsion gave the era a spirit of discovery and invention that fascinated Ely. The world didn’t cease being scary within those long rows of books, but it was also fascinating. Truth and tale, reality and perception and the nature of cultural memory began to become intertwined in Ely’s mind in ways that would later inform his work.įrom this young age, Ely took solace in libraries. And in that dream, I held this book and I thought, ‘With this book in my hand, I could build all these devices.’ I awoke and, of course, no book, and so I tried to make it.”Įly pauses for a moment, then adds, “Sometimes I think I’m still trying to make that book.”

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“I had this archetypal dream,” Ely says, “where I saw a book - it was about 10, 12 inches square - just full of drawings and instructions on how to build things. His initial inspiration came much earlier, though, in the late 1950s.

He is a major player in this world.”Įly began making books seriously in 1971, as he prepared to leave college with a degree in design and printmaking. “The skill is apparent in everything he does and the thought that goes into it. “I was dazzled by the work,” says Nick Basbanes, author of A Gentle Madness, a foundational tome on book collecting. Timothy Ely, tucked into a nook of his artist's studio, leafs through a book about a favorite subject: Egypt.

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