Allochronologies Three Volumes

Somerville, MA: Sarah Hulsey, 2024. Hardcover. Fine. Hardcover. One of 50 copies. There were a total of 75 copies of this book, with a deluxe version lettered A - O, 50 standard three-volume sets numbered 1-50, and ten individual volumes numbered i-x. Sarah is a renowned book artist whose complex and inventive works are widely recognized in the book arts world and are extensively collected by university and other institutional libraries. From her website: "Sarah Hulsey is a visual artist whose work draws upon on her background in linguistics, which she studied under Noam Chomsky at MIT. She was first attracted to the field because of the surprising, (truncated) apparently contradictory fact that language is incredibly complex and yet universal throughout humankind. Though languages appear to vary greatly, they have deep commonalities, and this underlying “universal grammar” represents a rich, subconscious knowledge that we all possess, with little awareness of its inner workings."

An introduction to a talk that Sarah gave at the 2024 Codex Symposium describes this book as follows: "Allochronologies explores alternate notions of time, all conceivable according to the laws of science, that do not adhere to our ordinary experience. Hulsey takes some of the more surprising ideas of modern physics (multiple universes, a universe that oscillates, reversal of time's arrow) and translates them into a multi-volume artist book. Each volume takes one kind of chronology and using fragments of fiction by some of the great 20th century writers, creates a book that physically embodies that conception of time."

Bound in gray cloth covers with small black image on front covers. Housed in a black cloth slipcase with title in silver to spine. The texts of all three volumes were printed letterpress from Univers type on Mohawk Superfine paper. The images were printed from polymer plates. The The contents of each volume is as follows. Volume One: "April March," the central story in this volume is excerpted from "A Survey of the Works of Herbert Quain" by Jorge Luis Borges, originally published in 1941. Translated from the Spanish by Andrew Hurley" and appearing in "Collected Fictions" published by Penguin Books in 1998. This volume has pages 9-44, including several pages of symbolic representation. Volume Two: The story in this volume is excerpted from 't zero' by Italo Calvino, originally published as "Ti con zero' in 1967. Translated from the Italian by William Weaver as "The Complete Cosmicomics" and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in 2014. The image running throughout is a wave form of the soundtrack of Carl Sagan discussing an oscillating model of the universe on the PBS series "Cosmos." The text is printed both at the top and bottom of the pages, with the bottom text appearing to be upside down. Unpaginated. [17 pages] Volume Three: "2 June 1905' is excerpted from "Einstein's Dreams by Alan Lightman by Pantheon Books, 1993. Numbered pages 9-18. (Inventory #: 37116)