An interview with Joe Devlin by Michael Hampton

On the occasion of Devlin's exhibition 'A collection of modified bookmarks' at The Portico, Manchester, 16 August – 5 October 2024

Joe Devlin is an artist and a librarian in rare materials at the Rylands Research Institute & Library, Manchester. He established Nuts and Bolts press with the aim of producing books that, in some way, reference the physicality of the printed object. Devlin’s interest is in materiality as a source of content, from faded covers to altered endpapers, creating publications that employ marginalia, dog ears, ephemera, graffitied pages, re-appropriated content and other additions. Recently, Michael Hampton returned an unsolicited modified N.B. bookmark. This act prompted Joe to contact twenty-two artists with the request to each modify a bookmark. Artists from around the globe have responded, including Derek Beaulieu (No press, Canada), Claudia de la Torre (back bone books, Berlin), David Bellingham (Wax 366, Glasgow), David Osbaldeston and Nina Chua.

Michael Hampton: It would be obvious to start by asking how and when your imprint Nuts & Bolts Press began, without falling into the trap of treating this interview as a chronological survey. Anyway, readers can do that via your website at nutsandboltspublishing.com. Let’s begin by getting an idea of your career as a librarian, and how you have situated yourself in relation to the institutional rules and regulations which govern the care of rare books. Also, if you could be explicit, can I ask about the challenges of operating as an unofficial, even clandestine 'artist-in-residence'? 

Joe Devlin: I fell into library work shortly after graduating in 1998. I recall seeing an ad in the Manchester Evening News for positions at the Joule Library, UMIST, i.e. the University of Manchester of Science and Technology. I think it was for counter work, shelving books and mainly low-level administrative jobs (photocopying, cutting labels, inking stamps). If my memory is correct, it was from 9-2pm over five days, meaning I could visit my studio after work, as a group of us had acquired a space on Newton Street, Manchester, five minutes from the library. Twenty-five years later, I am still employed at the library, in Special Collections. 

Shelving material afforded the time to look through books, allowing for chance encounters. At this point I was collecting pens and pencils left on shelves, bookmarks and other bits and pieces of ephemera; making photocopied booklets of found detritus. I then started drawing the additions made in books, thinking that this inexhaustible project had the potential to carry me through until I retired; a Sisyphean task! Each drawing consisted of all the additions made by former readers compressed onto a single sheet of Murano paper, often made on breaks, operating as an unofficial ‘artist-in-residence’.

This is the point at which my practice became much more focused, and the library itself began to inform it, scanning bookshelves for starting points or triggers for future works. It is easy to forget, in this age of algorithms, how much intuition played a role in selecting books to scrutinise, the wear and tear of the object providing clues to gems waiting to be discovered when opened. Slowly, a bibliographic investigation via reading past users' interactions with the library became central. American poet Susan Howe speaks of the archive as a generous space where we can connect ‘the material—the fragment, the piece of paper’, suggesting it ‘is all we have to connect with the dead.’

I remember chatting to a friend years ago, whose dad had just passed away. He was sorting through his belongings and stopped to scan the pages of the small library left behind in the flat when he encountered marginal notes. He said it was like hearing his dad's voice from beyond the grave, and shared this memory in relation to the marginalia-derived drawings I'd started to make.

In terms of challenges, well, like a lot of artists who are employed full-time, the primary one is making space in life to produce work. I am totally unaware of how many of my colleagues know I am engaged in making art, as there are a lot of staff employed over the various sites. I’ve only been working with Special Collections for around 10 years (only!), but it is a supportive environment and the acquisitions team at Rylands have purchased a number of publications containing my work, so maybe the unofficial label has started to slip lately.

MH: I believe this is an unusual, even unique way of working, steeping yourself in the library’s 'bibliographic unconscious', to borrow William H. Sherman's term. But taking it to the next level of copying serendipitous, found material, and producing derivatives from it, viz prints or other ephemera, treats the library as a permeable depository beyond its function either as a site of public lending or reference. Were you aware that as a mature student Marcel Duchamp did the similar kinds of library work which you describe? He was employed as a temp at the Bibliothèque St Geneviève, Paris, from 1913 to 1916, ‘fuyant le statut d’artiste pour se protéger sous la masque du bibliothécaire’^[1] (eschewing the job of an artist to hide under a librarian’s mask) and carrying out administrative tasks which allowed him the free time to delve into arcane knowledge; a slacker’s delight! It was only after the Great War that Duchamp's aleatoric book sculpture Unhappy Readymade (c.1919-1920) expressed some of his dissatisfaction and disgust with sterile scholarship and the constraints of the library on a book, which he anthropomorphised as ‘unhappy’. Can you relate to the concept of the 'mask' here, an ethnographic collector with a sly, ulterior motive, i.e. assisting readymade material in an intermediate zone not covered by the labels bibliographic studies or traditional art?

[1] [Yves Peyré, & Evelyne Toussaint, Duchamp à la Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève (Paris: Editions du Regard, 2014), p.7]

JD: Yes, I was aware Duchamp took time out to work at the Bibliothèque St Geneviève. In his words, ‘[t]aking an intellectual position as opposed to the manual servitude of the artist.’ Duchamp also spoke about the idea of the wind going through the book ‘choosing’ its own problems. So, around 2003 I made an untitled work, with fans on timers and a well-thumbed copy of Silence by John Cage on a table. The fans sifted through the pages, settling at random points when the timers switched off. Today, in 2024, I am considering revisiting it, possibly making a short analogue film focusing on the kinetic qualities of the piece: close ups of the turning pages, emphasising the sound of the whirring fans, that ‘silence’ when the fans stop and the book lies still. So if there are any curators or galeristes out there interested in a redo?!

The margins have provided space for contestation, additions, improvements to the main body of text over the centuries. I started making marginalia drawings on my MA course in 2003, having read Marginalia: Readers writing in books (2001) by H. J. Jackson, with a focus on compressing notes made in books by authors who championed writing in the margins.

Working with unmet and anonymous collaborators, i.e. those who wrote in the books I was using as source material, set me thinking, tangentially, of John Latham’s notorious ‘Skoob Tower Ceremonies’, towers of magazines and old legal textbooks that were set on fire in outdoor public spaces. When asked about these, Latham answered differently each time, maybe attacking institutional fixed knowledge or intimating that the cultural base had burnt out.