This evening our theme is Art / Image-embedded novels / creative responses to writing, exploring how art and literature intertwine through image‑embedded novels and creative responses to writing. 

It’s a theme that speaks directly to the way visual storytelling and text can inspire each other, and it’s especially relevant for us as art and design students. As a visual, interdisciplinary artist who likes reading, this is perhaps one of my favourite themes of the year and have studied it in-depth for my PhD.  

We’ll also consider The Nabokov Paper, which examines how artists respond to literature. If you’d like to read more, you can access an academic article about it through the Open University library here:
👉 The Nabokov Paper – OU Library Article

Whether you’re here to share your thoughts, discover new ideas, or simply enjoy listening in, you’re warmly welcome. This club is about connection, curiosity, and creativity — so bring your imagination and join the conversation.

Looking forward to seeing you there.

Warm wishes,
Katrina

BookLab is a monthly space for exploring the innovative world of artists’ books, photobooks, experimental narratives and hybrid forms of publishing. It focusses on creative, visual, and interdisciplinary book practices. analysing books that sit between art object, archive, narrative and experiment.

Each month we explore a different theme through an illustrated talk, with opportunities to ask questions. This Padlet acts as a shared digital reading room: a place to view examples, suggest further works, reflect on the month’s topic, and contribute your own discoveries.

Across the year, we will look at books that challenge our assumptions about what a book can be, including sculptural books, archival reconstructions, feminist photobooks, altered texts, narrative artworks, zines, and interdisciplinary formats.

April is our World Book Night Showcase.
On 23 April, BookLab hosts a digital exhibition of student artwork inspired by a book you have encountered this year. You can submit any creative response from photography, writing, illustration, textiles, collage, or inter-disciplinary.

BookLab is a space for curiosity, creativity and conversation — a living archive of the books that shape your practice.

There is no requirement to read a book before each meeting, as this is your choice to do so or not, but merely a place to use BookLab as a springboard for ideas in your research and practice. It can also be helpful as a way to start discussing and analysing books.

Please note that there may be some unavoidable 'spoiler alerts' but this is not about knowing the end of the book, just a place to highlight some key aspects.

Enjoy!

Deadline: Deadline 3rd March 2026 - Early submissions are very welcome.

Please speak to OCASA if you would like to arrange a visit to a book launch, print fair, artist book archive, bookbinder or publishing house, as a group.

For opportunities to discuss booking a table at an artist's book fair event, speak to Katrina Whitehead.

If you choose to read any of the books in their entirety, you may be able to obtain a copy of the book via your local library or the British Library.

The Nabokov Paper is an experiment in novel-reading. The project takes as its starting point a now famous class taught during the 1950s by Vladimir Nabokov at Cornell University, New York State, entitled Literature 311-312: Masters of European Fiction. Nabokov’s approach to teaching literary reading was notoriously idiosyncratic. Convinced that one must teach the books themselves, not ideas or generalities, Nabokov would make diagrams of the floor plans of fictional buildings, map the routes taken by characters through the spaces of the novel, and draw items of clothing or furniture; he would also propose to track the course of a single letter, offer a visual representation of a stylistic device, and uncover what he called the mysteries of literary structures. His methods are striking for the range of gestures they call for in the name of good reading. The published Lectures on Literature (New York: Harcourt, 1980) concludes with an appendix of sample exam questions. Responding to those questions some sixty years after the fact offers a means to explore what Nabokov’s take on how to read might have to teach us today: about the novel, about how reading works across practices and disciplines, and about the past, present and future forms of literary criticism.

In April 2012, ten artists, eight writers, six university professors, three translators, two architects, a librarian, a curator, a graphic designer, an illustrator and a computer engineer each selected a question on one of seven course texts: Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, Charles Dickens’s Bleak House, Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Franz Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis”, Marcel Proust’s Swann’s Way, and James Joyce’s Ulysses. The responses they turned in take the form of writing, drawing, painting, film, graphs, indexes, lists, maps, newly designed editions, objects, scale-models, a lecture and a reading game. This work, together with an introduction to the aims of the project, is presented in The Nabokov Paper – a publication that acts both as a record of the experiment and an invitation to undertake it again.

Baučeková, Silvia

The paper is situated in the OU library (digital download).

https://library-search.open.ac.uk/permalink/44OPN_INST/j6vapu/cdi_doaj_primary_oai_doaj_org_article_b34096c9da4248d0988f220f0873288d