Warren Lehrer’s A Life in Books (2013) is one of my favorite contemporary novels. A Life in Books is Lehrer’s first novel, but as many of CBAA’s readers surely know, Lehrer has been composing artist books and experimenting with typography and multimedia since the late 1970s. Readers familiar with Lehrer’s earlier works as well as the history of artists books and book history more generally will find A Life in Books is not only an evocative love song to the book as object but a masterfully original and emotionally driven work of visual storytelling. A Life in Books also happens to be an exemplary multimodal book-archive.
Warren Lehrer, A Life in Books, 2013, Goff Books. Front cover.
The full title to Lehrer’s novel is A Life in Books: The Rise and Fall of Bleu Mobley, The Long Awaited Memoir and Retrospective Monograph Featuring All 101 of Bleu Mobley’s Books.As its long title suggests, Lehrer’s novel is both a fictional memoir and a retrospective monograph written by a fictitious author and bookmaker named Bleu Mobley. Narrated from the confines of a prison cell, A Life in Books is Bleu’s 102nd and last book, transcribed from audiotapes, compiled and edited by a writer named Warren Lehrer, the real Lehrer’s fictional doppelganger. While I do not have the space to elaborate on how the novel explores issues of fictionality or matters of textual authenticity, nor do I wish to spoil the ending for those unfamiliar with the novel, I don’t think it’s too much of a spoiler to say that Bleu publishes a work of Fiction that he markets as a work of Non-Fiction, a kind of satirical hoax, written with the intention of exposing war crimes committed by the U.S. government—and that it is this literary scandal that eventually leads to Bleu’s imprisonment.
As a literary compendium of sorts, A Life in Books documents Bleu’s creative universe. It includes excerpts from 33 of his 101 published books, photographs of each of his 101 personally designed book covers, as well as book reviews, catalog copy, and artifacts from his personal archive—all woven together with Bleu’s life story. Much like Lehrer himself, Bleu experiments with all kinds of bookish forms. He creates letterpress books, scrolls, dos-à-dos books, accordion books, works of biblio-circuitry, VR book-installations, poetry on toilet paper, a mini television built into a book, flying poster poems, bookish furniture and children’s toys that look like books, and of course, Bleu cuts across virtually every popular genre at some point along the way. In other words, this is not merely a novel about the life of a writer and bookmaker, it’s about the institution of literature and the history of modern publishing. Each of Bleu’s books also reflects a technological stage in the development of printing and, given that many of the events narrated in Bleu’s memoir pertain to actual historical events, both Bleu’s life and his books index real historical events, too. Even the title of the novel is metonymic: Bleu doesn’t merely spend his life making books, his books stand in for his life—his life in books. As such, A Life in Books is paradigmatic of the more maximalist or encyclopedic variant of multimodal book-archives.
Diagram in A Life in Books explaining the book’s format.
Around the time when the book was published, Lehrer adapted several of Bleu’s books into short films. Embracing the expansive nature of the project, Lehrer took the 101 book covers he designed for A Life in Books, as well as the textual artifacts he produced that became the foundation for the novel, and exhibited them across the U.S. as a retrospective survey of Bleu’s extraordinary publishing career. In the spirit of archiving, I like to view this travelling exhibit less as a component of Lehrer’s book tour for A Life in Books, which it obviously was, than as a traveling book-art installation that showcases the Bleu Mobley archive.
Photo from the exhibition A Life in Books: A Bleu Mobley Retrospective. Photo credit: Warren Lehrer.
Just as some of Lehrer’s book titles from the 1980s end up being a part of Bleu’s oeuvre in A Life in Books (e.g., French Fries and i mean you know), Lehrer has recently taken some of Bleu’s stories and remediated them into standalone books. For example, Jericho’s Daughter (2024), which Lehrer co-authored with Sharon Hovarth, is an anti-war retelling of the Biblical tale of Rahab and takes the form of a bifurcated, dos-à-dos binding. Riveted in the Word (2024) is an interactive digital book, soon to be available at the Apple Store, that incorporates kinetic typography and an original soundtrack to explore a writer’s attempt to regain their language faculty after a stroke. Both books first appear in A Life in Books, albeit in different forms. That Lehrer continues to find ways to further elaborate on Blue Mobley’s textual universe is not simply a matter of postmodern recycling, it’s a testament, I would argue, to just how generative archival practices can be within the domain of book art and literature.
I encourage readers unfamiliar with Lehrer’s work to check his stuff out and, for those already familiar with his work, I highly recommend looking into the two aforementioned titles which are set to be published in June of this year.
Brian Davis teaches English in the Upper School at Stone Ridge School of the Sacred Heart as well as undergraduate courses in writing, literature, and film at the University of Maryland. His writing has appeared in Frontiers of Narrative Studies, electronic book review, Orbit: A Journal of American Literature, among others.
