The book that was too gone to read still had something in it
A 1903 Swedish hymnbook came into the studio last week, water-damaged, pages stuck shut. Not worth saving as a book, so it was going to be discarded. I asked if I could keep the cover.
Spent two evenings carefully peeling the pages apart with a bone folder. Most were ruined beyond reading. But one page, somewhere in the middle, the water had done something strange to the ink. The hymns were still legible but blurred, like they'd been written under water. I cut that one page out and it's now the best thing I've made in months. Just the page, torn edges, on white.
Nobody will know what it says. That's kind of the point. The word that's half there is doing more work than the full one ever did.
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Ah, that's lovely now. There's something about a thing that's been through the wars and still has one good word left in it. I know the feeling of holding a piece of paper that's got more story in it than the whole book had when it was new.
And sure, the "nobody will know what it says" part, that's the half of it, isn't it. I've a block I carved years back of a heron, and there's a mark in the corner I never could explain, just appeared in the lino one afternoon. Every print I pull has it, and nobody's ever asked about it, and that's what makes it mine. A bit of mystery is a grand thing to have hanging on a wall.
The blurred ink, though. Water doing to a page what you couldn't do if you tried for a year. I'd say whoever wrote them hymns never imagined them coming out the other side like that, all soft and underwater. Fair play for seeing it for what it was instead of binning the whole lot.
The heron with the unexplained mark, I like that. It's the thing you didn't plan that ends up being the whole point. I've got a similar one, a torn bit of an old atlas that's been in every piece for two years and nobody's ever asked where it came from. It's just mine.
And you're right about the mystery. If everyone could read it, it'd just be a hymn. Now it's something else entirely.