A SPHINX'S FIELD GUIDE
TO QUESTIONABLE ANSWERS

PROSPECTUS:  The Double Elephant Press presents A Sphinx’s Field Guide to Questionable Answers. The book commences with chiaroscuro woodcuts of various sphinxes in natural settings who serve as guides to common, rhetorical riddles. Colorful answers are displayed in wood type. The viewer is left to unriddle the question from which each answer was derived. Behind the first of many foldouts in the book is a cryptogram. Letters from a line of instructions may be swapped for letters on a spinable wheel (revealed through fold-up flaps adorned by walnut shells in an illustration of a sphinx with a lily headdress). A sphinx as Fortuna rides another wheel showing numerical orders to arrange the letters through three sequential substitutions. Another section of the book, titled A Sphinx’s Alphabet, shows a geometry proof of how to divide the circumference of a circle into seven equal sections. This geometry is then revealed as that which must have been used in the creation of the Great Pyramid, providing it was created from the ground up. From an aerial perspective, each face of the Great Pyramid is an equilateral triangle, but seen in section, the triangle corresponds to the points on the sacred geometry illustrated. Finally, an alphabetical key, loose in the back of the book, provides the names of the various typefaces displayed on the pages, turning the field guide into a rather curious specimen book.

A Sphinx’s Field Guide is meant as a kind of celebration of the merging of The Double Elephant Press’ studio with the studio of Art Larson’s Horton Tank Graphics in Hadley, Massachusetts in 2003. Art Larson has printed all of the letterpress for Double Elephant publications & has recently also begun to print etchings for the press, relieving Michael Kuch from this occupation. The wood-type in the book comes from Larson’s collection & the geometry proof is the result of the compass of his enthusiasm for the byways of geometry.

The book measures 7.5 by 10 inches with heavy, flax paper covers made by Shannon Brock of Brooklyn, New York. A red flax, three-flap chemise protects the book. The text paper is Japanese, handmade, natural gampi-torinoko. Robert Quigley of Cummington, Massachusetts prepared the wood blocks. Mark Tomlinson bound the book with an open stitch. Art Larson printed it all. Michael Kuch surveyed the sphinx.

Michael Kuch and Art Larson at work in the studio