Journal of Surrealism and the Americas 12:1 (2021), 60-77

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Object Study:
Binding Saint Glinglin
Jenny Harris
The University of Chicago

Like any book, Saint Glinglin (Fig. 1) is meant to be handled; yet its elaborate
and unique binding, designed and executed by the American artist Mary Reynolds
(1891-1950), transforms the quotidian act of reading into an unexpected encounter
of sensuous, even delicate materials. Reynolds unbound and rebound the book—a
trade publication that she received as a gift from the author—covering it in luxurious
green goatskin leather at some point after it was published in 1948.1 A narrow
strip of brown leather adhered to its surface signals its hybrid status: part book,
part sculpture; part readymade, part craft; part fine art, part applied art. Extending
horizontally across the front cover, spine, and back cover, it features gold stamped
lettering that identifies the title of the book, “Saint Glinglin,” on the front, and the
name of its author, Raymond Queneau (1903-1975), on the back. But the strip is not
simply a decorative motif, detaching where the cover meets the spine and looping
through the handle of a glazed earthenware vessel, likely that of a small cup.2 This
element, which lends the book an unexpected spatial dimension, also gives it a
chimera-like composite form, presenting a disorienting fusion of existing artistic
categories.
One way to confront the object’s slipperiness—its challenge to conventional
classification—is to consider the fact that a binding always remains indeterminately
tethered and in a sense subordinate to the book it envelops. Unlike an autonomous
art object, a binding is always contingent—a frame for the text within—and
therefore never meant to be considered in isolation. Reynolds’s binding for Saint
Glinglin is classified as a rare book within the Art Institute of Chicago’s Ryerson and
Burnham Libraries, signaling its status as a prime example of what is called “design
binding,” a strain of artistic bookbinding popular in the first half of the twentieth
century that commonly entails the disassembly and lavish recovering of an existing
book. Nevertheless, the library context has foregrounded its status as a book and has
Jenny Harris: jharris2@uchicago.edu
Copyright © 2021 (Jenny Harris). Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative
Works 3.0 Unported License. Available at http://jsa.asu.edu/

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Fig. 1. Mary Reynolds (American, 1891-1950). Saint Glinglin : précédé d’une nouvelle version de Gueule
de Pierre et des Temps mêlés: roman by Raymond Queneau, 1948. Mary Reynolds binding: full green
morocco binding; horizontal onlay across covers and spine; china teacup handle attached by onlay to
spine; title stamped in gold on front cover; author stamped in gold on back cover; marbled endpapers;
original paper covers bound in. Mary Reynolds Collection, Ryerson and Burnham Libraries, The Art
Institute of Chicago

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tended to obscure its resemblance to surrealist objects, like Joseph Cornell’s c. 1944
Untitled (Sand Box) or Claude Cahun’s 1936 Object in the AIC’s collection.3 One aim
of this essay is to show how Reynolds, who was actively engaged in surrealist circles,
was well equipped to engage such ideas directly and how she used the languages of
both art deco bookbinding and Surrealism to physically express aspects of Queneau’s
text.
At the same time, the object’s status as a rare book points to another equally
important component of its operations: the domestic context of its making and use
within Reynolds’s own home studio and library. By heightening the embodied aspects
of encountering a utilitarian object, Reynolds situated surrealist operations within the
domain of domestic life and the network of affective relations—whether friendly or
romantic—that such spaces accommodate. Through Reynolds, then, we can begin
to trace the way domesticity became central to a new set of surrealist practices that
have traditionally been seen to be at odds with dominant narratives of modernist art
history.
While the story of Saint Glinglin is in some sense specific to one artistic
figure at a particular moment in history, this focused study has broader ambitions: to
treat artist-bound books not just as texts but as objects of artistic merit and thereby
uncover contributions that are overlooked in the history of modernist art. Doing so
adds new texture to the story of Surrealism’s entanglement with the domains of the
applied arts and the decorative, and to domestic modes of viewership and sociality.
By attending closely to the social history surrounding Reynolds’s artistic pursuits,
the materiality and making of Saint Glinglin, as well as its sophisticated engagement
with the content of Queneau’s novel, this essay sets out to hold the book object’s
interconnected and overlapping spheres of influence in tension. In this light, the
binding emerges as a play of contradictory forces, facilitating and heightening the
physical experience of reading while also frustrating expectations about what such an
experience might entail. Troubling the distinction between interior text and exterior
frame, Reynolds’s binding extends the novel’s surrealist ethos and atmosphere into
the intimate realm of domestic life.
Reynolds’s Life and Milieu
Among Reynolds’s roughly eighty extant bindings—seventy-four of which
reside in the Ryerson and Burnham libraries—Saint Glinglin occupies a unique
position in that is among the few bindings, indeed likely the last, she produced
between her return to Paris following the war, and before her death in 1950.4 It
therefore presents a compelling summation of her bookbinding career and life
among the Parisian avant-garde. Born in 1891 in Minneapolis, Reynolds arrived
in Paris in 1921 following the death of her husband, an American infantryman,
who succumbed to influenza while serving in the war. Having uprooted her life
in Greenwich Village, she settled in Paris’ bohemian Montparnasse neighborhood

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where she soon became a central participant in surrealist social circles. Throughout
much of the 1930s and ‘40s, Reynolds’s home at 14 rue Hallé became a place of
lively artistic exchange. Reynolds installed her bookbinding studio there and housed
her growing collection of fine art and rare books. She also welcomed Marcel
Duchamp, her close companion and sometime collaborator, who maintained a
neighboring room and studio of his own.5 The two artists had likely met briefly
in New York in the 1910s and reconnected in Paris in 1923, beginning a romantic
liaison that continued sporadically until Reynolds’s death. Together, they hosted nearnightly open houses and casual daily gatherings of the avant-garde. Djuna Barnes,
Constantin Brancusi, André Breton, Alexander Calder, Jean Cocteau, Paul Éluard,
Peggy Guggenheim, Mina Loy, Henri-Pierre Roché, and Man Ray were regular
fixtures. Others like Frida Kahlo passed through while visiting from abroad.6
Reynolds’s formal bookbinding training began in 1929 when she sought out
instruction from Pierre Legrain (1889-1929), a well-known Parisian interior and book
designer. Duchamp, who knew Legrain through the collector and fashion designer
Jacques Douçet (1853-1929), likely facilitated the association. Douçet launched
Legrain’s career as a bookbinder, hiring the young designer to create bindings for
his extensive library of rare books and manuscripts between 1916 and 1919. A
budding collector in her own right, Reynolds may have seen in Legrain and Douçet’s
partnership a model for uniting her interests in making and acquiring art.
Financially stable as a result of the pension she received as a war widow,
Reynolds was able to approach bookbinding primarily as an artistic rather than
commercial endeavor. However, in keeping with her applied arts training, she would
not have considered her creations to be “artist’s books.” Rather, she was trained in
the art of “design binding,” in which the bookbinder typically selects an existing
book, takes it apart and rebinds it in a fine binding.7 Pulling from her growing
collection of Dada and surrealist writings, Reynolds rebound texts by the likes of
Cocteau, Alfred Jarry, and Queneau, among many others. Affectionate inscriptions
from these figures speak to the intimacy of such friendships.8
The majority of Reynolds’s bindings conform loosely to Legrain’s signature
style in which the covers are lavish, but largely self-contained—that is, flat covers
with no protruding elements—and comprised of exotic animal skins combined with
inlaid leather motifs. Pushing them into the realm of sculpture, however, Reynolds
occasionally emphasized their three-dimensional presence by incorporating everyday
objects: a zipper, corset stay, glass thermometer, or pair of children’s gloves. In 1935,
she and Duchamp collaborated on the design and making of an elaborate binding for
Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi: drame en cinq actes (Fig. 2). Bound in brown Morocco leather,
the book’s spine is carved into the shape of the letter “B,” while its front and back
cover are cut into U-shaped forms. When opened, the cover’s overall composition
spells the word “UBU.” Flipped upside down or turned sideways, the cut out shapes
likewise suggest the artists’ fused initials (MR and MD).9

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Fig. 2. Mary Reynolds, Ubu roi : drame en cinq actes. Paris: Librarie Charpentier et Fasquelle, 1921. Mary
Reynolds binding: Mary Reynolds binding: full tan morocco binding; boards die cut in the shape
of U; onlays on spine in shape of B; black silk endleaves; crown stamped in gold on front endleaf;
author stamped in gold on back endleaf; gilt edges; original paper covers bound in. Binding designed
by Marcel Duchamp. Mary Reynolds Collection, Ryerson and Burnham Libraries © Association
Marcel Duchamp/ADAGP, Paris/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York 2021

Reynolds’s books were also always the product of labor intensive processes
which she executed at 14 rue Hallé. Her niece, Marjorie Hubachek Watkins,
remembered Reynolds’s home and studio as a site of active engagement, advanced
workmanship and sumptuous supplies: “There were huge presses,” she recalled.
“[Reynolds] didn’t just go in and sit down to work as a routine. She would go into
the room, and she would pull a press up, change some papers, move things around. I
can remember some leather skins that she had stretched out. Her workroom was full
of all kinds of supplies, leather, tools.”10 Watkins’s description signals the remarkable
degree of skilled craftsmanship involved in the making of such objects and captures
the often-invisible aspects of the art of bookbinding: the elaborate preparation
of materials and the sometimes hours-long wait involved in multiple stages of

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stretching, pressing, gluing, and drying. Accordingly, such multi-step processes form
a backdrop for Reynolds’s (as well as Duchamp’s) artistic pursuits in these years and
became integrated into the activities of their everyday lives.
Reynolds’s industrious bookbinding activities of the 1920s and ‘30s were
temporarily interrupted by the outbreak of World War II. While many of her friends
(among them Duchamp, Guggenheim, and Man Ray) fled to the United States, she
remained stationed in Paris and became actively involved in the French Resistance,
aiding British pilots in need of escape, sequestering war materials, and hiding artists
in need of shelter.11 Reynolds left Paris reluctantly in 1943, narrowly escaping the
Gestapo and traveling on foot to Madrid by way of the Pyrenees mountains to
eventually reach New York.12 She remained in Greenwich Village for the remainder
of the war, returning to Paris only six weeks after its conclusion.
Despite the waning presence of Surrealism in Europe after the war, Reynolds
continued and even expanded her pre-war activities upon her return. In June
of 1947, she wrote excitedly to her friends Hélène and Henri Hoppenot of her
engagements: “Surrealist expo. Now July 1st…Kiesler, Pierre Matisse here and Man
Ray coming… .”13 In addition to frequenting and organizing exhibitions of surrealist
art, she took on new editorial responsibilities, serving as the Paris Representative to
View magazine, an important vehicle for the circulation of surrealist art in America.14
The role kept her engaged and up-to-date on surrealist art and writing. Though faced
by postwar shortages of materials, Reynolds also eagerly returned to bookbinding.
“It is delicious to work again with cisaille, knives, paste,” she wrote in November of
the same year: “Every once in a while a gesture comes back all by itself and is most
satisfying. Am spoiling some rather rare books with the greatest pleasure.”15
Reynolds’s Binding for Saint Glinglin
Though the art of bookbinding has been largely overlooked in histories
of twentieth-century art, close attention to the materiality of Saint Glinglin reveals
the degree to which Reynolds’s binding merges fine and applied arts strategies to
prepare the beholder/reader for an embodied experience of the text within.16 It
does so in part by deploying the language of fine binding as it was modernized in
France between 1910 and 1930, primarily by her instructor, Legrain. Reynolds’s use
of animal skin, onlay detailing, gold stamped lettering, marbled endpapers, and fine
laid paper flyleaves reflects Legrain’s Art Deco style and signals her formal training
in his atelier. 17 Like Legrain, her bindings often exploited the exotic connotations
and tactile properties of rare animal skins. In addition to traditional hides like deer
or goat, they incorporated toad, boa constrictor, and ostrich leather (Fig. 3). For
Reynolds, as for Legrain, these materials yielded sensuous effects but also served as
unifying design elements, a means of presenting the cover as an integrated whole
rather than three independent parts (two cover boards and a spine).18 In keeping
with this aim, Reynolds positioned the title and author of Saint Glinglin not on the

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Fig. 3. Mary Reynolds. La Science de Dieu. Paris: Chamuel, 1900, n.d. Mary Reynolds binding: full black
calfskin binding with full green calfskin and toadskin onlays on covers. Mary Reynolds Collection,
Ryerson and Burnham Libraries, The Art Institute of Chicago

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spine, where such information might typically live for practical reasons (making it
visible while resting on a bookshelf), but rather on the front and back covers as more
pronounced elements of the overall composition. Such placement requires that the
book be taken off the shelf and manipulated; it foregrounds handling and embodied
engagement as a mode of knowledge production and discovery.
Art Deco bookbinding had also introduced a shift in the relationship
between a book’s interior and exterior. Legrain’s modern bindings were neither literal
pictorializations of the interior text nor were they wholly decorative or independent.
Instead, they aimed to evoke the text’s atmospheric essence—to capture the reader’s
attention and imagination through suggestion rather than description.19 During the
year she spent as an apprentice in Legrain’s atelier, Reynolds absorbed these lessons
both by learning principles of design directly from Legrain and by executing such
designs alongside the bookbinders he employed, a practice in which Legrain did
not himself partake.20 Through this experience, she cultivated a commitment to not
only the interweaving of exterior binding and interior text, but also to the handmade
processes of fabrication required to realize such syntheses. As we will see when
turning to the content of the novel, Reynolds also complicated these unifying aims
by muddying the distinction between the interior space of the novel and the exterior
space of reader.
While in many ways Saint Glinglin is exemplary of Art Deco bookbinding, it
channels such aesthetic strategies towards the making of a distinctly surrealist object
in its suggestive imagery, defiance of ordinary use, and corporeal disturbance. Key
to this operation is Reynolds’s inclusion of the found ceramic fragment—the handle
of a drinking vessel composed of two intertwined serpents—which she pinned
to the book’s spine, rendering the object a composite of both crafted and found
forms. When the book is viewed from a stable, upright position, as on a bookcase,
the ceramic handle provides a literal invitation to grasp the object, to pull it off
the shelf. Once removed, the book’s soft and porous leather summons a warmer,
more sensuous mode of engagement. Together, these conflicting properties—cool
glaze and warm leather—prompt a heightened awareness of the act of touching
itself. They also invite the beholder to imagine their common, vaguely zoomorphic
language. Incongruous yet physically connected, these materials seem to swell with
unknowable, latent meaning, offering a fantastical image of something vaguely
animalistic.
The book’s materials also assert the embodied aspects of reading by posing
unexpected physical restrictions. Reynolds’s somewhat awkward placement of the
ceramic handle, for example, presents an unfamiliar, even fragile limitation; with
the spine taken partially out of operation, it becomes impossible to lay the book
both flat and open at the same time. Executed in what appears to be a “tight back”
binding, in which the book’s cover is adhered to the spine of the bookblock, the
pages themselves are also difficult to separate, making it a challenge to read the

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words near the gutter.21 By undermining the utility of the object in these ways,
Reynolds frustrates a straightforward delivery of the text within. At the same time,
she diverts the site of meaning away from the object’s interior core and towards the
object’s exterior, where the object meets the hands of the beholder.22 This operation
might seem to be at odds with the atmospheric linking of interior and exterior; but
in fact, as I will argue, it mirrors the way in which Queneau’s novel itself frustrates
legibility.
Carolyn Lanchner has written that surrealist objects, like their readymade
precursors, “shared a commitment to the principles of collage and displacement.
The sharper the shock of the juxtaposition, the better.”23 According to this logic, the
contrasting materials and the physical difficulty of encountering the book might be
interpreted as strategic effects designed to heighten the reader’s awareness (sharpen
the shock) of the object itself. A work like Meret Oppenheim’s 1936 Object (Fig. 4), a

Fig. 4. Meret Oppenheim (Swiss, 1913-1985), Object (Le Déjeuner en fourrure), 1936, Fur-covered cup,
saucer, and spoon; Cup, 4 3/8 in. (10.9 cm) diam.; saucer, 9 3/8 (23.7 cm) diam.; spoon, 9 in. (20.2
cm) long. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Purchase © 2021 Artists Rights Society (ARS),
New York/Pro Litteris, Zurich

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cup, saucer, and spoon covered in the fur of a Chinese gazelle, is comparable in that
the sensory experience of viewing is connected to touch and taste as much as vision.
Reynolds’s ceramic handle suggests a related transformation from book to vessel,
inviting its beholder to ingest or taste the text within.
Though the binding for Saint Glinglin transforms an everyday book
into a sculptural object, the discoloration of the leather on its spine and upper
edges suggests its domestic shelf life—the fact that it was likely stored rather
conventionally, upright and sandwiched between other books. It is both for and in
this domestic, social context, rather than a museum or gallery space, that we should
imagine her works being made and consumed, which distinguishes them from most
surrealist objects, produced for an exhibition context. Despite her formal training,
Reynolds bound books primarily for herself, her family and artist friends, culling
from the vast library of rare books and avant-garde literature they gave her. In this
light, the object can be seen to work in two directions simultaneously: on the one
hand, it proposes utilitarian, domestic objects as ready subjects for the transformative
qualities of surrealist art;24 on the other, it invites us to engage with surrealist art
within the context of domestic life.
Queneau’s Story Swirled
Reynolds found fitting subjects for her sculptural interventions in the
surrealist-inflected writings of Queneau, a French author and editor of Gallimard
who was deeply enmeshed in the activities of the surrealists in the 1920s. Though
he formally distanced himself from the group in subsequent decades, his works
remained of interest to figures like André Breton, who owned a copy of Saint
Glinglin as well as several of his other books and original manuscripts.25 The book is
one of twelve manuscripts by Queneau that Reynolds bound, the most she produced
for any single author with the exception of Jean Cocteau. Warm inscriptions written
by Queneau in this and other books attest to the intimacy of their friendship and
exchange.26
Like Reynolds’s binding, Saint Glinglin is a composite work: three of its seven
sections were published in 1933 under the title Gueule de Pierre; the next section,
Les Temps mêlés followed in 1941; and the completed book was published in 1948
under the full title, Saint Glinglin: précédé d’une nouvelle version de Gueule de Pierre et des
Temps mêlés: roman. Though there is a driving plot in Saint Glinglin, its meandering
style makes it nearly impossible to summarize. Indeed, Queneau deploys a bevy of
strategies—including multifarious wordplay, voice shifts, and fantastic imagery—
designed to undermine the novel’s narrative coherence. In loose terms, however, the
story retells the Freudian myth of Oedipus and coheres around a small community
known as Ville Natale (translated by James Sallis as “Home Town”) where it never
rains until the mayor’s son, Pierre, having killed his father, provokes a year of
ceaseless rainfall, flooding, and fish. Following Pierre and other characters, the reader

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proceeds through a quasi-unconscious world of dreamlike disorientation in keeping
with the delirious atmosphere induced by the binding.
Parallels between the story of Saint Glinglin and Reynolds’s binding are
evident on nearly every page, but the most direct reference is the ceramic vessel
fragment, a nod to the story’s titular festival, during which Ville Natale’s mayor leads
an annual ritual of competitive earthenware destruction. At the ceremony’s outset,
the narrator presents the following scene:
Zostril raised his golf club and with a single vigorous blow smashed
at least 203 plates. Pieces of the display shot off vertically, reaching
apogee in scant seconds. Proprietors and visitors alike hurled themselves shrieking onto crockery and porcelain. Some smashed salad
bowls with their feet; others got hold of a large soup tureen, hurling
it into a pile of fruit dishes and demolishing the whole lot with great
commotion. Sauceboats and butter dishes were flung into the air and
crashed back to earth in pieces. Specializing in the destruction of
saucers, a few connoisseurs methodically shattered them against their
heads. Some juggled, then suddenly abandoned their show of dexterity; plates seemed for a moment to hang immobile in the air, then
took a nosedive and crashed in pieces to the ground.27
Encountering the book through Reynolds’s binding, the reader would not only
visualize this scene of comical chaos, but would also experience it physically when
touching the jagged edges and irregular breaks of the ceramic handle, a visceral remnant of the story (Fig. 5). In one sense, the reader stands apart from the characters
of the novel: she does not partake in porcelain smashing, but rather encounters its
aftermath. Nevertheless, having seemingly escaped the confines of the printed page,
the fragment troubles the boundary between interior and exterior action. It positions
the reader not quite outside the novel’s operations, but somehow closer to its center.
In so doing it imbues the space of reading with the novel’s surrealist logic.
The handle’s excision from the text is mimicked in its form—an irregular x
shape comprised of two intertwined serpents. It likewise mimics a central formal
conceit of Queneau’s writing: his exclusion of the letter x throughout the book.
Queneau navigates this self-imposed phonetic obstacle through comical misspellings:
“essplique” (for explique/explain), “egzaminait” (for examinait/examined),
“eggzistence” (for existence), and so on. The repeated exclusion of the Latin prefix
ex (for out of or from), prompts a bevy of questions: what exactly is being taken
out, foreclosed, removed, crossed out, or made variable in this text? And how does
the binding—an exterior frame or enclosure—relate to such operations?
Queneau suggests a textual clue in his preface to a later edition of the book,
writing: “The reader will easily discover the symbolic significance, above all if he

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Fig. 5. Mary Reynolds, Saint Glinglin : précédé d’une nouvelle version de Gueule de Pierre et des Temps mêlés:
roman by Raymond Queneau, 1948. Mary Reynolds binding: full green morocco binding; horizontal
onlay across covers and spine; china teacup handle attached by onlay to spine; title stamped in gold
on front cover; author stamped in gold on back cover; marbled endpapers; original paper covers
bound in. Detail of exterior spine and ceramic vessel fragment. Mary Reynolds Collection, Ryerson
and Burnham Libraries, The Art Institute of Chicago

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notes that this letter [x] is preserved in the book’s last word, which rhymes moreover
with its pronunciation: ‘le beau temps fixe.’”28 On the one hand, the letter marks a
literal end or closure of the book itself. On the other hand, however, the phrase it
occupies—translated by James Sallis as “good weather of everlasting excellence”—
implies infinite continuity. 29 In seeming contradiction, the text may have ended, but
the continuous reality of Ville Natale, namely, its watery and verdant atmosphere,
lives on. A parallel paradox lies in the title itself: Sallis notes, “In French, when one
says I’ll love you till Saint Glinglin’s, it means that his love will last forever. And when
one says I’ll do something-or-other on that fictitious saint’s day, well, don’t hold your
breath: it’ll never happen.”30
Making explicit references to the festival within Saint Glinglin, the materials
of Reynolds’s binding also evoke and even thematize the novel’s atmospheric
conditions. Roughly midway through the novel, the climate of Ville Natale begins
to shift dramatically from dry and desolate to verdant and lush, the consequence of
endless rain. With great frequency, the characters invoke the fecundity of the new
landscape in terms that are echoed by the mossy green hue of the exterior dyed
leather binding. We are told of a “border of green skirting our town” and a “riot of
vegetation, on every side an arousal of plants.”31 Water gradually begins to overtake
every aspect of life in Ville Natale, eventually transforming it into an outdoor
aquarium in which the characters swim like fish from one scene to the next. “Water,
nothing but water. Water, water everywhere,” one character exclaims as he begins
shedding tears.32
A protagonist of Queneau’s novel, water is also the stuff of books, a
connection Reynolds evokes through the choice of marbled endleaves (Fig. 6).
These papers, common features of fine bindings, were made in the Suminagashi
(or “floating ink”) style, in which water-based inks hover on the surface of a
mucilaginous water-based mixture with antagonistic properties. A sheet of paper is
placed on the surface of the manipulated ink, and carefully removed to capture the
desired design.33 The resulting swirls of color make this process palpable while also
conjuring related imagery: the coil of an underwater crustacean or the rolling crest
of a breaking wave.34 In imaging water-based materiality, the marbled endpapers also
remind us that paper itself is made with water. Indeed, on a material-science level,
water is what makes paper expand and contract over time and therefore what gives
it life.35 That Saint Glinglin is both made from water and foregrounds this materiality
positions the book, like the paper that constitutes it, as a living, breathing thing.
While on the one hand the inky swirls hint at the shelf life of this book,
they also reflect the bewildering destabilization of narrative cohesion at work within
Queneau’s text. Like the other elements of the binding, they prime the reader for a
particular mode of engagement: as we open Saint Glinglin and turn its pages, we wade
deeper into the depths of disorientation and discovery, the experience of a story that
is nonlinear, indirect, jagged, swirled.36

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Fig. 6. Mary Reynolds, Saint Glinglin : précédé d’une nouvelle version de Gueule de Pierre et des Temps mêlés:
roman by Raymond Queneau, 1948. Mary Reynolds binding: full green morocco binding; horizontal
onlay across covers and spine; china teacup handle attached by onlay to spine; title stamped in gold
on front cover; author stamped in gold on back cover; marbled endpapers; original paper covers
bound in. Detail of front interior cover, marbled endleaves. Mary Reynolds Collection, Ryerson and
Burnham Libraries, The Art Institute of Chicago

Conclusion
This essay began with an examination of Reynolds’s social milieu, a context
which allowed her to approach bookbinding as a hybrid venture, informed in equal
parts by the craft of fine binding and the surrealist object. If a traditional binding
functions much like a frame, serving to contain and offset its interior object from
the exterior world, Reynolds’s binding for Saint Glinglin disturbs such distinctions by
effectively turning the book inside out. For Reynolds, merging fine and applied art
idioms meant producing objects that pose questions about the boundaries between
modernist art and lived experience. Through her careful attention to the contents
of Queneau’s novel, she translated its ideas into an embodied encounter, unleashing

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the story’s surrealist atmosphere into the world beyond the page. Unlike a frame, the
binding refuses foreclosure, instead proposing a constant slippage between interior
and exterior, text and object, narrative fiction and everyday life.

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Thank you to the editors of the Journal of Surrealism and the Americas, especially Jennifer Cohen. This
project was guided by the generous staff of the Art Institute of Chicago, in particular, Jill Bugajski,
Christine Fabian, Leslie Fitzpatrick, Caitlin Haskell, Maria Kokkori, and Autumn Mather. The essay
also benefited from the discerning feedback of Kathryn Cochran, Chelsea Foxwell, Christine Mehring, and Claudia Swan. Natalie Dûpecher, Clara Nizard, and Taylor Walsh all offered crucial comments at various stages. I am grateful for this community of colleagues and friends.
1 A material common to traditional bookbinding, goatskin is also known as chagrin levant, morocco,
niger, and Turkey leather. See: Jane Greenfield, Abc of Bookbinding: A Unique Glossary with over 700 Illustrations for Collectors and Librarians (New Castle and Nottingham: Oak Knoll Press; The Plough Press,
2007), 33.
2 The fragment is a form of earthenware, possibly terracotta, likely dated to the late nineteenth or
early twentieth century.
3 Cornell’s Untitled (Sand Box) was given to the Art Institute as part of Reynolds’s personal collection.
4 Saint Glinglin is part of an enormous trove of materials given to the Art Institute in 1951 by Reynolds’s brother Frank Hubachek (a trustee of the museum), following her death. The gift encompassed
nearly 500 objects, including Reynolds’s personal papers, extensive collection of avant-garde artworks
and periodicals, various exhibition-related ephemera, and her library of roughly three-hundred rare
books. Hubachek worked closely with Marcel Duchamp who had returned to Paris to be with Reynolds in the days before her death and subsequently assembled and distributed the contents of her
home. With a particular focus on the activities of surrealist artists in the interwar years, the collection
speaks to Reynolds’s intimate engagement with the ideas of her avant-garde contemporaries. Because
Reynolds’s books were never explicitly made for an exhibition context, they remained largely uncatalogued until after her death. For this reason, very few of them can be precisely dated with certainty.
Most of the bindings are dated in relation to the books they encase. In this case, she must have bound
Saint Glinglin in the short window of time between when the book was published in 1948 and before
her death in September 1950.
5 Man Ray later recalled, “Duchamp took an interest in fixing up the place, papering the walls of a
room with maps and putting up curtains made of closely hung strings, all of which was carried out
in his usual meticulous manner, without regard to the amount of work it involved.” Man Ray, Self
Portrait (Boston: Little Brown, 1963), 238.
6 For the most complete account of Reynolds’s biography, see Susan Glover Godlewski, “Warm
Ashes: The Life and Career of Mary Reynolds,” Art Institute of Chicago Museum Studies 22, no. 2 (1996):
102-129+196.
7 The bookbinder may also obtain the book in the form of unbound sheets (producing books this
way was quite common in France in Reynolds’s time), though this does not appear to have been Reynolds’s preference. In many of her bindings, as in Saint Glinglin, the original paper cover and cut out
spine are bound in. For a brief discussion of design bindings, see Woody Leslie, “Bridging the Gap:
Artist’s Books and Design Bindings by Karen Hanmer,” Journal of Artists Books (Spring 2016): 47-49.
The common attributes of fine binding, as outlined by Leslie, include the following: “rounded and
backed spine, laced-in boards, sewn headbands, decorative end sheets, leather cover, etc.”
8 Cocteau’s inscription on Reynolds’s copy of Les Chavaliers de la Table Ronde: Pièce en trois actes (Gallimard, 1937), for example, reads: “à ma très chère / Mary. De/ tout Coeur / Jean/” with his signature
star.
9 As Janine Mileaf has surmised, Reynolds likely also played an active role in the making of the
leather armature for the deluxe edition of Duchamp’s Boite-en-Valise. See Janine Mileaf, “Boxes, Books,
and the Boîte-en-Valise,” in A Transatlantic Avant-garde: American Artists in Paris, 1918-1939, ed. Sophie
Lévy (Berkeley, Los Angeles, Giverny, France: Musée d’Art Américain Giverny; In association with
University of California Press: 2003), 163-172.

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10 Marjorie Hubachek Watkins, quoted in Paul B. Franklin, “Remembering Aunt Mary: An Interview
with Marjorie Hubachek Watkins and Frank Brookes Hubachek Jr. in Étant donné Marcel Duchamp &
Mary Reynolds, no. 8 (2007): 11.
11 Page Dougherty Delano, “Kay Boyle and Mary Reynolds: Friendship Intensified by War,” Revue
électronique d’études sur le monde anglophone 10.2 (2013). Available online: http://journals.openedition.org/
erea/3132 (accessed May 2021).
12 See Godlewski, 111-13, and Janet Flanner, “The Escape of Mrs. Jeffries,” New Yorker (May 22,
May 29, and June 5, 1943).
13 Mary Reynolds, Letter to Hélène Hoppenot, June 17, 1947. Bibliothèque Jacques Doucet, Paris:
correspondence reçue par Henri and Hélène Hoppenot, Alpha MS 11317-22486 80 lettres MS 14123,
cited in Delano.
14 Founded in 1940 and edited by Charles Henri Ford, View was dedicated to modern art, literature
and music. See Irene E. Hofmann, “Documents of Dada and Surrealism: Dada and Surrealist Journals
in the Mary Reynolds Collection,” Art Institute of Chicago Museum Studies 22, no. 2 (1996): 130-149+197.
15 Mary Reynolds, Letter to Hélène Hoppenot, November 4, 1947. Bibliothèque Jacques Doucet,
cited in Delano.
16 Though Saint Glinglin is a late example of Reynolds’s output, it is no less instructive: it offers a rare
glimpse into the work of an American surrealist artist and collector in postwar Paris.
17 The term “onlay” refers to a very thin strap of leather of a contrasting color placed on the surface
of the leather and tooled on the edges. See Greenfield, 47. The term flyleaves refers to the blank pages bound between the marbled endleaves and the original cover of the trade publication.
18 Alastair Duncan and Georges De Bartha, Art Nouveau and Art Deco Bookbinding: French Masterpieces,
1880-1940 (New York: Abrams, 1989), 18. On Art Deco bookbinding see also Yves Peyré and H G.
Fletcher, Art Deco Bookbindings: The Work of Pierre Legrain and Rose Adler (New York: Princeton Architectural Press in association with the New York Public Library), 2004.
19 Duncan and de Bartha, 18.
20 Godlewski, 106.
21 On the term “tight back” see Greenfield, 70.
22 In this way, Saint Glinglin recalls Reynolds’s binding for Man Ray and Paul Éluard’s Les Mains Libres
(1937), which features a pair of children’s gloves on the front and back cover. As Mileaf has argued,
the inclusion of the gloves “frustrates the image of a freed hand.” Like the ceramic handle in Saint
Glinglin, its evocation of the hand is contradictory: at once beckoning and repellent. See Janine Mileaf,
“Boxes, Books, and the Boîte-en-Valise,” 163-172. For a broader discussion about the role of touch
and tactility in surrealist objects, see also Janine Mileaf, Please Touch: Dada and Surrealist Objects After the
Readymade (Hanover: Dartmouth College Press and University Press of New England, 2010).
23 Carolyn Lanchner, Oppenheim Object (New York: The Museum of Modern Art: 2017), 18.
24 In this regard, the work is consistent with the aims of surrealist objects as they were articulated by
André Breton in 1936. In “Crisis of the Object,” for example, he writes that one could discover the
fantastic or marvelous in the banal by giving an object a “new focus.” “With this,” he writes, “…the
same object, however complete it may seem, reverts to an infinite series of latent possibilities which are
not peculiar to it and therefore entail its transformation.” See André Breton, “Crisis of the Object”
(1936), trans. Simon Watson Taylor, in Surrealism and Painting (Boston: MFA Publications, Museum of
Fine Arts, Boston: 2002), 279.
25 It is worth underlining the fact that although Queneau withdrew from the surrealist group, he
and Breton continued to retain a friendship. Queneau’s inscription on Breton’s copy of Saint Glinglin
reads: “à André Breton / ces histoires du pays en hommage réel / Queneau.” See online catalogue of
Breton’s collections: https://www.andrebreton.fr/
26 The inscription for Les temps mêlés, (a section of Saint Glinglin published independently in 1941,
reads: “à Mary Reynolds / en fidèle hommage / Queneau/ 31 mars 42.” See Hugh Edwards, Surreal-

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ism and Its Affinities: The Mary Reynolds Collection, A Bibliography, 2nd edition (Art Institute of Chicago, c.
1956; reprinted 1973), 102. In Pierrot mon ami: roman (1942), Queneau writes: “A Mary Reynolds / pour
distraire son exil / avec les homages de / Queneau.” See Edwards, 101.
27 Raymond Queneau, Saint Glinglin, 1948, trans. James Sallis (Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press,
2000), 37. The original French reads: Zostril lève sa canne de golf et d’un coup puissant, unique et
vigoureux écrase pour le moins deux cent trois assiettes. De toutes parts le tapage éclate verticalement,
atteignant en quelques secondes son sommon d’intensité. Propriétaires et visieteurs se précipitent en
hurlant sur la faïence et la porcelaine. Les uns brisent les saladiers à coups de pied; d’autres s’emparant d’une large soupière, la lancent dans un lot de compotiers et le tout s’effrite avec grand vacarme.
Les saucières et les beurriers valsent en l’air et s’écrasent à terre avec fracas. Raymond Queneau, Saint
Glinglin, précédé d’une nouvelle version de Gueule de Pierre et des Temps mêlés: roman (Paris: Gallimard, 1948).
28 Raymond Queneau, “Preface,” in Saint Glinglin, trans. Sallis, vii.
29 James Sallis, “Introduction,” ibid., xii.
30 Ibid., xiii.
31 Queneau, Saint Glinglin, trans. Sallis, 77. The French reads: “Partout jubilant des végétations, partour naissent des plants.”
32 Queneau, Saint Glinglin, trans. Sallis, 139. The French reads: “De l’eau, rien que de l’eau, sans arrêt
de l’eau.”
33 Matt Roberts, Don Etherington, and Margaret R. Brown, Bookbinding and the Conservation of Books:
A Dictionary of Descriptive Terminology (Washington: Library of Congress, 1982), 166.
34 For more on this shape and its history see Darby English, “The Dome as Fact and Façade,” in
Martin Puryear: Liberty = Libertà (New York: Gregory R. Miller & Company, 2019).
35 Roberts et. al., 189. Somewhat paradoxically, too much water can of course also threaten the life
of a book by imposing irreversible damage.
36 Reynolds’s inclusion of such imagery recalls her earlier use of Duchamp’s Rotoreliefs of 1935 as
endleaves in the bindings for two books: Night-flight (1932) by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry and Loin de
Rueil: roman (1944) by Queneau. She likely drew the papers from the studio space that she and Duchamp shared on rue Hallé and the materials were likely proofs for Duchamp’s cover designs for the
winter 1935 issue of Minotaure. See Christine M. Fabian and Jack Perry Brown. “Never Judge a Book
by Its Cover: Mary Reynolds’s Binding for ‘Night-Flight’.” Art Institute of Chicago Museum Studies 34,
no. 2 (2008): 56. Intended to be viewed at a rotating speed of 40-60 rpm with one eye closed, the Rotoreliefs were designed to produce optical illusions—effects Reynolds made more bodily by converting
them into endleaves that would have been turned by hand. Put to work in the context of Saint Glinglin,
the colorful marbled whorls function similarly, signaling or priming the reader for the experience of
a story that is nonlinear, indirect, jagged, and swirled. On the bodily effects of Duchamp’s Rotoreliefs
see Rosalind Krauss, The Optical Unconscious (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994), 95-142. With its interest in
water as life form and disorienting device, Saint Glinglin also resonates with what Sean O’Hanlan has
described as “an aquatic current within Surrealist art and literature of the interwar period.” See Sean
Theodora O’Hanlan, “The shipwreck of reason: The Surrealist diver and modern maritime salvage,”
in Margaret Cohen and Killian Colm Quigley, eds., The Aesthetics of the Undersea (London: Routledge,
2019), 137-154.