Parsely Woody Leslie Large Home Tiny Idea, 2016
Parsely is a verbo-visual artist’s book that uses words alone to both narrate and illustrate a story, ostensibly about the neighbor’s parsley being eaten by some caterpillars under the author’s watchful eye. The reader is pulled through the book by the story’s narrative, but simultaneously slowed down by escalating digressions of language. As the book progresses, the pages grow ever denser, filled by increasing footnotes, vocabulary definitions, exegesis by individual words, talking punctuation and page numbers, and growing chains of word associations spilling across the page. It’s a thirty-second story that takes nearly thirty minutes to read, and even longer to fully unpack. In the end, the book is a meditation on words and language, the caterpillars and parsley simply acting as our guides.
Edition of 200 hand-bound offset printed artist’s books, with a special edition of 10 case-bound books. 6.5″ x 9.25″, 40 pages