A Purgatory of Nuns

I love books as objects. I like it when the people who design and manufacture books take some effort to make a memorable object. Of course there is a species of super-deluxe collectible books—and they can be remarkable examples of book-making craft—but my preference is first for books that I can read, then second for books that excite me as objects. This is all a lead-in to talk about my latest beloved book object, A Purgatory of Nuns by Julie Speed, published by Cattywampus Press. I first discovered Cattywampus Press when I encountered their booth at the Novel Ideas book fair at Blue Star Gallery in San Antonio—I practically cleaned off their table. A glance through their catalog shows that they specialize in gorgeous book-like objects from the art world of Texas.

I’ve only had a few days with A Purgatory of Nuns and there are already fingerprints on the cover. If I were a serious bibliophile and collector, I would handle such books with a lot more care—but that would prevent me from reading them, so what’s the point?

Julie Speed is a painter living in Marfa. Her paintings, mostly gouache or oil, feel quite surreal, but don’t have that ersatz realism that Magritte or Dali had. Her work has a storybook feel, as if she is influenced by Maurice Sendak and other masterful Newbury award caliber illustrators. Her work also reminds me a lot of Paula Rego’s in its disorienting fable-like content.

But A Purgatory of Nuns is mostly a series of collages. In her very brief introduction, Speed relates discovering a “stash of moldy engravings salvaged from an 18th century European guide to Catholic sects.” Using old engravings to make surreal somewhat anticlerical collages makes me think of Une semaine de bonté by Max Ernst, a “novel” published in 1932, composed of cut up Victorian book illustrations. But unlike Ernst, Speed is not creating a visual narrative. She described the source material as a “guide”—her book is more like a collector’s guide. Think of price guides for comic books or trading cards. You get a series of images of the nuns and a tiny amount of descriptive information on each spread. Just the kind of info a collector needs!

The title of the book is Speed’s neologism for a group for nuns. For some reason, in English we have coined a lot of bizarre words for flocks of different bird breeds: a murder of crows, for example, or a flamboyance of flamingos. Speed was honoring that tradition: a “purgatory” in this case is a collective noun for multiple nuns.

The image are composed of collage elements with a little gouache color. On the left page of each spread is a name for the nun (is it meant to be her order?), followed by protections offered by that nun (as if she were a saint). Under each image is text in French that presumably was on the original engravings, but in a few of them, Speed has altered the French text.

This book is a beautiful trifle. It is pure pleasure to flip through, read the protections each type of nun provides, look at these surreal, somewhat spooky images.

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