AMBruno
Finale

AMBruno's new book project for 2025 is Finale, with eighteen books by nineteen artists.

New book works conceived in response to the subject theme of Finale - as for instance: conclusion, farewell, final scene, denouement, coda.

The selector was Robert Bolick, curator of the Books On Books Collection.

The nineteen Finale artists are: Karen Blake, Laure Catugier, Claudia de la Torre, Judy Goldhill, Susan Johanknecht & Katharine Meynell, Rafael Klein, Pauline Lamont-Fisher, Philip Lee, Sophie Loss, John McDowall, Alastair Noble, Linda Parr, Ximena Pérez Grobet, Peter Rapp, Mireille Ribière, Cally Trench, Maria White, and Roy Willingham.

Please see the AMBruno Shop Window if you might be interested in buying a book from the collection.

The Finale project will be launched during AMBruno's Finale at Tate Britain in the Library & Archive Reading Rooms on Friday 26th September 2025, 1.30-5pm. The afternoon's events will include performances, screen works, readings, a talk by Robert Bolick, and presentations by some of the artists on their books. Central to the event are the performances, for which participating artists were invited to impart the concept and intrinsic character of their book by other means.

Karen Blake - . . . And yet

The book resembles a memorial, commemorating all the books that have been banned and burned throughout history. . . And yet their destruction is seldom final. Copies will survive and the books' contents will live on in people's minds. A wing extends from the book's fore edge, signifying this enduring vitality.

Open edition. Asymmetric cuboid book block, Marlmarque 270 gsm paper, hand cut and frayed feathers in Mull fabric. £120 €144

Laure Catugier - Autodafé

Bound by a candle, the book-architecture unfolds vertically into eight thick pages, each perforated with a letter. Together, they form the word 'autodafé', which designates the destruction of books by fire, usually motivated by cultural, religious or political opposition.

Edition of 13 +2 AP. 4 folded sheets, laser cut, perforated with holes, black-on-black print. £63 €75

Claudia de la Torre - PROLOGUES / EPILOGUES

PROLOGUES / EPILOGUES is a reversible book of 60 fictive prologues and epilogues. With its centre left unwritten, it invites the reader to bridge the gap - where meaning emerges not from narrative, but from absence, reflection, and the rhythm of imagined middles.

Edition of 50. 248 pages, perfect binding, card cover with French folds,14.5 x 10.2 cm. £34 €40

Judy Goldhill - The End

Seen through the eyes of a six year old child, this book correlates the naivety of a child's emotions with the sophistication of the cameras used by NASA for their kamikaze lunar space probe Ranger IX. It recreates her excitement followed by horror of the eventual impact.

Edition of 12. Casebound with inset screen panel on front cover, 52 pages, laser printed onto three different paper stocks. £150 €180

Susan Johanknecht & Katharine Meynell - Sunsetting

Sunsetting presents finale as a continuous moment in time, durational, circular, non-linear. Referencing precariousness of technologies and typographic descriptors in an unstable present.

Edition of 40. Handbound with yellow linen, 46 pages, letterpress printed on various yellow papers. £55 €66

Rafael Klein - Sketchbook for the End Times

A road trip to Italy is interrupted by a series of natural disasters recalling the interference of the Gods in Ovid's Metamorphoses. These reach a crescendo threatening total destruction. The book is intended to elicit surprise, having the rough characteristics of a sketchbook; incorporating collage, paint, and cut-outs. It has a durability that allows a vigorous, playful handling.

Edition of 14 +4 AP. Sculptural leporello of double-sided pop-ups. Pigment print on Fabriano stock. Price on application to the artist

Pauline Lamont-Fisher - Finale: thoughts and memories

This book is a reflection on the way a death provokes thoughts and memories, seemingly at random. They pop up at the least expected moments sometimes provoking images of shared experiences. They can be painful or cathartic.

Edition is 20. Casebound in book cloth, 120 pages, inkjet printed on Awagami Inbe Thick White and Fabriano Pergamenata papers. £30 €36

Philip Lee - Sun God

In Sun God, performance artist Philip Lee is gradually transformed into a sun god, celebrating all that has gone before and evoking the finale of a theatre performance. A sequence of collaged photographs, in the manner of a children's dress-the-doll book, show the artist becoming a flaming figure.

Edition of 12. Sewn folio, inkjet printed, gold metallic ink, and signed by the artist. £80 €96

Sophie Loss - Nano Morgante

There is a double-sided painting by Bronzino of Nano Morgante. One side depicts Nano before a bird hunt, and on the other the finale to his adventure. The content of this book is the illogical space in between, where Nano has made his way through the book/forest, crushing, breaking, and cutting through with his blade.

Edition of 12. Casebound, 28 pages, Indigo print. £120 €144

John McDowall - Encore

The book manifests the repetition of theatrical performances - moments of reprise here in a way doubled in the replication of pictorial pages, and in the written text - both references to three of J. B. Priestley's Time Plays: ones encompassing theories of temporal looping, precognition and eternal recurrence.

Open edition. Singer sewn, inkjet printed on Liber Charta 145 gsm white, and with 29 gsm Mitsumata Iron Oxide Pink interleaves. £45 €54

Alastair Noble - TIDINGS

'Silence all around marked the termination of his finale' (Ulysses, Chapter III Eumaeus, James Joyce 1922); a remark made by the keeper of the cabman's shelter where Leopold Bloom and Stephen Daedalus took refuge. The typeface Lyons is used to evoke the classical inscriptions on the cover of the first edition of Ulysses; employed in this book to imply an in memoriam.

Edition of 18. Hand sewn, 16 pages plus cover and endpapers. £32 €38

Linda Parr - Finale, or The Death of the Author

Roland Barthes' 1967 essay argued that the meaning of a text is not fixed by authorial intent but shaped by readers' interpretations. Responding to the theme Finale, this book echoes that debate - exploring the metaphorical and literal deaths of authors, their reflections on mortality, and their occasional last words.

Edition of 12. Hardback bound, sewn in six signatures over funereal ribbons, tied back over the spine, 104 pages. £60 €72

Ximena Pérez Grobet - HORIZONTEL

Accordion book with 132 horizontal landscape photographs aligned to an imaginary horizon line. When unfolded, they form a continuous landscape. The title Horizontel merges 'horizon' and 'horizontal', evoking a visual and symbolic boundary - both present and imagined - reflecting on continuity, limits, and the poetic structure of space.

Edition of 12. Leporello, 9 x 15 cm / 20 metres long open, numbered and signed. £250 €300

Peter Rapp - Emergent Occasions

This book is inspired by John Donne's 'Meditation XVII' from Devotions upon Emergent Occasions from which the expression 'for whom the bell tolls' derives. The form of the book echoes that of a bell with the pages mimicking the motion of a clapper.

Edition of 12. Cover plus 12 pages, hand-printed linocuts (images) and photopolymer (text) on Fabriano Rosapina Avorio paper. £80 €96

Mireille Ribière - Life End-Games

There is a circular hole in each page of text. The very last page, the one glimpsed through the holes cut out of all the previous pages, is blank. This marks the finale of the book. Yet it is an empty space, which signifies both everything ... and nothing. The plot is adapted from La Vie mode d'emploi by Georges Perec.

Variable edition of 17. 24 pages, plus circular cut-out pieces in envelope, digitally printed. Cover illustration by Claudia Shneider. £110 €132

Cally Trench - FOR THE DEAD

This book shows the final word of each line of The Order for the Burial of the Dead - in the same location, format and size as in The Book of Common Prayer I was given as a child - creating a partial but evocative account of this resonant and solemn service.

Edition of 29. Hand-sewn, and printed on Offenbach Bible Paper, gold-lettered linen card cover. Ribbon bookmark. Printed bookplate on parchment paper. £29 €35

Maria White - FINALE

A hand-sized book containing an acrostic poem spelling out FINALE - further, each line contains words that begin with the first letter of the line. With one line per leaf the reader turns the page to move on to the next line and letter. The poem suggests a fictional narrative.

Open edition. 20 pages, digitally printed, hand-stitched. £15 €18

Roy Willingham - Touch-Paper

Touch-Paper remembers the delightful names of classic fireworks and pays homage to their simple approach to packaging design while also quietly reconsidering their impact from a twenty-first century viewpoint.

Edition of 12. Concertina format of Turkish map folds, 18 pages, dimensions when closed 7 cm square, colour inkjet printed. £20 €24