Paul Stein (1949 to 2004) is present at the Klingspor Museum with 90 SketchBooks - one of the most important acquisitions of the Museum für Buch und Schrift in recent years. 90 books in which he noted down and illustrated everything that moved him throughout his life as an artist. A new textbook has now been published on this extraordinary and versatile artist, which Martina Helffenstein has filled with excerpts from the SkizzBooks:
148 pages, price: 100 euros, order from martinahelffensteinde
Jezz Awwa! The somewhat different offer
100 euros, a hundred? For a book, 1? Jezz awwa!, as the author of this very book used to fiercely object in writing. To quote a favorite pastime of this author: Thinking differently. How much would an adventurous voyage of discovery cost? Certainly ten times as much, at least. Or a lot more, given that the number of first-time participants is limited to 200. The means of transportation for the journey is: 1 book.
Immediately to be discovered is a small volume of 148 pages, apparently blown into the present from a time when the production of books (too) did not yet have to obey the all-dominant laws of the market, but love and care were allowed to be invested in them, so that small works of art could be created - as in this case.
Above all, however, there is the much too little known artist and almost completely unknown author PAUL Stein, who once feared that "a double talent" would probably "not be taken away" from him, but nevertheless accepted it with self-deprecating distance: "I can't imagine my life any other way than sitting at a table and drawing and writing all kinds of nonsense in books."
Which he has been doing with almost unbelievable consistency since April 15, 1974 (according to his own handwritten entry). The page with the last of his notes, dated August 5, 2004, shows the numbers 018875 in his meticulous pagination: almost 20,000 pages full of wordplay and flashes of wit, aphorisms and epigrams, fabulous fantasies and fantastic everyday occurrences - a veritable "library of labilism", with a name devised by PAUL Stein, which he even had cut as a stamp for the sake of repetition.
In the end, there were 90 volumes, which the producer himself liked to classify as "SKIZZ books", which are now resplendent in the Klingspor Museum in Offenbach. Its director, Dr. Stefan Soltek, notes that from the "overabundance" of material spread out in these volumes, the book advertised here has "distilled a concentrate from which the reader is not drunk, but (hopefully) intoxicated and inspired to take up the reading again and again." To put it another way: this incredibly inexpensive voyage of discovery only comes to an end when you finish it yourself.
Martina Helffenstein