James Castle

Silliman:

Apparently deaf from birth and unable to read or even speak, James Castle turned out to be one of the great American artists of the 20^th century.

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James Castle was one of the most prolific manufacturer of handmade books ever, constructed out of scraps of packaging or magazine ads, very competently sewn with whatever string he could scrounge up. There are books whose only content is the line, page after page of wavy lines clearly indicating his sense of how these go on. It is, in fact, a major treatise on the function of the line as a constituent of language itself, precisely because it is conducted by someone who can look at it from the outside.

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