Daoist Designer Binding
[I CHING.]
WILHELM, Richard, and Cary F. BAYNES, translators; C. G. JUNG, foreword. The I Ching or Book of Changes. London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974.
8vo, pp. lxii, 740, with a folding table of hexagrams at end; hexagrams and Chinese character at head of each section; minor stains to a very few pages; else an excellent copy bound in 1976 by David Sellars in green morocco with sunken panels and moulded inlays and onlays in 4 colours, spine lettered directly in gilt, edges gilt, endbands sewn in 8 colours on 2 cores, black suede doublures; preserved in its black morocco-backed cloth box, spine lettered in gilt, lined with red felt; box a little scuffed and sunned with superficial split to front joint; notes in pencil on hexagrams and the taiji to p. 720 and on the owner’s use of I Ching divination to rear flyleaf.
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WILHELM, Richard, and Cary F. BAYNES, translators; C. G. JUNG, foreword. The I Ching or Book of Changes.
Third edition, reprinted, in a striking moulded morocco binding by David Sellars, his first commission and most formative work.
The ancient Chinese divinatory text known as the I Ching (Yijing) or Book of Changes is found here in the highly influential translation by the German Sinologist and missionary Richard Wilhelm, later Englished by Cary Baynes, both of whom were associates of Carl Jung. The foreword, by Jung himself, interprets ‘this great and singular book’ as a key to self-knowledge, a reading that would play a large part in the text’s popularity (especially in this version) in Western counterculture of the 1960s and ‘70s.
The striking binding with fluid morocco onlays is an early work by the book artist David Sellars (1949–2015), known for his sculptural use of leather and experimentation with form. When interviewed for The New Bookbinder in 1984, he spoke of ‘my first commission, which changed my whole approach. The book was the I Ching – or Book of Changes … I tried to arrive at a solution to the design in the usual way but found it impossible. How could one deal with a book, the very nature of which was constant flux, with a static image faithfully reproduced? I decide [sic] to throw caution to the winds and to allow the book to grow as I worked each day. This has been the key factor in my work from that time. Although the overall idea is worked out I always allow for “organic” growth, without which I feel a work to be stilted and academic, in a word, dead! This is why I could never work in the French manner of sending out a “design” to be executed by a team of craftsmen. This way of working allows me to be involved with the creation from beginning to end. Works don’t become stale and the “risk element” keeps each piece alive, and not just the product of bored craft routine’ (p. 20).
See ‘David Sellars: an Interview’ in The New Bookbinder 4 (1984), pp. 15–27.