Jumping Book

Tagged within the Literary category, the title points to a book that has come alive — pages lifting, leaping from a shelf or table, or a child reading while the volume itself jumps in her lap. Ando's prints frequently animate inanimate domestic objects (chairs, lamps, fish, kitchenware) into restless or threatening states, and a jumping book sits squarely within that register. The intaglio plate would carry the book and surrounding figure in fine etched line, with aquatint used to model shadow and the dense, cross-hatched darkness of a closed cover. Chine collé bonds a thin sheet of Japanese paper to the support during printing, sometimes used here to suggest the open page itself as a separate physical layer within the image. Hand coloring is applied selectively to the binding, ribbons, and small surrounding ephemera. Jumping Book extends Ando's interest in the visual tropes of nineteenth-century European children's literature, in which books, dolls, and toys cross from inert objects into autonomous, faintly menacing actors.