It Was Much Pleasanter at Home

Abelardo Morell’s series on books depicts them simultaneously as conveyors of information and as palpable, even multisensory, objects. In 1995 he accepted a position as artist-in-residence at the Boston Athenaeum, an independent library and museum that was founded in 1807. “One of the big pleasures of this project has come from spending a good amount of time looking at, holding, smelling, and reading a terrific number of skinny, fat, tall, pompous, modest, funny, sad, proud, injured, and radiant books,” he later wrote. Recognizing that the physical features of books affect our perception of their contents, Morell transformed these humble, familiar things in ways that continue to occupy him to this day. In 1996 Morell was invited to make illustrations for a new edition of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. He cut out copies of John Tenniel’s original 1865 illustrations and photographed the two-dimensional figures as if alive and at play in a landscape of three-dimensional books, merging the real and the imagined.