Small Collects 2: Gift

Small Collects is what I once wrote on a box of stuff that had either been sent to me over the years or I'd found or bought on travels. This is a subset of infrequent posts that feature my personal collection of ephemera and creative publishing outputs.

Gift: I made this for you: Sarah Bodman, Bristol UK

Everyone in the creative publishing world should know of Sarah Bodman. She is the 'Angel of Book Arts', doggedly publishing the Artist Book Year Book and The Blue Notebook year after year in the face of all sorts of cuts and restructures and BREXITy things. 

She is also fascinated by things like MURDER and PSYCHIC EVENTS and such. In October last year she had a worldwide 'reading' of an object (it's a long story, some of which is here) and a bunch of people around the world did an automatic drawing of whatever thing we saw in our heads at that time. I think I was the furthest away from it, and this is what I drew (very early in the morning):

I had a lovely couple of weeks in Bristol with her and Angie Butler in 2018, hanging out in the print studios of the Uni of West England Centre for Fine Print Research. I would walk into the campus and every day I'd get lost because what in my turf would be a logical shortcut would take me somewhere completely different. One day I was sure I was on track but I went through a gap in a hedge and found myself in front of a huge mansion...

ANYHOO, I digress. When I left, I had a huge swag of goodies, and this book was one of them. Here's the official blurb:

A book inspired by the 'Angel of Bremen', produced to resemble the type of pamphlet publication / recipe book given away with newly purchased gas cookers in the 1940s-50s. It contains 14 'recipes' for 15 people. Each of the dishes was cooked and photographed by the artist in the same sequence that the original dishes were prepared. GIFT in the English language means a present, it is also the German word for poison.

If you knew nothing of the story, it's a lovely retro-looking pamphlet book, the kind you find in your nana's cookbook collection when you're boxing up her kitchen. Lots of recipes, and kind little notes to people reproduced saying things like Please help yourself, you must be famished, and It was meant to be a special meal, I laid the table exquisitely for you, my dear father, but you were too weak to leave your bed... Forgive me dear father, and you can sit here in the sunlit kitchen and lick your spoon all day my sweet cherub.

I found the bones of the book (so to speak) at MURDERPEDIA:

Gesche Margarethe Gottfried, born Gesche Margarethe Timm (6 March 1785 - 21 April 1831), was a serial killer who murdered 15 people by arsenic poisoning in Bremen and Hanover, Germany, between 1813 and 1827. She was the last person to be publicly executed in the city of Bremen.

Gottfried's victims included her parents, her two husbands, her fiancé and her children. Before being suspected and convicted of the murders, she garnered widespread sympathy among the inhabitants of Bremen because so many of her family and friends fell ill and died. Because of her devoted nursing of the victims during their time of suffering, she was known as the "Angel of Bremen" until her murders were discovered.

Her murder weapon of choice was 'mouse butter', a mix of arsenic and fat, which she used in her delicious recipes.

The twist in this tale is that not only did Sarah collect the recipes used to kill Gottfried's family and friends, but she cooked them herself in order to photograph them, and then served the dishes to her own loved ones, who showed remarkable trust and love in eating them for her.

Gift is, as the title suggests, a lovely play on the cleverness of Gottfried and on the expectation that beautiful food is prepared with love for someone's well-being and pleasure, and in this spirit, the book has only been distributed as gifts. I feel honoured to own one.

Colophon: Sarah Bodman, Gift: I made this for you, 2016 (acquired 2018). Saddle-stitched booklet, 32pp, 214 x 148 x 5 mm. Offset lithography. Printed in an edition of 500 by Axminster Printing Company, Axminster, UK, June 2016.