CARRIÓN, Ulises.

Tell me what sort of wall paper your room has and I will tell you who you are.

[1] leaf of wallpaper sample, mimeographed title-page, & [20] leaves of wallpaper samples with typewritten captions. Small 8vo (173 x 110 mm.), orig. gray paper wrappers (a little sunned), orig. burgundy cloth binding tape around spine, staple-bound. Amsterdam: In-Out Productions, 1973.

First edition of an exceptionally rare Ulises Carrión bookwork that embodies the type of book he would champion in his influential manifesto “The New Art of Making Books.” The first edition comprises just 50 copies; we find three institutionally held examples, at Princeton University, Museo Reina Sofía, and KB, Nationale Bibliotheek (The Hague). Carrión gave ours as a gift to a fellow artist and signed the verso of the title-page, where the limitation is printed; this is copy no. “3,” written with pencil.

According to Tineke Reijnders in her essay on the In-Out Center Archives website, the bookwork originated with Carrión’s discovery of discarded sample books produced by the illustrious wallpaper manufacturer Rath & Doodeheefver. He cut these up to constitute the leaves of what became the first edition of the present book. The numbered edition of 50 copies was quickly disseminated by sale, gift, or exchange. Carrión made a second edition in a slightly wider format in 1974 in an unknown edition size.

This bookwork gives us a tour of the imagined bedrooms of the people in his life. In order, we are presented with wallpaper specimens for: “my room,” “my parent’s room,” “my sister’s room,” “my oncle’s room,” “my wife’s room,” “my teacher’s room,” “my doctor’s room,” “my accountant’s room,” “my lawyer’s room,” “my psychiatrist’s room,” “my boss’ room,” “my lover’s room,” “my friend’s room,” “my neighbour’s room,” “my servant’s room,” “Guest room,” “Their room,” “Your room,” “A room,” “……’s room.” Omitting any suggestion of narrative, the artist leaves us to form our own associations and interpretations of the wallpaper selections and the rooms we visit through the course of the bookwork. The samples vary from copy to copy.

“[The bookwork] was assembled from an assortment of wallpaper swatches and literalizes Carrión’s idea of the book as a space-time sequence. Emphasizing the book object’s architecture more patently than previous bookworks, it plays with the slippage between a book’s underlying structure and architectural spaces as such. For Carrión, a lyric poem’s stanzaic structure relies on the space of the page, yet it belongs in the old art, for this space is not the physical space of the page but an ‘ideal, abstract, impalpable’ one, according to ‘The New Art.’ In this bookwork, however, recto pages made of actual wallpaper samples index the rooms of a constellation of potential figures in the reader’s familial and social circles. Pages are empty and inscrutable but for the labels indicating where the wallpaper supposedly belongs… If we gather anything from traversing the bookwork’s different time-space units, it’s that the reader it imagines is not the alienated individual mirrored in a lyric poem but a late twentieth-century professional whose compartmentalized relations are mostly familiar or transactional.”–M. de la Torre, “An Essay in Nine Bookworks (and Not),” in S. Hamerman & J. R. Ramos, eds., Ulises Carrión: Bookworks and Beyond (2024), p. 33.

A truly special bookwork, in excellent condition.

❧ S. Hamerman & J. R. Ramos, eds., Ulises Carrión: Bookworks and Beyond (2024), pp. 33-35 (pictured) & p. 172.

J. J. Agius & R. Ocampo, eds., Ulises Carrión: Books & More, Catalogue Raisonné (2013) 6.

T. Reijnders, “Ulises Carrión and the In-Out Center,” In-Out Center Archives website (accessed August 2025).