There's another box.

This one also comes bearing gifts from the Barrs to Christchurch Art Gallery, and those gifts'll lend strength to a little-known but increasingly interesting slice of the CAG's collections – namely, our artists' books.

Among the thirty-five or so items in the new cache are things by Giovanni Intra, Simon Denny, John Barnett and Lesley Kaiser, Daniel Malone and, well, see (and read) for yourself....

Some lapidary scalpel-work by Patrick Pound...

An unwrapping of the body (poetry with pictures) by Joanna Paul...

An ultra-rare string-bound 'McCatalogue' by Ronnie van Hout....

From Michael Smither, some waves...

And quickly caught buildings...

And plans for shoring up New Plymouth sand dunes...

There's New Zealand sliced into 'four bits of fish' by Warwick Freeman...

Three books by et al., inscribed and encrypted (shelve them between phantasy and philosophy)...

And another...

And then by the same artist/s in an earlier incarnation (L. Budd), an early bookwork that's really numerous works, aptly titled 'What constitutes originality?' (dedication: 'TO HANK, A good critic, a good friend...')...

Then a walk on the wild side with Stuart Page ("INGREDIENTS: SEX, BOOZE, CIGS, DOPE...")...

Some classic Killeen, head and hand...

Less-is-more music by Julian Dashper...

Lines taken for a walk by John Reynolds...

And finally (don't they give the red lantern to the rider at the back of the bike race?), Judy Chicago meets Georgia O'Keefe by way of Showgirls and Crazy Rick's Discount Warehouse in this electrokitsch embellishment by Judy Darragh of Merylyn Tweedie's 1988 Masters Thesis....

It doesn't bite. In fact, if you want to get to grips with it or any other books in the collection, you can do so by making an appointment with the CAG library -- just as soon as a big neighbouring building's been demolished and we're all back where we want to be.