A Book About Ray offers a survey, the first of its kind, of the confounding career of Ray Johnson, collagist, mail artist, poet, jester. It aims to tell “an art story,” as opposed to a life story, focused on the formal principles and key themes that structure Johnson’s work. This aim is complicated by the fact that Johnson himself blurred the art-life distinction to the point that even those closest to him came to imagine that, as one friend put it, “Ray wasn’t a person. He was a collage or a sculpture. A living sculpture, you know. He was Ray Johnson’s creation.” The book, then, tracks the thinking behind Ray Johnson’s creation, which melded his perpetual life-as-performance with his prodigious production of jewellike collage-paintings made for exhibition and rough-edged assemblages of ephemera made to be stuffed into envelopes and fed into the maw of his correspondence network.

The book’s story loops back and forth in time while keeping a close watch on crucial developments in Johnson’s art and in the New York art world where he served as both court jester and gimlet-eyed historian. Its pages, like Johnson’s own work, feature a continuous mix of word and image, made seamless by the marvelously inventive design of Rosa Nussbaum.