Sophie Nys: Alas

First published in 1759, Laurence Sterne’s ‘The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy’ is widely considered a revolutionary novel, and its style is marked by digression, double entendre, and graphic devices. In ‘Alas’, artist Sophie Nys obsesses about one of these devices, the so-called black page, famously paired with the line, “Alas, poor Yorick!” She compiles a remarkable collection of black pages, all gathered from more than 100 different editions of Sterne’s book. Included is a text by Peter de Voogd, the collector and owner of the library from which all the images in this publication originate, on the technical challenges that printing a black page presented for these early editions.