The Labyrinth is the Saul Steinberg book that was in the house when I was growing up. I must have been about seven years old when I first opened it on my lap. Unlike the rest of my family I was not a natural reader; what absorbed me were drawing and studying pictures. I spent a lot of time seated at the end of the couch beside the shelf where The Labyrinth lived. Despite lacking text of any kind, this book told even a child that it was meant to be leafed through from start to finish. The momentum begins on the first page, where a draftsman is seen drawing a horizontal line that will, during its transit across seven pages, undergo mutations that make it a geometer’s X-axis, the waterline attaching a domed Venetian church to its reflection, a railway trestle, a roofline, and, finally, the first of many labyrinthine flourishes. The book introduced by that manifesto soon impressed me as unique, and it still does. The Labyrinth adds up to something—not a narrative but something authorial, more journal than story. Between its covers lives a mind making itself inhabitable—a mind, moreover, that has been around, a mind that is about things.
Source : A Mind in Line
