“Mark Twain and the dozen pilgrims he accompanied from the steamship Quaker City 150 years ago didn’t have cameras, took no photos, no selfies. Instead, at most of the holy sites they visited, they took the place itself, chiseling off pieces to cart back home.”
The collaboration between Dupont and Menasche dates back to 2004, when — a writer/ photographer team — they reported from the region during the Second Intifada. Thirteen years later the pair returned for the 150th anniversary of Mark Twain’s trip, following a route that today weaves between Israel and the West Bank. The result is a journey, alternately reverent and comic, that winds through the grottos and deserts and seas and checkpoints and churches, from the volcanic plateau of the Golan Heights to the Old City alleys of Jerusalem.
Driven by a desire to see what has changed in the 150 years since Mark Twain’s visit, textually Signs & Wonders creates a palimpsest of experiences (Twain's, the artists’ own reportage during the Second Intifada, and the present journey), told through the use of obsolete technologies (typewriter/letterpress).
Mark Twain, problematic politically (he was anti-Arab AND anti-Christian) was an assassin of pieties. And in that regard the book’s text follows in his footsteps, sparing neither Christian pilgrims, Palestinians, Israelis — or Twain himself. Nor do the artists escape unscathed. Despite being practiced observers who’ve made dozens of trips to the region over the past 25 years, they are also, like Twain, innocents abroad, neither Israeli nor Palestinian nor religious. Signs & Wonders reflects all this plus the random contingency of a travelogue.
“Inside the Jaffa Gate, we descended the stone steps of the bazaar on our way to the holiest place in all Christendom: Calvary, the site of Jesus’ crucifixion. On both sides of us stalls peddled the usual souvenirs: wooden camels and t-shirts and postcards. Stephen loved the light, the sunbeams that slashed this way and that, setting ablaze piles of scarves and pink plastic bags stuffed with pomegranates and kaleidoscopes of candy. Then there were the people — men in black hats, women in hijabs, children in packs — all of them slipping down alleyways or framed under archways, pictures everywhere you turned.”
144 photos (119 b&w, 25 hand-colored)
8 maps
268 pages total
52 kozo paper text pages
44 chapters
20,000 words
Dimensions: 12h x 9.25w x 3.5d
Prospectus
Project
Signs and Wonders, retracing Mark Twain’s 1867 Holy Land Expedition, is a joint project between Jacques Menasche and Stephen Dupont
Photography
Black and white images by Stephen Dupont were taken with a Leica MP, a Mamiya 6, and a Hasselblad X-Pan — all using Kodak Tri-X film
Color images by Jacques Menasche were taken with a Lomo’Instant Automat Glass
Printing
Image pages were printed in the Hunter Valley, Australia using a Devere digital enlarger, and silver gelatin liquid photographic emulsion made by Foma Bohemia hand-painted on Canson Edition 100 % cotton rag fine art paper by Stephen Dupont and Chris Reid
Text
Text pages were hand-typed by Jacques Menasche in New York on hand-made 100 % Japanese Kozu paper using a 1964 Olympia SM-4 typewriter
Art
Color images were hand-colored with oil paints in Melbourne, Australia by Lynette Zheng
Maps were constructed using pages from an 1870 first-edition of Mark Twain’s “The Innocents Abroad” and an 1887 edition of “Historical Geography Of The Bible " by J.L. Hurlbut
Hand-pressed letters were made using a 1920s art deco wooden letter press set from Paris, France
Design
Book design by Jacques Menasche and Stephen Dupont
Cover design and binding by Uriel Cidor, Center for Book Arts, New York
Making the Book
Signs & Wonders was produced over two years and three continents. Preliminary research began in New York in early 2017. Then, in September of that year, Menasche and Dupont met in Israel to follow Mark Twain’s path from the Golan Heights to Jerusalem. After the text was written and the pictures were edited, in February 2018 they met again in Scarborough, Australia, where they produced the first prototype of the book. Over the following year they worked independently, Menasche typing the text in the US, and Dupont printing the images in Australia. In the spring of 2019, they reunited in New York City and integrated their respective pages. There, they also completed the maps and letterpress stamping, and oversaw the binding and the construction of the clamshell case at the Center for Book Arts on 27th Street.