Billy’s Good Advice by Klüver, Billy and Mimi Gross - 2005

Osaka, Japan: Acetate, 2005. First printing. (106) pp., 4.5 x 5.5 inches. Wire-comb binding, with printed card covers. Trilingual (English, Swedish, & Japanese). Published in a limited edition as acetate005. Preface by Kenjiro Okazaki and introduction by the author; translated, with an afterword, by Takumi Taguchi. Illustrated by Mimi Gross. Light scuffing and edge-wear, and one small closed tear to cover, otherwise very good.

Billy Klüver (1927-2004) was a Swedish engineer and inventor who came to the United States in the mid 1950s and worked with artists; while at Bell Labs in New Jersey in the early 1960s, he assisted Jean Tingueley with his self-destructing sculpture Homage to New York, and subsequently on projects with Robert Rauschenberg, John Cage and Merce Cunningham, Yvonne Rainer, Jasper Johns, and Andy Warhol. He was the driving force behind (and longtime president of) Experiments in Art and Technology; in addition, his research (with his wife Julie Martin) into the evolution of the art community of Montparnasse around the turn of the twentieth century led to the celebrated books Kiki’s Paris and A Day with Picasso.

In 2001 Klüver self-published a small collection of pieces of advice; as he explains, he had been prompted to write the collection by the desire to do something new for the lectures he was often invited to give to students in the 1990s. The original collection, with additional advice from 2002, was translated and supplemented with illustrations for this posthumous edition published in Japan.

Mimi Gross based her illustrations on photographs that she had taken of Billy’s "Invisible Inventions to Make Life Easier,” the “surprising objects” and “various contraptions” that she always noticed in the house where Klüver and Martin lived. This is number four from a group of ten signed and numbered copies in which Gross has hand-colored the illustrations, identified by her as the "Gothenburg Series.”

Extremely uncommon in any edition; WorldCat locates just one copy, in Tokyo.