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From Luminous Darwin
Notebook Y
The “lost” notebooks were fabricated by contemporary artist Eve Andrée Laramée. With tongue in cheek and a twinkle in the eye, Laramée hand-crafted and weathered them to look like the now-priceless notebooks that Darwin filled with observations over many years.
In her text below, Laramée makes the provocative claim that these notebooks about the animal, mineral, and vegetable kingdoms were lost in 1956, discovered in 1998, and authenticated in 2007. This is just one of Laramée’s playful challenges to our sense of history, reality, and truth.
From the Artist
[...] In 1942, three additional notebooks surfaced, Notebook X: The Dreams of the Plants; Notebook Y: The Memories of the Stones; and Notebook Z: The Awareness of the Cells. In 1956, these too vanished, only to resurface again in 1998, after being discovered by a rare book collector at the Waterlooplein flea market in Amsterdam, in a box containing second hand clothes, old books, maps and other curiousa.[...]
Eve Andrée Laramée (b. 1956)
Notebook Y: [The Memories of the Stones] 1837-1844
17cm x 9.7 cm notebook bound in brown leather, blind embossed front cover with label of cream-coloured paper with Y written in ink. This notebook had a total of 72 numbered pages. Out of these, 14 were excised by Darwin, of which 6 pages (3 leaves) have been found and restored. 8 pages (4 leaves) have not been found.
EAL-DAR 002.2009-10
