Bartleby & Co.

Bartleby & Co. is an artist project founded in 1995 by Thorsten Baensch. Bartleby is celebrating the art of copying and collaboration and was created to give to every published project beauty, care, originality, respect, spirit, love and nonetheless uniqueness through very close discussions with the various creative partners. Bartleby & Co. works with artists, artisans, authors, poets, scientists, thinkers, translators and other experts of all kinds. Bartleby & Co.’s editions are both: playful and serious; complex and simple; poetic and cryptic; convivial and hermetic, often multilingual and mostly combining innovative materials with mixed printing and binding techniques. Inspired by Herman Melville’s character Bartleby, the scrivener and his iconic reply "I would prefer not to" to many of his superior's requests, Thorsten Baensch’s editions are a tribute to the profoundly human need for resistance. They are an artist’s  statement on the absurdity of our existence.