the notebooks of john balance

all pages from John Balance’s notebooks, as featured in the cupboard under the stars, compiled by Claus Laufenburg, timeless edition, france, 2023

essay

text by CLAUS LAUFENBURG

 

The Cupboard Under the Stars offers a candid and tactile portrait of John Balance — the visionary, poet, and cofounder of Coil — through a vivid compilation of his notebooks, marginalia, sketches, scribbles, and half-finished spells. These pages don’t just archive his work; they animate the intensely tactile world in which it was created: an entirely analog era alive with urgency, mystery, and the fragile permanence of ink on paper. These analog times offered no “save” button, no infinite cloud storage, no undo function. Instead, creation was immediate, ephemeral, and often messy. Notes had to be caught in flight — on napkins, backs of envelopes, the margins of fanzines, or in the well-worn pages of Balance’s ever-present notebooks….