As indicated in a 1985 exhibition catalogue sponsored by the British Arts Council, the idea for a new codex appears in the first notebook as part of the Central School teaching programme: like a Mexican codex in concertina form but 'applied to modern wrapping paper, one side only'. The notion lay dormant for many years but from 1972 its advances and vicissitudes are chronicled in the notebooks. Wright was working at that time on his article 'The Essential Book'. Peguy was the exemplary craftsman: for him 'a book meant a total commitment to social and spiritual truth. . . . A book meant writing, editing, printing, proof correcting, publishing and even opening a bookshop in the Rue de la Sorbonne'- the making and the message were inseparable.In an article written in a 1991 issue of Eye magazine on Wright's work, the form of the codex - is quite roughly made and free of grand summarising gestures. The chief subject is lunfardo, the slang of the vagrant people of Buenos Aires. This code was a medium that carried a human culture: in resistance to the mechanisms of official control. The book works as a kinetic construct. A single sheet of brown wrapping paper, printed on the rough side, is held between springy plywood covers. The paper is folded into facing pages that may make one spread of words or a pair of contrasting images. Vagrants (atorro) face a state-issued postage-stamp bull, ironically labelled lastre: food. A truant boy drinking milk (from Truffaut's Les Quatre Cents Coups) is labelled yirar (roam) and faces some raft travellers (yugo, work). The connections may be loose and dreamy, but - as usual - there's a strict grid keeping the rough elements in place.The essay mentions that Edward Wright's work fizzes with energy and ideas. "Disparate, sometimes mishandled in production, often done in collaboration and so visibly suffering the joys and despairs of that way of operating, much of it hidden or disappeared: it is far from the perfect oeuvre that anyway exists only in the minds of unrealistic historians. Wright's work all of it- badly needs to be taken away from the club of his friends and launched into the arena of public consciousness. Those in the know might regret losing the secret, but would be glad for him. He also needs to be seen in context, as part of the buried history of dissident Modernism in Britain: a network of designers and makers who never made it to "Sir" or "Professor" or into the journalistic and academic record, and never wanted to. In their work, "modern" means lively, improvising, antiauthoritarian, cosmopolitan, humane, modest, self-critical, regionally conscious and site-specific. It has absolutely nothing to do with the grey, centralising Modernism of the present myth. Maybe these claims are too loud for someone often quiet and withdrawing. But things have now gone so far and so cynically retrograde. Work made with such purity of heart comes to seem the more remarkable." -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.