Yesterday Polish poet Wisława Szymborska died (you can read the obituary here). I bought my first letterpress to print several of her poems and last night I re-read some of her poetry. (I think the best translation into English is this one.)
My current favorite is A Word on Statistics, which starts out

Out of every hundred people,

Ready to help,
if it doesn’t take long:
forty-nine.

Read the entire poem here.

Guy Laramee has 2 series of books carved into landscapes and structures, The Great Wall and Biblios.

He says

So I carve landscapes out of books and I paint Romantic landscapes. Mountains of disused knowledge return to what they really are: mountains. They erode a bit more and they become hills. Then they flatten and become fields where apparently nothing is happening. Piles of obsolete encyclopedias return to that which does not need to say anything, that which simply IS. Fogs and clouds erase everything we know, everything we think we are.

Guy Laramee’s “The Great Wall”

[First seen on boing boing]

The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore from Moonbot Studios. “Morris Lessmore” is a story of people who devote their lives to books and books who return the favor. It is one of five animated short films considered for outstanding film achievement of 2011 in the 84th Academy Awards.
To see a full screen version, click on the symbol to the left of the word “vimeo”…

I knew immediately what to do with this week’s prompt challenge word. Slimsy is a portmanteau, a word formed by combining two other words (many examples here). Since I’d been thinking about mix and match books that create new creatures by blending the parts of others, I thought it would be the perfect structure. After a bit of research (see this post from the other day), I also knew that a week really wasn’t enough time to do much more than a rough model.
After trying out a few ideas, I settled on drawing some people and animals, and then giving each one three attributes (for a bear, for instance: clumsy, rough, grumpy). When a new creature is created by flipping pages in the book, it mixes not only head, torso and legs, but it also has 3 new descriptors.
As I set about photographing the resulting book, it seemed awfully slimsy, both in heft and quality. So maybe I can say it’s a success!

This one is a combination of bear, ballerina and snake.

This is a combination of snake, dog and bratty little boy.

Next word: neoterism: noun. an innovation in language, as a new word, term, or expression.

Several people commented and wrote me that the mix and match books I wrote about last week are rooted in the Exquisite Corpse game played by the Surrealists in the 20’s. Bonnie Baker enlisted over 26 artists to contribute a page to the book The Body Revisited (that’s one picture to the left). I like that the style of each contribution is radically different.
The people at Idiot Books have a very elaborate version, with ten stories and matching illustrations able to recombine into 10,000 different combinations. This one doesn’t follow the rule of most exquisite corpses: that each participant is unaware of what the others have contributed. But it’s quite a feat to get all the stories and illustrations to coordinate.
Poets.org has directions for a text-based version of the game. Instead of drawing a head, torso, feet, players contribute parts of sentences. Say the first gives a adjective, second a noun, third a verb, fourth a adjective, fifth a noun. Here’s the resulting poem of such a game:

Slung trousers melt in a roseate box.
A broken calendar oscillates like sunny tin.
The craven linden growls swimmingly. Blowfish.
A glittering roof slaps at crazy ephemera.

Since the beginning of November I’ve bookmarked nearly 100 things to re-read and consider for posting here on my blog. But I’m seriously behind and just now really going through them. For instance, the The Boxcar Press Holiday Gift Guide: 22 Gifts for a Letterpress Printer. Although it’s past Christmas, it’s still fun to look. I especially liked the Gutenberg Printing Press below, from European Papers. They say “our detailed cast metal miniature model of the Gutenberg Printing Press, complete with moving parts, is also a pencil sharpener!”