March 2011 – Page 2 – Green Chair Press Blog

The Book: A Contemporary View

The Book: A Contemporary View is a exhibit of bookworks up at Towson University (in Maryland) until April 11. It’s a nice on-line catalogue with essays about the state of the artists’ book, and enough information about the artists to make me look for their other work. One artist I found in particular was Andrew Huot. His book A Guide to Dogs is shown below. In the catalogue it says

A Guide to Dogs was made while the artist and his wife were searching for a dog. He did not have experience as a dog owner but his wife wanted his opinion, so he wrote a guide, using what knowledge he gained from movies and TV

It’s printed letterpress with handset type, linoleum cuts, and photopolymer plates. See Huot’s other bookwork here.

Poetweet

Today is World Poetry Day, as well as the 5th anniversary of the first twitter message. Randy Kennedy has an article in the NY Times about how “poetry and literature may be flowering in the socially networked, microblogged world of the tweet.” To celebrate Poetry Day, the Times “asked four poets each to write a poem within Twitter’s text limit of 140 characters — the contributions by Billy Collins, Claudia Rankine, Elizabeth Alexander and Robert Pinsky are here. You can also share your own poems on Twitter using the hash tag #poetweet. Or just read them here.

March Mathness

Etsy has a feature where visitors can curate lists of things they find on the site. Usually these lists have a theme, and my stuff gets selected for groups that have to do with reading or libraries or Jane Austen or Sherlock Holmes. But the ones I like best are all number images. Recently I was selected for one called Math Madness, compiled by Elaina Louise Studios. Here are the ones I especially liked. You can see them all here.

abacus earrings	Funky Accounting	Euler’s Identity Cozy
Number TShirt	A Little Math Necklace	Schrodingers equation …
Dial-A-Matic Adding Machine	Quadratic Equation Bowl	Pi

Letterpress T-Shirt

This t-shirt, from dock2letterpress, was printed using wood type on a Wesel Iron hand press (that’s it to the right of the tshirt). The form measures roughly 22″ tall by 16.5″ wide. There’s a great set of pictures of a Wesel on Flickr and some more quite amazing pictures of hand presses at the Briar Press Museum.

Art of the Book

The sixth annual Art of the Book exhibit takes place at the Donna Seager Gallery in San Rafael, CA from March 18 – April 30. She has the exhibition online if, like me, you can’t make it to see the books in person. Below is Granden Press’ Point Plane Solid, described as

A visual meditation on some of Euclid’s definitions. Nine leaves, 12 x 3 inches, bound in a palm-leaf structure with wooden boards, strung on yellow cord held by a red wood cube. The pages unfold to reveal typographic or sculptural illustrations of geometric concepts. There are 3 small pop-ups or assemble-it-yourself structures within the pages.

Grandon Press is a collaboration between Barbara Mauriello and Barbara Henry. You can see more of this book and their other work here.

Happy Pi Day!

Here’s what Pi sounds like:

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