Month: September 2011

Paperphilia

cave-paper.jpgI’m back from Vermont and one of my first tasks is to tackle rearranging my studio. Or at least dealing with some of the boxes I haven’t unpacked since we moved. When packing my studio to move to Santa Fe, I got so overloaded with deciding what to keep and what to get rid of, I finally just put everything in boxes and brought it with me. There’s been so much to do to get our house set up, I’ve not unpacked several of those boxes. And the other day when I finally did, I got a pleasant surprise — a little roll of 2 sheets of handmade paper from Cavepaper, one mustard colored and the other grey blue. When I unwrapped them, I gave up on unpacking and rearranging and instead spent the rest of the afternoon going through my paper stash, getting reacquainted.
Then yesterday a wonderful word showed up on word spy: “paperphilia”

n. A deep appreciation for the aesthetic qualities of paper; a preference for reading items printed on paper rather than displayed on a screen.

Here’s one citation they give (all of them here):

Why Moleskines, and why now? Their resurgence coincided exactly with the rise of digital connectedness, and my gut told me the two must be related. But how? Was it just nostalgia, an effort to escape from the messiness of the present into the simplicity of an idealized past? Maybe paperphilia really isn’t so different from the recessive pinings that motivate some people to own antique cars.
—William Powers, Hamlet’s Blackberry, Harper, June 29, 2010

Designing Alphabets

DesignSponge contest to design an alphabet


Last fall, the blog DesignSponge had a Design Your Own Alphabet Contest and I’m just now getting around to looking at all the entries and the winners.

  1. first group of entries
  2. second group of entries
  3. third group of entries
  4. the winners
Although it didn’t win, my favorite is shown above, “Kern Over” by Daniel Wintle — who picked the name because “kerning is the process of adjusting white spacing in a proportional font.”

Within the Envelope

Within the EnvelopeFor the past week the news has been full of pieces about the upcoming 9/11 anniversary. Ten years ago I’d just started a year-long class on artist’s books at the San Francisco Center for the Book. Many weeks we had an assignment to make a book for an upcoming class, and the one prior to Sept 11 was to make a book using a paper sleeve from an old record and the text from 2 letters written by Kafka to his fiance Felice. The letters are completely over-the-top — I don’t have the 2 we used, but here’s an example:

Dearest, what have I done that makes you torment me so? No letter again today, neither by the first mail nor the second.

You do make me suffer! While one written word from you could make me happy! You’ve had enough of me; there is no other explanation, it’s not surprising after all; what is incomprehensible, though, is that you don’t write and tell me so.

If I am to go on living at all, I cannot go on vainly waiting for news of you, as I have done these last few interminable days. But I no longer have any hope of hearing from you.

I shall have to repeat specifically the farewell you bid me in silence.

I should like to throw myself bodily on this letter, so that it cannot be mailed, but it must be mailed.

I shall expect no further letters.

As I stood at my workbench after 9/11, reading the letters and fingering the record sleeve, I wondered how to recover from such a horrible shock, how to feel safe again. The book I made was an attempt to work through what I’d seen on TV and in the photos that filled the newspaper.
I titled the book “Within the Envelope: Fear and Comfort.” It’s got an accordion spine and each page is a small record sleeve with a piece of paper where the record would go. I was taken with the idea that what one saw through the hole in the sleeve was about fear, but there might be comfort after pulling the page out to see the entire picture. This is an idea I’ve returned to several times, but none, I think, as successful as this first attempt. I’ve made a video of the book below.

Bread and Puppet

from the Bread and Puppet museumThere have been lots of things to do on my visit to Vermont, but one of the more unique was the Bread and Puppet Theater, a performance group in Glover. All summer they have performances on Friday evening and Sunday afternoons, and their museum of puppets is open every day. They bill themselves as “cheap art and political theater in Vermont.” The puppets — mostly huge and inventive heads — are quite amazing. This photo and this one give you an idea of the size of the puppets and the heads.
They also house a press that publishes small books (such as “how to make a papier-mâché puppet”), posters and calendars. To the left is a display in the museum of one of the puppets printing a broadside. Below is a table of their broadsides and a sign that quite nicely sums up the philosophy of their books.

Bread and Puppet broadsides

Sign for Bread and Puppet jingle books