January 2013 – Green Chair Press Blog

Kevin Steele

I spent some more time looking through the designs on French Sample Room and found this turkish map fold book by Kevin Steele. It’s called “Naughty but Nice” and he says

In this tongue-in-cheek book, suggestions on social etiquette are contrasted with naughty illustrations in which the subjects have bypassed all formality of manners, in varying states of undress. Text excerpts are from social etiquette books, 1847-1950. Illustrations are from French spot and romance illustrations of the same era.

It’s a miniature book (1-1/2″x1-1/2″) and letterpress printed on both sides, too.

This lead me to his website and this really wonderful modified tunnel book. He calls it an “accordion book featuring a repositionable Alpine landscape.”

I buy a lot of paper from French Paper, and the other day I ran across a website they’ve set up to show off projects using their papers—the French Sample Room. That’s where I found this tunnel book. They don’t seem to link back to the original designer, unfortunately.

Laura Davidson

I ran across book artist Laura Davidson’s web site the other day. She says “maps, art history, travel, architecture and her love of birds are recurring elements in her visual vocabulary.” Some of her books showcase her drawings, such as the Tool Alphabet below. She also has pop-ups and tunnel books (see pictures below).

Tool Alphabet

Fort Point—Boston

Mapping My World – buildings & bridges

Paper Innovation that Changed Type Design

James Felici has posted an article about “how a change in papermaking technology caused a revolution in type design (and upsetting some delicate sensibilities in the process).” He starts out

John Baskerville is known best as the man who, in the mid-18th century, created a new typeface that now bears his name. It was finer, more delicate, and lighter on the page than all that went before it, and it opened the door to a new genre of type designs: the so-called modern faces, including Bodoni and Didot. As such, Baskerville and faces like it are commonly referred to as transitionals, the bridges between oldstyle and modern.

But Baskerville’s innovative types—and those that followed—could only have existed because of his arguably more important innovation: a new papermaking technique that yielded sheets whose smoother surface could reproduce much finer detail in both type and graphics, including etchings and engravings.

Read the rest here. And see all of his articles on Creative Pros.

People Flag Books

Last Saturday I went to a Santa Fe Books Arts Group meeting where Freya Diamond gave a workshop on the “Ins and Outs of Creating a Flag Book.” While I’ve made flag books before, I was intrigued by her “people flag books” pictured on the Vamp & Tramp website.
She started the workshop by showing the evolution of her flag book ideas. When she first learned how to make the structure, she made a book for her six year old granddaughter, with each flag showing her at each year of her life. Diamond then went on to develop the idea of using people, primarily women artists, on each flag. In person the books are quite delightful, with the people dressed in their own artwork. Below are a few of her books (see more here).

Sonia Delauney, A Body of Work by Freya Diamond

Mary Cassatt, A Body of Work by Freya Diamond

Dolls of Africa by Freya Diamond

Picasso’s Dora Maar A Body of Work by Freya Diamond

Double Flag Book

Jill Timm has a new book with an interesting structure—a double flag book. She says it is a “reversible book, both sides attached to a single spine.” See more pictures here.