As I mentioned recently there are now many people selling their bookworks on Etsy. Elena Mary Siff has gotten some of them together to form the The Alchemical Codex Society: Book Artists of Etsy. She’s posted samples of their work here.
The book sculpture to the left is entitled Sleeper on Book Birdie by Daniel Lai. He has many more book sculptures here.
It can sometimes feel as if the world is very small. The other day my friend Richard, who I know from one part of my life — bike riding and my jobs as a computer programmer — and who knows my interest in paper and folding, sent me a link to an article about a En Origami, a specialty font. When I went to read it, I discovered the author is my book arts friend Kate Godfrey! In her article, she explains how En Origami was constructed but ultimately she says it’s really only good as a titling font: “En Origami is a feat of typographic engineering, but it is severely limited as a font… A T-shirt for the local origami club might be just the job for En Origami.” There’s a sample below. And Kate has other font reviews here.
Photographer Cara Barer has self-published a “photography picture book with a tale of the demise of the printed word as we know it.” On her website she writes about the process of making her book art:
I realized I owned many books that were no longer of use to me, or for that matter, anyone else. Would I ever need “Windows 95?” After soaking it in the bathtub for a few hours, it had a new shape and purpose….Half a century ago, students researched at home with the family set of encyclopedias, or took a trip to the library to find needed information. Now, owning a computer, and connecting to the internet gives a student the ability to complete a research paper without ever going near a library. I have fully embraced that technology, and would not want to be without it, but, I also fear that it is rapidly leading us to rely less and less on the reference books common in the last two centuries…With the discarded books that I have acquired, I am attempting to blur the line between objects, sculpture, and photography.
You can see a preview of the book here and see larger versions of the photographs of her bookworks here.
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The first books I made were alphabet books — mostly 26 pages, each with an illustration or some content related to a specific letter. About this time of year, I pull out my list of alphabet book ideas to see if one of them moves me to work on one or another of them. This time I decided to print my alphabet poster in some new colors. I’ll post pictures in the next few days.
I thought I bookmarked an interesting alphabet book I’d seen featured on someone’s blog a week or so ago . Alas I didn’t. I spent some time today trying to re-find the book, to no avail. But I found some other interesting ABC-ish things along the way.
Top left, David Sacks’ Alphabets: A Miscellany of Letters, that combines a bit of history of alphabets with illustrations by many artists. You can see images from the book here and here.
In the middle is another book by Sacks, Letter Perfect, a history of the Roman alphabet. What I found interesting here is that the Kindle version looks to be a reformated version of the book. Which makes sense for a book with illustrations. I wish all books that had font changes or illustrations did that (I read Jill Lepore’s Blindspot on my Kindle, which alternates narrators in each chapter. In the print version, this is made obvious by the use of different fonts. On the Kindle — with only one font face — the book was confusing going until someone told me about the print version.)
On the right is Hemant Anant Jain‘s poster The Reader’s Alphabet. Each letter represents a famous literary character and a little text summarizes the story of the book in which the character appears. You can see a large version here.
And finally, this story about Ceejay Epton who, after having a baby decided to change her name to “help him learn the alphabet.” The new name: “Ceejay A Apple B Boat C Cat D Dog E Elephant F Flower G Goat H House I Igloo J Jellyfish K Kite L Lion M Monkey N Nurse O Octopus P Penguin Q Queen R Robot S Sun T Tree U Umbrella V Violin W Whale X X-Ray Y Yo-Yo Z Zebra Terryn Feuji-Sharemi”
 If you haven’t gotten a calendar for 2011, mine are now on sale for $15. See more pictures and information here.
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Kyle Durrie of Power and Light Press recently funded a new project called Moveable Type: cross country adventures in printing through Kickstarter, a sort of social network site for raising money for small projects. Her description of the traveling venture:
“My plan is to build a mobile print shop in the back of an old delivery truck. Within these tight quarters, I’ll create an efficient and fully functional shop, with a small table top press for printing smaller work, and a larger proof press, capable of printing larger posters.
And then I’ll take this rig on the road! I plan on visiting schools, art spaces, city parks, music festivals, craft shows, parties, and anywhere else that might have an interest in learning about printing.”
See more about the project here.