The workshop I attended last weekend, as part of the Handmade/Homemade exhibit, had 2 parts. First we learned how to do Suminagashi, a form of water and ink paper marbling, from Suzanne Vilmain. This was followed by JenMarie Davis’ Context/Content Divination: Methods of Generation.
JenMarie’s method is broader than the biblio-divination I wrote about earlier this week. She and her partner at Fact-Simile Press publish others poems, and she uses her techniques to create artist’s books to couch these texts. Her method could certainly be used to generate the texts as well, but like JenMarie, I usually start with someone else’s text for my books, and my challenge is always how to design a structure that enhances that text.
For me the word “divination” means a way to predict the future, like reading a tarot card, which isn’t much help in designing a book. But JenMarie wanted us to take away a method of asking questions about our texts or idea for content, and then a way to constrain the answers so we could make headway with a design. Her “divination” device is a paper fortune teller. (You may call it a cootie catcher. Wikipedia has directions for making and using one.)
Instead of using colors and numbers to guide the answer to a question, as in the Wikipedia directions, JenMarie had us use our biggest concerns when making a book (two of mine are: “what structure best suits the text” and “how can I make whatever I come up with affordable”) as well as a list of things to consider about a text — the story or narrative, images, sounds, memories that arise… We all folded up fortune tellers and tried them on a simple example text and image. I often get stuck when thinking about my book designs — they come slowly — and I left the workshop intrigued by the idea of asking questions that could refocus my attention.

This past weekend, I participated in a workshop associated with a small book arts exhibit here in Santa Fe, Handmade/Homemade. The mini exhibit features letterpress chapbooks, one-of-a-kind editions and broadsides from small literary presses. As part of the workshop, I got to look at some of the books, most of them of poetry, and cleverly done. One I particularly liked was Helen White’s book Ariadne, pictured below. She’s a visual poet, and each page used some part of the body for the poem, while the transparency kept the coherency of the figure. More pictures of books from the exhibit are here and here.