Abigail Uhteg has documented her summer internship at the Women’s Studio Workshop with a video flipbook of the 3000 photos she took over the course of printing and constructing her edition of 35 artist’s books.
Map Cuts
Cathy sent me a link to a post about Karen O’Leary’s Map Cuts. They are hand cut, and Karen says this on her Etsy shop:
If you’re interested in a certain city, please send me an email and allow a few months for me to complete it. please note, each map takes quite a bit of time. Custom pieces will be hand-cut in the order that payment is received.
Poetry for the Mind’s Joy
Recent US Poet Laureates have established projects related to poetry during their tenures. There’s Robert Pinsky’s Favorite Poem Project, Billy Collins’ Poetry 180 for high school students and Ted Kooser’s American Life in Poetry newspaper column. The current laureate, Kay Ryan, recently announced her own project that “embraces community colleges through an online poetry page Poetry for the Mind’s Joy and a poetry-writing contest.”
I simply want to celebrate the fact that right near your home, year in and year out, a community college is quietly—and with very little financial encouragement—saving lives and minds,” said Ryan. “I can’t think of a more efficient, hopeful or egalitarian machine, with the possible exception of the bicycle.”
Ryan added, “It is at a community college that a student can progress all the way from learning to read to learning to read poetry. That is, she can get the basic tools she must have to advance in the world and then go on and use them for the mind’s joy. This is a progression that improves both the student and her community every step of the way.”
Steel Rules
Last Friday I went up to the vendor’s room at the Guild of Bookworker’s standards conference to check out the paper and other bookbinding supplies. I had in mind to buy a piece or 2 of Cave Paper’s beautiful handmade paper. It’s expensive, but I’ve always wanted to use it in a chapbook. So now I have 2 different colors, plus some hand dyed linen thread (from Kinglet Cottage Designs). All I need is the poem!
There were lots of other vendors there as well. One was Talas, with a large array of binding supplies, from calipers to leather hides to glue brushes. Since I’d been thinking only about paper I didn’t look very seriously at their table. But then I spied a steel rule kit — about 5 years ago I took a class from Hedi Kyle where she showed us how to use narrow strips of metal rule to evenly space boards. Nearly every time I do a bookmaking project, I remember those rulers, fleetingly think “I should figure out how to get or make those,” and promptly forget. Now here they were, staring me in the face. What could I do but buy them? They come in 1/8″, 1/4″, 1/2″, 3/4″ and 1″ wide strips, and I’ve already used the 1/4″ one!
Type Chess
This chess set made from wood type and a type tray aren’t from someone who loves type or even chess, but from a book by 2 designers called Tossed and Found.
What some view as trash, Linda and John Meyers see as raw material. The wife-and-husband team—subscribers to the “reduce, reuse, recycle” ethos—have perfected a design strategy that will save you money, help the planet, and provide hours of DIY fun. The strategy? First, visit a yard sale, construction-site dumpster, or even your own attic. Select something that somebody (even you) thought had outlived its usefulness. Then, transform that castoff into a piece that’s interesting and usable.
You can see projects from the book here, and read how they made the chess set here.
{via printinteresting}
Summer 2009 Ampersand
The Summer 2009 Ampersand, quarterly book arts journal of the PCBA, recently came out. This is my last issue as editor — after 5 years I’m ready to hand it off to someone else! Yvonne Tsang, a letterpress printer here in San Francisco, takes over with the Fall 2009 issue. The Summer issue features a “how-to” article by Ginger Burrell on making two variations of the star book. You can see 2 of Ginger’s star books here and here.
Back issues of the Ampersand are here.