Book Collecting: A Bestiary

Kay Ryan reading broadsideIt’s been a long time since I posted a book in my artist’s book collection. Then the other day I read that the poet Kay Ryan had gotten a MacArthur Fellow Genius award. I have a broadside from a reading she did at the SF Center for the Book in 2001 hanging near my own press (that’s it to the left — click on it to get a larger image and read the poem). Ryan had allowed the Center to use her poetry in a book produced by a year-long letterpress class — the text is in Centaur, set by hand, and the drawings, by Michelle Geiger, were done in photopolymer. I also have a copy of that book, which I happily re-read. The title page is shown below.

A Bestiary, title page

Dryad Press

Ann Slayton’s Catching the LightWhile in Vermont I had the chance to meet two of my sister’s friends, Merrill Leffler and Ann Slayton. Merrill runs a small publishing company, Dryad Press, and his wife Ann is, among other things, a poet. Merrill showed me several of the chapbooks and prose pieces he’s published and talked about why he’d chosen various titles. Especially interesting is They’ll Have to Catch Me First about a woman who was a prisoner at Mechelen during WWII and “assigned to the painters’ workshop, she painted numbers that prisoners wore around their necks, linen armbands for other prisoner-works, and signs. During her year-and-a-half of imprisonment, Nazi officers had her do portrait paintings of themselves and mistresses — at the same time, she and other artists surreptitiously drew and painted scenes of camp life. After liberation by the Allies, Mrs. Awret was able to rescue what was left of her own artwork.” The book is a memoir that includes the artwork of various prisoners as well as interviews and with former prisoners.
On the drive home from Vermont, my sister & I read Ann’s poetry aloud, a lovely way to pass the time!

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.

Poets making books

Denise Newman’s bookAs a follow-up on my recent post on Jeannine Stein’s thoughts on what bookmaking means to her, I’ve been looking for comments by other bookmakers. I ran across a set of interviews from 2000, in the journal How 2 called Livres de Poètes: Six poets talk about the books they make. The interviewer, poet and book artist Dale Going, says: "In co-curating, with Jaime Robles, an exhibition in June 2000 at the Berkeley Arts Center called Livres de poètes (femme), I’ve had the pleasure of reading, handling, looking at, experiencing about a hundred such handmade books by poet/book artists whose work balances on the textual/visual cusp. I talked with six artists whose work covers a range of methods, techniques, and intentions." (entire intro to the interviews here.) The poets/bookmakers she interviewed are:

Lisa Kokin (her website)
"I don’t just make books: I also make sculpture and installation art…"

Emily McVarish (more of her work)
"I’ve been really interested in the three-dimensional and mechanical aspects of reading and poetics…"

Denise Newman
"I began making books over a series of summers spent writing on the Danish island of Bornholm…"

Eléna Rivera (website with her poetry)
"I used to write and make books as a child, so for me, making letterpress books was a rediscovery of book making…"

Jaime Robles (read some of her poetry)
"I started working with books when I was fairly young; in college I majored in both English and art…"

Meredith Stricker (one of her books, Alphabet Theater, and see part of the book on GoogleBooks)
"Thinking about my own history of writing, it has become clear to me that it’s not that there was poetry and then there were books; the materials and objects were the poetry…"

A Bookish Life

One of Jeannine Stein’s travel booksThere’s a nice article in the LA Times by book artist Jeannine Stein about what bookmaking means to her. Stein is the author of Re-Bound: Creating Handmade Books from Recycled and Repurposed Materials and Adventures in Bookbinding: Handcrafting Mixed-Media Books. That’s one of her travel books to the left (photo by Glenn Scott / Quarry Books). The article starts off

I made my first book about 17 years ago, a feat I consider a miracle. On a whim I took a class on making cased-in books with hard spines, and when I looked at the finished product I was astounded, as if I’d made a car with my bare hands.

Book a Day

Donna Meyer’s Book a Day blogThis year, Donna Meyer started a blog to record her “make a book a day” challenge. She says “The whole point is not really the books. The idea is to stretch myself in many ways as an artist and a person, to set up a discipline, stick with it and see what that teaches me” and “Why books? A book can be made of almost anything, and I can stretch its definition. Some will be fancy, skilled and take time. Others will be quick-&-dirty, maybe just images, or ephemeral, disappearing books.”
Most of the books are blank, but a few have content, like the one to the left, called Seeing Past Myself. Take a look at all of them here.