Green Chair Press Blog

Prompt Challenge: Carp

carp, v; to find fault or complain querulously or unreasonably.

This week’s word reminded me of a post on Brain Pickings that I had meant to write about here on my blog… a collection of complaints monks scribbled in the margins of illuminated manuscripts, from an article in the Spring 2012 issue of Lapham’s Quarterly. (The post has links to a few other book related subjects as well.)
To the left are examples of the things monks carp about. And this Google image search will provide you will plenty of other examples, both written and sketched.
I was pretty sure I couldn’t top these — with the double whammy of being both carping and bookish. Despite that, I kept looking at images of old manuscripts, and I decided to pursue marginalia in some form for this week.
I spent some time reading, especially What I Really Want Is Someone Rolling Around in the Text, Sam Anderson’s riff on marginalia and its importance to reading (his own reading habit at least).
And then I found Billy Collins’ poem Marginalia, which starts out

Sometimes the notes are ferocious,
skirmishes against the author
raging along the borders of every page
in tiny black script.
If I could just get my hands on you,
Kierkegaard, or Conor Cruise O’Brien,
they seem to say,
I would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head.

and ends

Yet the one I think of most often,
the one that dangles from me like a locket,
was written in the copy of Catcher in the Rye
I borrowed from the local library
one slow, hot summer.
I was just beginning high school then,
reading books on a davenport in my parents’ living room,
and I cannot tell you
how vastly my loneliness was deepened,
how poignant and amplified the world before me seemed,
when I found on one page

A few greasy looking smears
and next to them, written in soft pencil-
by a beautiful girl, I could tell,
whom I would never meet-
“Pardon the egg salad stains, but I’m in love.”

And I knew I’d found my project for this week. I laid out a generic book page spread, with the text “word word word…” repeated over and over. And I used Collins’ poem as the marginalia. Here’s the spread with the end of the poem… (read the entire poem here.)

Next up: catechize, v; To instruct orally by means of questions and answers.

Ingrid Dijkers’ Tunnel Books

While looking at tunnel books this past week, I ran across some marvelous work by Ingrid Dijkers. Her tunnel books aren’t bound on two sides, but only one as a regular book. But using cutouts in the pages, she gets a tunnel effect, both forward and backward! There’s a story to go along with the illustrations, so they are good examples of incorporating text into the structure. The one below is called “Though the Rabbit-Hole.” Her blog has several more examples. She also has a website with a gallery of her journals, tunnel books and altered books.

How To: Tunnel Books

After making a tunnel book for my last prompt challenge word, I spent some time looking at other tunnel books as well as directions. Here’s some of what I found:
A tunnel or peephole book is a set of pages bound into accordions on two sides and viewed through a central opening. Scenery or shapes are cut out of the pages and then assembled in layers. Inspired by theatrical stage sets, this book form dates from the mid-eighteenth century and continues to be popular.
The photo is of Kara Russo’s Tibet as I Remember It — I especially liked this one as it uses color and shape in much the way I tried to use them in my own recent model.
I made my book using an accordion spine on the left and right, made out of thin white Japanese paper so light would come through the sides. The National Museum of Women in the Arts has PDF directions for this sort of structure.
Ed Hutchins has instructions for a slightly more involved, one sheet tunnel book. On his website, his article Exploring Tunnel Books includes a history of tunnel books and a photo gallery of example books. There are good discussions of what makes the structure a book, rather than a novelty piece, how various artists have adapted the form, and how one might incorporate text.
Book artist and teacher Carol Barton has been instrumental in popularizing tunnel books with book artists. She has a gallery of tunnel books on her website.
Beth Lee has a nice list of links to tunnel books she likes.
Rand Huebsch wrote an article for the Bone Folder on tunnel books.
And lastly, click here to see all the tunnel book images Google has collected.

Prompt Challenge: Profluent

profluent, adj; Flowing smoothly or abundantly forth.

The arroyo in front of my house One of the usage examples for this week’s word was from Caitlin L. Gannon’s Southwestern Women: New Voices:

In southern Arizona, it rains in summer, and I’m impatient for the monsoon torrents of August, for an indulgence of water, a baptism that will roister over rocks and swell profluent down the mountainside, roll through the rubble of the canyon floor…

This immediately brought to mind an August afternoon in our first summer in Santa Fe, and our introduction to “monsoon season.” The sky got dark very quickly, followed by cracks of lightening and thunder, followed by a 30 minute torrential downpour. The rain came down so hard we ran inside and watched from the porch as the arroyo running along one side of our house filled almost to the brim. And as soon as the rain calmed, we donned rain jackets, pants and boots to see if there was any damage. Luckily not.
It’s winter now, so the arroyos are dry. But I took some pictures (that’s one above — the water came almost to the top of the stones in the lower left of the picture that August two summers ago), printed a few and propped them up next to my computer to look at. I also took pictures of arroyos around town.
What I love about the southwest are the muted colors, especially the browns of adobe houses, against the brilliant blue sky. The paintings below, all by Georgia O’Keeffe, give you an idea of that contrast of brown and blue.
Besides brown, the other prevalent color is green — the dark green of pinon pines and the sage-gray-green of chamisa. After looking at my photos for a week, I wanted a structure that would mimic the pictures I had taking of arroyos, but emphasize the shapes and colors. So I made a tunnel book, trying to use the layers to show the depth in the photos.

Next word: carp, n; a peevish complaint.

How To: Turkish Map Fold with Rectangular Paper

Folding the turkish map fold with a non-square piece of paper isn’t as straight-forward as with a square sheet. So for completeness, I’ve put directions for using a rectangular piece of paper here.

Joy Serwylo’s Turkish Map Fold Book

As I continue looking at artist’s book on Etsy, I found Australian Joy Serwylo’s Willo Press where she makes miniature books. The one I liked best, given my recent obsession with the Turkish Map Fold, is her maps of the ancient world, below. The book has 6 pages, all with the map fold. See all her miniature books, including a cook book, here.