After finding Bo Press Miniatures on Etsy the other day, I’ve been looking at other book artists who sell there. The map below is from Brian Kring and his Emporium of Tiny Literature, Cards and Other Things Paper. The letterpress printed map below details the neighborhood walk he takes with his 3 year old son. The outline is printed letterpress and then hand colored. Brian has other artist’s books, moveable cards and paper sculptures here. He’s also got a website with more of his work.
Due to a series of vexing computer and printer issues this past week, I didn’t make much progress on last week’s prompt challenge word, so I’m going to keep it for next week.
In the meantime, it’s PI Day tomorrow, March 14. I found this pi book by Pat Sweet on Etsy. She says:
This is a tiny book containing four recipes for Pi:
1. the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter.
2. Wallis’ Product
3. the Gregory-Leibniz series
4. Viele’s Formula
– all running through the book in parallel , with increasing complexity. This sounds pretty dry, unless you’re a Pi-est, so I’ve sweetened the book with two magnificent endpapers, depicting a giant metallic PI lounging on a Hawaiian beach, and in a snowy Norwegian forest. The typeface was chosen to evoke memories of old elementary school textbooks.
Do check out all of Pat’s other fun miniature books here.
Here in Santa Fe there’s a working press & bindery affiliated with the New Mexico History Museum, at the Palace of the Governors. They print collections of poetry for the state & city Poet Laureates and design & print really lovely broadsides. Currently they are printing and binding 100 copies of a special edition of a book about Georgia O’Keeffe (who lived in New Mexico much of her life). There’s a nice article and video in the local newspaper this morning about printing the book. The photo to the left is Tom Leech, curator of the Palace Press, printing pages for the book on their Vandercook.
I’ve used this variation in my last two prompt challenge words. I got the idea from Jeannine, who said she “start(s) with 2 straight folds (horizontal and vertical) and only one diagonal.” Here’s how to fold it — in the fourth step below, reverse the crease on the diagonal fold to get a square that is half the size of the original sheet.
I took 4 folded sheets and glued them to a backing sheet to get this:
Gluing the folded sheets back-to-back, and rotating each sheet 180 degrees as you glue, like the picture on the right, gives you an accordion book that has a wonderful slinky-like action to it. Below is a model I made that I hung up in my studio.
My friend Cathy calls these “Lotus Books,” and she has an example here and more complete instructions in this PDF.
Susan Kapuscinski Gaylord calls them “diamond fold books” and she has more examples on her website.
All my posts on Turkish Map Folds, the variations and examples can be found here.
Last Monday I stopped into a store that sold handmade journals here in Santa Fe. One of the journals used the same fold I used in last week’s prompt challenge, only instead of putting them on a backing sheet, she stacked and glued them. When opened, the pages were quite sinuous — almost like playing with a slinky! I immediately knew I’d use that structure for this week’s word.
When I was making collages a couple of weeks ago, I’d run across some paper I’d bought for a project years ago — Canson mi-tienes in coordinating colors (see to the left). The colors made me think of summer. I used them to make a model of the structure and hung it up in my studio — that’s it on the right. 
The result had a wonderful springy elastic quality, and hanging it allowed me to admire the colors.
I’ve always loved mobiles (as a kid, I remember seeing Calder mobiles at museums and being fascinated). My collages often have a cascade of coordinating colors, and I thought it would be interesting to use strands of the folded paper to turn my collages into something 3D by making a mobile.
The squares for the model on the right are 4″. I thought that was too big, so I made several chains of various sizes. I liked the results with 1″ squares best, but I couldn’t really tell if the mobile would be what I wanted with just one strand. I hoped a model with 9 strands would tell me — and while that was a lot of folding, it went rather quickly by coupling the folding with mindlessly watching TV!
You can see the result below. Once constructed, unfortunately the strands aren’t really bendy or sinuous anymore. It reminds me of chimes. This afternoon it was quite warm, and I had the door open. The gentle breeze that came through rustled the paper strands together, making a lovely musical sound.
Next up: profluent, adj; Flowing smoothly or abundantly forth.
I’m always intrigued by calendar objects, as opposed to the more traditional ones I make myself. Recently I ran across the calendar below (on the Moontree Letterpress blog). It’s by Angela Liguori. She also has a section of limited edition books, as well as Italian cotton ribbons on her website. (Moontree Letterpress has more pictures of the calendar here.)
