My friend Barb showed me how to make this dos-a-dos (2 sided) book from a single sheet of paper. It’s in Helen Hiebert’s book Playing with Paper. The dos-a-dos book is pretty skinny, but I think it’s a good structure to have in my arsenal. I’m going to try it with a few non-standard sized papers to see if I can make it a bit wider. Click here or the picture to the left for a large view of the instructions.
The San Francisco Center for the Book’s latest exhibition is “Superstition 13”:
Superstition 13 is a juried show which invites artists to investigate superstition and the esoteric….rtists are encouraged to submit book works which speak to the mysterious, the alchemical, the arcane – both written and unwritten.”
Tom Leech, the printer at the Palace Press at the Palace of the Governors here in Santa Fe, submitted “The Scottish Play,” a chapbook of Act IV, Scene 1 from Shakespeare’s Macbeth. This is the scene where the witches chant “Double, double toil and trouble; Fire burn, and caldron bubble.” It’s handset type (all 36pt but of different faces). I bought a copy of the book, and here’s a few spreads. Be sure to read the very entertaining colophon pictured at the end of the post. Notice I got copy 13 (or maybe they are all copy 13!)
Last Friday was the opening for “Expressions in Book Arts” at the Mesa Library in Los Alamos. I went with a group of friends, and the best part was watching Bebe, a printer who is new to book arts, get very excited by the altered books she saw in the exhibit. The ones she liked the best were books that had been cut up in strange ways. I’ll be interested to see what she comes up with!
The gallery space at the library is long and narrow with only a few pedestals, and is configured for hanging wall art. Barb, who put the show together, was successfully inventive in using the space. On one wall, she hung a long white rain gutter to display the books. This past spring, I taught a workshop on woven bindings, and one attendee, Phoebe, submitted a book to the show using one of the weavings we learned. This is her book in the “gutter display.” The books might have a tendency to fall off a more conventional shelf, but the lip on the gutter kept them in place.
Julia and Dana collaborated on a book that didn’t require you to turn the pages, as all the pages are displayed at once. It’s a homage to TS Elliot’s The Wasteland and James Joyce’s Ulysses (both were published 100 years ago in 1912).
This one is Barbara’s “The Magic of Light,” a start book with hand painted papers.
The show is up until the end of October.
Last month, Edie Tsong spoke at the monthly Santa Fe Book Arts Group meeting. She’s very interested in poetry, and she had a contest asking people to submit a love-letter written using text abbreviations. She then letterpress printed the result as a broadside. For those of us who don’t read the abbreviations well, here’s what it says:
Early this morning
before the sun
I rolled out of our bed to soak
olive slowly shifting to black
raven and owl chasing
each other in the meadow
white bird of night
black bird of day
endless conversation
swooping play
and dance
love M.
Read more about the poem and contest here.
My friend Tinker recently got a new cat, a black male called Lucky. She sent me exuberant emails about his antics, and I thought about the haiku & drawings I had done of my own little black cat. Figuring I’m on a roll with matchboxes, I put my drawings and haiku together in a tiny book housed in a handmade matchbox.
The book is an accordion-fold with spreads on both the front and back. Below is a photo of the front of the accordion. See more here.
