ABC of Bugs and Plants in a Northern Garden (2012)
ABC of Bugs and Plants in a Northern Garden (2012)
Judy Fairclough Sgantas and Claire Van Vliet
Clamshell box, softcover, open spine, paper-tab-sewn binding. Box: H188 x W192 x D65 mm. Book: H167 x W171 x D35 mm. 27 f&gs, 1 folded pastedown at end. Edition of 120, of which this is #45. Acquired from Vamp & Tramp, 15 September 2023.
Photos: Books On Books Collection. Displayed with artists’ permission.
Claire Van Vliet, of Janus Press, and Judy Fairclough Sgantas, an artist and gardener, collaborated on this double alphabet book. The classical Roman letter forms decorated with plant life and insects appear twice for each letter of the alphabet. A black-and-white image on the left of the three-panel spread faces a second, hand-colored one on the right. The descriptive text for each occupies the center panel. More detail can be found in the colophon shown below.
Inner and outer views of the clamshell box
First panel of the A folio
All three panels of the A folio
Central panel of the A folio with arrows indicating the image to which the descriptions apply.
Views of the non-adhesive binding
Colophon
Andrew Miller-Brown, Audrey Holden, and Katie MacGregor also worked on The Gospel of Mary (2006), which can be found in the Books On Books Collection. Also in the collection is Woven and Interlocking Book Structures (2002), coauthored by Elizabeth Steiner and Van Vliet, which includes a version of ABC‘s non-adhesive structure and for which Mary Richardson also provided a clamshell box. Additional examples of Claire Maziarczyk‘s work with paste paper can be found in Maziarczyk paste papers (Alembic Press, 1991) and under the Wayback Machine links to her name and Pastepapers.com.
High-resolution images for Sgantas’ letters D, E, and M at the University of Wisconsin-Madison enable you to see the grain of the paper. It is, however, well worth visiting collections to request ABC of Bugs and Plants and look more closely at the non-adhesive binding and illustrated calligraphy and enjoy the heft and texture of the Arches and Barcham Green papers. Even more rewarding is to explore ABC alongside the works mentioned above as well as other related abecedaries such as
- Marie Angel, An Animated Alphabet (1996)
- Vanna Bartlett, Arthropedia : An Illustrated Alphabet of Invertebrates (2020)
- David L. Kulhavy & Charles D. Jones, A Forest Insect Alphabet (2013)
Further Reading
“Abecedaries I (in progress)“. Books On Books Collection.
“Claire Van Vliet“. 3 July 2022. Books On Books Collection.
Iyengar, Sujata. 2023. “Conversations about Time and Space: Early Modern Books and Contemporary Artists’ Books” in The Oxford Handbook of the History of the Book in Early Modern England. Adam Smyth, ed. Oxford
Books On Books 