Artist’s book

Books On Books Collection – Heidi Zednik

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Alphabet of Desire (2006)

Alphabet of Desire (2006)
Heidi Zednik (text and images) and Alicia Bailey (design)
Miniature hardback, casebound, handmade paper overboard, foil-stamped front cover, plain doublures, sewn. 70 x 70 mm. 32 pages. Edition of 100, of which this is #42. Acquired from Alicia Bailey, 26 October 2023.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.

A larger version (171 x 171 mm) of this work was published as a portfolio. The miniature uses the same text and imagery and is digitally produced rather than hand printed.

The abstract use of colors and painted letters surpasses the text. In its miniature form, it offers an aperitif to Zednik’s artistry with color and shape, which can be found on her site.

Books On Books Collection – Jonathan Safran Foer

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Tree of Codes (2010)

Tree of Codes (2010)
Jonathan Safran Foer
Perfect bound paperback of die-cut pages. H220 x W135 mm. 284 pages. Acquired from Visual Editions, 30 January 2014.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.

The artist’s book “tradition” of excising words from the page goes back at least to Marcel Broodthaers’ and Mario Diacono’s renderings of Un Coup de Dés Jamais N’Abolira le Hasard by Stéphane Mallarmé. Jonathan Safran Foer’s Tree of Codes (2010) takes that tradition to the more complex plane that Tom Phillips reached with A Humument (1980-2016). In the hands of Foer and his publisher Visual Editions, the treatment becomes simultaneously more personal and mechanical. The more personal aspect is best expressed in Foer’s afterword (see below). The mechanical aspect is the use of die cutting for production and the reader’s use of a blank sheet to enable reading the text left over from Bruno Schulz’s The Street of Crocodiles (1934, trans. 1963) that forms the new narrative of Tree of Codes.

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Books On Books – Marlene MacCallum (II)

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Marlene MacCallum’s latest artist’s books remind me of Claude Monet’s two series of paintings of the Rouen Cathedral’s façade and a field of haystacks. The series were influenced by Japanese ukiyo-e prints (“pictures of the floating world”). Rather than changing vantage points on Mt. Fuji, Monet used one perspective on one façade and sought to capture the instants of light and atmosphere on its surface at several different hours of the day. He rendered his vision of them with thick layers of paint, brushstrokes, and colors. MacCallum, too, has chosen a fixed-viewpoint: in her case, of Lake Ontario. She, too, follows different hours and, also, different seasons as Monet did with his haystacks. She, however, renders her vision with an intricate verbal-visual dance of metaphor, book structure, registration, photographic filters, print technique and paper.

sleep walk (2023)

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Books On Books Collection – Chisato Tamabayashi (I)

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Plunge (2010)

Plunge (2010)
Chisato Tamabayashi
Casebound, cloth over boards. Pop-up book. H193 x W152 mm. [12] pages. Collinge & Clark, 6 August 2024.
Photos: Books On Books Collection. Displayed with permission from Chisato Tamabayashi.

“This book begins with a dive into the sea, down into the deep and back again, encountering various creatures on the way. The pages are designed to be held and angled in different ways so that the reader can explore the depths and the two sides of the sea’s surface.”–Artist’s statement

It is a pleasure to touch and turn the pages forming the surface and bed of the sea on which the pop-ups and movable elements rise, fall and move. The screen printing with TW graphics ink (pigment ink) enrich the book’s freshness and vibrancy. These photos and very brief video further below do little justice to Plunge and only hint at the sheer fun of manipulating it.

Pages: Simili Japon paper 225gsm. Pop-ups, hand cut by scalpel from Murano pastel paper 160gsm and Colorplan paper 175gsm.

As the double-page spread below shows, Tamabayashi thinks and crafts “in the round” to position his paper sculpture to suggest a sea turtle’s motion through the water.

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Books On Books Collection – Katsumi Komagata (II)

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The Paris-based publishers Les Trois Ourses announced that Katsumi Komagata died on 29 March 2024. Although the Bologna Children’s Book Fair responded quickly with a memorial on 8 April, it is strange that no significant obituary has yet appeared for such a major figure in the book arts, children’s books and artists’ books. Fortunately there is extensive biographical information on the site of his publishing firm One Stroke.

Piece of Mind (2022), one of his last limited edition works, becomes all the more treasured.

Piece of Mind (2022)
Katsumi Komagata
Casebound, card around perfect bound block of lighter card stock. H300 x W196 mm. [30] pages. Edition of 100, of which this #67. Acquired from One Stroke, 7 August 2023.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.

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Books On Books Collection – Helen Siegl

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Herball , The Dialogues of Creatures Moralised (1979)

Herball from The Dialogues of Creatures Moralised Applicable and edifying to every merry and jocund matter, and right profitable to the governance of men. [Ascribed to Nicolaus Pergamenus and Mayno de’ Mayneri. First printed in Latin by Gerard Leeu in Gouda in 1480 & in English in 1535.] (1979)
Helen Siegl
Hardcover in mustard colored cloth with a paper label to the spine; with 11 woodcut illustrations hand-colored by Helen Siegl. HxW mm. [24] pages. Edition of 150, of which this is #56. Acquired from Black Swan Books, 20 July 2024.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.

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Books On Books Collection – Carol Barton

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Land Forms and Air Currents (2014)

Land Forms and Air Currents (2014)
Carol Barton
Leporello (with 11 pop-ups) fixed to inside cover of case, cloth over board, debossed with fitted, pastedown artwork on front cover and spine. Cover: H292 x W192 x D50 mm. Leporello: H275 x W175 mm. 37 panels. Edition of 25, of which this is #21. Acquired from the artist, 27 October 2023.
Photos: Books On Books Collection. Displayed with artist’s permission.

Carol Barton’s reputation for paper-engineering, supported by her well-received multi-volume The Pocket Paper Engineer, should not overshadow appreciation of her talents with watercolor and words. With its poems of free verse, scanned watercolors and pop-up structures all by the same author/artist, Land Forms and Air Currents (2014) qualifies as a champion of the Blakean tradition in artists’ books.

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Books On Books Collection – Jacobus Oudyn (III)

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Restless (2020)
Jacobus Oudyn
Loose sheets from plastic comb bound notebook in a clamshell box covered in Japanese paper. Box: H240 x W170 x D40 mm. 60 pages. Unique. Acquired from the artist, 2 January 2024.
Photos: Books On Books Collection. Displayed with permission of Jacobus Oudyn.

Restless consists of a continuous drawing with graphite and collage across sixty loose sheets of 120gsm cartridge paper removed from a plastic comb bound notebook. Like Oudyn’s earlier work Out of Breath (2019), meant to represent the medical conditions of mesothelioma and black lung, Restless aims to evoke chronic restless leg syndrome.

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Books On Books Collection – Jane Cradock-Watson

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Ebb and Flow (2023)

Ebb and Flow (2023)
Jane Cradock-Watson
Concertina book with cloth hard bound covers. H155 x W27 mm (closed), W680 mm (open). 64 panels. Edition of 20. Acquired from the artist, 21 January 2024.
Photos: Books On Books Collection. Displayed with artist’s permission.

An exploration, both visually and physically, the ‘edge’ of the sea where it meets the land, with its continuous ebb and flow of the breaking waves, rhythmically rolling back and forth onto the sand. (Artist’s description)

With the binding and her photography in Ebb and Flow, Jane Cradock-Watson has sculpted and painted the sea’s edge. Four digital photographs printed on Zerkal paper have been spliced together between two cloth-covered boards. The flexibility and extent of the concertinaed paper create an undulating structure that turns seascape stills into mesmerising cinema.

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Books On Books Collection – Teo Eve

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The Ox House (2022)

The Ox House (2022)
Teo Eve
Perfect-bound paperback. H210 x W148 mm. 68 pages. Acquired from Penteract Press, 6 August 2022.
Photos: Emilia Osztafi.* Displayed with permission of the publisher.

A love letter to the letters of the alphabet, Teo Eve’s debut collection The Ox House contains an eclectic array of constraint-based poems, innovative forms, and concrete & visual works. At once homage to the intricate hieroglyphs used in Ancient Egypt & the beautifully illuminated capital forms of Medieval manuscripts, and an exploration into the possibilities of new ways of playing with letters’ shapes & sounds, The Ox House harks back to a time when words were magic, and language was new. — Publisher’s description.

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