Book Art

Books On Books – Thomas A. Clark and Diane Howse

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A Slow Air (2016)

A Slow Air (2016)
Thomas A. Clark and Diane Howse
Perfect bound softcover. H200 x W150 mm. 64 pages. Edition of 750. Acquired at the Small Publishers Book Fair, London, in 2018.
Photos of the work: Books On Books Collection.

If you live where red kites thrive, you will see them most often singly, in pairs or threes. If you are lucky, you may see as many as eight or ten at a time. Near Harewood House in West Yorkshire where red kites were reintroduced in 1999, there are hundreds. In 2016, photographer/artist Diane Howse (Countess of Harewood) and poet/artist Thomas A. Clark collaborated on an exhibition at Harewood House: the grove of delight.  Using objects, words and images, the exhibition turned the house’s Terrace Gallery into a symbolic grove; also displayed was a series of 15 photographs by Howse of red kites over Harewood. For the exhibition and under the direction of Peter Foolen, the diligent Dutch publisher of herman de vries, Peter Liversidge and others, A Slow Air (the book) was produced and published by Harewood House. Foolen and the artists have assembled and manipulated the photos in a sequence of color and image that exerts a forward movement like a film or narrative. Like a real sighting of these birds circling and banking as if to a slow musical air, the book mesmerizes.

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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 – F. Gene Wilson

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The Illustrated History of ABC Hornbooks (2008)
F. Gene Wilson
Plastic comb binding. Wood and horn. Booklet: H140 x W113 mm. Hornbook #1: H154 x W80 mm. Hornbook #2: H95 x W47 mm. 60 pages. Acquired from F. Gene Wilson, 1 November 2022.
Photos: Books On Books Collection.

Further Reading

“Drukwerk in de Marge“. 2 November 2022. Books On Books Collection.

“Bård Ionson“. 9 July 2023. Books On Books Collection.

“Margo Klass“. 9 July 2023. Books On Books Collection.

“Karen Roehr“. 26 December 2022. Books On Books Collection.

“Connie Stricks“. 9 July 2023. Books On Books Collection.

“Ashley Rose Thayer“. 9 July 2023. Books On Books Collection.

“Andrew White Tuer“. 26 December 2022. Books On Books Collection.

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 Collection – Helen Yentus

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On Such a Full Sea (2013)

On Such a Full Sea Chang-rae Lee credit: Riverhead Books

On Such a Full Sea (2013)
Chang-rae Lee
Jacket and slipcase design
Helen Yentus
Book in slipcase. H23o x W150 mm; slipcase only, W110 mm. 368 pages. Edition of 500, of which this is #178. Acquired 1 October 2018.
Photo: Riverhead Books and AIGA.

Riverhead art director Helen Yentus and members of the MakerBot team designed this slipcase for Lee’s novel. An edition of 500, made with the MakerBot® Replicator® 2 Desktop 3D Printer with MakerBot PLA filament, a bioplastic made of corn and fabricated by MakerBot in Brooklyn, New York, appeared in 2013 just before the trade edition in 2014.

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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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Bookmarking Book Art – Movables Now and Then

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In July this year, a video was posted as if in response to the conclusion of Kyle Olmon’s “Movable Book Artists” in Parenthesis 31 (2020):

There is little in the way of scholarship and criticism in regard to pop-up and movable books. Part of this is the stigma of being represented as a commercial novelty product or kiddie book by twentieth-century publishers. The explosion of artists’ books in the 1970’s gave rise to a subset of book artists that moved beyond the standard textblock to explore the book form in ways that surpassed commercial novelty publishing efforts. To date there is no consensus within the community on the classification of the types of book formats or even the terminology used when describing pop-up and movable elements in a work. Hopefully this will change when articles about pop-up artists’ books appear with more frequency and more scholarship is undertaken.

The Newberry Library’s Curator of Rare Books and Manuscripts Suzanne Karr Schmidt gave the Book Club of Washington a reprise of her 2023 exhibition “Pop-Up Books through the Ages”:

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Books On Books Collection – Jessica Drenk

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Carving 9 (2021)

Carving 9 (2012)
Jessica Drenk
Altered book and wax. H203 x W152 x D38 mm. Unique. Acquired from the Seager Gray Gallery, 10 February 2019.
Photo: Courtesy of the gallery.

Once a book becomes another material from which art can be made, the rectangular block offers itself up to an unbounded variety of treatments. It can be folded into something else. Or macerated and squeezed out, or into, something else. Or shot, burnt, frozen, soaked, coated or buried and dug up. Or torn, shredded and reconstituted or scattered. Or carved with any number of implements into any number of shapes.

But that oblong of material just lying there and the techniques of altering it are not usually sufficient starting points for the artist. In Jessica Drenk’s case, a visit to a botanic garden’s “large greenhouse full of hundreds of different succulent species” provided the necessary catalyst. As she explained in an interview with Patron: “It blew me away to see so much slight variety within the same category of plant and this experience sent me down a path of experimenting with books in the studio; I wanted to see how many different shapes and objects I could make out of the one material.”

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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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