Bookmarking Book Art — Diane Jacobs

Books On BooksLeave a comment
Nourish by Diane Jacobs
Nourish by Diane Jacobs
letterpress printed reduction linoleum and wood blocks, pressure printing, polymer plates, handset title page and colophon, bamboo box, gampi paper, wool felt, cast paper pulp, porcelain
8″ x 8″ x 2″

The wondrous power of the sun and moon mark our cycles of circular and linear time. We rely on them for light, energy, warmth, and continuity. The oceans and forests create habitat for a diversity of species whose existence we depend on, yet many of our human choices harm the earth. The burning of fossil fuels, pollution, and exploitation of land distresses our relationship with this majestic planet. Join me on a pictorial journey to celebrate the wonders of our natural and created world.  Nourish is a book about hope and stewardship, as the drum symbolizes the heartbeat—the pulse of life—it connects us all.

The eight twice-folded folios printed on both sides of the paper have endured over 100 runs through a Vandercook letterpress. I explored new artistic territory in this project; investigating color by mapping out fifteen different multi-color reduction relief prints, and experimenting with layered images on transparent paper.

via 23 Sandy Gallery | Nourish by Diane Jacobs *LIBRARIAN’S CHOICE AWARD!.

Nourish_01

Bookmark — “How Old is Innovation before it’s New?” David Worlock

Books On BooksLeave a comment
Fachbuchhandlung
Vienna’s Manz Bookstore, facade by Adolf Loos

Two interesting words: “semantic” and “innovation.”  Find yourself a good cup of coffee, a slice of sachertorte, the aroma of cinnamon and take the time to read this article by David Worlock.

“Getting” the fundamentals of digital publishing means “getting” semantics: the semantic web, taxonomies, ontologies, tagging and all that.  David Worlock’s article is a good place to start to understand why.

Related articles

Bookmark — The evolution of bookselling

Books On BooksLeave a comment
overdrive-retail-ebook-kiosk--134x250
Nate Hofhelder, The Digital Reader

No good history of the book in the late 20th and early 21st century will overlook this part of the book’s value chain.  In covering the earlier eras, the outstanding historians — Chartier, Davenport, Eisenstein, Johns,  Lefèbvre and Martin,  McMurtrie,  Pettegree, Pollard, and Suarez — touch on distribution and retail to varying degrees.  When it comes to our era though, the effect on the book itself of the distribution/retail roles played by Barnes & Noble, Borders, Amazon, Apple, Google, OverDrive and a host of other smaller key players such as Project Gutenberg will loom larger.  (So will that of self-publishing if we consider BookStats‘ report that self-published ebooks represented 30% of ebook sales in 2012.  What the effect will be, though, is harder to say.)

Around since 1986, OverDrive has its roots in the production end of the industry, providing publishers with conversion and formatting services from diskettes to CDs to ebooks.  Its owner, Steve Potash, set the foundations of its contribution to distribution and retail in 1999-2000 with his participation in the Open eBook Forum, now the International Digital Publishing Forum, and his creation of Overdrive’s Content Reserve.   As of this writing, Content Reserve contains over a million ebooks; it is the “overdriver” behind the firm’s library distribution service and the OverDrive Retail Kiosk.

If the OverDrive Retail Kiosk becomes a key to unlocking the way back for book retail in the “real world,” it will by its own definition contribute to the evolution from the printed book to the ebook.   Anyplace — in the mall, the main street or high street, the coffee shop, canteen or library — can become an outlet for the purchase of ebooks, which will feed back into the supply and value chains.

No doubt, historians will note that OverDrive required no physical ereader of its own, no Kindle, no iPad, etc., to reach this point in the evolutionary path but rather, it was its dual focus on finding an effective way to rationalize the delivery of multiple formats while pursuing a standard (EPUB) and on meeting the distribution needs of libraries then retail that put OverDrive in its current position. That position is symbiotic with both “closed garden” ereaders and apps as well as books-in-browser solutions.

Just as the Gutenberg press would not have taken off without the regular supply of a more relatively standardized form of paper, the digital book has had to await — is still awaiting — a more standardized format and mechanism of delivery.  In reinventing themselves and these parts of the book industry’s DNA, OverDrive and others contribute to the evolution of the book.

 

Overdrive Digital Bookmobile
Overdrive Digital Bookmobile (Photo credit: Librarian In Black)

 

Related articles

Bookmarking Book Art – Vita Wells, Updated 11 February 2014

Books On BooksLeave a comment

Wells %22Flights of Mind%22From 3 February to 20 March 2014, Vita Wells (born Béa Welsh Weicker) has a new “Flights of Mind” installation. A year ago, she had placed an installation of the “Flights of Mind” at the Berkeley Central Library, the first being in 2012 at the Oakopolis Gallery in Oakland, California.

Wells Flights of Mind BerkeleyFollowing the Berkeley installation, the following was posted on BooksOnBooks:

Appropriately, this latest installation was for the “11th Annual Authors Dinner,” sponsored by the Berkeley Public Library Foundation.  Soaring forty feet above the patrons’ heads were hundreds of altered discarded books, their covers spread into wingspans, their pages folded into rounded bird bellies and each book suspended on cables from the ceiling at varying pitches,  yaws and distances from one another.   They are no longer there, nor at the Oakopolis.  By the installation’s name, they should now exist only in the mind, but the artist provides an extensive online “installation” with numerous pictures and videos, an essay on her intent and a detailed description of the installation’s physical characteristics.

It is delightful to have access to the online version, and we may fool ourselves into thinking of it as virtual.  Even the digital is subject to forensics.  Still, although Wells may well take down the online installation, or its URL may be hijacked or fall into 404-dom, it is not temporary in the sense that its instances in Berkeley and Oakland were.  So does its presence challenge the integrity of those temporary installations?

Almost a century ago now, Yeats wrote of the swans’ “bell-beat” of wings overhead at Coole, and that poem entered the world of lasting works of art.  It has its many physical instantiations in books the world over.  It lives in recordings.  It lives on the Web.  It lives in countless minds ready to recite it.  Of course, the books will rot, the recordings and sites decay, the minds fall into silence.  Yet in the presence of thought become art, soaring overhead, we dare to dream of persistence even in the face of such imperfections as Wells’ “worn, frayed, … beat-up and patched” birdbooks or the challenge of the age of digital reproduction to the integrity of art.

… now they drift on the still water

Mysterious, beautiful;

Among what rushes will they build,

By what lake’s edge or pool

Delight men’s eyes, when I awake some day

To find they have flown away?

Vita Wells’ art feeds the dream.

Related publication

Tracey Taylor, “Berkeley artist Vita Wells makes books fly at main library”, Berkeleyside, 11 February 2013, accessed 11 February 2014: http://www.berkeleyside.com/2013/02/11/berkeley-artist-vita-wells-makes-books-fly-at-main-library/

 

Bookmark for Literacy — Tom Chatfield

Books On BooksLeave a comment

Tom Chatfield’s short essay “I Type, Therefore I Am” celebrates the increasingly rapid rise of literacy.

At some point in the past two million years, give or take half a million, the genus of great apes that would become modern humans crossed a unique threshold. Across unknowable reaches of time, they developed a communication system able to describe not only the world, but the inner lives of its speakers. They ascended — or fell, depending on your preferred metaphor — into language.

The vast bulk of that story is silence. Indeed, darkness and silence are the defining norms of human history. The earliest known writing probably emerged in southern Mesopotamia around 5,000 years ago but, for most of recorded history, reading and writing remained among the most elite human activities: the province of monarchs, priests and nobles who reserved for themselves the privilege of lasting words. …

In the past few decades, more than six billion mobile phones and two billion internet-connected computers have come into the world. As a result of this, for the first time ever we live not only in an era of mass literacy, but also — thanks to the act of typing onto screens ­— in one of mass participation in written culture.

via Tom Chatfield – Language and digital identity.

This is territory bookmarked before in response to Ferris Jabr’s “The Reading Brain in the Digital Age” — Bookmarking a Bookburning II — but it occupies higher ground.

Bookmarking Book Art – Casey Gardner

Books On BooksLeave a comment
Body of Inquiry, Casey Gardner
Body of Inquiry, Casey Gardner

This is a work that succeeds on every level: the text, both humorous and pithy, is engaging, the craft and material selection superb, the design and layout a balance of image, information and space.

The presentation is such that one is informed, enticed and amused before even getting to the ‘insides’ of the work – a corporeal codex, the inside story.

We read that the work was inspired by Torso Woman, a genuine anatomical model of serene evisceration. Mounted on the interior central panel, appropriately placed on a brush worked depiction of an armless, legless female, who does, however, have a head), wearing a stoic (or is it serene?) expression is an organically shaped book that includes overlapping shapes reminiscent of the human anatomy books of the fifties.

via Artists Book Cornucopia III – Casey Gardner « Abecedarian Gallery’s Blog.

Based in Denver, Colorado, Abecedarian Gallery offers an eclectic and enjoyable selection of bookworks and prints for sale.  The Abecedarian holds regular exhibitions (such as the Emerging Artists exhibition) and offers an annual Gallery Directors Award (which Gardner won in 2013).  Well worth a visit online.

Gardner was also a finalist for the MCBA 2015 award with the work below:

 Phoebe is a traveller through time and space in search of what matters. Along the way, she meets an intergalactic wayfarer who is also on a quest. He seeks the 10th dimension which can only be reached by learning what is uniquely human. Together they travel to the beginning of the universe and back. Meanwhile, the two travellers investigate the workings of the universe. Each of the seven folios chronicles a mission that revolves around a field of exploration: light, gravity, time, matter, infinity, constellations and science. On the back of each folio is a mission dispatch reporting their discoveries of meaning in the natural forces and phenomena of the cosmos.

From mcbaprize.org

This particular work reminds me of the rise of infographics. It also stands as a clever introduction to a scientific topic through fiction as well as design.  For more of Gardner’s work, visit her site Set in Motion Press.

Bookmarking Book Art — British Academy

Books On BooksLeave a comment

News Item – British Academy.  Part of Literature Week at the British Academy for the Humanities and Social Sciences, an exhibit called “Turning the Page” and presenting the book sculptures of Justin Rowe, a bookseller in Cambridge, is being held from 20 May through 24 May.   The works are in the  “reverse ekphrastic” mode:  the bookwork is an expression of, or meditation on, the text of the book from which it is made.  The exhibit has attracted attention from the BBC and even the free Metro paper.  Looks and sounds worth a visit if you can skive work for one of the lectures and a browse round the exhibit.

Turning the Page, Justin Rowe
© Justin Rowe

 

Bookmark — Anniversary of the Book’s Freedom from Taxation

Books On BooksLeave a comment

Louis-xii-roi-de-france
Louis XII, Roi de France, 1498-1515

In 1513, Louis XII of France issued an edict praising printing, exempting it from a large impost and removing a tax on books.  Louis declared that “the printer-booksellers … ought to be maintained in their privileges, liberties, franchises, exemptions, and immunities, in consideration of the great benefits which have been conferred upon our kingdom by means of the art and science of printing, the invention of which seems rather divine than human ….”  Two years later, Louis was dead, and the lot of books and printer-booksellers fell under the shadow of France’s so-called Father of Letters, François I, who issued an edict in 1535

 

Francis1-1
François I, Roi de France, 1515-1547  

 

banning the use of the printing press and permitted books and printers to be consigned to the flames for blasphemy.   (Richard Christie, Etienne Dolet: The Martyr of the Renaissance, 1508-1546, 1899. Pp. 330-31).    Which might be said to challenge the certainty of taxes while confirming that of death.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bookmark — Anniversary of The Imprint and Its Font

Books On BooksLeave a comment

Gerard Meynell's The Imprint
Gerard Meynell’s The Imprint

The Imprint

This year is the centenary of Gerard Meynell’s trade periodical The Imprint, which was the scene of Stanley Morison’s first appearance in print. How appropriate then that Morison’s book A Tally of Types tells the story of the journal’s founding and, equally important, how the historic font called Imprint Old Face came into being. The font’s importance is that “the design had been originated for mechanical composition. … the first design, not copied or stolen from the typefounders, to establish itself as a standard book-face.”(p.21) Ironically, Meynell and his colleagues intended for the font to be freely available to the trade, but eventually it came into the ownership of Monotype Imaging, where it can be obtained today under the OpenType family.

As the world of print morphs into its digital incarnation, we see the same impetus behind the new generation of typographers, the ones born digital, but we see varying degrees of adherence to the “type wants to be free” movement.

Related articles

Bookmarking Book Art — Wendy Williams, updated 20180922

Books On BooksLeave a comment

Update: Williams participated in “Frankenstein 2018, The Liverpool & Knowsley Book Art Exhibition”

Wendy Williams ‘Notes on Nature’ portrays ‘the Monster’ as a ‘lover of nature, sensitive and curious’, something that Shelly hinted at in her original manuscript. Again, a very emotional angle to explore and one that really does make you want to reach into the display box and leaf through it.

Review by Moira Leonard – May 17, 2018
Declaration, Wendy Williams
Declaration, Wendy Williams

The “starflies” — those butterfly-shaped, W-shaped sheets of printed paper — are Wendy Williams’ signature (see the installation “King“).

In her 2010-11 “Travel Project,” she reached out to those who appreciate her work to put her signature to use with the Internet’s version of “Kilroy was here” as variously practiced by Travelocity and others in the “roaming gnome prank” and by film-maker Patrick Keiller and others with the fictional character Robinson.  Not that she cited those examples, which I mention here to suggest how the “Travel Project” speaks to the “intentional fallacy” anyway.

The intentional fallacy, which those educated in the latter half of the 20th century learned at W.K. Wimsatt’s and Monroe Beardsley’s knees, rests on the premise that “the design or intention of the author is neither available nor desirable as a standard for judging the success of a work of literary art.”  Sounds reasonable, but artists do have intentions, and if they state explicitly that those intentions are woven into the work at hand, what then?  How should we interpret the work?  

In one of her blog entries in 2010, Williams writes, “The travel project is going OK. People are so hesitant to take a photo of something that isn’t theirs.  I have got a few back, which is good as I can use them as examples to show what I’m after. I suppose February is a while off yet so there is plenty of time.”  What is Williams “after”?

No one has stolen her “gnome” to take it on a global trek.  The viewers of her art are not an army of enlistees or draftees intent on “marking” every tree, lampost and view with their cultural scent.  The artist recognizes that there may be discomfort and hesitation in her viewer/artist arising from the boundaries of intellectual property lines. Even in the face of stated intention, the viewer/critic hesitates.   In placing Williams’ starflies within the frame of photos taken around the world, what do the contributing participants become:  the brush and maulstick of the artist?  artists in our own “right” as well?

If the non-participating viewer or critic deems “Travel Project” a meaningful, artistic success, on what criteria is that success measured?   Its reflection of Williams’ intention? The quality of Williams’ curation — how does the critic measure that quality if the critic is not privy to the elements “curated out”?  The degree to which Williams’ signature integrates the many contributing hands or voices into the implicit hand or voice of a Robinsonian perspective?

By the standard of whether a work of art makes us think and whether it draws us back to itself, the “Travel Project” lays a fair claim.