Posts on books related to the book arts. Also available are an esoteric list of book-arts related books to consider—for their beauty, for instruction, for inspiration, for fun and a list of books on books from the book arts listserve (by title and author)
In 1900, Arthur Evans, an English archaeologist, digging in Knossos on the island of Crete, unearthed clay tablets with an unknown writing system for an unknown language. He called it Linear B, and it wasn’t until 1951 that the tablets were finally deciphered. Recently I read The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code by Margalit Fox, an account of how the language was deciphered. The book is so well written and so interesting that I actually gulped it down, reading it in pretty much one sitting! Written for a general audience, you don’t need to know about linguistics, puzzle solving, or any language other than English. She walks the reader through the complicated bits and turns the story into a detective tale. There are lots of fun facts in the book, but here’s one that is particularly bookbinding related. One reason the tablets Evans found were buried is that the city in Knossos had been destroyed, probably by fires. The tablets Evans found were clay and the heat of the fire had hardened them into pottery, conserving them for 3000 years. Fox explains that the tablets were meant to be short term storage—at the end of each year the information on them was copied to a more permanent substrate, maybe papyrus, and using water, the clay tablets were melted and reused. Paradoxically, the hardened clay survived, the papyrus didn’t. Linear B is available as a digital font, see below for an example. Fox’s book is really great, I highly recommend it.
Last week i attended Focus on Book Arts, a 5 day conference outside Portland Oregon. At the associated book arts shop, as i paged through a spiral bound book entitled “A Compendium of Guild Project Pages,” put out by The North Redwoods Book Arts Guild, a woman sidled up to me and said “membership in that book group is the best bargain—they have a monthly newsletter that always includes a how-to bookmaking project.” As I stood in line to buy the book (a bargain at $10 for 38 projects), another woman said the same thing. So I’m passing on the advice. Check out their website and become a member.
John Green makes what he calls “book origami” — he “up-cycle(s) old books and make them into pieces of art. (He) can make words, symbols and designs just by folding the pages.” You can see some of his designs in his Etsy shop. He also has a how-to ebook that includes templates and patterns you can make yourself.
Photographer Cara Barer has self-published a “photography picture book with a tale of the demise of the printed word as we know it.” On her website she writes about the process of making her book art:
I realized I owned many books that were no longer of use to me, or for that matter, anyone else. Would I ever need “Windows 95?” After soaking it in the bathtub for a few hours, it had a new shape and purpose….Half a century ago, students researched at home with the family set of encyclopedias, or took a trip to the library to find needed information. Now, owning a computer, and connecting to the internet gives a student the ability to complete a research paper without ever going near a library. I have fully embraced that technology, and would not want to be without it, but, I also fear that it is rapidly leading us to rely less and less on the reference books common in the last two centuries…With the discarded books that I have acquired, I am attempting to blur the line between objects, sculpture, and photography.
You can see a preview of the book here and see larger versions of the photographs of her bookworks here.
I picked up a copy of Kate Carlisle’s first book Homicide in Hardcover because it’s subtitled “A Bibliophile Mystery.” The heroine, Brooklyn Wainwright, is a book restorer in San Francisco. She grew up in a commune in Sonoma (run by Guru Bob) where everyone has improbably become millionaires. As the novel opens, she attends the opening of a local museum’s exhibit featuring her mentor’s latest project, only to find him shot and dying in his workroom. The book he’s been working on, a copy of Goethe’s Faust, is said to be cursed and “caused” more than one death. Brooklyn is asked by the museum to finish the restoration and she agrees thinking it might help her figure out who killed her friend. The story moves along at a rapid pace, narrated by Brooklyn in a flippant tone. She portrays herself as independent and self-sufficient, but when the mysterious (and very handsome) security agent, Derek Stone, shows up, she turns into a giggling 12 year old with a crush. Book conservation and restoration and the promised bibliophile aspect of the book are unfortunately lacking and disappointing. There are also some odd inconsistencies: her mentor is supposed to be restoring the Faust and has 2 notebooks filled with his notes about it, but when Brooklyn gets the book, no restoration has been done on it… So it’s really a cross between a romance novel and a crime novel, and a silly one at that. But I was looking for light reading in the evening, especially this week when I’ve been doing a lot of cleanup for winter in my yard and so tired about all I’m good for is propping my feet up and reading a silly book.
The Possessed is really a book about reading, rather than bookmaking, but since it’s the start of summer, when I typically do most of my reading, I thought I’d mention this one as I thoroughly enjoyed it. The subtitle is “Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them” and it’s a collection of essays by Elif Bautman on her graduate studies in Russian literature. It’s part memoir, travelogue and literary critique, as she learns Russian and Uzbek, travels to exotic but dreary Samarkand, and recounts her many misadventures. The Russian literature I read in high school and college was so full of angst that I was a bit hesitant about this book before starting in, but the essays are so funny and engaging that I may just have to tackle Anna Karenina again!
In 1900, Arthur Evans, an English archaeologist, digging in Knossos on the island of Crete, unearthed clay tablets with an unknown writing system for an unknown language. He called it Linear B, and it wasn’t until 1951 that the tablets were finally deciphered. Recently I read The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code by Margalit Fox, an account of how the language was deciphered. The book is so well written and so interesting that I actually gulped it down, reading it in pretty much one sitting! Written for a general audience, you don’t need to know about linguistics, puzzle solving, or any language other than English. She walks the reader through the complicated bits and turns the story into a detective tale.
There are lots of fun facts in the book, but here’s one that is particularly bookbinding related. One reason the tablets Evans found were buried is that the city in Knossos had been destroyed, probably by fires. The tablets Evans found were clay and the heat of the fire had hardened them into pottery, conserving them for 3000 years. Fox explains that the tablets were meant to be short term storage—at the end of each year the information on them was copied to a more permanent substrate, maybe papyrus, and using water, the clay tablets were melted and reused. Paradoxically, the hardened clay survived, the papyrus didn’t.
The story moves along at a rapid pace, narrated by Brooklyn in a flippant tone. She portrays herself as independent and self-sufficient, but when the mysterious (and very handsome) security agent, Derek Stone, shows up, she turns into a giggling 12 year old with a crush. Book conservation and restoration and the promised bibliophile aspect of the book are unfortunately lacking and disappointing. There are also some odd inconsistencies: her mentor is supposed to be restoring the Faust and has 2 notebooks filled with his notes about it, but when Brooklyn gets the book, no restoration has been done on it…