Sewn Books – Page 5 – Green Chair Press Blog

Book Collages

I always enjoy looking at Lisa Kokin‘s book art. This is one of her “book collages,” Love Always Juanita. She has a nice explanation of her process

In my never-ending quest to find different ways to eviscerate books, I stumbled upon the book collage. First I find a book which interests me, either for some element of text, image or marginalia, or for the look of the book itself. Sometimes I remove some of the pages and glue and/or sew the book open to the particular page of interest. Other times I remove all the pages and use the inside covers as the collage surface. I build upon what initially interests me by layering images and text from the same or other books, found photos, and other small objects, using a variety of collage and transfer techniques. Often I scrape away and dig into the surface as well. Many of the books have sculptural protrusions and extensions because I feel that the shape of books should not be limited to a rectangle.

I am particularly attracted to the lowest of literary life forms, the Discarded Library Book. My favorites have “DISCARD” stamped on the inside front covers, and as if this isn’t insult enough, “DISCARD” stamped here and there on the inside as well. The largest number of book collages come from a series of citizenship workbooks tossed away by my local public library and rescued from extinction by an acquaintance who works there. These little volumes make all sorts of statements and promises about our country which are belied by history and current events. “Why do we elect honest men to office?” A statement like this is all I need to get my itchy fingers cutting, pasting, altering and subverting.

Cherry Blossom Trees along a River

I stumbled onto these lovely fabric books the other day. They are tiny— 2 3/4 by 3 1/8 inches—and have really lovely names. Cherry Blossom Trees along a River, Forest of the Night… The fabric is hand-dyed, using indigo and natural plants. See them here (the website is mostly in Japanese, but the book arts section has lots of images).

Exposed Spines

Jody Alexander makes fabric books that cry out to be touched. She’s a bookbinder and paper maker in Santa Cruz, CA. These are from a series she calls “Exposed Spines.” These are new to me— the ones I’ve seen in person are from a series of “Ghost Books”. I wrote about those back in 2008 and there’s more about them here. And finally there’s more on Jody’s website

Embroidered Ledger

When I see books like this, I wish I had this much patience for sewing! This is an embroidered composition book by Candace Hicks. See more of her work here.

Book Clutches

Olympia Le-Tan designs handbags (I guess you’d really call them clutches) with embroidered recreations of book covers from first-edition novels like Moby Dick, The Catcher in the Rye and Lord Jim. The collection is titled “You Can’t Judge A Book By Its Cover,” and is inspired by Le-Tan’s affection for collecting old books. Le Tan says “I was thinking there were all these beautiful books around and they were being forgotten with everybody on the Internet, so I made it so that you can carry them around.” You can see lots of the book bags here.

Beyond Perfect-Bound

The Poetry Foundation recently posted an interview on their website with book artist Jen Bervin and poet Nancy Kuhl about small publishers producing poetry chapbooks — both the traditional form of pages sewn along a fold as well as more complicated artist’s books. It’s interesting for what they have to say about the state of the chapbook, although I spent more time exploring the links within the article to various bookworks.
The page detail to the left is from Jen Bervin’s The Desert — “a poem (she) wrote by sewing row by row, line by line, across 130 pages of John Van Dyke’s, The Desert: Further Studies in Natural Appearances (1901).” Bervin uses sewing in many of her books — her website has good pictures and text about her editions. She talks in the interview and on her website about the small chapbooks Emily Dickinson made of her poems, as well as Dickinson’s use of punctuation and marks to indicate variants in her work. The Dickinson Fascicle is Bervin’s artist book in response to Dickinson’s work. Bervin also has an online-only artist book, A Non-Breaking Space.