Following up on my post of the other day about juror awards from the biannual Pyramid Atlantic Book Arts Fair, here’s another winner: Katie Baldwin of Queen Anne’s Revenge Press in Philadelphia. The book to the left is The River Parcenta. Her website is here. Even better (at least to me) are these pictures of her studio, taken by her intern Sarah Alfarhan.
Last year was the first year since I began making books that I didn’t attend a handmade book fair. But happily the Fine Press Book Association blog has been reporting on many of the ones I missed. Recently they posted the juror awards from the biannual Pyramid Atlantic Book Arts Fair last November. The winner of the Award for Artistic Excellence was Sarah Bryant and her book Biography. She says
“Biography” is an exploration of the chemical elements in the human body and the roles they play elsewhere in the world… Each spread is a diagram describing the elements as they exist on the periodic table, the earth’s crust, a variety of man-made weapons, medicines and tools, sea water, etc. Each element is identified as a specific colored rectangle and these rectangles continue through the diagrams. These diagrams sometimes difficult to decode, and toward the end are interrupted by blind stamped organic shapes and pressure printing.
The letterpress printing in the spread on above looks intriguing! She also sells the folios as prints. Take a look at her website and etsy shop.
When I was a teenager I listened to a lot of folk music and one of my favorites was Bob Dylan’s first album The Freewheeling Bob Dylan (I even still have the record). I never thought much about the picture on the cover until about two years ago when I heard this interview on Fresh Air with Suze Rotolo — turns out she’s the woman on the cover. She had just published a book about her relationship with Dylan, A Freewheelin’ Time: A Memoir of Greenwich Village in the Sixties. My interest was even more piqued when Rotolo said she makes artist’s books — you can see them on her website. Sadly Rotolo died this week, her obituary is here.
The Exquisite Book: 100 Artists Play a Collaborative Game. The book is a project based on the Surrealist game called the Exquisite Corpse. The book is split into ten “chapters.” For each chapter, ten different artists contributed one page. The first artist was given a few words to inspire their drawing. Each of the following artists only saw the page that immediately preceded their own. Each artist used images (and optionally, words) to create the continuation to the story, and the inspiration for the next artist in line. The process took approximately five months.
Each “chapter” is on a fold-out accordion page, so viewers can really see how each artist continued the story. There’s a video here showing a bit about the book and an example chapter.
Traumgedanken (Thoughts on dreams) is Mary Fischer‘s final year project at University of Applied Sciences, Augsburg, Germany. She says
To ease the access to the elusive topic [dreams], the book is designed as a model of a dream about dreaming. Analogue to a dream, where pieces of reality are assembled to build a story, it brings different text excerpts together. They are connected by threads which tie in with certain key words. The threads visualise the confusion and fragileness of dreams.
The pictures below give you an idea of what she’s done, but there are lots and lots here.
I’ve been making and selling the same reader diaries for over 5 years. They began life as an entry to a calendar show with the title “Marking Time” — I thought then that a traditional calendar was too rigid but as a notorious list maker I incorporated my list-making habit into my calendar entry with a diary for readers. With the new year, I’ve been looking over what I sell, and decided it was time for a reader diary redesign. Maybe I should call them “new and improved” but mostly they are just a bit different. Smaller (3-1/4″ x 5″ rather than 4″ x 7″) and with more room to write notes or comments. Click on a picture below to see the insides and more information.
|
 |
 |
|