Bookmaking – Page 60 – Green Chair Press Blog

Tape Brothers

When I was designing To a Friend Going Blind, I wanted to use a sewing measuring tape for the binding. A conventional measuring tape, bought from a sewing supply store, was too thick and too expensive for an edition of 50. Then somewhere I found rolls of tape that looked like a measuring tape. (As a binding it was strong, but a pain to prepare — I had to unroll the tape and apply it to tissue paper first as it had adhesive on the back, then cut the blank top off by hand.) When I packed up my studio in December, I found 1/2 a roll, and carted it here to Santa Fe, although I’m not sure why.
When I found that 1/2 roll, I had already packed up my copy of the finished book, so I couldn’t go back and look at it. And of course I quickly forgot that I wanted to look at it again… until the other day when I read an article in Salon called “The craft that consumed me” where the author mentions making duct tape wallets and says “Check out TapeBrothers.com, which features an extraordinary selection, even my most-loathed pattern of all time after perhaps animal print anything: camouflage.” So I did. The measuring tape tape is filed under “Artist Tapes.” Seems like a good resource to know about. Then I went off and found my copy of To a Friend Going Blind and re-read the poem with a cup of tea.

Book Carvings

Australian artist Kylie Stillman carves images in the sides of books. See here work here. I first saw a mention of it here. Once I looked around the web for more references, I found this great comment from Lee Kottner about Stillman: “Her book stack carvings remind me of the elaborate fore-edge paintings in their distortion of the book. In this case, instead of fanning the book to create a canvas, she disregards the boundaries of the book, like covers, to make a sculptural surface.”

The Art of the Book V

Every year the Donna Seager Gallery in San Rafael, CA has an exhibit of bookworks. This is the fifth year. In a recent issue of the PCBA Ampersand, Emily Martin calls Seager “the patron saint of the artist book.” The exhibit is from June 4-July 31 and is also online. Unfortunately not all the photos are linked to larger pictures and more info, but of the ones that do, most show multiple bookworks for the artist.

The Tell Tale Heart

Recently a post on the Etsy Bookbinding Street Team blog had some very intriguing photos of Red Pumpkin Studio’s book. It’s hand-written, hand-bound and inspired by Edgar Allen Poe’s short story The Tell-Tale Heart. You can see the beautiful calligraphy here (which made me sigh and wish I could pen such gorgeous ampersands!). Jennifer talks about making the book on her blog — I especially like her cover treatment!

Unseen Hands

Last weekend I stumbled upon an online exhibit from Princeton University Library’s Graphic Arts Collection called Unseen Hands: Women Printers, Binders and Book Designers. The introduction to the exhibit starts

Women have been involved in printing and the making of books ever since these crafts were first developed. Even before the advent of movable type, there was a strong tradition of women producing manuscripts in western European religious houses. In the Convent of San Jacopo di Ripoli in Florence, we find the first documented evidence, in 1476, of women working as printers. Girls and women were often trained by their fathers or husbands to assist in printing businesses, and there are many instances from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries of women taking over and managing these enterprises upon the early demise of their male relatives.

It’s nicely arranged — you can look at the women featured by name, occupation, thumbnails of their work or on a timeline. Links lead you to a short summary of each woman’s work and more pictures.
Pictured above, women setting type at a monotype machine at the Riverside Press, Cambridge, 1911 (seen here).

Fall and Winter PCBA Ampersands

Yvonne Tsang has taken over editing the PCBA’s journal, Ampersand. The 2 latest issues are now available for purchase.

The Fall 2009 issue includes a 10:1 Scale model of the Vandercook Universal 1 Hand Test Press for you to construct as well as Johnny Carrer’s article, Translating a Complex Fine Press Edition into a Trade Edition, about the process of collaborating with Chronicle Books to produce the trade edition of his fine press book, “Pictorial Webster’s.” See the entire table of contents here.

The Winter 2010 issue includes an article on the origin of the California Job Case and Debbie Kogan’s interview with 3 book artists who make their own paper for their books. See the entire table of contents here.