May 2010 – Green Chair Press Blog

The Possessed

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!

Papercut Poem

This 2006 book by Dutch graphic studio floortje fluitsma uses paper cutouts applied to photographs to illustrate a short poem by Cralan Kelder. You can see larger photos of the book here.
From that website, I found the Paper Cut Expo — the site is in Dutch (you can translate it here) — there are links to all the artists in the expo and the introduction says

Referring to the sharp edges of paper, this exhibition shows that paper is not just something to print or write. Decoding is a mindset which also apply in the analog world. More than 15 international designers show innovative ways to deal with (still) one of the most important materials of our civilization.

Tocqueville’s Sewn Notebooks

I’ve read (and heard on NPR) several reviews of Leo Damrosch’s recent book Tocqueville’s Discovery of America, and the review in the New Yorker has a nice detail:

Tocqueville amassed thousands of pages of drafts as he worked on his book, and kept voluminous notes in little books that he folded and stitched by hand.

The picture with this post is from draft report by Alexis de Tocqueville and Gustave de Beaumont on the survey of penal institutions in New York. You can see more here.

Stitches

The theme of the last book I received in the journal project I’m participating in as part of the Santa Fe Book Arts Group was sewing and stitches. We are encouraged to sew directly on the pages. This particular journal is spiral bound, and contributors don’t have to worry about whether the book would close after adding in their thick sewn pieces.
I’ve been slowly recovering my dining room chairs, with my newly reconditioned sewing machine, and thought at first I would try to incorporate that project into my journal page contribution. But then I remembered the Guild of Book Workers downloadable pamphlet diagramming 60 book sewing structures and created by Betsy Palmer Eldridge for the Standards of Excellence conference in Toronto in 2008. I’ve been meaning to try some of the patterns and this seemed like the perfect opportunity.
I wanted people to see both the front and back of the stitching, so I glued a piece of tyvek to the back of the sheet I was going to sew, then punched my patterns through the two layers. This precaution was to strengthen the paper, making it more like a spine piece thickness and weight. I only had room for 4 sewing structures, and it was hard to select which ones I wanted to try. So I practiced about a dozen before settling on my final choices. I neglected to take a picture of the finished page before sending the journal on to the next person — but I found this post about embroidering on bread, which is much more festive then my own spine sewings!

Hyperactivitypography from A to Z

Who said typography had to be stiff and boring? Hyperactivitypography from A to Z is “is an activity book for typographers illustrated in a nostalgic vintage style to give it a sweet and childlike look. The book is packed with activities, ranging from silly to hard core nerdiness. It’s great to test your skills on and to learn new things while having fun.” The 196 page book is designed by Studio 3, an in-school design agency at the Graphic Design Department of Westerdals School of Communication in Oslo, Norway. You can flip through the book, print the pages or buy it here.
{first seen here}

Some Colors…

Another book I enjoyed from the Handmade/Homemade exhibit I saw last week was Some Colors Will Touch Regardless, with a poem by Travis Cebula and designed by Fact Simile Press. The press has a yearly chapbook contest, and Cebula was a runner-up. Fact Simile designs and publishes an artist book for the 3 winners.
The book is a simple Japanese-bound set of cascading pages, each colored at the bottom and hand torn. The color strips echo the title, and in addition, the poem on each page mentions the color on its edge. The presentation is a simple structure but elegantly dovetails the poetry inside.
Unfortunately the edition is sold out, but look here to see more books published by Fact Simile.