Book Collecting: Pulp Painting

Klage by Hesse, printed by John GerardAt the Codex Book Fair last week, I stopped by book binder John DeMerritt’s table to say hi and admire his wife Nora’s new book. We started talking about paper, and John said to be sure to look at the pulp painted papers made by John Gerard at the table across from him. I was immediately entranced by the beautiful papers and bought the chapbook on the left. It’s very simply made — an accordion text block with a letterpress printed poem is pamphlet sewn into the covers, but it shows off the paper so well!
To make a pulp painting, specially prepared pulps are applied to a freshly made sheet of handmade paper, sometimes with the aid of stencils, sometimes freehand, so that when it all dries, the finished sheet of paper fully incorporates the image. Several years ago, we had an article in the Ampersand about Claire Van Vliet’s large pulp painted broadsides — you can see two of them online: What evaluation we make of a particular stretch of land… and this glorious one called A Scribe of Kloster Eibingen with pulp painting, letterpress and silkscreen.
I seem to be in a poetry reading mood recently — the Hesse poem in my new acquisition is in German, but I found a translation online by Joseph Knecht:

Lament
by Hermann Hesse

No permanence is ours; we are a wave
That flows to fit whatever form it finds:
Through day or night, cathedral or the cave
We pass forever, craving form that binds.

Mold after mold we fill and never rest,
We find no home where joy or grief runs deep.
We move, we are the everlasting guest.
No field nor plow is ours; we do not reap.

What God would make of us remains unknown:
He plays; we are the clay to his desire.
Plastic and mute, we neither laugh nor groan;
He kneads, but never gives us to the fire.

To stiffen to stone, to persevere!
We long forever for the right to stay.
But all that ever stays with us is fear,
And we shall never rest upon our way.

You Are Here

I saw a number of books with map themes at the Codex Book Fair last week. But my best treat was at lunch before the fair, when my friend Sharon produced 2 books to show me: You Are Here: Personal Geographies and Other Maps of the Imagination by Katharine Harmon and The Atlas of Experience by Louise Van Swaaij & Jean Klare.
In You Are Here, Harmon says “maps intrigue us, perhaps none more than those that ignore mapping conventions” and then asks what makes a map an accurate depiction of the world and does accuracy matter? She answers with essays, quotations, poems and, yes, lots of maps. She’s built “an idiosyncratic collection of maps that transcend the norm, either because of the mapmaker’s personal viewpoint, or sense of humor, or ingenuity, or all of the above. These are maps of the imagination, as all maps are, only more so.” There are hours and hours of looking to be done with this book, but at the bottom of this post is one Sharon especially pointed out to me: “Shan map relating to a border dispute between (British) Burma and China along the Nam Mao River”. You can read an excerpt from the book and see a dozen or so maps in this article from Duke Magazine.
The Atlas of Experience is written and drawn by 2 Dutch cartographers using traditionally map-making conventions, but charting such “lands” as Secrets, Knowledge, Bad Habits, Home, Boredom, Mountains of Work, and Haute Cuisine. Each map is accompanied with quotes and commentary.

Shan map

Poetry and Valentine’s Day

Oh Child by Tony FitzpatrickSeveral years ago, in a fit of self-improvement, I subscribed to Poetry Magazine. They were having a 1/2-off sale, so I figured for $17, how could I go wrong? There’s not just poetry, but commentary, many letters to the editor, and even artwork (and the font face and layout are beautiful.) Granted some of the poetry and the nitpicking in the letters are unintelligible to me, but every issue has at least one thing I read and return to again.
The Feb 2009 issue has a section of collages by Tony Fitzpatrick (see on the right). Fitzpatrick is both a collage artist and poet, and he often includes his poetry in his artwork. The introduction to the collages in Poetry quotes Fitzpatrick:

“We love in poetry but, unfortunately, we live in prose. Sometimes the two are not congruent. What we remember of love is usually a fiction. What we aspire to is haiku: short, sweet, perfect.”

The Poetry Magazine website has a selection of love poems celebrating Valentine’s Day both to read and listen to. From the current issue, my favorite is a very black love poem, an anti-Valentine, if you will, by Kim Addonizio called Weaponry. But more in keeping with the spirit of the day is this one, by Stephen Dunn

Connubial

Because with alarming accuracy
she’d been identifying patterns
I was unaware of—this tic, that
tendency, like the way I’ve mastered
the language of intimacy
in order to conceal how I felt—

I knew I was in danger
of being terribly understood.

CPSIA Update

Pile of booksIn this post, I wrote about the new law in the US that required, after Feb 10, 2009, that all children’s products sold in the US must be certified they meet specific lead levels. As written, the law includes books, and is retroactive, so existing and used books would also need to be tested and certified. There was lots of confusion and concern from libraries, thrift stores, publishers and non-profits about how exactly the law effects them (would libraries need to close their childrens’ rooms?)
Since I wrote that post, the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC, which administers the law) has said they would “not impose penalties against anyone for making, importing, distributing or selling” a list of specified products, including “an ordinary children’s book printed after 1985.” That’s good news for me — my flip books are new. However most libraries have lots of books printed before 1985 in their children’s section and it’s not unusual for small independent booksellers to have old children’s books as well. In the extreme, there are reports on Etsy of thrift stores just throwing away their older children’s books. Publishers and booksellers submitted enough evidence to convince the CPSC that “ordinary children’s books” printed before 1985 don’t contain lead, and I hope they are able to further persuade them to exempt pre-1985 too — it would be a shame not to be able to buy children’s books that are now out of print.

Pictorial Webster’s

I had a wonderful time exploring all the books on offer at the Codex Foundation Book Fair in Berkeley the other day. My favorite book (although it’s hard to choose just one) is Quercus Press’ Pictorial Webster’s — a 400+ page leather-bound book printed using the original wood engravings and copper electrotypes of the Merriam-Webster dictionaries of the 19th Century — the 1859 & 1864 editions of the American Dictionary of the English Language (the 1st illustrated dictionary in America) and the 1890 International Dictionary. I think I first saw this as a work-in-progress when I had a table at a book fair in Seattle, about 5 years ago. It was wonderful to see the printing finished and the book bound, and even better to hold it in my hands and page though it.
The Quercus Press website has a lot of information about how they obtained the images (borrowed from Yale), how they selected the order, and how they were printed (using a linotype and letterpress). There are also lots of photos of page spreads. Here’s a page from the finished book:

Pictorial Webster’s