When I have a table at a book or craft fair, I’m usually manning it by myself and the day is too hectic to allow me to look at all the other vendor tables. I especially missed doing that at the BABA Book Jam fair a few weeks ago. When I got home and remembered that I hadn’t really looked at the copy of 500 Handmade Books I’d bought recently, I sat down with the book in my lap hoping to get the hit of book-artist-ness that I’d missed. It’s part of Lark Books’ 500 Series, essentially fat picture books of contemporary (mostly handmade) design on subjects ranging from chairs to bowls to 50 types of jewelry to dolls.
I was hoping to be inspired. But instead I had my usual reaction to most such treatments of artist’s books — oh to be able to touch the books and read the words! Yes, the photos are beautiful and most have 2 images per book. But the larger one is usually the cover (boring and tells nothing about the binding or the content) and the second one is too small to see any details. The books appear as static sculptures and completely miss what drew me to artist’s books in the first place — the interaction with the words and binding and paper and makeup of the book. A few sentences by the artist for each book, about the content or the binding, would have gone a long way to making this collection much more interesting and inspiring.
