Green Chair Press Blog

Book Traces

My friend Marilyn recently showed me a book she made, with reproductions of title pages from books she owned. Many had inscriptions—some to her, some to others from her second-hand books. That reminded me of the article I read recently in the Atlantic called “What is a Book? Not just a bag of words, but a thing held by human hands.” It talks about the Book Traces Project, a project to track down & digitize the human markings in 19th-century books. The idea seems to be that the marginalia and underlining in books is just as important as the text.

Letterform Archive

I had a nice time the other day browsing through the images on the Letterform Archive. Here are a few I liked:

Carnerio da Silva, detail of plate from Breve Tratado Theorico das Letras Typograficas, Lisbon, 1803, 19.6 x 15.4 cm

Oswald Cooper, A Calendar for 1930, Bertsch & Cooper, Chicago, 16.5 x 21.5 cm

Their Logo

Landays

A “landay” is a 2-line, 22 syllable poem, a “folk couplet…an oral and often anonymous scrap of song created by and for mostly illiterate people: the more than twenty million Pashtun women who span the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan.” My friend Suzanne has a book of them, translated into English, called I Am the Beggar of the World, compiled by Eliza Griswold. They are sometimes funny but most often heart-wrenching snippets of life in a male-dominated war-torn country. Below are a few from the book. Griswold’s introduction to the form (with many more examples) is here and there’s a review on Slate here.

How much simpler can love be?
Let’s get engaged now. Text me.

When sisters sit together, they always praise their brothers.
When brothers sit together, they sell their sisters to others.

You sold me to an old man, father.
May God destroy your home, I was your daughter.

Many Ampersands

I took over editing the PCBA Ampersand in the fall of 2004. The first issue was a book arts resource guide, and was put together by me and my friend Cathy. We had a lot of fun with the layout. In particular, with the back cover, where we did a shaped ampersand filled with “An esoteric list of still more books to consider—for their beauty, for instruction, for inspiration, for fun.” That’s the result below, and I’ve put this list in a more readable form here.
I stumbled across this the other day, when I was dusting the shelf holding my copies of Ampersand. I’d completely forgotten how I did this in InDesign. It’s 10 years later, and my InDesign/Illustrator/Photoshop skills are markedly better. After a while I found myself fooling around with a shaped poster that was all about ampersands. The result is the second photo below. You can see more pictures, as well as one with black instead of white text here.

Flag Book

Last weekend I helped take down a book arts exhibit in Rowe NM at the AMS Community Art Gallery in Rowe NM. I took a bunch of pictures before putting the books away. This is Madeleine Durham’s “Whimsical Flag Book” made using transparent flags with pointy black ends. One great thing about the book is when you close it up, some of those pointy flags stick out of the covers…

Madeleine Durham’s Flag Book

Paper Mache Books

I saw these paper mache “books” at Joann’s the other day, and I wondered what people did with them.

In my search, I found this book “drawer”…

and a blog post by Kelly Rowe about making a “vintage book” from the form I saw at Joann’s.