I’m still catching up on remaking the books I sold out of over the holidays. This week it’s Catku, my miniature matchbox book with haiku & drawings about my cat. I’m in the process of making 20 of them, which is not just the book but the little box. I’ve got all the pieces cut and I’m about 1/2 done assembling them. The photo shows my progress—the box sleeves are in the foreground, the box trays are in the back.
This past week-end I took Carol Pallesen’s Tiny Handwriting workshop. In two days she taught us 3 alphabets and we made 3 tiny books. I signed up ostensibly to work on my own handwriting but I got a lot more. Best of all I discovered my handwriting isn’t all that bad if I slow down and enjoy the task! The first alphabet she showed us was a style of monoline italic lettering—letters written with a regular pen or pencil and that don’t have thick and thin lines as a calligraphic script would. She went over each letter of the alphabet, both upper and lower case (or, as Carol called them, majuscule and minuscule), showing us how to make the strokes and emphasizing the similarities in the various letters and the proportions we should try to maintain. Here’s an example of Nautilus Monoline Italic, which is similar to her alphabet.
Over lunch I wrote a page of pangrams, trying to mimic her letters. “s” was really hard. And getting my letters to slant (she said about 5 degrees) was even harder as my habit is to write letters as vertical as possible. Then we made a little 3/4″ square book and a tiny origami box to put it in. The book was dead simple to make—the spine was made out of a tiny brass ornamental hinge from Home Depot and the covers from 2 little pieces cut from a scrap of leather. The inside was an accordion-folded strip of paper. Below are the pieces, and you can see my attempt at the monoline letters (the words are far apart as I put one word per panel of the accordion). Following that are the finished book and box. (I’ll write about the rest of the workshop over the coming week.)
This is Katherine Venturelli’s book “Alchemic Calculations”, which uses a Turkish Map Fold. She says it “integrates some of the archetypal symbols from my on-going series, “universal language”; the symbolic images are my text. I fused a friend’s beautiful mathematical notations with etched spirals at each of the folds of the traditional accordion structure. Inspired by the medieval science of alchemy, included is the metallic element of silver leaf- a symbol of power or process of transforming something common into something precious.” See more of her books here.
Recently I read a review of the movie “Tim’s Vermeer,” which details inventor Tim Jenison’s efforts to duplicate the painting techniques of Johannes Vermeer using optics and lenses. The review mentions David Hockney’s book Secret Knowledge which covers the same subject. Since the movie hasn’t shown up here in Santa Fe, I got Hockney’s book from the library instead.
Hockney’s premise is that European artists used lens and optical tricks to produce paintings that are almost photo-realistic, long before the invention of the camera. To investigate this idea, he covered the walls of his studio with a time line of reproductions of Old Masters and started studying them. The book takes the reader along his journey to find clues to back up his theory. The first half is primarily visual, full of good color reproductions, as he walks the reader through his observations on painting between 1400 and 1500 and how there was a giant leap toward realistic portraiture. Whether or not you believe Hockney’s thesis that it wasn’t just artistic genius but optics that helped produce the art, he makes you look at the paintings in a new way. He says at the beginning that easily attainable full color reproductions and Photoshop have made verifying his thesis possible. And that the book is the perfect medium to present his argument (rather than a video or museum exhibit or even a lecture):
You bring your own time to a book, it is not imposed, as with film or TV. With a book you can stop to think something through, or go back and look at something again if you need to.
The rest of the book is written material to back up his theory, most of it in a very hard-to-read font, which wasn’t at all pleasurable to read. But the front half is a lovely treat for the eyes!
Knowing how I like ampersands, Karen Cutter sent me a pointer to this clamp—or, as the maker calls it, a Clampersand. They also say it is “typographically superior to the c-clamp.” Check it out here.
While the east coast of the US has been buffeted by storm after storm this winter, here in the Southwest winter has been a non-event. We had one big snow storm at the end of November, and then nothing. January and February were dry and unseasonably warm. While my friends on the east coast can’t wait for spring to start, I’m lamenting the end of winter. There’s a magical silence on days when it snows here that is so rejuvenating, at least for me, and I only got one or two of those back in November. But today I woke to an unexpected overnight snow fall. And the snow has continued, big fat flakes falling lazily from the grey clouds, all morning. Above is a picture of a little hill in my yard where I’ve planted daffodils bulbs—and in the middle are the first shoots coming up in the snow.
Tonight we turn the clocks back for daylight savings time. Or is it daylight saving time? And should there be a hyphen (daylight-saving time)? According to dictionary.com, all three are acceptable. As is “daylight saving” without the “time”. Whichever way, I prefer light in the morning rather than the evening.