This altered book, by Malena Valcárcel, is inspired by an Emily Dickinson poem. Notice that the poem encircles the book shelf…
There is no frigate like a book
To take us lands away,
Nor any coursers like a page
Of prancing poetry.
This traverse may the poorest take
Without oppress of toll;
How frugal is the chariot
That bears a human soul!
Nicholas Jones is a book sculpture who carves, cuts, sculpts, folds, tears and sews old books. Here are a few examples, but you can see all his work here.
High Coup, a sculpted book
Bookworm Ensconced, a torn and sewn book
Christmas Island, a cut book
Mary Delany (1770-1788) was an English artist who made “paper-mosaicks,” intricate paper collages of flowers, that are now in the British Museum. Her great-great-great niece wrote about her method:
With the plant specimen set before her she cut minute particles of coloured paper to represent the petals, stamens, calyx, leaves, veins, stalk and other parts of the plant, and, using lighter and darker paper to form the shading, she stuck them on a black background. By placing one piece of paper upon another she sometimes built up several layers and in a complete picture there might be hundreds of pieces to form one plant. It is thought she first dissected each plant so that she might examine it carefully for accurate portrayal…
When my mother told me she was reading The Paper Garden, Molly Peacock’s book about Delany, I found some of the mosaicks online and was quite amazed—they look more like paintings than collages or paper cutouts. So I got the book from the library to find out more.
First off, the book is beautifully produced. It’s approx. 8″ x 5″, narrower than most books, with a nice feel in the hands, and the pages are thick high quality stock. The page layout itself is very pleasing, with the page numbers in the wide outside margin about 2″ from the bottom of the page. The reproductions of Delany’s mosaicks are lovely. Clearly a lot of care was taken with the book design. I wish I could say as much for the writing. Delany’s life is compelling; she was an avid correspondent so there’s lots of information about her life, opinions and avocation. Peacock also sets the stage well, giving lots of details about 18th century life for the well-do-to in Britain. However she not only interjects her own story, comparing her life to Delany’s, but her use of 21st century slang seems out of place and jarring. I quickly figured out to skip the parts about the author and concentrate on Delany. It might be that the relative’s book quoted above (Mrs. Delany: Her Life and Flowers) would be a better read.
Below are several of Delany’s flower portraits.
Cute typewriter calendar from SkyGoodies. It’s a “printable”—you download a PDF and assemble it yourself.
On the way to looking for something else, I ran into a post with this wonderful photograph. It’s a book from the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, and the blog writer says about her visit to the museum:
“One of the most wonderful things, in my opinion, was a huge (C19?) pattern book, full of all the different stencil patterns that could be printed onto fabric to make into a kimono….We also saw some original stencils such as would have been used to make these samples. They were made out of several layers of mulberry paper, and glued together with persimmon tannin. It must have been such an effort just to make the stencils, let alone print the fabric as well.”
Click here to see a much larger version of the photo. Of course then I spent a very happy hour searching for kimono pattern books, oblivious to the task I had tried to accomplish in the first place!
Last month I wrote about using What the Font to identify a typeface. Here’s the image I gave to “What The Font”
The answer was a modern digital font, Dexterous.
Steve Saxe wrote to remind me that the specimen I was trying to identify was from a pamphlet printed from metal type, not a digital publication. While such a font search might point me in a general direction, I should have looked further and found the foundry type face name. Here’s what Steve wrote, including a bit of history of the face that was used in the specimen, Art Gothic:
Type designs cannot be copyrighted (though they once were, in the US at least.) But names can be copyrighted, so those who wish to copy or pirate a design usually think up a new name for it. (For instance, “Swiss” for “Helvetica.”) Dan X. Solo did this with a lot of ornamented typefaces. This causes great confusion, since some popular faces have been arbitrarily given several names. In this case, forget “Dexterous.” For that matter, forget “Identifont” when you are dealing with metal typefaces – it may work for digital faces, but the sample given was clearly printed before the twentieth century.
Art Gothic was designed by Gustave Schroeder of the Central Type Foundry, St. Louis. It was patented 17 May 1887 in the name of Carl Schraubstadter, owner of the Central Type Foundry (US design patent D17350)
From Nineteeth-Century Designers and Engravers of Type by William E. Loy, edited by Alastair M. Johnston and Stephen O. Saxe:
“It may be said he [Schroeder] originated a new departure in letter designing, and his first series, the well-known Art Gothic, was the most severely criticized and the most highly praised of any style in recent years. It soon made its way in popular favor, and has been bought and worn out three or four times in some offices. The suggestion for this series was discovered by Mr. St. John on the label of a soap box.”
David MacMillan also wrote me about the post, and pointed me to his website, a list of metal types, most with specimen sheets and the history of the face, here. In particular, there’s a scan of a specimen sheet for Art Gothic here.