Expressions in Book Arts opening

Last Friday was the opening for “Expressions in Book Arts” at the Mesa Library in Los Alamos. I went with a group of friends, and the best part was watching Bebe, a printer who is new to book arts, get very excited by the altered books she saw in the exhibit. The ones she liked the best were books that had been cut up in strange ways. I’ll be interested to see what she comes up with!
The gallery space at the library is long and narrow with only a few pedestals, and is configured for hanging wall art. Barb, who put the show together, was successfully inventive in using the space. On one wall, she hung a long white rain gutter to display the books. This past spring, I taught a workshop on woven bindings, and one attendee, Phoebe, submitted a book to the show using one of the weavings we learned. This is her book in the “gutter display.” The books might have a tendency to fall off a more conventional shelf, but the lip on the gutter kept them in place.

Phoebe’s book at the Mesa Library show

Julia and Dana collaborated on a book that didn’t require you to turn the pages, as all the pages are displayed at once. It’s a homage to TS Elliot’s The Wasteland and James Joyce’s Ulysses (both were published 100 years ago in 1912).

Julia and Dana’s book with open pages

This one is Barbara’s “The Magic of Light,” a start book with hand painted papers.

Barbara Parke Wolff, The Magic of Light

The show is up until the end of October.

luv 4evR

Matthew Chase-DanielLast month, Edie Tsong spoke at the monthly Santa Fe Book Arts Group meeting. She’s very interested in poetry, and she had a contest asking people to submit a love-letter written using text abbreviations. She then letterpress printed the result as a broadside. For those of us who don’t read the abbreviations well, here’s what it says:

Early this morning
before the sun
I rolled out of our bed to soak
olive slowly shifting to black
raven and owl chasing
each other in the meadow
white bird of night
black bird of day
endless conversation
swooping play
and dance
love M.

Read more about the poem and contest here.

Catku: Another Matchbox Book

My friend Tinker recently got a new cat, a black male called Lucky. She sent me exuberant emails about his antics, and I thought about the haiku & drawings I had done of my own little black cat. Figuring I’m on a roll with matchboxes, I put my drawings and haiku together in a tiny book housed in a handmade matchbox.
The book is an accordion-fold with spreads on both the front and back. Below is a photo of the front of the accordion. See more here.

catku-fb.jpg

Snow Poems

Last winter I noticed block letter poems in windows around town. They appeared to be stenciled onto the glass, and the poems had a haiku-like quality. This is the one I saw regularly, at an elementary school near my house.

poem by Joey Gurulé (3rd grade), Carlos Gilbert Elementary School

This past week, at the monthly Santa Fe Book Arts Group meeting, the organizer of these “snow poems,” Edie Tsong talked about the project — “a community poetry project that explored cities as ‘living books’ written by their inhabitants.” They asked people to submit poems and also held poetry workshops around town. They used 10″ high letters for the poems, affixing them to the windows (backwards), covering the window with snow spray, then removing the letters. I only saw the poems from the outside, but apparently the way the sun cast shadows inside the buildings was quite wonderful. Here are some more pictures, the first one showing the installation (removing the letters after spraying the snow). See more about the project here.

Installing snow poems
Installing a snow poem

A Snow poem

poem by Michelle Holland, “Doghouse” @ the Railyard
poem by Michelle Holland

Prompt Challenge: Agglutinate

The word for our group prompt challenge this month was agglutinate:

verb tr., intr.:
1. To form words by combining words or word elements.
2. To join or become joined as if by glue.
3. To clump or cause to clump, as red blood cells.

I went straight for the 2nd definition as it seemed like a good bookbinding term! For 5 years, I edited the quarterly magazine for a book arts group in California. The part I liked the best was doing the layout (soliciting articles, not so much). And I miss the layout challenges. So my plan for agglutinate was to make a zine or small magazine about glue.
Glue is messy, and I tried to incorporate that into my zine. But old habits and preferences are hard to break, and the pages are pretty block-y and standard.
Here’s the cover, followed by the table of contents and then one of the spreads. I did have a good time writing the little articles and thinking about all my own glue messes. Especially the time my husband and I installed a glue-down floor in my studio—the glue was thick mucus looking stuff and, as glue will, it got everywhere. But it didn’t help that I absently stepped on the glue brush in my stocking feet, getting glue all over the floor and in my own shoe.

The Glue Issue

TOC for The Glue Issue

The Glue Issue