A few months ago, as part of my prompt challenge group, I did a mockup of a book using an Emily Dickinson poem. Since then I’ve been reading about Dickinson with the thought of expanding that book. One of the first things I learned was that Dickinson bound clean copies of her poems into little booklets (now called fascicles) with a simple stitch of string through the spine.

Jan Bervin has studied these fascicles and was interested in the marks Dickinson made on the pages — she uses a + to indicated variant words, words that could be substituted to change the meaning of the poem. Bervin says

The variant words are preceded by the + mark and often appear listed in clusters after the poem but before the horizontal line Dickinson drew to signal the end of a poem. To read the variants, you move backwards through the poem trying to find the point of insertion, the corollary word or phrase (preceded by a +) that the variants refer to in the poem. They are sometimes quite close in meaning to the marked word, but in other instances, they are as far ranging as “+ world, + selves + sun.”

Bervin used these marks as the basis for quilts (see picture above). She says

I wanted to see what patterns formed when all of the marks in a single fascicle, Dickinson’s grouping of poems, remained in position, isolated from the text, and were layered in one composite field of marks. The works I created were made proportionate to the scale of the original manuscripts but quite large—about 8′ wide by 6′ high—to convey the exact gesture of the individual marks.

Below are two more photos of her quilts (click on them to see much larger photos). You can see more here. In addition, Granery Books, in conjunction with Bervin, made an artist’s book called The Dickinson Composites.

I’ve spent a very pleasant hour today looking at the books submitted to the MCBA Prize — a biannual competition from the Minnesota Center for the Book Arts.

I got to look carefully at one of the finalists — Amy Borezo’s book “Labor/Movement (seven workers)” — last fall, when she was at the table next to mine at the Pyramid Atlantic book fair. It’s the first picture below.

I’ve just barely gotten started looking at all the entries. Two that immediately caught my eye are below Amy’s book. I got stuck for a long time looking at Accounting by Maureen Cummings, as I’ve been working on an expanded version of the book I did recently in my prompt challenge series.

Amy Borezo, “Labor/Movement (seven workers)”

Maureen Cummins, “Accounting”

Scott Helmes, “One Thousand Haiku”: A book consisting of ten visual haiku poems, one each to a page. Each page is divided into three segments, one segment per line. The poems are bound together, thus enabling the reader to turn one line at a time. This results in one thousand possible poems (10 x 10 x 10), determined by the reader’s actions.

You can see all the books submitted here.

From the Heavenly Monkey Books blog, I found a link to the University of Toronto’s exhibit A Death Greatly Exaggerated: Canada’s Thriving Small and Fine Press. Sadly there was only one picture, but it’s a great one. The tunnel book above is by William Rueter (The Aliquando Press) and seems to be called “Gutenberg’s Press,” showing off Gutenberg’s workshop. Click on the image above to see a much larger image. Rueter is quite prolific — see this post about an exhibit of his work (he’s published 108 books and 82 broadsides in the 50 years of the press). See Aliquando’s other books here.