Protective boxes and cases for storage of manuscripts and printed books have a long history. Daniel Solander’s invention at the end of the 18th century was so significant that today his name identifies his box. The 20th century has seen a great development of the book conservation practice, including box-making. Influenced by anti-restoration beliefs and gifted with remarkable skills, British and Irish master bookbinders have created wooden boxes that retain their original function many years after their construction. In this paper, examples of wooden boxes are presented and their features are discussed. Research into book conservation techniques increased after the Florence flood in 1966. The box-making practice was also influenced and the Phased-Box evolved shortly after the flood. A glimpse into the history of the Phased-Box allows one to observe recent changes of this box-style.

Gianlorenzo Pignatti, “Boxes for the Housing and Protection of Books: Observations on their History and Development”, e-conservation magazine 23 (2012) pp. 32-46

     Rapunzel, 2009, Dennis Yuen

Book artist Dennis Yuen publishes CaiLun one of the earliest paper and bookbinding blogs.

Heide Hatry is a New York-based German neo-conceptualist artist who also has a life-long engagement with printed matter, initially as a maker of book-works, followed by a seventeen-year career as an antiquarian bookseller. Chapter 1 presents works by over 40 artists that Hatry has brought together around Franz Kafka’s injunction that “a book must be an ice-axe to break the frozen seas of our souls.” This exhibition is a slightly smaller version of what she originally curated for the Pierre Menard Gallery in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in March of 2011.

Chapter 2

Books as Visual Objects

Doug Buebe, Robert Kelly, Michael Maranda, Susan Mills

Curated by Peter Dykhuis

Not all publications function as book-like objects in the traditional sense. Artists Doug Beube, Michael Maranda and Susan Mills create systems-based work composed of multiple units that extrapolate on readings embedded in existing visual arts publications and, in doing so, consider the relationships between covers, pages and content. In addition, the eleven books on wooden lecterns that constitute Robert Kelly’s Minutia suggest a non-linear, visual narrative that also becomes scripts for additional performative presentations.

Susan Mills’ two accordion books are directly referential to Joseph Albers’ iconic 1963 publication Interaction of Color in which he explores formal relationships in colour theory. In her work titled Interaction of Tantra, Mills excises illustrations and texts from the recent Albers edition, sewing portions of the colour plates into the first volume and black and white text with illustrations and diagrams into the second. As two separate volumes, the dual strands of image and text, vision and intellect braid together into a single work of art. To further underscore this fusion of Eastern and Western worldviews, Mills—literally—stitches the excised image/texts from the Albers’ book onto handmade Japanese mitsumotta chiri paper using personally chosen sewing patterns of basic shapes (circles, squares, coils, and arrows), each laden with elemental visual associations.

Toronto-based artist Michael Maranda’s ARTFORUMx is a three-part project published through his imprint titled Parasitic Ventures Press. It delineates the 48-year history of the New York-based, quarterly publication Artforum in visual form, with particular focus on the number and size of advertisements that have appeared in the magazine over the years.

Part 1, presented in a library-style study carrel, consists of replicas of each issue, but with red rectangles standing in for editorial content and black rectangles for advertisements. Reminiscent of constructivist graphic experiments and minimalist visual art, the resulting books signify the base level of the economics of publishing, reflecting the ebb and flow of the market (art or otherwise) over the course of the publication’s history.

The second part of the project consists of six hardcover summary volumes, each 7 inches square and containing roughly 100 pages. The first five volumes condense each issue into a single page with a grid of red and black squares—again representing content versus advertising—and is essentially a page plan of that issue. The sixth volume is an extended bar-chart of the contents of the magazines along with a representation of the contemporaneous rise and fall of the Dow Jones Composite Index.

Completing this critique of the intersection of art world politics and economics, the third part of Maranda’s project is a foil of sorts. 177 spreads of the March 2007 issue are rendered in watercolour with the already introduced Mounted on the walls in grid form and evoking at first sight minimalist paintings, Maranda playfully and perversely introduces the watercolourist ‘hand’ of the artist as a value-added market-based strategy into his otherwise resolutely photo-mechanical project.

Doug Beube, currently living in Brooklyn, New York, creates mixed media sculptures and collaged artwork out of existing globes, maps, books and found materials. When solely manipulating books, his sculptural modifications and manipulations divide along core production activities that he identifies as ‘Cut’, ‘Fold’, and ‘Gouge’.

Part of his ‘Gouge’ project, the series in this exhibition is titled Masters in Art, and began with six pocket-sized art books published by The Hyperion Press in 1948 under the moniker of Hyperion Miniatures. These small books, intended for budding connaisseurs, feature short introductory essays by prominent art historians followed by pages of illustrations of ‘famous’ works by each artist (Botticelli, Cezanne, Degas, El Greco, Goya and Van Gogh). Based on intuitive interventions, Beube systematically cut small organic shapes out of images on specific pages; when strategically lined up the cutting treatments appear as a gouging down into the thickness of the physical volume.

And herein lies Beube’s comment. By removing material from existing pages, he creates a web of peek-a-boo intrigue as images bleed into each other. As well, the visual reading of any single ‘master work’ is compromised by the missing components. Prioritizing the cutting process on either the right hand or left hand page of the book also results in unusual outcomes on the backside image of the chosen page—not only is the chosen image strategically interfered with but a verso image is affected in a non-linear manner. Through this seemingly destructive act of removal, Beube asserts his own ‘mastery’ over the book – which is, in turn, tempered by visual outcomes that cannot be predicted or controlled as he digs down into the physical material of the publication.

Calgary-based artist Robert Kelly’s love of language led him to create the project titled Minutia, which consists of eleven different books of concrete poetry each placed on a lectern. These poetry texts are based on eleven words from a sentence fragment that Kelly heard during a lunchtime conversation he had with a friend who had recently moved from Hong Kong to Vancouver. In an attempt to convince his spouse to join him in his newly adopted country, Kelly’s friend used the words “the first time I heard the sound of a page turning” to describe the quietness of Vancouver compared to the bustle and din of his former homeland.

Kelly committed this phrase to a table napkin and became mindful that he had never considered what constituted the sound of a page turning. The resulting installation—the words, letters and performed sounds of the poetry in the eleven books—explores the dynamic tension between meaninglessness and meaningfulness; in a challenge to heighten our level of everyday awareness, Kelly suggests that the awareness of the minutiae of everyday life is fundamental to contemplating meaningfulness within one’s daily routine.

Chapter 3

John Murchie: see what you think

Typically spaces for the quiet contemplation of works of art, galleries and museums often have an imposing presence of silence. During see what you think, an installation by Sackville, New Brunswick artist and librarian John Murchie, this silence is interrupted by the mechanical sounds of a paper shredder as it gradually consumes the Gallery’s archives.

The installation, which will develop over the course of the exhibition, explores the accumulation and preservation of “stuff” within the context of continually expanding archives. Curating any collection of documents, whether book-based or in other formats, suggests a mindful comprehension of what is worth retaining for future reference and what is not. Indeed, intelligent destruction is the flipside of orderly creative accumulation and is the non-present ghost partner in the construction of the historical record.

It is also worth noting that the mass of the archival material does not change when shredded—it is merely transformed and scrambled into a pile of illegible texts on waste paper destined for recycling.

Threads, a series of talks curated by Steve Clay and Kyle Schlesinger, is devoted to the art of the book featuring poets, scholars, artists, and publishers. The objective for the series is to build on the discourse within book arts to explore and enrich relationships between various strands of book culture that are often approached in isolation, for example poetry and writing, visual and performing arts, collaboration, design, printing, independent publishing, literary history, critical theory, and material culture to name a few. The talks were recorded before a small studio audience and are available for public consumption here on PennSound. Eventually the series will be collected and published in book form.

In celebration of the publication by The Library of America of The Collected Writings of Joe Brainard, edited by Ron Padgett, Joe Brainard “Painting the Way I Wish I Could Talk” will open at Tibor de Nagy Gallery on March 15. The exhibit will run through April 21, 2012.

In Taiwan, for more than half a century, Chang Chieh-Kuan has been creating the tiny lead building blocks of books and poetry.

David Keefe and Eli Wright are co-coordinators of the Combat Paper Program at the Printmaking Center of New Jersey. They are both combat veterans that served in Iraq, and are now dedicated to helping veterans transform their lives through making paper out of their military uniforms.  They are currently raising funding via Kickstarter.

Timothy Barrett, a papermaker based in Iowa, shows the step-by-step process of making a Western-style paper.

“The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore” is one of five animated short films that will be considered for outstanding film achievements of 2011 in the 84th Academy Awards

TRIPLE CANOPY PODCAST

On January 19, at McNally Jackson Books in New York, Triple Canopy’s Alexander Provan and Peter J. Russo read selections from Invalid Format: An Anthology of Triple Canopy and discussed its genesis and form with the book’s designer, Prem Krishnamurthy, and Adam Michaels, both of the firm Project Projects. (They were joined by other, interjecting editors in the audience.) Krishnamurthy and Michaels talked about how Project Projects makes productive use of the tension between new and old print technologies and design conventions in its work, which ranges from exhibitions to pamphlets, websites to catalogues. Michaels spoke of historical precedents for Invalid Format and his recent volume, The Electric Information Age Book: McLuhan/Agel/Fiore and the Experimental Paperback, a collaboration with Harvard cultural historian Jeffrey Schnapp.