Paper Chipmunk Taxidermy

Hidden Clue by Sarah Wallace Scott at Abecedarian Gallery

Abecedarian Gallery in Denver, Colorado is currently hosting Artists' Book Cornucopia II, a juried exhibition. There is an online catalogue.

Needless to say, I was quite taken with this particular item, Hidden Clue by Sarah Wallace Scott. Says Sarah,

"In my process of working with paper I found that I could make faux taxidermy using only paper. The problem was that no one could tell the difference. I tore out the pages of a used book and started attaching them in the same way as the other paper to make a more obvious paper chipmunk..."

Paper chipmunk taxidermy aside, I should add that there is work from quite a few interesting people in this show, including fellow blogger Anna Mavromatis (who has blogs about her book art as well as more ephemeral matters).

Sohei Nishino Diorama Maps

© Sohei Nishino, taken from NY Times.

I just came across these interesting "diorama maps" by Sohei Nishino on his website. They are constructed from the "enormous mound" of film photographs he takes when visiting various cities.

They were also mentioned in a January New York Times travel piece about maps and such in London.

Pop-up Exhibition Video

Pop-ups! They're Not JUST for Kids from Bowdoin College on Vimeo.


With thanks to Elissa Campbell of Blue Roof Designs, who shared this on Facebook (and who says she in turn discovered it through someone at the Book Arts Guild of Vermont).

Paper Mosaic Collage Sighting

All Trains Go to King's Cross St Pancras ©2001

The other day I discovered that one of my old Underground paper mosaic collages is being used, with permission, in an interesting online exhibition at the musée historique environnement urbain. 

This link will take you to the beginning of the London section of the virtual exhibit. If you roll your mouse over the pictures and follow the arrow that appears on the right, you'll eventually get to All Trains Go to King's Cross St. Pancras. It's being used to illustrate the tube-like nature of the deep level tunnels. The main site  for the virtual musée (in English or en Français) has links to all kinds of exhibitions on aspects of urban life.

By way of background, the picture was based on a photo that I took several years ago at Manor House Station on the Piccadilly Line. The title comes from the announcement on the electronic sign. They've since "refurbished" the station. I haven't seen the cleaned up version in person, although judging by the glossy, bright pictures, I suspect I wouldn't actually like what they've done.

How an Artist's Book is Not Like a Picture

I've been pondering ways of conveying the progression of time and movement in books. I was recently re-skimming parts of Keith Smith's Structure of the Visual Book. He talks about how the structures of artists' books relate to those in "music, poetry, story-telling and cinema." He then cautions:

Carryover of past concepts is often inappropriate... Revolutionary ideas must be realized when starting to work in a new medium. The basic problem in making books is approaching it as if it were many single pictures, and it is not. 

This error comes from working in one medium, and carrying over principles to a new process, rather than discovering what is unique about the new medium.

As someone who used to work largely in single pictures, this is something that I've found to be both exhilarating and vexing about making artist's books.

I was listening to a talk that Bea Nettles gave at Duke University (thanks to a link posted on the Book Arts List). She mentioned how in one of her books she partly conveyed the slow, subtle process of aging by gradually transforming the background color of the book's pages. As the book progresses and the subject grows older, each page becomes ever so subtly more purple. By the end, the viewer realizes that the pages have become deep purple, hinting at how a person almost imperceptibly ages from day to day, slowly evolving into an older person. Now that's the sort of thing that makes a book unlike a painting.

Paper Backing Silk Video

Someone mentioned here recently that she'd tried to back silk with paper, but had problems. By coincidence, I just came across this video and thought perhaps it could be useful.

Modern Book Burning

http://www.xkcd.com/750/

Do Typefaces Matter?

From bbc.co.uk/news/magazine

The BBC News Magazine has an article on the importance of typefaces. With thanks to a tip from the Typo-L listserv.

"To most people, typefaces are pretty insignificant. Yet to their devotees, they are the most important feature of text, giving subliminal messages that can either entice or revolt readers, says Tom de Castella.

When Avatar, the biggest grossing movie of all time was released, one section of the audience was immediately outraged . . ."

Volvelles

Volvelles are paper wheel charts with rotating parts. The modern ones, such as those reproduced in Jessica Helfand's Reinventing the Wheel, are enjoyable. But there's something so captivating about the ones from previous centuries that were incorporated into books. These were used for serious stuff like astronomy, medicine and fortune-telling. They were computing devices in their day. To think that the modern movable book has such exalted ancestry.

When I posted a picture recently of a volvelle from Petrus Apianus's 1529 Cosmographia, it whetted my appetite for more. Here are a couple of other examples from the Cosmographia.

From the Lambeth Palace Library Exhibition catalogue.

A spread from the Library of Congress website, showing the positions of the sun, moon and planets.

According to the Lambeth Palace Library Exhibition catalogue, Petrus Apianus (1495-1552) was a mathematician and a pioneer in astronomical and geographical instrumentation. The Cosmosgraphia was a European best-seller. It appeared over the next century in as many as 45 editions in 4 languages, printed in 7 cities by at least 18 printers. It contained four volvelles.

Here are a few links to historical volvelles:

Robert Sabuda has a brief history, with pictures. An early one, pictured below, was made by a Benedictine monk in 1250 and was used to determine when to observe holidays. Some say it is the earliest known example of a volvelle.

A few reproductions from the 1552 Astronomicon Caesareum, which contained 35 volvelles, can be found here. The following image from it is thanks to the Wikipedia page on Volvelles:

This page also has a brief history of volvelles and some more pictures from the Astronomicon C., among others, but be warned that several of the links here no longer work.

The following is a "cipher encoding machine" from around 1600, from an exhibition of manuscripts that was at the Getty:

Doesn't it just make you want to start cutting and assembling circles?

Tasteful Letterpress

"The sweetness of the melting ABC on your tongue" in 48 point chocolate FagoMo Bold font sounds rather appealing as I sit here with a sweet tooth. Typolade Text aus Schokolade is in Stuttgart. 

What sort of ink is compatible, I wonder. Chocolate sauce?

Maps Cut in Paper

These all-white layered cut paper maps of rivers by Lauren Rosenthal are amazing (if you follow the link, click under projects to see more).

Detail from Upper Delaware River Watershed, 

2008 (c) Lauren Rosenthal, hand-cut watercolor paper.  

Jig Videos

I like this guy's bookmaking videos. Here he makes a jig for an embossed inset.



It was third in a series on making jigs for an accordion. Parts one and two are here. It's interesting to see how people approach such things.

Maps as Art

The world's smallest atlas, made for Queen Mary's doll house.

Source: news.bbc.co.uk

I've been pondering a potential project--a metaphorical atlas (for lack of a better description). I've long loved maps and map-like visuals, and have been wanting to use that kind of imagery in my artwork for as long as I can remember. I think the time is coming to do it as a book. We'll see if anything materializes. For now, it's mostly in the sketching and pondering phase. 

What made me want to mention this was stumbling upon this exhibition review on the BBC news site. The British Library and the Royal Geographical Society are both currently putting on shows that focus on the artistic aspect of maps. One of the items they show is the miniature atlas above. 

Catching up After the Outage

Our electric was out for a day and a night. Blech. Let's hear it for rural living...

So, with a whole day's worth of email and stuff to catch up on, what better thing to do than find a nice little paper-related video?

Each frame was crafted from a 4 x 6" piece of card stock. By Javan Ivey.

Fun Little Time Waster

Warning: stay away from this site if you have a tendency to compulsively doodle.

Microscope in a Book

From 1820, an engraving of a microscope built into a book binding at the Wellcome Library site.

With thanks to Margaret Fenney, who posted this on the Book Arts List.

Piddle on Papyrus

I don't have a professional graphics background. But through my work with books and printed matter, I've come to notice type.

And ever since I first started noticing it everywhere, the Papyrus font has set my teeth on edge. Trust me—in 10 or 20 years anything in Papyrus is going to look atrociously dated, in the same way that certain typefaces from the 70s scream of that era. It already looks dated.

And then there's Comic Sans. In order to better understand what it is, exactly, that makes Comic Sans so upsetting to so many, I googled "comic sans sucks." I got 30,900 hits. I discovered there is even a Ban Comic Sans web site.

Comic Sans is used so much, and so often inappropriately, that it has become a cliché. It was based on the writing in comic books and developed for balloon captions for a Microsoft children's program. Most comic book writers don't even actually use it. They use other comic fonts.

I hadn't realized, but quickly discovered, that lots of people loathe Papyrus too. In fact, "papyrus sucks" gets 1,090,000 hits on Google. There are even a few anti-Papyrus groups on Flickr and blogs devoted to hating Papyrus. It's rather gratifying to realize other people share one's own pet peeves.

As I say, I'm not a graphic designer, but I can appreciate the sentiment...


Graphic Avenger.

Long S

I was amused by this recent post from Jeff Peachey and thought you might enjoy it too.

Louisa Boyd's Work

It occurred to me I haven't shared any Flickr finds or web discoveries in a while.

I've been enjoying Louisa Boyd's intriguing book forms, collages, paintings and other work on her Flickr stream.

Some of her books certainly add a new dimension to the concept of a sculptural book. She binds (and sometimes alters) books, then tears and shapes the pages to make objects. Often these relate to birds, or are even shaped like birds. The one pictured here is "Paper Bird #1--Housemartin."

As for her non-bird books, in recent times I've been growing a bit jaded by altered books in general. But then I see something like "Keeping Secrets" (pictured below) and my interest perks up and I want to look again.

Her paintings and other works are also interestingly textural and evocative.

Louisa additionally enjoys keeping in touch with like-minded people through her Facebook page, so if you're on there you might want to check that out as well.

Pop-up Collection Video from Australia

This segment from a show about collectors was originally broadcast in Australia back in March. Carol Barton also mentioned it on one of her blogs. Says the blurb:
Graphic designer Corrie Allegro has an immense collection of 3,500 pop-up books collected over 30 years and including four Australian-produced books. The collection dates from the 1830s to the present day, with over 90 pre-1940s books. The books were created by “Paper Engineers” and not made just for children, but rather for adults and students, to explain things - how architecture and famous buildings, the human anatomy and plants and animals work. The earliest pop-up books were made in the 1500s, but they weren’t produced in quantities till the 1860s. Early books illustrated astronomical and scientific works, and it wasn’t till the 18th century that pop-up books were produced for children. The collection includes books illustrated by well known Australian designers such as Graeme Base’s My Grandma lived in Gooliculch, and political cartoonist and satirist, Patrick Cook‘s The Pop-Up Waltzing Matilda. The oldest book in the collection is Metamorphosis which was produced in 1830.

Corrie says, “It all started by coming across a simple pop-up book in London in 1978. As a graphic designer working with paper, textures and colours ….I was hooked. The beauty lies in the unlimited possibilities of designing 2-D images that ‘come to life’ by turning a page”