CBAA the Association for Book Art Education

Capitalizing on the interdisciplinary nature of the field, this blog calls attention to criticism and theory about the book as a medium and/or subject in works of art and, more generally, about book art. It seeks to encourage dialogue, solicit comments, and create a generative space for new ideas from critics and theorists of various fields regarding the aesthetic, semiotic, haptic, cognitive, historical, and other features that distinguish these works and their function in ethical, political, and social matters.

To contribute to the list of underrepresented voices in the book arts, see CBAA Book Art + Social Justice Resource List.

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ZINES AND HONG KONG – 11/15/2024 // Beth Sheehan

15 Nov 2024 12:00 AM | Susan Viguers (Administrator)

I had planned to write an article that would act like a love letter to artworks that are not technically books but feel bookish to me; instead, given the results of the election, I have been constantly reminded of the topic of my final paper for an art history class I took recently on Contemporary Chinese Art. The topic I chose was Zines and Collective Identity in Hong Kong.

In that paper, I argued that zines provided an exceptional platform to create community, share individual experiences, and build a collective identity worth fighting for during the Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill (Anti-ELAB) protests in Hong Kong in 2019. By examining Save Hong Kong Ourselves, Self-Help First-Aid, 自己香港自己救, 自己受傷自己救 by Yan Yu and 咸濕 (Salty Wet) by T▇▇謝▇ (Tiffany Sia), I discussed the dissemination of counter-hegemonic perspectives and the way that zines are uniquely equipped to provide information while creating connections that embolden and unite individuals. These zines and others that were produced during the recent Hong Kong protests were uniquely positioned to fight for democracy and against censorship because of the role zines play as democratic multiples written by the people and for the people.

Image courtesy of the author.

Prior to 1997, Hong Kong did not have a notable history of large protests, other than the demonstration in 1989 after the Tiananmen Square Massacre. From the signing of the Sino-British Joint Declaration in 1984, announcing that Hong Kong would be returned to Chinese rule in 1997,(1) up until the transfer of power actually occurred, the threat of monumental change intensified for Hongkongers, exponentially. Although many people living in Hong Kong are ethnically Chinese, the history of Hong Kong followed a path that diverged greatly from the mainland, making the prospect of reunification a tense subject when considering the disparities in the collective identities of Hong Kong and mainland China. I argued that the impending countdown created a pressure cooker environment, leading Hong Kong to solidify a more definite identity for itself and its people in that interim. When the incident at Tiananmen Square happened in Beijing in 1989, the act of both protesting and specifically supporting pro-democracy movements naturally took root in the DNA of Hong Kong.

It is then no surprise that this foundational aspect of Hong Kong’s identity featured so prominently in the citizens’ reactions when faced with the Extradition Law Amendment Bill in 2019. By that time, the territory was no stranger to protesting, proving that the collective identity of Hong Kong was strong and thriving. The most prominent protest prior to 2019 was the Umbrella Movement in 2014. It was during this 79-day period that political zines started to play a considerable role in Hong Kong, further shaping the collective identity of the citizens. Many makers chose to create zines in tandem with this major movement as a way to draw on the rich global history of zines being used for activism and expressing dissent, particularly in fights for women’s rights and LGBTQIA+ rights.(2)

One of the most notable differences with the Anti-ELAB movement when compared to earlier protests was the immediate and continual dedication to decentralizing the movement. The phrases “no central stage” and “be water” became paramount, (3) encouraging participants to have autonomy and allowing for more flexibility to respond to the situations they were met with. By creating an environment where citizens felt like any form of involvement was helpful to the collective, the production of communications, publications and artworks took shape through posters, photographs, drawings, infographics, and zines that were distributed both tangibly and online. Tong Kin-long, a scholar of Hong Kong zine history, contextualized the importance of zines taking on topics of protest and identity when he stated, “zines are beyond a resistive text that challenges mainstream narratives. They are also an important tool for artists to communicate a version of the self to cope with the trauma of state violence.”(4)

Image courtesy of the author.

It is that idea of claiming stake in a collective identity and actively asserting aspects of that identity for the good of the collective that has been on my mind over the past few weeks. I have heard a lot of talk (primarily from privileged white people) of leaving the U.S. because of the upsetting election results and it is my opposition to that mentality that has most reminded me of the Anti-ELAB protests because if those protests show us anything, I hope that it is how important every person’s actions are. Wanting to separate your identity from your demographic and, instead, be seen as “one of the good ones” does not exempt you from being part of that collective, so instead of distancing yourself, (speaking to myself and other white people) I hope you find ways to shift the collective identity. I hope we can all find ways to fight for democracy, kindness, and community; in smaller ways like creating zines, and in larger ways like getting involved in community organizing.

Works Cited:

Ackbar Abbas, Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance (Minnesota: the University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 3.

Adela C. Licona, Zines in Third Space: Radical Cooperation and Borderlands Rhetoric. (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2012), 2.

Nam Kiu Tsing, Hongkongers’ Fight for Freedom: Voices from the 2019 Anti-extradition Movement (Leiden: Koninklijke Brill NV, 2023), 32.

Tong Kin-long, “Overcoming Fear: The Representation of State Violence in Hong Kong’s Protest Zines during the Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill Movement,” in Violence in Art: Essays in Aesthetics and Philosophy, ed. Darren M. Slade, (Chicago: Inara Publishing, 2022), 3.

Beth Sheehan is an artist currently living in Tuscaloosa, AL. She teaches paper, print, and book workshops around the US and virtually. She co-authored the book Bookforms. Sheehan has also worked as a professional printer at Durham Press and Harlan and Weaver and was the Bindery Manager at Small Editions.

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CBAA – ENCOUNTERING PRINT HISTORY // Beth Sheehan

01 Nov 2024 12:00 AM | Susan Viguers (Administrator)

The Miami-based community printshop and book arts studio IS Projects, established by Ingrid Schindall, just celebrated its 10-year anniversary. As part of that celebration, they officially announced a name change and several exciting new facets that are ushering in the next era. Now known as the Miami Paper & Printing Museum, the studio will continue to offer many of the fantastic opportunities and amenities it has been providing to the thriving South Florida art community for the last decade. These include workshops, print club meetings, studio rentals, artist residencies, events, and more. But now the Museum also includes dedicated galleries for the museum’s permanent collection and contemporary exhibitions, as well as a store to purchase supplies, tools, artist books, prints, and many other incredible goodies.

Contemporary wing of the new Miami Paper & Printing Museum. Image courtesy of Ingrid Schindall.

The store inside the new Miami Paper & Printing Museum. Image courtesy of Ingrid Schindall.

In a state where the accessibility of information has seen more and more restrictions recently, IS Projects becoming the Miami Paper & Printing Museum feels like a deliberate assertion of the important role that history, information, and art all play in creating an open, inclusive, and kind world. As part of the transformation, I curated an exhibition in the newly christened Permanent Collection Gallery: the bathroom. My goal for this exhibition was to provide viewers with an engaging and informative overview of the history of papermaking and printing. In organizing and installing this exhibition, I continuously came back to thinking about how much information is edited, culled, manipulated, erased, rewritten, and re-presented in our contemporary lives. Information is purposefully erased or made harder to access with things like the book bans in Florida and the Anti-DEI Senate Bill 129 in Alabama, but in addition to these targeted acts of erasure, information can often be erased to make it more comprehensible, to create more streamlined narratives, or to fit into the spatial limitations of museum galleries.

Inside the Permanent Collection gallery of the new Miami Paper & Printing Museum. Image courtesy of Beth Sheehan.

The information that is included in exhibitions and publications by prestigious institutions routinely perpetuates biased and selective information about art, participating in echo chambers honoring the knowledge of the critic or scholar, rather than the knowledge and experience of the maker or non-academic. Work is being done to consciously and ethically undo some of the harm caused by that process as people fight to decolonize museums. But plenty of important information will still inevitably be left out of museums in favor of trying to make the information understandable to audiences that may not have specialized knowledge in the given topic, and in favor of fitting the “most important” information into the space the museum has available.In its new incarnation, the Miami Paper & Printing Museum is trying something different.

Inside the Permanent Collection gallery of the new Miami Paper & Printing Museum. Image courtesy of Beth Sheehan.

It might seem humorous to house a museum (at least partially) in a bathroom, and it is, but when Schindall approached me about curating the show in the bathroom, I was immediately overjoyed by the idea because it seemed to be such a wonderful way to make information accessible. Museums have been contentious places in regards to accessibility; ideally they are places that provide everyone equal access to knowledge and culture, but when collections do not include diverse artists, entrance fees bar people from entering, and people feel that contemporary art is too hard to understand without didactic information, art museums stop being places that people feel welcome. So, by placing the MPPM permanent collection exhibition (one that includes diverse artists) in the bathroom (no entrance fee), anyone can close the door (for a… “private viewing”) and spend any amount of time that they want (or need) looking at the exhibition. My hope for the space is that it will make going to museums less intimidating and that it will prompt people to think about alternative ways history, knowledge, culture, and art can be shared. If you were to make a museum that showed people how impactful and empowering your artistic medium can be, what would you include? How would you make that space more accessible? More engaging? More inclusive?

The Tactile Wall of the new Miami Paper & Printing Museum. Image courtesy of Beth Sheehan.

Beth Sheehan is an artist currently living in Tuscaloosa, AL. She teaches paper, print, and book workshops around the US and virtually. She co-authored the book Bookforms. Sheehan has also worked as a professional printer at Durham Press and Harlan and Weaver and was the Bindery Manager at Small Editions.

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WHY WE LOVE BOOKS, PART II: THE OUTCOME // Rachel Simmons

15 Oct 2024 11:21 AM | Susan Viguers (Administrator)

Similar to the first edition of Why We Love Books, the second communicated a range of ideas about the preciousness of books as both conceptual and physical objects that readers, writers, librarians and artists connect with deeply. The projects tapped into the myriad reasons that people love books as objects of infinite possibility, expression and knowledge. For the second edition the participants shared memories of their first book ever read or made, offered confessions about disliking altered books, and considered whether or not writing in a library book is ever okay. The format of the workshop was instrumental in this exchange; as participants moved around the room in game of musical typewriters, each sheet loaded into a machine became a potential conversation. Writers could allow previous responses to shape their thoughts or they could start fresh with a new sheet. The prompts, which were written in collaboration with members of the guild and meeting volunteers, were more much specific for this project, and the materials were limited to sheets of paper and typewriters. This allowed participants to really focus during our hour-long session. To be more inclusive, prompts encouraged contributors to consider a range of experiences, from literary to creative. Many contributors were book artists, but many were also librarians, writers, curators and avid readers.

These were the prompts for the second volume paired with a favorite selection of responses:

Describe, in detail, the first book you ever made.
Before I could read, I stapled my drawings together and gave them to my mother. Book after book after book.

Which bookmaking activity do you like best, folding, gluing or sewing? (Follow up: which one do you hate most?)
GLUING IS HIGH STAKES. Folding calms me right down, sewing makes me feel productive and industrious.

What kind of book or art materials would spend a lot of money on?
I spend my money on the triangles. I love the triangles so very much. All the triangles.
This response was followed by:
I love that answer. I’m the same way about triangles, especially brass ones. I’m not allowed near a leather seller. :) Triangles and squares are lovely, but I have to add paper. PAPER!

Is there a book that you like to keep with you?
A sketchbook, a book for lists, a book of debris that is not always useful.

What is a book you’ve read over and over again?
I’m such a cliché because I read over and over is the Great Gatsby. Gaaaaaaaatsby, Old sport.

Would you ever draw or write in a library book?
I would NEVER write inside a library book! I also don’t like to make altered books. They are creepy and sort of horrifying, though I realize that many people don’t agree with me and have a lot of fun “recycling” old books that way. Which is why I keep quiet about this opinion and don’t sign up for any altered books workshops.

Do you keep journals or sketchbooks and would you ever share them in public?
I have shared my sketchbooks in public. It was kinda okay.

Which story do you remember most vividly from childhood?/ Which author or artists have influenced you?
Margaret Atwood and Audrey Niffenegger.
And,
i had a book called 100 dresses and i think it’s why i enjoy thrifting so much.

What would the most mysterious book in the world look like, smell like, feel like? Would it be heavy or light? Large or small?
70% imagery. 30% text. has a lot of funny jokes. Measures 6” in height. Some pages open out into 3D models of different things that represent cultures.
And,
Your face is on the cover. The plot is the opposite of every choice you’ve ever made. But it ends the same.
And,
The most mysterious book will change every time someone reads it. Sometimes it would be big, sometimes it would be tiny. Sometimes it would smell sweet.

The typewriter asks, “Do you have any questions for me?”
Do you like being attended by nimble fingertips? What does a typical day look like? Where are the exclamation marks? Do you feel obsolete?
As the curator of this collection, I can identify several common threads from the responses. First, it seems that books are highly valued objects, whether we make them, write them, collect them or read them. Secondly, it seems that many book artists fell in love with making books as young readers; there is a clear connection between being an avid reader and becoming a book artist. As most people are first exposed to literary books and only later learn about artists’ books, this trajectory sheds light on the unique ways in which our community of practitioners has developed, examined, and expanded this rather recent genre of contemporary art. It’s interesting to think about how book arts will continue to to evolve as society’s relationship with the book as an object changes over time.

Rachel Simmons is an artist and educator from Orlando, Florida who makes artist books, comics, zines, and prints. In her creative practice, she explores environmental and social activism, science, philosophy and memory. She teaches book arts and printmaking at Rollins College and serves on the board of CBAA. You can find her work at www.rachelsimmons.net and follow her on instagram @bearwithjetpack.

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WHY WE LOVE BOOKS, PART I: THE PROCESS // Rachel Simmons

01 Oct 2024 12:00 AM | Susan Viguers (Administrator)

Why We Love Books, designed, edited, and bound by Rachel Simmons, June 2024. A collaborative one-of-a-kind artist ’s book created with typewritten participant responses, risographs, and stab bound with metal rivets. 5.125” tall x 10.75” wide x .5” deep. This book is 77 pages long and printed on French paper.

Why We Love Books is a collaborative community book arts project I organized for “Critical Reading,” the CBAA annual meeting I co-hosted with Ben Rinehart at Rollins College, June 7-9, 2024. Over 30 artists, librarians, and book enthusiasts contributed to the pages of this book by responding to a set of prompts developed in collaboration with participants. Each prompt was displayed on a different manual or electric typewriter (including a rare IBM Selectric with three fonts) and participants were invited to type their way around the studio, embracing the unique experience of working on typewriters and giving themselves permission to leave typos behind as a record of authentic, in-the-moment reflections. Everyone wrote together in the studio, creating a symphony of fingers hitting typewriter keys and accompanied by ringing return chimes and happy chatter. This environment shaped their energetic and thoughtful responses, which were often in dialogue with one another.

After the responses were submitted, I gathered the pages to trim and edit (without correcting typos) and collaged them over a variety of vivid risograph patterns. The vibrancy of the backgrounds echoes the dynamic qualities of the writing and bring focus to each writer ’s voice. After scanning all 77 pages, I bound them together with metal rivets in a stab bound book with a wide pattern. There are two digital copies available for download, one with the pages turned horizontally for better viewing, and one where the pages are set vertically for easier printing on a US letter sized sheet. Contributors are welcome to download, print and reproduce these files.

I created the first volume of this book in 2019 in collaboration with members of the Book Arts Guild of Central Florida. In that version, I asked contributors to respond only to the prompt, “Why We Love Books.” We each contributed a collage and typewritten folio to what ended up being a very long leporello. In the two hours we had to finish our folios, we worked primary with found collage elements which allowed us to explore visual representations of why we love books as well as through writing.

Rachel ’s folio from the first edition of Why We Love Books, 2019

Rachel Simmons is an artist and educator from Orlando, Florida who makes artist’s books, comics, zines, and prints. In her creative practice, she explores environmental and social activism, science, philosophy and memory. She teaches book arts and printmaking at Rollins College and serves on the board of CBAA. You can find her work at www.rachelsimmons.net and follow her on instagram @bearwithjetpack.

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SOME "HOWS" OF CREATIVITY // Peter Tanner

15 Sep 2024 12:00 AM | Susan Viguers (Administrator)

Over the weeks since my last post, and as I continue to teach my undergraduate introduction to literature and film analysis in Spanish, I have been introducing my students to figuras retóricas or rhetorical devices. Rhetorical devices are technical vocabulary associated with the production of various forms of writing in order to give it greater depth, beauty, and expressivity. These devices include the basics that most of us are very familiar with such as: alliteration, analepsis, hyperbole, metaphor, simile, etc.

Rhetorical devices are more than technical embellishments used to demonstrate a writer’s skill. On the contrary, they are tools used to construct new structures to convey new meanings. Therefore, the utilization of these tools structures the form of content in such a way that it constructs and conveys new meaning. In this way, the employ of these techniques as exercises can lead artists—whether writers, painters, or book artists—to experiment with new formats of presentation, as well as lead them to explore new discoveries, and create new content.

As I have been reviewing and providing examples of each of these and other meaning-making devices to my students, I have reflected upon their potential significance if applied as theoretical frameworks or guidelines to create artist books.

What if hyperbole, a form of extravagant exaggeration, was the parameter for the creation of an artist book? Every aspect of the book would have to be pushed into some form of exaggeration. Paper with an extreme amount of tooth. The sewing on the binding would have to be so elaborate that it would have to be recognized as an essential part of the book. The printing exaggerated in such a way that the work is potentially unreadable or readable in multiple formats, printed in multiple directions, producing a shifting prism of potential readings.

Shifting gears to something a little more radical, how could the use of hyperbaton, the alteration of idiomatic word order—exemplified by the way that Yoda talks in Star Wars movies, where “Do your judge me because of my size?” becomes “Judge me by my size, do you?”—influence the creation of a work of book art? This transposition of word order as a framework for a book could inspire some really topsy-turvy work. For example, a book where the binding and cover are in the middle of the book with the pages all around the outside. Or a book with only pages and no cover at all. Perhaps even a book where the binding is along all the edges with each page opening up in another direction from the center out.

What of metonymy, or the use of a figure of speech in which the name of one thing is used to stand in for another of which it is an attribute or with which it is associated? Recently Levi Sherman, in his August 15^th 2024 Book Art Theory blog post People as Books / Books as People, examined several ways in which discourse surrounding book art reflects this metonymic perception of the book as body, individuals as books, books as stand-ins for their creators, libraries standing in for their collectors, and libraries as multitudes. Another possible approach would be to create a book work where everything used in the book had to be a metonymic reference to another object, the book itself would then be assembled of parts that all referred or alluded to something else, and never to the ultimate question that could be perhaps posed as a riddle: I begin where the story ends, my life in your hands it depends. What am I?

What about the use of alliteration, or the repetition of similar sounds at the beginning of two or more words or within them—which also includes assonance: alliteration with vowel sounds, and consonance: alliteration with consonant sounds—as the premise for the production of an artist book. This could be a book where all the materials used to create it all share a similar consonant or vowel sound in their name. It could equally be a book where every page or part includes the deliberate repetition of some sound motif (in this way it could also be an example of synesthesia where the repeated sound motif is presented by means of a very tactile medium to bring both the sound and the haptic sensation together).

Finally let me propose the use of anaphora, the repetition of a word or expression at the beginning of a succession of phrases, clauses, sentences, or verses for not only rhetorical or poetic effect but also for the purpose of emphatically highlighting the particular reiterated element. Such a work that made use of this technique could begin on each page with the same phrase or visual element that grounds or iterates continued reflection upon the material presented upon that page as well as upon each succeeding page.

These ideas are just to suggest that while book artists are frequently aware of the book-ish nature or their creations, perhaps there is another book-ish aspect, one that has been there since hermeneutics began, that has been overlooked or underappreciated as a potential source of creative concepts, of inspiration, to construct their works. Just think about what could be done by employing:

Phantom structure: When the second line of the first stanza becomes first line of the second.

Cesura: A pause or break in a line of poetry that mimics the natural rhythm of speech.

Antiphrasis: The usually ironic or humorous use of words in senses opposite to the generally accepted meanings

Chiasmus: An inverted relationship between the syntactic elements of parallel phrases

Apophasis: The raising of an issue by claiming not to mention it

Dysphemism: The substitution of a disagreeable, offensive, or disparaging expression for an agreeable or inoffensive one

Dialogism: A disjunctive conclusion inferred from a single premise

Acrostics: poetic composition in which the initial letters, read vertically, form a name or a phrase.

Blank verse: Poetry with regular meter but no rhyme

Onomatopoeia: Naming a thing using a world that makes the sound like the thing.

Oxymoron: The combination of contradictory or incongruous words.

Kennings: A figurative phrase or compound word is used instead of a simple noun.

Antiphrasis: An ironic or humorous use of words in an opposite sense of their meaning.

Red herring: Misleading through irrelevant diversion.

Tautology: Unnecessary repetition of meaning using different words to say the same thing.

Peter Tanner teaches Spanish Language and Literature at Utah State University and is Editor of Openings: Studies in Book Art. He has a Ph.D. in Latin American literature, an MA in Latin American Art History, and a BFA in Painting and Printmaking. His research focuses on artist books from Latin America.

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THE “WHY” OF CREATIVITY // Peter Tanner

01 Sep 2024 12:00 AM | Virginia Green (Administrator)

Over the last few weeks, I have been begun a new semester of teaching an undergraduate introduction to literature and film analysis. My students are learning how to talk about, in Spanish, the various cultural currents and trends in the last century in Latin America. Recently we discussed the following basic questions:

Why do we as human beings tell stories?

Why do human beings make art?

When we talk about art what are we talking about? What is your definition?

Here are some of my students’ responses for your consideration:

We tell stories because they teach basic lessons in a fun way.

Humans create art because it is fun, and it is a good way to express our emotions.

When we talk about art we are talking about other people's creations.

I think the reason why we tell stories is because people can read the stories and know more about the world and the lives of others.

A reason why I think humans create art is to express emotions. When a person cannot say things with words, a person can express it with art.

When we talk about art, we are talking about the perspectives that art reveals to us. Each person has a different idea and perspective on art.

I believe we tell stories because we need to know the history of human beings to know what can help our problems today, and what won't help.

I believe that human beings create art because it is a type of communicating with people on a more directly human level.

Art for me is an expression of ideas, emotions, and stories shared by other humans in a type of communication that is more personal than just directly telling someone the reason why something happened. This way you can discover what others have experiences by looking at their experience through their creative expression.

We tell stories to remember and show people's different experiences. They show and help you to learn lessons. We tell stories to know people's perspectives. It helps to have empathy.

I believe that human beings create art to express opinions and emotions on specific topics.

I think that to be an art form it must be a creation that expresses opinions or emotions. Art is a way to show your ideas. It is a way of perceiving the world.

We tell stories to pass information and experiences to other people. We tell stories so that we can connect with other people and so that others can understand more about us.

I think that human beings create art to express themselves. That means expressing feelings, opinions, and understandings about the world that they live in and the experiences they have as well. It is a way to link thoughts in physical form so that others can also understand something about the artist.

When we are talking about art, we are talking about an artist's way of expressing themselves artistically, that is, in a different and unique way that is their own way.

These seemingly simple questions have inspired the creation of many a tome of poetry and prose, as well as countless texts regarding the interpretation and meaning of artistic works within their discursive and historic milieu. These same questions are important for us, as makers of art and as interpreters and critics of art, to rehash from time to time.

I think for some of us it has been years since we have thought about these questions that have defined our lives.

I would love to hear your thoughts, based on your experiences, to see if in all of our collected experience with art creation, art history, art criticism, we have established a more nuanced understanding of the reasons we do what we do.

Perhaps when we ask questions such as “Why do we as human beings tell stories?” “Why do human beings make art?” and “When we talk about art what are we talking about?”, we might as well be asking why we breathe.

If we stop breathing, we’ll die. If we stop making, discussing and writing about art, our individual worlds would die. Is it really that heroic or is there something else?

Let me know what you think.

Peter Tanner teaches Spanish Language and Literature at Utah State University and is Editor of Openings: Studies in Book Art. He has a Ph.D. in Latin American literature, an MA in Latin American Art History, and a BFA in Painting and Printmaking. His research focuses on artist books from Latin America.

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PEOPLE AS BOOKS / BOOKS AS PEOPLE // Levi Sherman

15 Aug 2024 12:00 AM | Susan Viguers (Administrator)

Many artists’ books explore the metaphor of the person-as-book or the book-as-person. There are the common clichés (to read someone like a book) and the shared anatomical vocabulary (spine, shoulder, head). At a deeper level, if we believe that a book enables communication between reader and creator, then it would seem to embody the creator in some way. And as the biblical reference in Johanna Drucker’s The Word Made Flesh (1996) suggests, the incarnated book is nothing new. Rather than offer a theory of the book-as-person, this blog post is exploratory: I survey works of contemporary art that deal with books, and especially with libraries, to see how the metaphor has been used.

Individuals as books

If we are told not to judge a book by its cover, it is because the analogy between books and people goes deeper than the spine or shoulder. After all, every person has a story. Perhaps the Human Library Organization has gone furthest in realizing this version of the person-as-book. While not framed as art, their events “where readers can borrow human beings serving as open books” to “have conversations they would not normally have” share obvious parallels with social practice art.[1] Tellingly, the organization’s slogan is “unjudge someone.” Artist duo Rebecca French and Andrew Mottershead instead lean into first impressions in their take on the human library book: Borrow Me (2006). The human books are tagged with labels like “sleeper” or “gossiper,” and, as expected, they perform versions of these stereotypical behaviors that one might encounter among library patrons.

Books as their creators

Just as people can stand in for books, so too can books stand in for people. For his first sculpture, Pense-Bête (1964), Marcel Broodthaers entombed the remaining copies of his final poetry book in plaster to signal the death of his literary self and the beginning of his career as a visual artist. Publication and person are also equated by Thomas Hirschhorn in his monuments to philosophers: Spinoza Monument (1999), Deleuze Monument (2000), Bataille Monument (2002), and Gramsci Monument (2013). Each of the increasingly complex public works includes a library of works by the philosopher, which viewers can read.

Libraries as their collectors

Thus far, we have dealt with the analogy between books and their creators. But books can also represent their collectors. Anyone who has felt proud, or more likely self-conscious, as a guest examines their bookshelves will sympathize with Craig Dworkin’s The Perverse Library (2012). Having enumerated his entire collection, Dworkin can project an imagined book that would, in some way, represent himself: “a 48-page perfect-bound volume by Clark Coolidge [New York: Sun & Moon, 1982]. No such book actually exists; its details are merely the projection of a statistical mean.”[2] Buzz Spector’s exhibition and book, Unpacking My Library (1995) similarly investigates how the organization of one’s books represents them — with a nod to Walter Benjamin’s essay of the same title.

Dworkin and Spector bare their own libraries, but others are more interested in the voyeuristic (or scholarly) appeal of other people’s books. Abra Ancliffe’s Personal Libraries Library (2009–) recreates the libraries of influential thinkers and makers, and allows readers to check out the books. The idea that you can learn something valuable from someone’s library had led Anne H. Young to argue that artists’ personal libraries should be preserved as writers’ often are.[3] An example of one such project is Donald Judd’s library, perfectly preserved in Marfa. I would argue that its digital presence (you can virtually browse every foot of shelving) combined with its physical presence (where viewers are not allowed to browse) are as much a monument as anything by Hirschhorn. Robert Smithson’s library has also been saved, and furthermore, is the subject of artist Conrad Bakker’s Untitled Project: Robert Smithson Library & Book Club, an impressive series of painted book surrogates.

Libraries as multitudes

For Dworkin, Spector, Ancliffe, and Bakker, the library stands in for an individual. But if a book can represent a person, then one can also see the library as a collective of many people. This is, indeed, the logic behind many memorials and monuments. Yinka Shonibare’s British Library (2014) is an installation of more than 6,000 books bound in the artist’s signature Dutch wax fabric. Many of the books’ spines are stamped with the name of immigrants or prominent opponents of immigration. The blank books are meant to represent future migrants. Shonibare’s follow-up American Library (2018) and African Library (2018) replicate the installation format but also include websites with archival documents and additional information about many of the people represented on the shelves.

Using a similar logic, Rachel Whiteread's Judenplatz Holocaust Memorial (2000) is in many ways the opposite of Shonibare’s libraries. It is devoid of color, anonymous, and signifies loss. The memorial is one of the best-known libraries in contemporary art, but it is preceded by Micha Ullman’s The Empty Library (1995). Both are voids that resist would-be readers — Whiteread turns her library inside out, as if it is a negative space cast from an absent positive, and Ullman’s empty shelves are sunk beneath the street, extending meters underground. A plaque added later to Ullman’s memorial bears the most infamous analogy between people and books: “That was but a prelude; where they burn books, they will ultimately burn people as well.” It is worth noting that Heinrich Heine wrote these words a century before the holocaust, and it is therefore no surprise that artists have used libraries to memorialize other conflicts.

Wafaa Bilal’s participatory installation 168:01 memorializes the University of Baghdad’s art library, which was burned during the 2003 US invasion. With rows of uniforms white books representing 70,000 lost volumes, it is through participation that the analogy between a person and a book is made. Donors can exchange one of the blank books for a new book requested by the university faculty. One book — one donor — at a time, the blank library gives way to culture. Another poignant work about a lost library derives its impact through the analogy of the book as person: Emily Jacir’s Ex Libris (2010–12). Jacir’s book presents books from the Jewish National Library in West Jerusalem that were looted during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, the Nakba. By photographing the handwritten inscriptions from the books’ frontispieces, often gifts from one person to another, Jacir reminds the reader of the individual behind the book.

Bilal and Jacir memorialize conflicts that destroyed people and books alike. However, the fact that both artists were drawn to the library shows how wrong it feels when books are assaulted. It may be unsurprising, then, that the analogy between the destruction of books and people can be reversed. Mohammad Sharaf’s installation The Cemetery of Banned Books (2018) envisions a mass grave of books to criticize the banning of 4,300 books in Kuwait. The rectangular tombstones echo the shape of a book, and each is inscribed with a title and stamped with “Banned in Kuwait.” The installation was, predictably, dismantled by the authorities.

The Human Library Organization. “Unjudge Someone,” May 1, 2024. https://humanlibrary.org/.

Dworkin, Craig. The Perverse Library. York: Information as material, 2010.

Young, Anne H. “Preserving Artists’ Personal Libraries: Providing Insights into the Creative Process.” Art Documentation: Journal of the Art Libraries Society of North America 35, no. 2 (2016): 339–51.

Levi Sherman is a PhD student in Art History at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and the founder of Artists’ Book Reviews.

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FANDOM AND CREATION // Icarus Key

01 Aug 2024 12:00 AM | Susan Viguers (Administrator)

The fine arts world, to be quite frank, looks down on books and printmaking as a creative medium. They’re strongly and obviously tied to commercialism (though we can look to the beautifully decorated Sistine chapel and remind painters that Michelangelo too was paid to promote the church’s agenda), and for an artist who is used to spending hours on a one of a kind piece, the idea of an edition—with each copy an original work of art—is antithetical to how they operate. Still, as easy as it is to understand their logic, it doesn’t make the pill any less bitter to swallow. And it doesn’t solve the problem of printmaking and book making as skills going under-acknowledged and under appreciated. Fortunately for this, we live in a time where humanity is more connected than ever.

My first experience with the internet was through media fandom, a portmanteau of the words fan + kingdom. Think of fandom like sports fans; there are many levels of obsession but ultimately it’s a group of people excited about a mutually loved piece of media. Online, people will share (fan)art and (fan)fiction based on the original stories and characters, as well as musings, theories, and breakdowns of the source material, all for free.

What does this have to do with book arts?

I engaged with fandom using my graphic design skills to layout “fanzines.” The name is archaic as the modern fanzine is more artbook than zine, but the communal collection of art and stories has strong ties to historical zinemaking and printmaking history. And it’s through these spaces I learned that there is a real hunger for that history in younger artists who might not have access to a more traditional art education. Outside of fanzines, artists create casebound books out of fanfiction to show off online that captivate people, and digital artists share fledgling attempts at linocut with familiar pink Speedball Easy Carve and a cheap set of tools. People want to express their love of someone’s work through their own creation, and do so even with the most basic knowledge gleaned from youtube tutorials or elementary school art projects.

This is the space I want to share my work. To that end, I have created Threadhunters, a comic that utilizes traditional printmaking to create comics. Think Frans Masereel, only instead of wordless woodcuts I am utilizing multiple printmaking methods and digital typesetting before running it through offset lithography, in the tradition of classic American comic books. The book, for this project, does not matter so much as the tools I’m using to create the mark and tell the story. But the story and the art will draw attention and curiosity to the methods being used. It will generate discussion and interest in creation, and as someone who is interested in passing on the tools of the trade, I can help guide younger artists in how to safely use these tools and engage with the larger historical narrative they’re taking part in.

I also take part in these spaces because of their accessibility. Young people (and many other people, but my focus here is on those still growing up) cannot afford our expensive, handmade books. And as a storyteller, I focus on giving people the language they need in order to express themselves, especially in matters such as gender identity and mental health. Language that I myself did not have growing up. It would be almost hypocritical of me if I did not seek out a way to share my stories in as accessible a way as possible. And the internet in general creates a way for me to share this comic and similar stories widely and freely, both by hosting it online for free and offering print on demand copies for $10 versus the $40+ of the traditionally printed and bound copies.

Threadhunters (v.1, p. 13) offset lithography

The internet is not an easy place to translate a book, but neither are formal gallery spaces. For me, it’s more important to share the story, as well as the mechanical process of creation, than it is to show off a beautifully put together codex that can’t be touched because it’s under plexiglass. There is space for both, but I have learned that the internet and the people who desire to learn are far more accommodating and far more interested than traditional spaces.

Icarus Key is a recent MFA graduate of the University of Arts. He hopes to use printmaking and narrative storytelling to empower the next generation to tell their stories and engage meaningfully with the community around them. His work will be updated on instagram at @happysadyoyo.

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NOTES TOWARD A TYPOGRAPHY OF CARE, PART 2 // Emily Larned

15 Jul 2024 12:00 AM | Susan Viguers (Administrator)

At an exhibition opening just hours after writing my previous post, I ran into my former professor John Gambell. I told him about my interest in the Yale Typesetting Checklist as an act of care. He replied, “Oh! I got that from Geoffrey Dowding. He was a crafts teacher in London after WW2 and wrote several books about typesetting. I still have several designers who set type too tightly because of it.”

An AbeBooks search yielded a first edition of Finer Points in the Spacing and Arrangement of Type by Geoffrey Dowding available from a bookseller in the UK. The slim volume has just arrived. Scanning the book quickly, I cannot find a checklist within it. Did John mean he had taken the main ideas from this book, and turned them into the Yale checklist? Or is a typesetting checklist in one of Dowding’s other books?

But before I get further into it: the possibility that somebody else had written theYale Typesetting Checklist had never occurred to me. It is true John didn't put his name on it. I was the one who did that before sharing the handout with my students. Yet, I hadn't assumed that my former professor had invented the checklist, either. Certainly the lineage of typographic convention (and education) traces back centuries to incunabula, and to the scribes even more centuries before. Yet, the way this knowledge had been passed down often failed to resonate with me as a student. Often typography manuals discuss “ideals,” and achieving “mastery” or “perfection.” As I suspect is true with most of us who enjoy making things, I like attending to the process of making, of caring-while-working, of the lived experience of sustaining (and being sustained by) a state of engagement and focus. Fixating on a perfect outcome makes me anxious and miserable. When I think of my own effective teachers: what had struck me about John was how much he cared about type. He had visceral reactions to our awkward work. I was awed by how sensitive he was to small details that were invisible to us students. He saw differently.

Years later, to enjoy and be effective in teaching typography myself, I realized I needed to identify a framework that aligned with my values.* Achieving perfection and mastery was not it. “Seeing differently” sounds wonderful, but isn’t that more of an endpoint than a process? How does one learn to see differently? By caring. And slowing down. Attending to details. The Yale Typesetting Checklist shows a way.

Reading Dowding's books, influential to my own mentor, is a way to dig into a genealogy of my education. So, for a preliminary reading of Finer Points in the Spacing and Arrangement of Type, here is a concordance of care, including its corollaries, careful, and careless:

“But in the opposite direction there is, and always has been, abuse: the pernicious system of piece rates for the job, for example, does not conduce to careful text setting & the proper division of words, but only to a maximum number of ens per hours ‘standard’ and thus to disturbingly large amounts of white space in the wrong places, i.e., between the words—the antithesis of good composing & sound workmanship.” (xii)

“From the time of invention of printing from movable types in Europe, that is, circa 1440, up to the present day, one of the hall-marks of good printing, and of the good printer, has been the care and attention paid to the setting of text matter.” (1-2)

“A carefully composed text page appears as an orderly series of strips of black separated by horizontal channels of white space.” (4)

“If he has organized his job well, there will be a set of house rules in the hands of all who work for him, but, with the greatest care, such rules can never be exhaustive, and much will depend on his being lynx-eyed and uncompromising in enforcing the standards he has set himself.”- H.P. Schmoller” (7)

“Extra thin spacebands were used, and normal care was taken to see that word spacing was reasonably even and close, by the judicious breaking of words at the ends of lines.” (7)

“In arranging text setting care must be exercised to ensure that the type and the measure are so related that the eye has, firstly, no difficulty in swinging easily to and for without any suggestion of strain: and secondly, is not hindered in finding the beginning of the following line.” (9)

“Colons and semi-colons are often carelessly spaced also.” (20)

“The introduction of unnecessary punctuation marks and their frequently careless setting makes for fussy and ugly typography.” (22)

“Even a casual glance through a book or newspaper reveals initials used in this manner but in many instances it also discloses appallingly careless methods of setting.” (30)

“Only two of the many treatments of initial letters have been mentioned, but they indicate the care with which the setting of initials should be treated.” (32)

“This care in setting & printing, nullified when extra space is inserted between paragraphs (for there is some show-through even on reasonably good paper), adds to the beauty & clarity of the pages by heightening the contrast between the lines & their interlinear whiting.” (33)

“Care is necessary in adjusting the leading of the lines so as to give visually even spacing between them.” (43)

“Careful placing laterally, either to the left or the right of the mechanical centre, is necessary to make lines which begin with A, C, G, J, O, Q, T, V, W, Y, and c, e, j, o, q, v, w, and y or end with A, D, F, K, L, O, P, Q, R, T, V, W, Y and b, c, e, f, h, p, r, v, w & y, appear centered.” (43-44)

* If this notion strikes you as unfamiliar or unconvincing: “We know that the consequences of our motives for teaching and learning are significant: Keith Trigwell and Mike Prosser have shown that the instructor’s intentions in teaching (“why the person adopts a particular strategy”) have a greater impact on student learning than the instructor’s actual strategies for teaching (“what the person does”) (78). Their research has shown that approaches to teaching that are purposefully focused on the students and aimed at changing conceptual frameworks lead to deeper learning practices than teacher-centered, information-driven approaches (Trigwell 98). The implications are that the instructor’s fundamental beliefs and values about teaching, learning, and knowledge-making matter.” —A Guide to Feminist Pedagogy

Emily Larned has been publishing as an artistic practice since 1993. She is currently Associate Professor of Art in Graphic Design at the University of Connecticut, Storrs.

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NOTES TOWARD A TYPOGRAPHY OF CARE* // Emily Larned

01 Jul 2024 12:00 AM | Susan Viguers (Administrator)

Recently I’ve been thinking about typography as a practice of care.

By typography, I mean both the communications function of type, as well as its crafted details. The “communications function” entails attending to the meaning of the text, coaxing it out, making it visible, giving it physical form. By “details” I mean everything from creating and managing spaces (whether between letters, words, lines, paragraphs, or margins), to the use of dashes, to considerations of when one might use old style vs. lining vs. tabular figures.

For a contemporary analysis of care, I turn to Matters of Care by María Puig de la Bellacasa, who draws upon the thinking of feminist theorists before her, including Joan Tronto and Bernice Fischer. While this book makes no mention of typography, I find it rich with resonance.

De la Bellacasa offers Tronto’s definition of care as “everything that we do to maintain, continue, and repair ‘our world’ so that we can live in it as well as possible” (3). ‘Our world’ contains design artifacts; individual design artifacts, such as books, also create their own world. De la Bellacasa emphasizes that “‘caring about’ and ‘taking care of’ need to be supported by material practices” (4), that caring necessitates acting; one cannot design without doing something. She notes that “feminist interest in care has brought to the forefront the specificity of care as a devalued doing, often taken for granted if not rendered invisible” (53). The labor of typographers and graphic designers is ubiquitous, yet largely anonymous. Evidence of their work surrounds us, and yet as workers they remain largely uncredited and invisible.

I came to the notion of “care” as a lens to think through how to teach typographic rules that feels personally authentic to me as a feminist practitioner. As my students will attest, I care a lot about typographic detail. And my eagerness to teach conventions gives me pause. Many contemporary students and instructors alike are skeptical of Eurocentric inheritances, weary of their weight, and seek alternatives. New texts in this area, such as matriarchal design futures: a collective work in progress, by Heather Snyder Quinn and Ayako Takase, advocate for “changing the rules, unlearning the systems and structures under which we have been trained” and advise students against “checking off boxes and working to ‘please the professor’” (n.p.). My zealous presentation of a handout called the Yale Typesetting Checklist (distributed by a beloved former professor, Yale University Printer and Senior Critic John Gambell, now retired) hardly seems in line with this pedagogical approach. I relish teaching this checklist, yet I identify as a feminist design educator who values creating an environment where students explore, experiment, identify their influences, follow their interests, and develop their own research and methods. How do I reconcile my love of this traditional checklist with my dedication to feminist pedagogy?

Learner-centered teaching is knowledge and skill sharing, something long considered a part of feminist practice and process. Certainly there is power in understanding how and why things work, and being able to shape material to get a desired outcome: to know how to polish something. When students take a raw paragraph into InDesign and iterate various ways to shape and detail it based upon a desired outcome, the text gains character, liveliness, identity; the text becomes more itself. De la Bellacasa offers that “collective reenactment of committed knowledge [is] a form of care” (16), which suggests to me that typographic shaping is a way of caring for a text. One cannot care without knowledge and without action. The point to remember is that there are many types of knowledge, many ways of knowing, many ways of caring, multiple ways of acting.

So in teaching the checklist, the question becomes “how to care in ways that challenge situations and open possibilities rather than close or police spaces of thought and practice”(67)?

How to teach skills and principles while creating space for invention? What could this mean for a typographic checklist?

In the original checklist, one item is “to render all underlined titles of literary or artistic work in italic type.” I offer to my students that this is a reminder to treat titles differently: italics is a quiet and effective approach. Other options could be to underline a title (creating custom underlines is one of my favorite InDesign tricks), or make a title bold, or a different typeface, or a different color.... the reminder is to attend to the difference of the title, and not flatten it to the rest of the surrounding text.

Another item in the checklist outlines the usage of hyphens, en dashes, and em dashes. Dashes are glyphs, symbols, meaning-givers, like the letter A: you use the sign you need to communicate what you need to communicate. While I may be satisfied with conventional dashes and have yet to seek alternatives, I think of Samuel R. Delany inventing his own punctuation mark “⋮” for simultaneity. So in dashes there could be room too for invention, if students have the desire and care to create them.

Instead of a rigid list of rules, the checklist becomes a jumping off point for (re)considering every design choice. Does caring for a particular text mean adhering to the conventional, or inventing the unconventional? In discussing the value of the checklist, my student Tomaso Scotti offered “When details are cared for, people notice.” He elaborated that even if a layperson may not be able to identify why or how a design artifact appears cared for, they still recognize the designer’s attention. This “caring for” is a world-building, and world-maintaining, an outlook of attention and responsibility, an ethics of praxis: a cycle of theory, action, and reflection. If you consider a book (or any design artifact) its own world, “to maintain, continue, and repair ‘our world’ so that we can live in it as well as possible” offers a feminist lens through which to think through what we do as typographers, one checklist point at a time.

* this post presupposes that typography is a book art relevant to all students and practitioners of the book.

Works referred to:

de la Bellacasa, María Puig. Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017.

Quinn, Heather Snyder and Ayako Takase, matriarchal design futures: a collective work in progress, Chicago and Providence: self-published, 2024.

Emily Larned has been publishing as an artistic practice since 1993, when as a teenager she began making zines. She is currently Associate Professor of Art in Graphic Design at the University of Connecticut, Storrs.

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