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.

<< First < Prev 1 2 3 4 5 ... Next > Last >>

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.

Read more • Comments (1)
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.

Read more • Comments (1)
THE ZINCS: CAPTURING A BYGONE WORLD – PART TWO // mahala kephart

20 Jun 2024 12:00 AM | Susan Viguers (Administrator)

Used in commercial printing from the 19th century through the mid-20th century, the 20,000 photoengraving blocks in the J. Willard Marriott Library collection would have been used in the production of a variety of printed materials, including books, pamphlets, newspapers, announcements, invitations, greeting cards, and advertisements. Under the direction of Book Arts Program faculty, book arts program volunteers and student assistants have been responsible for most of the cataloging efforts to date.

At first, the collection was organized by grouping, like subject matter (such as birds, images of people, or ships) together on galley trays. This organizational strategy, however, required moving and reorganizing all of the galley trays as blocks were put away. As the number of cataloged blocks grew, this practice was, pun intended, shelved. Now blocks are filed away and given a cabinet address based on their original galley tray. This means that carefully labeled “birds” will be scattered through the galley tray cabinets. Cabinet address and inventory numbers are noted on the original print proofs as a backup inventory control measure.

With the rare exceptions of zinc cuts that exceed an 8.5 x 11” footprint, scans appear in the physical catalog at true size. Large zinc cuts appear at a reduced size, with appropriate notation. Zinc cuts that are damaged are proofed and scanned, with damage notes added to the catalog. Moving to a digital catalog will require physically measuring each zinc cut with digital calipers since size will no longer be obvious to the potential end user; notations about damage or other issues will also transfer to the digital catalog.

Zinc cuts can be fiddly to print, requiring some amount of make-ready temporarily attached to sections of the wood block underneath the metal plate. Nails are sometimes visible in the printed image; usually this can be fixed using a nail set and light tapping with a small hammer, being careful not to strike any other part of the plate with the nail set or the hammer. In cases where the nails are not possible to hide, damage notations are made in the catalog. A galley tray usually contains between ten and fifteen blocks, carefully arranged to maximize use of the space (sometimes fitting them back presents a Tetris-like challenge). The blocks are square or rectangular but are occasionally irregularly so (like Utah’s state boundaries compared to those of Wyoming or Colorado). A proof printing session can proceed most efficiently if the blocks from one tray are printed from largest to smallest (and the next tray from smallest to largest, and so forth); this greatly reduces setup changes.

In addition to the multi-step, manual process of printing the photoengravings and preparing them for digitization and search engine optimization, one of the serious challenges of cataloging the images in the collection has been the sheer volume of subject matter present. Only about a fifth of the collection has been cataloged, so many more gems sit waiting to be found. Some images provide interesting insight into long-ago mechanical or logistical processes in factories, below deck on ships, or in the loading of ships from dockside. There are dramatic scenes that are quiet; dramatic scenes that are full of action; and other dramatic scenes that seriously beg the question of what was going on in the accompanying text.

As electronic platforms have advanced in functionality, some early versions of key wording in the studio were lost in computer and software upgrades, a long pandemic hiatus, and other incompatibilities. Moving the existing data as well as updating and standardizing descriptive material under the umbrella of the Marriott Library’s Digital Collections team should ensure data integrity, continuity, preservation, and backup going forward. Additionally, this move will create a road map for future staffing needs and standardize information about the project to ensure smooth knowledge transfer and strategic planning.

The accompanying illustrations offer the very briefest introduction to the wonderful variety and not-yet fully explored creative potential of the J. Willard Marriott Library Photoengraving and Zinc Cut Collection housed in the Book Arts Studio at the University of Utah. We look forward to being able to share this resource more broadly with book artists near and far in the coming years.

mahala kephart, flutist by training and retired university development administrator, is a long‑time volunteer and student in the University of Utah’s Book Arts Studio. Work on printing and cataloging the photoengraving and zinc cut collection has proven to be a surprising marriage of the analog and digital worlds.

Read more • Comments (1)
THE ZINCS: CAPTURING A BYGONE WORLD – PART ONE // mahala kephart

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

The Book Arts Studio housed within the University of Utah’s J. Willard Marriott Library is home to a collection of approximately 20,000 photoengraving blocks that capture and preserve a surprisingly rich array of images from a world gone by.

The vast majority of the pieces in the collection were originally part of the collection of the Newcomen Society in North America. Established in 1923, its members were leaders from a variety of fields (industry, invention, transportation, communication, energy, mining, agriculture, economics, banking, insurance, education, and the law). Newcomen Society members addressed gatherings of their peers in talks focused on the history, triumphs, and challenges of their particular enterprise; these talks were held across the US and Canada.

Eventually the Newcomen Society in North America established a physical campus and headquarters in what is now the Philadelphia suburb of Exton, Pennsylvania. The campus, designed by architect Briton Martin, included offices, guest houses, a chapel, a bell tower with carillon, as well as many antique model steam engines. Also located on the campus was the Thomas Newcomen Memorial Library in Business History which housed some 2,700 volumes.

The business model of the Society also included Newcomen Publications, Inc. and an on-site print shop. The print shop produced a long-running series of pamphlets that served to document the presentations given at meetings. The booklets, which were generally paid for by the entity being recognized (the business or organization highlighted in the publication, whose leader had given one of the meeting addresses), were produced using a consistent design strategy for decades, and were illustrated first using both commissioned and antique engravings; later publications were illustrated primarily with photographs. With more than 2,500 institutions and organizations having been honored during the four decades the Newcomen Society was active, the number of commemorative booklets produced by Newcomen Publications, Inc., was significant.

At its height, the Newcomen Society of North America had a membership roll of 17,000. Membership, however, declined significantly in the last part of the 20th century. The campus was sold; the collection of photoengraving blocks came to the University of Utah; the collection of antique engines was auctioned; and the Society officially disbanded in 2007. The organization’s remaining archives are housed in the National Museum of Industrial History located in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.

The University of Utah’s collection contains other photoengravings and zinc cuts, as well. These likely came from newspaper printers in Salt Lake City (the Salt Lake Tribune and Deseret News), as well as the University of Utah print shop. The provenance of individual pieces in the collection, however, has not been fully documented.

The images on the physical objects are both photoengravings and line art that were etched onto thin zinc (sometimes magnesium or copper) sheets that were then trimmed and affixed to blocks of wood with small nails. The distance from the base of the block to the highest face of the engraving was calculated to 0.918 inches, the US industry “type high” printing standard.

Cataloging the University of Utah’s collection began in earnest when the Book Arts Studio moved to its current location in the J. Willard Marriott Library in 2009. The engravings are housed in designated galley tray cabinets in the studio. The cataloging process involves cleaning and polishing the metal part of the block (this operation is largely limited to engravings that are extremely dirty, dusty, or appear to be stained or damaged); taking a proof of the image by printing it onto paper on a flatbed press; scanning the resulting proofs; assigning keywords and galley tray addresses to the scanned images; and, finally, adding an inventory number to the physical object.

From 2010-2023, the resulting “Zinc Cut Catalog” information was made available through physical notebooks housed in the Book Arts Studio. Beginning in 2024, the physical catalog will be phased out and the photoengraving catalog eventually made available through the Marriott Library’s Digital Library Collections.

More about this exciting development our next post.

Sources:

Swearingen, John E. The Growth of Standard Oil Company (Indiana): 1889-1964. Princeton, NJ: Newcomen Society of North America, 1964.

“Public Relations: The Newcomers,” Time Magazine, July 21, 1952, https://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,859909,00.htm, accessed February, 2024

Wikipedia. “Newcomen Society of the United States.” Last modified March 2, 2024. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newcomen_Society_of_the_United_States

mahala kephart, flutist by training and retired university development administrator, is a long‑time volunteer and student in the University of Utah’s Book Arts Studio. Work on printing and cataloging the photoengraving and zinc cut collection has proven to be a surprising marriage of the analog and digital worlds.

Read more • Comments (1)
PART TWO: WARREN LEHRER'S LIFE IN BOOKS // Brian Davis

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

Warren Lehrer’s A Life in Books (2013) is one of my favorite contemporary novels. A Life in Books is Lehrer’s first novel, but as many of CBAA’s readers surely know, Lehrer has been composing artist books and experimenting with typography and multimedia since the late 1970s. Readers familiar with Lehrer’s earlier works as well as the history of artists books and book history more generally will find A Life in Books is not only an evocative love song to the book as object but a masterfully original and emotionally driven work of visual storytelling. A Life in Books also happens to be an exemplary multimodal book-archive.

Warren Lehrer, A Life in Books, 2013, Goff Books. Front cover.

The full title to Lehrer’s novel is A Life in Books: The Rise and Fall of Bleu Mobley, The Long Awaited Memoir and Retrospective Monograph Featuring All 101 of Bleu Mobley’s Books.As its long title suggests, Lehrer’s novel is both a fictional memoir and a retrospective monograph written by a fictitious author and bookmaker named Bleu Mobley. Narrated from the confines of a prison cell, A Life in Books is Bleu’s 102nd and last book, transcribed from audiotapes, compiled and edited by a writer named Warren Lehrer, the real Lehrer’s fictional doppelganger. While I do not have the space to elaborate on how the novel explores issues of fictionality or matters of textual authenticity, nor do I wish to spoil the ending for those unfamiliar with the novel, I don’t think it’s too much of a spoiler to say that Bleu publishes a work of Fiction that he markets as a work of Non-Fiction, a kind of satirical hoax, written with the intention of exposing war crimes committed by the U.S. government—and that it is this literary scandal that eventually leads to Bleu’s imprisonment.

As a literary compendium of sorts, A Life in Books documents Bleu’s creative universe. It includes excerpts from 33 of his 101 published books, photographs of each of his 101 personally designed book covers, as well as book reviews, catalog copy, and artifacts from his personal archive—all woven together with Bleu’s life story. Much like Lehrer himself, Bleu experiments with all kinds of bookish forms. He creates letterpress books, scrolls, dos-à-dos books, accordion books, works of biblio-circuitry, VR book-installations, poetry on toilet paper, a mini television built into a book, flying poster poems, bookish furniture and children’s toys that look like books, and of course, Bleu cuts across virtually every popular genre at some point along the way. In other words, this is not merely a novel about the life of a writer and bookmaker, it’s about the institution of literature and the history of modern publishing. Each of Bleu’s books also reflects a technological stage in the development of printing and, given that many of the events narrated in Bleu’s memoir pertain to actual historical events, both Bleu’s life and his books index real historical events, too. Even the title of the novel is metonymic: Bleu doesn’t merely spend his life making books, his books stand in for his life—his life in books. As such, A Life in Books is paradigmatic of the more maximalist or encyclopedic variant of multimodal book-archives.

Diagram in A Life in Books explaining the book’s format.

Around the time when the book was published, Lehrer adapted several of Bleu’s books into short films. Embracing the expansive nature of the project, Lehrer took the 101 book covers he designed for A Life in Books, as well as the textual artifacts he produced that became the foundation for the novel, and exhibited them across the U.S. as a retrospective survey of Bleu’s extraordinary publishing career. In the spirit of archiving, I like to view this travelling exhibit less as a component of Lehrer’s book tour for A Life in Books, which it obviously was, than as a traveling book-art installation that showcases the Bleu Mobley archive.

Photo from the exhibition A Life in Books: A Bleu Mobley Retrospective. Photo credit: Warren Lehrer.

Just as some of Lehrer’s book titles from the 1980s end up being a part of Bleu’s oeuvre in A Life in Books (e.g., French Fries and i mean you know), Lehrer has recently taken some of Bleu’s stories and remediated them into standalone books. For example, Jericho’s Daughter (2024), which Lehrer co-authored with Sharon Hovarth, is an anti-war retelling of the Biblical tale of Rahab and takes the form of a bifurcated, dos-à-dos binding. Riveted in the Word (2024) is an interactive digital book, soon to be available at the Apple Store, that incorporates kinetic typography and an original soundtrack to explore a writer’s attempt to regain their language faculty after a stroke. Both books first appear in A Life in Books, albeit in different forms. That Lehrer continues to find ways to further elaborate on Blue Mobley’s textual universe is not simply a matter of postmodern recycling, it’s a testament, I would argue, to just how generative archival practices can be within the domain of book art and literature.

I encourage readers unfamiliar with Lehrer’s work to check his stuff out and, for those already familiar with his work, I highly recommend looking into the two aforementioned titles which are set to be published in June of this year.

Brian Davis teaches English in the Upper School at Stone Ridge School of the Sacred Heart as well as undergraduate courses in writing, literature, and film at the University of Maryland. His writing has appeared in Frontiers of Narrative Studies, electronic book review, Orbit: A Journal of American Literature, among others.

Read more • Comments (1)
PART ONE: THE RISE OF MULTIMODAL BOOK-ARCHIVES // Brian Davis

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

Most of my writing during and after graduate school has argued that contemporary multimodal literature, for the most part, employs an archival poetics.[1] Books like Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves (2000) — which is arguably the most influential example — as well as Steve Tomasula’s The Book of Portraiture (2006), Leanne Shapton’s Important Artifacts (2009), Reif Larsen’s The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet (2009), Anne Carson’s Nox (2010), Doug Dorst and J. J. Abrams’s S. (2013), Warren Lehrer’s A Life in Books (2013), Thalia Field’s Experimental Animals (2016), Matthew McIntosh’s theMystery.doc (2017), Rian Hughes’s XX (2020), and many, many others, not only exploit the material and expressive possibilities of the book as object, they function as physical sites for compiling and organizing heterogeneous collections of textual artifactsfor narrative and other expressive purposes. I call these aesthetic objects book-archives and examine them through the lens of archival poetics, a poetics of documentation and preservation, of curation and transmission.

In addition to employing a variety of literary modes and linguistic registers, book-archives often include reproduced photographs, paintings, drawings, handwriting, newspaper clippings, x-rays, maps, diagrams, charts, and other kinds of textual artifacts and ephemera. Makers of book-archives tend to also organize their books according to archival techniques and principles such as collation (the combining and comparison of objects), cataloging (the listing and inventorying of various things), annotation (commentary and diagrams of objects), cross-referencing and intertextuality (the citation of texts in other texts), indexicality (how textual objects point to specific places and contexts in the world), and conceptual metonymy (how textual objects stand in for larger psychosocial complexes, spatiotemporal continua, and other textual objects).

Given the physical dimensions, design potential, and portability of books, book-archives often take on the form of compendiums and dossiers. On the one hand, there are the more maximalist or encyclopedic book-archives like House of Leaves and A Life in Books, which recapitulate entire schools and traditions of literary history and printmaking. On the other hand, there are the more minimalist book-archives like Nox and Important Artifacts which are more modest in terms of their scope of documentation and narrative scale. At both ends of the spectrum, book-archives employ archival principles and techniques.

The emergence of book-archives as a contemporary mode of writing and bookmaking occurs at the intersection of literary-cultural history and material-technological development. In recent decades, a wide variety of literary modes and genres, including encyclopedic fiction, metafiction, artists books, electronic hypertext, visual literature, and graphic narratives, among others, have tended to coalesce in individual works, and this convergence has come at a time when the technological affordances of new media, including software like QuarkXPress and Adobe’s InDesign and Photoshop, become readily accessible and fairly easy to use. Nowadays, authors and designers are able to incorporate practically all forms of media into their books. No longer limited to the pen, typewriter, word processor, or letterpress, writers are able to integrate virtually all types of inscription and media into a single object—the book—using various design software on their personal computers. This convergence in large part explains why we have seen the book-archive as a mode of writing and bookmaking emerge when it has.

The rise of archival poetics also overlaps with various responses to supposed threats brought on by digital technology to print and media culture, reading practices, public discourse, social trust and cultural memory. Central to multimodal book-archives are matters of textual authenticity—that is, of determining whether a textual artifact is real or fake, genuine or a copy. And of course, issues of authentication typically tip over into questions about authorship and attribution as well.

So while artificial intelligence and social media, for instance, have created real and pressing concerns pertaining to matters of authenticity, book-archives have tended to respond to these matters by drawing attention to how subjectivity, knowledge, discourse, and cultural memory are increasingly configured through distributed networks of people and artifacts in different social and institutional spaces. Book-archives, in other words, use the book object as a vehicle for interrogating some of the most pressing issues of the twenty-first century.

In my next blog post, I will attempt to tie some of these threads together with a discussion of Warren Lehrer’s A Life in Books

1] Those interested in reading more about archival poetics and multimodal literature may wish to read my interviews with Warren Lehrer and Bill Bly, both published at electronic book review. I have also published articles on Anne Carson, Bill Bly, and Mark Z. Danielewski.

Brian Davis teaches English in the Upper School at Stone Ridge School of the Sacred Heart as well as undergraduate courses in writing, literature, and film at the University of Maryland. His writing has appeared in Frontiers of Narrative Studies, electronic book review, Orbit: A Journal of American Literature, among others.

Read more • Comments (1)
AI AND AB (ARTIST BOOKS) // Peter Tanner

15 Apr 2024 11:19 AM | Susan Viguers (Administrator)

Recently I have been fascinated to learn more about how to use AI for teaching purposes. I have found it to be a great resource, always disclosing to my students that I am using it so that they use similar best practices and cite its use. To demonstrate some of what AI can do I asked ChatGPT a few questions. It is interesting to see its answers and how they represent ways that the information we share with AI influences the results it can provide. For clarity’s sake all the questions below are from myself and all the answers in all their redundant glory were generated by the ChatGPT’s AI.

+++++

Peter Tanner Question (PT Question): What is ChatGPT and what can it do?

ChatGPT AI Answer: ChatGPT is a conversational AI model developed by OpenAI, based on the GPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer) architecture. It's designed to generate human-like text based on the input it receives. ChatGPT is trained on a vast amount of text data from the internet, allowing it to understand and generate responses across a wide range of topics and contexts.

Here are some of the things ChatGPT can do:

1. Answer Questions: ChatGPT can provide information and answer questions on a wide variety of topics, drawing from its extensive training data.

2. Engage in Conversation: ChatGPT can engage in text-based conversation, responding to prompts and interacting with users in a manner similar to human conversation.

3. Generate Text: Whether it's writing stories, poems, articles, or even code snippets, ChatGPT can generate text in a coherent and contextually relevant manner.

4. Assist with Writing: ChatGPT can help with writing tasks by suggesting ideas, providing feedback, or generating content based on specific prompts or requirements.

5. Language Translation: While not perfect, ChatGPT can assist with language translation tasks by converting text from one language to another.

6. Creative Exploration: ChatGPT can be used for creative exploration, generating ideas, brainstorming, or providing inspiration for artistic or design projects.

Overall, ChatGPT is a versatile tool that can assist with a wide range of tasks involving natural language processing and generation. However, it's important to keep in mind that while ChatGPT can produce human-like text, it doesn't have understanding or consciousness like a human does.

+++++

PT Question: What is an artist book?

ChatGPT AI Answer: An artist's book is a medium of artistic expression that uses the book format as its primary means of presentation. Unlike traditional books, which focus primarily on conveying written content, artist's books emphasize the visual and tactile experience of the book object itself. They can take many forms, including handmade books, altered books, unique or limited-edition works, and even sculptural or multimedia creations.

Artist's books often blur the boundaries between visual art, literature, and design. They can incorporate a wide range of materials, such as paper, fabric, metal, wood, and found objects. Artists may use various techniques such as painting, printmaking, collage, photography, and typography to create their books.

The content of artist's books can vary widely, ranging from narrative storytelling to abstract expressionism to political commentary. Some artist's books explore themes of identity, memory, or social justice, while others experiment with the structure and format of the book itself.

Overall, artist's books offer a unique and immersive artistic experience that engages the viewer on multiple levels, challenging conventional notions of what a book can be.

+++++

PT Question: Can AI help create artist books?

ChatGPT AI Answer: Yes, AI can certainly play a role in the creation of artist's books, either directly or indirectly. Here's how:

1. Content Generation: AI can be used to generate written content for artist's books. For example, a language model like GPT-3 could be prompted with themes, ideas, or specific text passages to generate narratives, poetry, or other textual elements that can be incorporated into the book.

2. Design Assistance: AI tools can assist artists in designing the layout and visual elements of their books. For instance, software programs equipped with AI algorithms can help with layout composition, image editing, and typography selection, ensuring a visually appealing and cohesive design.

3. Collaborative Creation: AI can facilitate collaborative creation processes between artists and machines. Artists can interact with AI models to explore new ideas, experiment with different styles, or generate content collaboratively, leading to innovative and unexpected outcomes.

4. Automated Production: AI-driven automation technologies can streamline the production process of artist's books by handling repetitive tasks such as image processing, text layout, and even physical bookbinding in some cases, allowing artists to focus more on the creative aspects of their work.

5. Inspiration and Exploration: AI can serve as a source of inspiration and exploration for artists, providing access to vast amounts of data, images, texts, and other resources that can spark creativity and inform the conceptualization and execution of artist's books.

While AI can provide valuable assistance in various aspects of creating artist's books, it's important to recognize that human creativity, intuition, and artistic sensibility remain essential throughout the creative process. AI should be viewed as a tool to augment and enhance human creativity rather than replace it entirely. Ultimately, the synergy between human and machine capabilities can lead to exciting and innovative outcomes in the realm of artist's books.

+++++

PT Question: What are key artist books from United States?

ChatGPT AI Answer: The United States has a vibrant tradition of artist's books, with numerous influential works that have contributed to the development of the medium. Here are some key examples:

1. "The Birds" by Edward Ruscha: Published in 1972, "The Birds" is a seminal work by American artist Edward Ruscha. It features black-and-white photographs of various species of birds, accompanied by simple, descriptive text. Ruscha's use of photography and text in a minimalist format has had a profound influence on the genre of artist's books.

2. "A Humument" by Tom Phillips: Tom Phillips' "A Humument" is an ongoing project that involves altering and reinterpreting the pages of a Victorian novel, "A Human Document" by W.H. Mallock. Phillips paints, collages, and obscures the original text, creating a new narrative and visual experience. The project blurs the boundaries between literature and visual art and has inspired generations of artists.

3. "Diary of a Victorian Dandy" by Duane Michals: This artist's book by Duane Michals combines photography and handwritten text to create a fictional narrative about the life of a Victorian-era dandy. Michals' innovative use of sequencing and storytelling techniques has made "Diary of a Victorian Dandy" a landmark work in the genre.

4. "Seven American Deaths and Disasters" by Kenneth Goldsmith: Published in 2013, "Seven American Deaths and Disasters" is a provocative artist's book by conceptual poet Kenneth Goldsmith. It consists of transcriptions of radio and television broadcasts related to seven iconic American tragedies, including the assassination of John F. Kennedy and the September 11 attacks. Goldsmith's appropriation and recontextualization of media texts raise questions about representation, memory, and collective trauma.

5. "House of Leaves" by Mark Z. Danielewski: While not strictly an artist's book, "House of Leaves" is a groundbreaking novel that incorporates innovative typographic design and unconventional page layouts to create a complex and immersive reading experience. Mark Z. Danielewski's experimental approach to storytelling challenges traditional notions of narrative structure and has inspired artists and writers alike.

These are just a few examples of the diverse and influential artist's books that have emerged from the United States. They demonstrate the country's rich artistic heritage and its ongoing contributions to the field of book arts.

+++++

PT Question: What was the first artist book?

ChatGPT AI Answer: Pinpointing the "first" artist's book can be challenging due to the broad and evolving definition of the genre and the long history of artists experimenting with book formats. However, one early example often cited as a precursor to the modern artist's book is the "Hypnerotomachia Poliphili," published in 1499.

The "Hypnerotomachia Poliphili" is a Renaissance-era book that combines text with lavish woodcut illustrations. It tells the story of a protagonist, Poliphilo, on a dreamlike journey through a landscape filled with classical architecture, mythological figures, and erotic encounters. The book's intricate design and integration of text and image make it a landmark work in the history of book arts.

While not a contemporary artist's book in the modern sense, the "Hypnerotomachia Poliphili" exemplifies many characteristics of the genre, including the integration of visual and textual elements, the exploration of unconventional narrative structures, and the use of the book format as a vehicle for artistic expression. It has inspired generations of artists and designers and continues to be celebrated for its beauty and innovation.

+++++

PT Comment: All the previous answers were generated by the ChatGPT AI. For many of you and myself, the repetition that we read can be grating, but that is important to note because it separates us from the AI. But also think about what these answers represent: An AI provided the definition of the artist book. That represents a non-research-based consensus found on the internet. It created a list of the most important books in the history of artist books in the United States, but it did not choose Twenty-six Gas Stations, which may perturb many readers. What should be readily apparent is that while there are vast amounts of information available for AI to use, there is a great deal of serious academic research that is not available for access by either AI or Google’s search engines. AI can only present us with an amalgam of the data that we have fed to it. The adage “garbage in garbage out” comes to mind. AI can generate many types of information. However, as humans and specialists in our fields we are the content authorities. The metadata is a proxy, not “the” thing.

+++++

PT Question: Who is Peter Tanner?

ChatGPT AI Answer: As of my last update in January 2022, I don't have specific information about an individual named Peter Tanner who is widely known or recognized. It's possible that Peter Tanner could be a private individual, a professional in a specialized field, or someone who has gained prominence after that time. If Peter Tanner is associated with a particular field or area of expertise, providing more context could help in providing relevant information.

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.

Read more • Comments (2)
MUSING FROM THE 2024 COLLEGE ART ASSOCIATE CONFERENCE // Peter Tanner

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

In February of this year, I was in Chicago for the annual College Art Association (CAA) conference. It was, as usual, a fantastic opportunity to take the pulse of art historic trends, and it was also a chance to raise awareness about CBAA as I co-chaired a session with Levi Sherman on artist books. As I attended the various sessions that were of interest to me, I was struck by how often I encountered theories and practices that are relevant to book art and book art theory.

In one session, an infamous book from México El libro negro del terror nazi en Europa: Testimonio de escritores y artistas de 16 naciones (published in Mexico City in 1943 under the auspices of the exile press El Libro Libre) was analyzed as a document that proves that information was escaping from Europe about the horrors of Nazi concentration camps to at least México, if not all of Latin America at a very early date, perhaps even before the U.S. knew of such atrocities. It emphasized to me the fact that books are and contain testimonies of assembled knowledge.

In another session about community engagement with art and art history outside the lecture hall, artists and art historians both discussed how to use art object production in association with collections from regional museums and diverse art aficionados. This panel’s presenters discussed how teaching about diverse art objects from diverse communities enhanced student experiences in primary and secondary educational institutions. They also spoke to the importance and presented examples of taking art to the community. At one of these institutions, art history students and art students worked with people from a center for the blind and visually impaired, through interviews and descriptions, to create art that both permitted non-visual appreciation and opened up students’ understanding of diverse communities’ wants and needs. We could use some more outreach like this.

There were also other sessions where theories relevant to the artist book and from the history of artist books were presented.

The shallowest mention was in a session about how to get published. In that session one audience member asked the editors present if their particular publishers published artist books. My ears naturally perked up. I took the opportunity after the session to ask the person who asked that question what it was that they had meant by publishing an artist book. They had meant a monograph of some sort on a particular artist’s work, which is what I had suspected. However, to my surprise they had not heard about our field of activity, nor had they thought that an artist book could have any other meaning. I explained the difference in the time that I had with them, hoping to not appear to be as much of an artist book kook as I really am. The point of this interaction is that wide-spread knowledge of our field is not something that we can take for granted. To this point, one person who attended our panel had never heard of artist books nor CBAA until this conference. We are all ambassadors and educators for our field.

One very interesting question that came up for artists and art historians involved how each discipline navigates its connection to advancing technology and AI in particular. AI represents a new connection between art and technology, and as such raises manifold questions and implications that are too broad to be discussed here. What I will ask instead is what kinds of artist books can be made using AI? How will artist books in all their varieties engage with similar technologies? While I do not believe that AI will replace humans or artist books and their makers, I do think that people who can use AI will redefine what we think of as possible in the creation of artist books.

The most direct and profound reference to artist books was in a session co-sponsored by the Association for Latin American Art (ALAA) and the Institute of Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA). In this session the keynote speaker, Dr. Esther Gabara, from Duke University, presented research from her 2022 book titled Non-literary Fiction: Art of the Americas under Neoliberalism, in which she explicitly applied to art in Latin America the theories developed by Mexican book artist and theorist Ulises Carrión (1941-1989). She argued that those theories contributed to a new way to interpret Latin American conceptual and theoretical art. However, what she missed is Carrión’s connections to the larger world of artist book creation (though I am hoping she points that out later in her book, which I have yet to finish).

Through my attendance at CAA, I became further aware of two very important but conflicting perspectives. Artist books and book art have a great deal to contribute to the theoretical understanding of art and its long and manifold connections to technology, but it also labors in relative obscurity. What kind of solutions to these problems do you see?

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.

Read more • Add comment
KEEPING MOMENTUM // Beth Sheehan

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

One of my favorite questions to ask artists is: if there was an apocalypse and you were the only person left but all of your basic needs were met (electricity still works, you have plenty of food, etc.) would you continue to make art?

In my Considering Everything article, I discussed idea generation and where to start when you are beginning a project. But after you have your idea there are still a lot of decisions to make and all of the effort that goes into the creation of your work. The art-making process can be draining and it seems inevitable for artists to experience maker’s block at some point, so how do you keep your momentum and motivation as an artist? How do you stay interested in what you are making over the course of your artistic life? What do you do if you get stuck along the way? I do not believe there is a universal answer, so I would like to present some solutions and encourage a discussion about additional solutions.

Monotype by Beth Sheehan

Sometimes artists get stuck at the idea generation stage. When this is the case for me, I find that there are two primary causes. First, my output can only be as good as my input: similar to the way gas tanks function, if I have not filled my tank, my creative practice will run out of momentum. So, if I am not having success generating ideas and artwork, I consider what I have been reading, watching, listening to, and looking at. Inspiration can come from anywhere, but it has helped me to recognize what kinds of sources provide me with inspiration more frequently than others and then turn to those kinds of sources again and again.

The second cause that typically blocks my idea generation is often a processing issue. I may have many ideas and a lot of creative fuel, but if I do not spend time processing and organizing my thoughts, the fuel is not usable. To assist in my processing, I prefer to journal about my ideas. I usually ask myself questions such as:

● What interests me most about this idea?

● What part of my idea feels the least solid?

● What are the most important aspects of this idea?

● Should this idea become several separate projects?

● Are there any rules that I would like to impose on this idea (such as a specific size, form, medium, etc.)?

Beth Sheehan graining a litho stone

Sometimes artists get stuck at the execution stage. Perhaps you enjoy coming up with ideas but do not enjoy the actual making. There is precedent for creating non-object artworks, one form being what Gao Minglu terms “proposal art (fangan yishu)”[1]. However, there are also ways to push forward into actually making your work, as well. It should be noted first, though, that art does not have to be made within a specific timeframe, you are allowed to work on more than one artwork at a time, and you are not a failure if you abandon a project that is no longer enjoyable (it is good to remember that just because you have spent time, money or energy on a project, does not mean you need to continue with it, as per the Sunk Cost Fallacy).

During the execution stage, I find that it is easier to move forward if I produce test prints, material tests, or make multiple mock-ups of my ideas. Alternatively, I occasionally find it more beneficial to make smaller projects that I do not treat seriously. By focusing on something that is lower stakes and more immediate like a quick one-page book, a collage, or a monotype print, I can get into the mode of making without the pressure of executing my actual project. Using writing prompts as making prompts or using ideation decks can be particularly liberating.

And finally, if I am further along in the execution stage and feel myself losing momentum, I find it best to invite an artist, art historian, critic, or curator to my studio for a studio visit. The visitor might see threads in your work that you have not seen, they may suggest artists or media for you to research that help reinvigorate your passion for your project, or you may even disagree with their insights but through disagreeing, you find you are able to think through what you think about your work in ways you were unable to do alone.

[1] Gao Minglu, Total Modernity and the Avant-Garde in Twentieth-Century Chinese Art (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2011), page 142.

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 & Weaver and was the Bindery Manager at Small Editions.

Read more • Comments (1)
WHAT DO WE OWE THE VIEWER? // Beth Sheehan

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

Lately, I have been participating in discussions regarding the artist’s role in artworks, specifically if the artist’s background and personal experiences should manifest in their artworks or if artworks should be more universally relatable and non-auto-biographical. In these conversations, the predominant mentality is in favor of non-auto-biographical works, which seems heavily tied to a desire for artwork to be accessible to every audience. These discussions have prompted me to contemplate the question: What do artists owe their viewer?

My artwork is about memory and my drive to make my work comes from personal experience with Severely Deficient Autobiographical Memory (SDAM). SDAM primarily manifests for me in an inability to visually replay moments from my past, thereby making it particularly difficult to determine if my memories are genuine recollections or if they were fabricated from a narrative I created or embellished. But memory is universally untrustworthy for all people and that universal unreliability also plays a role in my work as I use my own lack of memory to frame questions about the truth and reality of a past that is inaccessible in the present.

Beth Sheehan, “Memento,” 2015-2022

I find myself on a potentially less-popular side of the auto-biographical art discussion, as I would argue that artworks should not (and cannot) cater to every member of an audience. I would like to further assert that by generalizing the accessibility of their content, an artist can lessen the importance and impact of their artworks for the community that relates to the artist’s auto-biographical works. Further, the removal of the personal can rob a viewer of the potential to understand experiences that they are unfamiliar with.

Through my artworks, I have connected with people who did not realize that their cerebral experience was abnormal because discussing the intricacies of memory and perception presents a difficult stage for communication. For example, if two people are discussing a shared memory, both may use the phrase “I remember,” but one person may be using visual recall to replay the memory like a movie (episodic memory) and the other person may be simply accessing the factual information their brain stored (more similar to the way we recall trivia). If my work contained no relation to my personal experience and instead focused solely on universal experiences of memory, I feel I would be doing my viewer a disservice.

Beth Sheehan, “In the Moments,” 2023

However, even though my personal preference favors works that are founded in the artist’s experience, I also feel that everything is best in moderation. If an artist’s work stems from personal experience and that artist creates work that is self-referential and completely unrelatable, I would begin to question if the work should be shared with the public. So, then, I come back to my initial question: What do artists owe their viewer?

To unpack that question further, I’d like to consider the following as well:

- Does the artist owe the viewer relatability, understanding, connection, universality, authenticity, or their story/experiences?

- If the viewer is owed something, are they owed that thing within the artwork itself or in the artist’s statement or interviews?

- Is abstraction kinder to the viewer because it has the potential to be equally relatable/accessible regardless of the viewer’s experience? If the viewer presumes artwork will have a deeper meaning and then they cannot glean one from abstraction, will the work no longer be accessible?

- Should art be for everyone? Does your answer change if I phrase the question differently: Should all art be for all people?

-What are the sacrifices made when art becomes less personal and more universal? What are the sacrifices made when art IS personal?

- Do the expectations for the viewer/artist relationship change based on medium? Does visual art demand something different for the relationship than a medium like poetry?

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 & Weaver and was the Bindery Manager at Small Editions.

Read more • Add comment