Blogorrhea Junior

Typography Meets Church Architecture

Every now and then my worlds collide, producing some really interesting mashups. I love cathedral and church architecture, especially the Gothic and neo-Gothic. I love typography, as you've probably gathered by now. I'm a big fan of poster art of all kinds, but especially letterpress. So I was in a little ecstasy of delight when I ran across this amazing, amazing piece of typographical design by Cameron Moll, via Veer's website (click the "Ideas" tab for more coolness from Veer).

This is only a detail of the whole 16"x24" print which is a rendering of the main Latter Day Saints Temple in Salt Lake City, though it was designed to advertise a design review independent of the church itself. You can see other pictures of it at Veer's website or order one for yourself. Half of them are gone already, at $50 a pop + postage and I just ordered one for myself, so if you love this kind of stuff, get on it now. I'll let you know how glorious it is and gloat a little when it arrives. Just the pictures have really knocked my socks off

[Click the photo for full size. Cross posted at Dowsing]

Catching up: Miscellania

I am, obviously, way behind on, well, everything right now. I can probably blame some of that on my new blog, which I've been compelled to write in just about every day. The class I'm teaching, even though it's only one section, is keeping me stepping looking for new material for them to read, because I've never taught journals or diaries as lit before. Plus, it's hot out (and inside since I don't have AC) and this is when my friends and I do a lot of catching up. Summer is for playing! I don't think I've ever really gotten away from that academic schedule in my head, despite years of corporate employment. And my energy level is kinda low right now, something I hope will fix itself in a couple of weeks. Anyway, that all combines to produce the benign neglect of my blog that you see here. So let me do a little catch-up today with some selections from people who aren't slackers like me.

First up, a fab video from Asheville bookbinder Annie Fain talking about sewing books, being an artist, making books. If it looks professionally done, that's because it's part of the series by Ursula Gullow, producer of Art Seen Asheville cable tv. Enjoy! Her blog is fantastic, too, so check it out.

• If you're in NYC and interested in stamping and other paper arts, The Ink Pad is having its third annual A*Muse*A*Palooza Stamp Extravaganza July 7-13th. "Seven days of fun with two classes, one Make-n-Take, and a card contest." The staff there are lovely, funny, helpful and very knowledgeable. I always drop way too much money there when I go in.
• Links! Lots of 'em! The Centre for Fine Print Research in the UK has a massive list of book arts links from all over the world that's definitely worth checking out. It's frequently updated and comes with handy little descriptions.
• Paper Sewing tutorial links, yet another technique (which includes paper quilting) for book and paper arts, over here at Silverspring Studios.
  
• Green Chair Press, one of my favorites, has an exquisite set of letterpress printed playing cards which I'm coveting like you would not believe. And I don't even play card games. But cards—they're kind of a passion of mine. I love unusual card sets. These are just gorgeous. If you missed my birthday . . . (hint, hint).
• Paper Dragon Books, a new(ish) bindery and printshop in Chelsea here in NYC. How did I miss this when it opened? (thanks to Moontree Arts for the heads up).
• Vroooom! This paper V12 engine blew me away. Engineers and architects make models like this all the time, but usually they're computer-rendered. This one wasn't rendered until it was hand-built first. Amazing.
• Calico Cat Press, who's doing some interesting books, lately.
• In case you missed it, the NYTimes had a nifty article on font design programs and some of the cool, free fonts that are coming out of them. Being a font junkie myself, this delighted me.One of these days, I'm going to get around to giving that a go, along with making my own paper and printing my books on letterpress. Yep, any day now.
• &rew Borloz (don't you love that use of the ampersand?) of Urban Paper Arts has been doing a beautiful and fascinating series on visual journaling over his blog. You'll have to scroll through to find the specific entries, but believe me, it won't be a hardship. &rew has some beautiful stuff on his blog.
• Amazing, amazing comic strips (though that seems entirely the wrong term) by Coco Wang about the May Chinese earthquake. Get a hanky before you click. (Thanks to Ampersand Duck and Arctic Oak for the heads up)
• Nice interview with Elissa Campbell of Blue Roof Designs with pictures of her and a great slideshow of her books.
• Beautiful paper objects, some under glass from Lyndie Dourthe. The site is in French, but just click through the links to see her anatomical doll illustrations, paper flowers, displays under glass and more pretty fabulous displays and installations. (Tip o' the hat to Double Happiness
  

Working, for a Change

Hey peeps, sorry I've been AWOL for a while. I've actually been working in one form or another and moonlighting on my other blog for a bit. So between writing lessons plans for a new class I've never taught before and reading tons of published journals and diaries for it, taking care of some health problems (don't ask; believe me, you don't want to know, though it's nothing serious, just embarrassing), looking for other money-making endeavors, having a birthday, catching up with friends, and . . . you get the idea. Life: it interferes with work so often (but in a good way). I have, however, gotten up to no good, too.

I'm happy to report that I have the mock-up of the body is as solid as the thought that holds it in place, the collection of Carlos Schröder's poems that I've been working on possibly forever. The mock up is currently in Argentina, where Carlos is spending the summer (those lucky profs), and apparently he will have to pry it out of his mother's hands to bring it back. She lets him "borrow" it when he's wanted to take it to his editor and book-selling friends down there. Moms, they're just like that. Pics of that, when it comes back from vacation.

So in the meanwhile, I've been practicing making more blank books and giving them away. Well, the making part, anyway. I'm pretty good at the giving away part. Here's two of them, with more to come as soon as the others are out of the press and I can take pictures. (Click thumbnails for larger pics.)

I'm off to buy more paper tomorrow at Blick's sale. I want more of these fun hot chocolate paper, since I screwed this one up and had to use that pretty watered paper for the back cover on this one. It makes cute books. I've made some sort of happy mistakes with this and decided imperfection is just an excuse for crafty improvisation. I had the most fun pasting up little cut-outs of the cover paper on the inside of the books though. Some of the crayon ones came out fun. And my sewing is getting better, but I've decided I need more thread now, of course. Especially after I went fabric shopping with Gretl on Sunday and found some beautiful silky polyester in a faint lilac color with an oriental plum blossom print on it. The next experiment will be making book cloth. So, yeah, purple thread is definitely in the works. And guess what? Volcano Arts is having a sale on it! Yay!

"45 Lessons" Copyright Update

Well, that turned out to be ridiculously easy, and a great example of why it's not so hard to find authors or copyright holders as you think it might be. Five days after I posted about looking for the author of the 45 Lessons of Life, my old (in every sense of the word *wink*) pal Leslie from my undergrad days sent me the name of Regina Brett, a columnist with the Cleveland Plain Dealer. Brett turned 50 last year and updated the original list of 45 to reflect that, then posted it on her blog at the paper, where it was no doubt found by some enterprising soul, copied into an email and sent around to friends with the tag, "Hey, isn't this great?" Somewhere along the way, as so often happens in the ether of perpetual forwarding, the chain email lost the name of the author, and it arrived in my in-box, via MG, anonymously. To be fair, I'm sure MG got it without the author's name, too, since, as an artist herself, she's scrupulous about giving credit where credit is due.

From this particular column of hers, you might get the idea that Brett's a fluffy, "women's page" columnist, but she's is anything but. She was a finalist this year for the Pulitzer because of her columns on teen violence and she's written on teenage pregnancy, racism, the death penalty, Sudan, and reforming the justice system. Which makes her 50 Lessons of Life,even more valuable, since they come from experience.

And, BTW, she has a great column on how not to be a writer, the title of which says it all: "Words are Free. Write. No Excuses." My favorite lines from it are: "Get your doctorate in creative writing first. Start therapy. Find the right writers group." More on this in another post.

Now, the next step is to decide what kind of book I'd like to make with this text, and to contact Ms. Brett about using her text.  Keep you posted.

Snail (Mail) Art

I used to be a prolific letter writer when I lived in the boondocks, in college, and before the advent of email. I still have drawers full of cards and stationery paper and, and once I discovered desktop publishing, I started to make my own stationery. If you got a letter from me, it was likely to be several pages long, handwritten in a fun color with a fountain pen (then later typed, because my handwriting is so bad and I can type faster than I can write), on funky stationery or in a cool card, and the envelope would be stamped and stickered and glittered up. Like most kids, I'd been fascinated by postage stamps too, and kept odd ones that I liked. I've always loved getting mail, and I wanted to make that a special experience for my pen pals, too. My former college roommate, who now lives in South Carolina, still sends me handmade, collaged cards with lovely line drawings and pictures on the envelopes.

I drifted a little closer to it when I bought the first three Griffin and Sabine books, by Nick Bantock. Those books opened a double door for me: one into book arts, and one into mail art. Although I'd been decorating my own envelopes and making my own stationery, I'd never thought of actually making my own cards or postage stamps. At the time, it wasn't even possible to make your own stamps, unless you did it by hand, and then they weren't valid postage. Now, of course, the Post Office allows you to design your own, and there are a couple of different services to help you, including one for Canadian postage. Little did I know decorated envelopes and cards were part of an entire art form.

Nor did I have any idea it had gone on so long. After all,  mail service as we know it is only a few hundred years old., though people have been sending each other written messages for as long as there has been writing, and ways of traveling. Wikipedia (that all-wise, all knowing source; just kidding) says, "Mail artists claim that mail art began when Cleopatra had herself delivered to Julius Caesar in a rolled-up carpet," although I would classify that more as "parcel post art" myself. Wired Magazine, in its Rants and Raves section, actually has a monthly mail art contest called "Return to Sender" of who can send the wackiest crap with the weirdest packaging. The latest is a shredded issue of Wired in a clear plastic bag. Those geeks—what kidders!

Mail art mostly consists of postcards and letters, everything from decorated envelopes to handmade cards, and postcards, or whatever you can send through the mail. They're a bit like artist's trading cards (ATCs), but with stamps, and bigger. As with ATCs, there are mail art groups and associations (I found a bazillion googling "mail art"), national and international.

If you like this sort of thing, the Center for Book Arts is hosting a new exhibit that I checked out on opening day:

Mapping Correspondence

Mail Art for the 21st Century
Also on View: Featured Artist Project: Karen Baldner and 2007 Artists In Residence Workspace.

The exhibit's got some great stuff in it, as always, including a chance to make your own art on a postcard with stamps, a book of thorns, a couple of great piano hinge books, and loads of fabulous postcards and other kinds of "letters."

Through June 28th
Center for Book Arts
28 W. 27th Street, 3rd Floor

Letterpress: The Fireside Bowl Project

Rock & roll and letterpress. In its heyday, letterpress was the medium of choice for band fliers and posters, for venues like the Fillmore East and West, the Avalon Ballroom and L.A.'s Whiskey-a-Go-Go. One of the most famous printers was Hatch Show Print, in Nashville, now inductees into the Country Music Hall of Fame, and still the master of rock & roll ephemera. You can see more of Hatch's work at the Ryman Auditorium gallery.

Now, Reba Rakstad of rar rar press is embarking on a great project that follows in this tradition with its own cool twist. The Fireside Bowl Project comes in three parts: an exhibition consisting of stories about punk and underground bands people have seen at the Fireside when it was still hosting music events (1994-2004) as well as photos and ephemera, followed by a book, and a web archive of the exhibition. The kicker is that Reba is letterpress printing the stories, condensed to a couple of short sentences, into posters reminiscent of show posters. Just not your grandma's rock posters.

The designs are almost all purely typographic but her use of color and wood type is reminiscent of Hatch's work, without slavishly duplicating it. In fact, the overprinting she does, sometimes in several colors makes them throb off the paper in a completely different way. You don't need graphics with these. They're graphic enough in themselves, visually and verbally, as electric and exciting as the shows. They mark crucial rites of passage, missed opportunities, passing craziness, injury, and that indescribable experience of being in a crowd of people listening and dancing to great music. Check out her Flickr set, too, which includes process photos as well as finished posters.

The exhibition is part of the Columbia College Interdisciplinary Arts Department's 2008 Thesis Exhibit and Performance May 2-23 at the Hokin Center Gallery, 623 S. Wabash in Chicago. Go. I'll have to settle for the photos. To me, this is one of the most exciting things I've seen done in letterpress in a long time. Thanks for the heads-up from Timothy B. Buckwalter, who thinks so too.

Poetry for Book Artists and Everyone Else

You know where to find it in the bookstore, but where can you find it on the web? Just in case you didn't know this (and where have you been? Under a rock somewhere?) there are loads of resources on the web for reading, publishing, even teaching poetry. There are e-zines galore, associations, graduate programs, small presses, and plenty of individual poets. The web has opened up a world of poetry for everyone. It's everywhere, in many guises and styles. And it's free! (Which is why poets mostly have other jobs; not that I think that's a bad thing.)

And take note all you book artists: these are people you'll want to hook up with to find great material to use in your books. It's not like it's a new idea; the Center for Book Arts sponsors an annual poetry chapbook contest (PDF) to give their letterpress and book arts students material to work with. In the class I took a couple of years ago, we made a broadsheet of a gorgeous poem by Gregory Pardlo that was part of a collection that later won awards. They also have a broadsides reading series. Most of the poets you'll find on the web would be very excited to work with you. Don't be shy.

Associations:

These are some of the mainstream poetry associations, but they all have links to others, and you can find just about any kind of poetry you like somewhere, just by starting here.

• The Academy of American Poets
• The Poetry Society of America not to be confused with:
• The Poetry Society of the UK. I guess they thought of it first, so we had to distinguish ourselves.
• United Poets on the West Coast and
• Poets West in the Pacific Northwest
• And if you're in New York, there's Poets House, with its vast collection of poetry books and public reading room.

Important Venues/"Schools"

I use the term "schools" very loosely. These aren't MFA programs; they're more like the School of Hard Knocks Poetics, and some amazing people have come out of them. I know the ones in New York best, because well, that's where I live. Feel free to add others in the comments.

• St. Mark's Poetry Project
• Nuyorican Poet's Cafe
• Bowery Poetry Club
• Cowboy Poetry at the Bar-D Ranch
• Gathering of the Tribes

Individual Poets (some of my personal local favorites):

• Christine Hamm has a blog called this is all your fault. She posts poems and her schedule for readings there. If you're in NYC, go look her up at one of them, especially the Poetry Brothel, and don't miss her poems.
• Cheryl B's The B-List, with news about her regular Poetry vs. Comedy gigs at the Bowery Poetry Club and elsewhere, and a fantastic set of links to other poets, writers, writing sites, zines, etc.
• Bob Holman, proprietor of the Bowery Poetry Club, poet, and poem pimp extraordinaire.
• Angelo Verga, one of my favorite Bronx poets.
• LivePoets.com has footage from a number of slams and spoken word performances.
• And if you want to know more about other poets, living and dead, and their poems, you can look them up at Poetry.org.

Just for fun (with lots of pop-ups, so be forewarned) the haiku generator. There, that should get you started.

Tonight! Live Poetry at the Bowery Poetry Club

It's National Poetry Month, remember? So get used to the poetry-related posts here for April (don't worry, I haven't entirely forgotten book and paper arts.)

Tonight at the Bowery Poetry Club are the alumni of Urban Word NYC, slam and spoken word performance at its best. And if you'd like to get involved yourself, after watching these inspiring performances, Urban Word offers workshops that are free for teens, including (and here's the book arts connection):

**Spoken INC with Tahani Salah and Tara Betts
Mondays, March 17-May 26 4:30 – 6:30

You asked for it! You wanted help putting together a collection of work? Well Urban Word NYC has answered your calls. We'll cover basic bookmaking concepts, layout, short writing exercises and editing so participants can create their own chapbooks with individualized artistry. We will have opportunities for you to be published in anthologies and online contests. This workshop will also include multiple special guests from slam champions to rock stars of the writing world that will talk about their experiences in publishing.

See?  Poetry and book arts go together like milk and Oreos. Or lime and tequila. Go sample some tonight.

Boing! Lights, Camera, Pop-ups!

You may have gathered that I'm kinda a fan of engineered paper and pop-ups. I own a couple of Robert Sabuda books (Alice in Wonderland and the dinosaur book), and I'm hoping to take a class with Carol Barton at the Center for Book Arts this spring. So I was kinda excited to run across this podcast with Barton on the Santa Fe Radio Cafe. It's a great interview and just really whets my appetite for more. One of the most interesting things she talks about is how the pop-up market is changing from being mostly for kids to aimed at adults as well, or exclusively. One of her books, for instance, is a pop-up of Elvis's house Graceland, and one version has a sound chip in the back cover and an Elvis who "moves his hips in a paper-engineered way."

Barton's work is engineering in more ways than one, since it often involves some kind of circuitry for lights or sound. Many of her books, like Sabuda's, are "mass produced" (i.e., hand assembled) in China though she makes her artist's editions by hand herself, sometimes as many as 600. Having done or attempted to do an engineered book edition of 100, that made me sweat just hearing it. What Barton has to say about the history and development of moving books and pop-ups is really interesting. Give it a listen.

There's also this vid of Robert Sabuda and Mathew Reinhart at the 2008 Gadgetoff, where they're the most low-tech people in the crowd. (YouTube, of course, has a pile of great vids on pop-ups and engineered books.)

Cut and Paste

Remember all that construction paper art you did as a kid, cutting a pasting figures on a background with edible paste (and there was always somebody who had to do a taste test of the paste, wasn't there?). Michael Veliquette cuts and pastes his art, too, but it ain't your grade school art projects. His pieces are rich and vibrant and intricate, sensuous, colorful, and carefully layered in 3-D. Like this:

Michael Velliquette
The Blue Serpent (Lapis), 2008
Cut paper and glue, 12" x 12" x 1"
Image courtesy the artist and DCKT Contemporary, New York

The compositions start as sketches and are built up layer by layer with hand-cut archival card stock, from background to foreground. The images remind me of a combination of some of the better illustrations for children's books and Chinese paper cutting. They're so visually intricate, and there's so much going on in them that it's hard to believe they were ever 2-D. As you can see by the dimensions, there's a good deal of 3D texture going on. Veliquette describes his aesthetic as referencing "Symbolism, Art Brut, and folk paper crafting." I can't think of anything quite like them, though. I just want one. [Via Propeller & PJ Lighthouse]

There's a similar aesthetic and technique going on with this piece by Wojciech Kakowski, Natalia Paszkowska, and Marcin Mostafa, for a completely different purpose. It's a model of the new Polish Pavilion for the World Expo 2010. Here's the designers' take on their creation: "In our design, the cultural idiom is primarily conveyed through the theme, the motif of folk-art paper cut-out." There's a flat model you can copy and put together for yourself, too, though you're on your own for the little people. [Via Poppytalk, Paper Alchemy & BldgBlog]