Openings: Studies in Book Art (E-Journal)
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The Line and the Loom: Weaving, Poetics, and Artistic Collaboration
Get PDFThe connections between text and textile, or poetry and weaving, are ancient, yet remain a powerful conceptual framework for artistic collaboration and reflection. Wood engraver Richard Wagener, and poet Alan Loney use weaving as a thematic and formal medium for their collaborative fine press book, Loom. The two artists ask: how few threads make a weaving? Loom focuses on the importance of a line—from threads to text, from the lines of print to those of the burin. Though both text and image have a spare aesthetic, Wagener's style of incision making and Loney's theories of poetics suggest that weavings are hard to escape.
Dreaming on the Edge: Poets and Book Artists in California by Alastair M. Johnston
No full textA book review of Dreaming on the Edge: Poets and Book Artists in Californi
A Typology for Book Arts Programs
Get PDFThere is great variety within and across American book arts programs, however, there have been very few attempts to systematically analyze programs. As the field of book arts education matures, a typology for classifying programs can contribute to the field’s critical dialogue and may aid teachers, administrators, and students in developing and sustaining book arts programs. A typology is a classification strategy typically used in the social sciences that is problem-oriented. Typologies are used to analyze variables and create useful categories for phenomena that are evolving and changing. This typology was developed to stimulate systematic thinking about the teaching of the book arts and may contribute to promoting the continued evolution of book art programs in a wide variety of institutional contexts
Radical Science Writing:An Interdisciplinary Book Arts Approach
Get PDFThe tenet of this article is that historic scientific works, along with science-themed artists’ books, photobooks, and U.S. government-produced reports, can contribute to contemporary science education in inspiring ways. By integrating these materials into undergraduate science-writing projects, we are pioneering an alternative paradigm that merges the sciences and the arts. We are teaching undergraduate science majors through content that invokes scientific curiosity, sparks creativity, and makes science accessible. Through handwritten and printed text, visual art, and artistic works, students learn how science has been communicated across the centuries. As in science education, we explore how students use the information resources made available to them by the teacher in the classroom and from other sources (in this case, two specialized library departments) to construct meanings, produce their own rhetorically shaped versions of entities and concepts, and present themselves as learners of science. Challenged within our respective disciplines and by our campus community, we engage students in a learning process deemed radical by our peers
Paper as lens: Using the Medium’s Cultural Significance to Introduce First-Year Students to Higher Education Principles
Get PDFThe medium and technology of paper serves as the focal point for a seminar-style course that introduces first-year college students to foundation concepts in higher education, such as research methodology, critical thinking, and creative problem solving, and to the multitude of resources on campus. This article provides an outline of the course's design and modules and suggests ways that it could be adapted to other academic instiutions. It is intended to provide a fuller understanding of how one professor along with multiple staff collaborators are using paper as the starting point to address foundational intellectual ideas, approaches, and concerns in the academic setting.
Visual Reconstructions of Language
Get PDFThis article discusses the central conceptual role that linguistics plays in Sarah Hulsey's visual art. By referencing the theory of generative grammar, she discusses how she creates visual analogs of sentences, sound patterns, and other linguistic structures through printmaking and artist’s books. Two projects are discussed, Diagraphia and The Space of Poetics, along with their influences, both visually and linguistically
Paper, Paper, Paper
No full textA book review of 3 books about paper: On Paper: The Everything of Its Two-Thousand-Year History by Nicholas Basbanes, The Paper Trail: An Unexpected History of a Revolutionary Invention by Alexander Monro, and Paper: Paging Through History by Mark Kurlansky
Anais Nin: Diarist as Letterpress Printer
No full textAt the onset of World War II, when she was 36 years old, Anais Nin (1903-1977) fled Paris for New York, where she bought a platen press and set up a letterpress shop in a small wooden house on Macdougal Street. Together with her lover Gonzalo More, she began teaching herself typesetting and letterpress printing in order to produce her own writing under the imprint Gemor Press. The resulting volumes include The Winter of Artifice (1942, revised reprinting of 1939 the Obelisk Press Edition), Under a Glass Bell (1944), This Hunger (1945), A Child Born out of the Fog (1947), and House of Incest (1947, reprinting of 1936 Siana Editions, a press she co-founded with Henry Miller and other writers). This paper examines this period of Nin’s life as transcribed in her detailed diaries, and is interested in the following questions: how does the meditative discipline of letterpress influence the daily writing practice of a diarist? As an already-published writer, what types of autonomy did Nin seek through this practice of self-printing and self-publishing? Why did she personally reprint copies of books already published? And ultimately, why did Nin stop producing her work in this way