Julie Chen is Coming to Tucson!

Written by: Margi

This Friday, I am ridiculously excited to announce that one of my book art heroes is coming to Tucson, Julie Chen. I think this must be what regular people feel when they find out they’re meeting … the Kardashians? Or someone else.

Since 1987, Julie has published limited edition artist’s books under the imprint, Flying Fish Press. Her work is not only meticulously crafted, but seamlessly combines interesting writing and concepts with lovely, often abstract imagery and a sense of play.

Anyway, the Book Art Collective is hosting an artist talk this Friday @ 4pm with Julie at the University of Arizona’s Poetry Center. The Poetry Center was gracious in co-sponsoring the event with us, and we thought the space would be fitting for Julie’s lyric work.

To promote the event, our co-president, John, designed some posters and we letterpressed them yesterday on one of our trusty Vandercooks. The style sort of parallel’s Chen’s use of games in her work. We printed the posters on various French Papers, this one their Pop Tone Whip Cream, Cover #140. It’s pretty. For ink we mixed some metallic copper with brown and then violet. It was…experimental, to say the least.

If you’re in Tucson or nearby, come to the talk and reception after. Meet Julie. Meet the rest of us. Eat food. Hera are the details, yo:

Artist Talk with Julie Chen
Friday, November 5th @ 4pm
Poetry Center, University of Arizona
Reception to follow in Book Art Lab

[Note: I'm cross-posting this on my personal site, here.]

A Conversation with Book Artist Karen Hamner

Written by: Margi

We are pleased to announce that well-known Chicago book artist and binder, Karen Hamner, will visit the School of Art on October 19th at 5:30 pm. She will give an informal presentation in Room 205 in the Art Building.

Karen is in town for Guild of Book Workers Conference and has generously offered to talk to students, faculty and the our very own Book Art Collective. There will be a hands-on look at her books and she’ll answer questions about her work, which has been shown around the world.

Karen is an expert binder and has just come out with a new book Nevermore, Again: Poe Exhumed. She is probably best known for her flag books, one of which is in the University of Arizona Special Collections.

We hope you’ll join us to talk with Karen and see her work!

Happy Birthday, Paul Moxon, Vandercooks, Etc.

Written by: Margi

This weekend, the Collective had the pleasure of meeting the master of Vandercook letterpress machines, Paul Moxon. Paul was in town for a week or so, offering demonstrations, workshops and a lecture on Vandercooks to the Book Art Collective, our ever-expanding club, as well as members from the community. All of this, it should be noted, was made possible by designer/educator Karen Zimmermann, whose excellent fundraising and organizing made the event possible.

It’s basically understood that Paul knows everything there is to know about Vandercooks, proof presses made by Vandercook & Sons beginning in 1909. In addition to working as a printer and artist, he maintains a website, VandercookPress.info, where anyone can access information about presses.

In the 59 years the company was in business, about 30,000 presses were manufactured; there are currently about 1,500 Vandercooks documented in existence. And what do you know, 23 of them are in Arizona; 4 are kept by the Book Art Collective. Last year was the Vandercook’s 100th birthday and Paul orchestrated a Centenary Print Bundle with lovely prints from shops throughout the country.

The workshop this weekend covered basic operating procedures of the presses and we brought him in not just to teach, but also to fix up our new machines. This summer, the Collective acquired three new presses, one of which seems to have been outside for, well, years.

Paul covered typesetting, adjusting furniture, proofing, measuring, inking and, finally, printing.

Paul was gracious enough to travel here from Alabama on the weekend of his birthday. So happy birthday, Paul! Thanks so much for spending some time with the Book Art Collective. We hope to have you back soon.

Pastepaper Workshop!

Written by: Margi

Pastepaper making is a technique developed by bookbinders about 450 years ago, according to some accounts, in which pigmented starch paste is designed on paper to create decorative pieces which act as book covers or end sheets. They can also be used in greeting cards, wrapping paper and boxes…or anything, really.

Pastepaper is actually a really interesting and rewarding technique of making your own decorative papers rather simply and beautifully. And today, we had the pleasure of participating in a workshop led by book artist and paper ninja Curt Dornberg. He spoke briefly about the history of the craft, then showed us – the Book Art Collective – what to do.

Basically, all you need to do is mix paste with pigment (as in, Golden Acrylic Paints). There are many, many recipes to make paste so here is a simpler one from Curt:
- 3c boiling water
- 1c cold water
- 1/2c cake flour
Mix flour and cold water with wire whisk. Gradually pour boiling water into mixture, stirring constantly. Bring mix back to a boil, reduce heat slightly and cook for ten minutes, stirring constantly to prevent paste from burning. Cool completely; then whisk again. Paste will keep for one week or so.

With the mixtures mixed and supplies at the ready, Curt demonstrated for us the basic techniques of pastepaper making. Or designing. Or whatever one might call it. A most basic tool to lay pigment to paper is a brush, which, if I do say so myself, renders this craft a lovely way of combining gestural techniques with design. Note, the paper is first dampened with a sponge before working.

In addition to the brushes, you can use other tools, anything really, like stencils, hand carved burnishers, plastic grout spreaders, rubber spatulas and popsicle sticks. Dough rollers also come in handy. You can carve shapes from sticky-backed foam and paste them onto cardboard rolls. Then you can insert them onto the roller and make patterns.

After watching the demonstrations, we spent the next several hours working on our own sheets that Curt had generously prepared for us.

We then laid them to dry. One of the exciting possibilities of pastepaper is that you can layer the pigments. Once your first layer/pattern dries (usually 24 hours is the wait time…but Tucson is a pretty dry place) you can add a second pattern, creating a really interesting sense of depth and texture.

Another spontaneous way of creating patterns/textures/designs is to paint them on, or literally remove the pigment using objects like the back end of paint brushes. This can also be a way of illustrating the canvas.

We were in the Printmaking Studio for this workshop, and laid our papers wherever we could find space. The equipment in there is so incredibly beautiful. Here are some of our final results!

In the next week, we will make many of our papers into book covers of notebooks to display at the Tucson Festival of Books, where we have a booth! So, if you’re in town, come check us out (Booth 108), and if not, visit us in the digital world here or on our site.

Lastly, here are some sources to inspire your bookmaking practices:
My Handbound Books
Paste Paper Patterns
Sage Reynolds

Happy painting/making/pasting/book-covering!

A Studio Visit with Mark Andersson!

Written by: Margi

This weekend, the Book Arts Collective and I had the exciting opportunity to visit bookbinder, conservator and teacher Mark Andersson at his studio, Panther Peak Bindery.

For nine years, Mark was the head of Boston’s North Bennet Street School Binding Department. This School, featured on PBS’ Craft in America Program, focuses on hand crafts like violin-making, cabinetry and [drumroll] bookbinding. Hear president Miguel Gómez Ibáñez describe the programs here:

What’s so exciting about visiting a kind of human like Mark is that we are able to see how alive the craft of bookmaking is. Mark has a diverse background, which includes a Fulbright Scholarship to study bookbindings in Sweden and playing in a rock band. (He also saw Bob Marley in concert, which affords him no small amount of street cred.)

Mark has a ton of teaching experience, which is of great benefit to us. In addition to his knowledgeable brain, which he’s happy to let you pick, he has a ton of didactic samples of bindings, stitches, boxes and gold tooling. Here’s a smattering of what we learned.

Above and below are examples of trends found in stitching/books made in different time periods. An interesting point made in the visit was the resourcefulness of binders throughout time. Basically, bookmakers utilize materials available and affordable. Traditionally, they were academically uneducated, trained perhaps only in their craft (beginning as apprentices).

Part of the trade of binding is decorating your books. One method of fancifying is gold tooling, which is an ornamental decoration applied to leather book covers by impressing heated tools into the material.

Tools can come in the form of metal wheels (above) or stamps (below), and each has a different purpose. Wheels are for consistency in line work, as in creating the front or back covers. Stamps are used for the spine, which requires more controlled precision. Often, only the spine will be decorated to save money…and show bling when on a shelf.

After the visit, we got to see the Andersson garden, complete with all kinds of tomatoes, peppers and snap peas. Yum.

Mark is also a member of the Guild of Bookworkers, a national organization for all of the book arts. All of them. There was talk over the weekend of starting up a Tucson chapter, which would be fitting as their annual Standards of Excellence Conference is happening here this year (in October). This is super exciting because it means that book artists, binders and conservators from all over the country will be right here, in sunny Tucson.

So, if you’re in need of, well anything related to books, Mark can probably help out. Check him out at the Panther Peak Bindery. Happy binding.

Barb Tetenbaum’s Pressure Printing

Written by: Margi

Barb loading a low-relief collage onto the Vandercook letterpress

This past weekend, we had the lovely pleasure of meeting Barbara Tetenbaum, a letterpress artist, bookmaker, writer and teacher, among other things. She came to lead a Pressure Printing Workshop for our Book Art Collective.

Pressure printing, a term coined by Barb, is an experimental letterpress technique in which a low-relief collage is made with thin objects (string, stickers, lace, thread), arranged into a composition (or not), glued onto a sheet of paper and then placed underneath the paper to be inked. The resulting image is similar to a rubbing, though (in my opinion) much more polished and lovely looking. Barb notes that the final piece is always better than you are, meaning that a simple arrangement can result in a beautifully finished piece.

Explaining registration and use of the (not-yet-inked) MDF board, which is topped with plexi glass

One of the most exciting learnings from the workshop was our binding technique, a whirlwind binding. The story behind the whirlwind is fascinating. In the early 1900s, caves were “discovered” by a monk in the ancient city of Dunhuang, in the Chinese province of Gansu, which contained thousands of manuscripts of various forms evincing the diversity and breadth of the art of bookmaking. The manuscripts, for which content was the driver of the forms, dated from the 5th to the early 11th century. Holy crap is right.

The binding techniques, with descriptions and instructions, are freely available here.

So. For the workshop, each participant created her own low-relief collage and then printed a small edition on silky kitikata, a handmade Japanese paper. Each person received one of every print, trimmed the pages to book size and bound them into a whirlwind book. The [modified] whirlwind is convenient for this project because each page size is the same, but they are glued such that a sliver of every page is visible, creating a lovely kind of pattern reference when the book is opened.

A few of the pressure printed compositions from the workshop

We’re still finishing up our bindings. Pictures to come. Anyway, the workshop was successful. An excellent combination of getting to know a strong thinker and eloquent speaker in the world of bookmaking, of learning technique and making something pretty. We also had a party with lots of delicious food, which helps too. Workshops are a great way of integrating yourself into your field.

Barb’s beautiful work can be found and purchased at Vamp & Tramp Booksellers. (I highly recommend having at least of her pieces in your collection.)