Calligraphy & more — the studio of Beth Lee, Bozeman, MT
http://northeastauctions.com/product/two-extremely-rare-needlework-instruction-books-with-samples-from-the-female-model-school-kildare-place-dublin-ireland-1833-37/
http://northeastauctions.com/product/two-extremely-rare-needlework-instruction-books-with-samples-from-the-female-model-school-kildare-place-dublin-ireland-1833-37/
I’m pleased to have one of my books included in the book arts exhibit words|matter in Chicago from October 3 – October 29th, 2015.
While I was traveling, I heard from several friends that they had received the current issue of Bound & Lettered and that my piano accordion book was pictured on the front cover. I was happy to finally get to see it for myself when I got home. My first thought was, “It looks bigger than life!” When I compared the book to the photo, I was right: It’s 106% bigger than life. Just like gettin’ my picture on the cover of the Rolling Stone 🙂
At the beginning of the year I completed a small edition of the piano accordion book shown here for a book exchange. The accordion text which fits into the button box tells the story of how our son became interested in learning the accordion after a Suzuki Institute week in New Orleans, and how I eventually began playing the accordion with him. The accordion text in the box beneath the piano keys is a “Just So” story which explains how the politically incorrect lyrics to a popular 1940s accordion song came to be replaced with lyrics about healthy eating for a children’s piano accordion primer.
The bellows alternates these two sets of lyrics.
The project was as much a graphic design puzzle as a calligraphy and bookbinding endeavor. I drew, painted, and lettered various parts of the book, scanned them into Photoshop, pasted it up in InDesign, and printed the parts on an Epson WorkForce 1100.
At yesterday’s meeting of our local calligraphy guild, Bridger Mountain Scribes, I led a tutorial on the fishbone fold, invented by Hedi Kyle. Despite having finally figured it out earlier that morning (!), it went smoothly. I followed the fishbone variation tutorial that Alisa Golden published on her blog, Making Handmade Books.
As I understand it, the standard fishbone has a stepped-out fore-edge; in this variation, the fore-edges are all the same width from the spine … ideally.
At the close of the tutorial, we each had a 3″ x 3-1/2″ text block of Arches Text Wove and a black pastel paper cover; end papers could be added at home. Even though we had measured a spine based on the width of the text block, the book did not close nicely and the glue stick (this was tutorial, remember) did not adhere the pastel paper cover well.
I returned to the studio and kept looking at the model I had made during the tutorial. I love Arches Text Wove, and this book block called out for some yummy black lettering. I did that. I decided to replace the paper cover with a cloth-covered board cover. This helped the book to close, but didn’t altogether solve the problem. So I added a bone closure.
Now it had a book shape. I lettered in black sumi and watered-down white gouache on black paper and trimmed those down for end papers.
I like it.
My daily lettering earlier this week was pretty uninspiring. I had been trying all kinds of gouache tints with various mark-making tools, all on a big sheet of black Arches Cover. It was a mess. I often tell myself this is a good piece of the collage bin. This time I cut out as many 2″ x 4″ windows as I could find on the piece and assembled it into this flag book.
The photo still has a slight purple cast to it, but nothing like the electric blue cast it had straight out of the camera.
Cover boards are wrapped in old scraps of amateur homemade book cloth — made a long time ago, before I convinced myself not to use synthetic fabric. I painted the end papers when I couldn’t find anything that looked right. The book is propped up on the book box I made of more Arches Cover and off cuts of the lettering practice. Renaissance wax on the book box doesn’t seem to have been a great choice, but I may try adding another couple of layers later.
Brian Dettmer has an interesting take on the current role of books. He talks of the book as a body, a tool, a machine, a landscape. He makes an interesting book is not the best format for non-linear information; digital media does that better. He says that just as photography allowed painting to quit its day job, now that most of our information is stored in digital form, the book is becoming something new.
But watch it yourself:
I was pleased this morning to read the announcement of the webpage for the Smithsonian Libraries Artists’ Books Collection at library.si.edu/collection/artists-books
More from Anne Evenhaugen, Reference Librarian:
The Artists’ Books Collection includes hundreds works of art in book form at numerous branches at the Smithsonian Libraries, spanning the 20th century through today. The site serves as the portal to search or browse the entirety of the collection at all of the branches, to provide information about collection access, and to highlight book arts-related happenings, projects and acquisitions at the Smithsonian Libraries.
This search portal has been a collaborative effort to bring artists’ books to light at the Smithsonian’s Cooper Hewitt, National Design Library, the American Art Museum/National Portrait Gallery Library, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden Library, and the Warren M. Robbins Library at the National Museum of African Art, as well as the Dibner Library of the History of Science and Technology. The webpage is the culmination of several years of work on the part of staff and interns across the Smithsonian Libraries.
More details about the Smithsonian Libraries Artists’ Books Collection can be found at the following web link: https://library.si.edu/collection/artists-books
It will help in planning a visit to Washington DC, but there are no images of the books, as far as I can tell, except for the slideshow of images on the page list above. In the search pages, the slideshow view of the reference documents does not seem to working yet.
Fun stuff. I had a little setback today — dropped some parts in the snow between house and studio. I had to start over on them. Not a problem I ever had in Florida.
