This art exhibit, organized by the University of North Texas Art Gallery, is currently on display at Carleton College. Surprisingly, I hadn’t heard anything about this exhibit through the book arts channels. Instead, I read about it in this post on the blog Across the Great Divide. While there are plenty of images at this Carleton College link,the blog post provides some interesting background information on Mohammed Al Shammarey, one of the artists, as well as a link to his own gallery.
Maybe I’m thinking too big here.
Toni‘s encouragement towards the making of a manuscript book makes me realize that maybe I’m not acknowledging what I’ve already done.
Here’s a book I made summer before last. It classifies as a manuscript book because it is hand lettered and bound, and yet I didn’t think of it in my previous blog post for several reasons:
1. It’s only 10 pages long.
2. I varied the lettering style throughout, so I never had achieve consistent lettering over the many days of work on the book.
3. I never had to deal with the flow of text from page to page, because each of the quotes existed on separate pages.
4. Although I set up a classical page layout, I then negated it somewhat by setting up a bottom line of inter-painted lettering which fell outside the page layout.
These considerations don’t necessarily detract from its classification as a manuscript book. But they do clarify for me what I want to do in my next manuscript book!
Spring Haiku — 1997
Spring Haiku — an artist book I made in spring 1997. Covers of handmade paper with turnip greens inclusions, over matboard; Arches Text Wove for text. Oriental paper hinges, painted, cut into 3x-wide strips. Handmade paints — pure pigments plus gum arabic plus (in the case of Alizarin Violet) titanium-coated mica flakes for sparkle. The washes brushed with methyl cellulose — to improve the surface for fine (that is to say, small) lettering. The lettering was done with a #5 Mitchell dip pen.
Size: 2 1/2″ x 2 5/8″.
Uploaded to test software. Both photos are thumbnails to larger photos.
Guild of Book Workers’ Exhibition
A little inspiration — Abecedarium: An Exhibit of Alphabet Books.
And a terrible tease. A single image of a book gives you less information about that book than a trailer does for its movie. But whatcha gonna do? short of shooting a movie of someone turning the pages of the book, or somehow expropriating the Turning the Page software the British Museum. http://www.bl.uk/onlinegallery/ttp/digitisation1.html
Pretty wonderful software.
A single image of a book is still better than nothing at all. After all, I’ve got single images of hundreds of books at my website.