New Book - Tikilluarit

I’m excited to announce a new book from Z’roah Press in New York. Tikilluarit sees me working once again with Roni Gross and Peter Schell, the team that created The Night Hunter.

A sonnet from my Greenlandic series, originally published in Modern Poetry in Translation as ‘The Hunter Teaches Me To Speak’, has been recast by Gross and Schell in a new, experimental setting.

Tikilluarit was created for An Inventory Of Al-Mutanabbi Street. This project, ‘both a lament and a commemoration of the singular power of words’, is an international response to the explosion of a car bomb in Al-Mutanabbi Street, the historic centre of bookselling in Baghdad and the heart and soul of the literary and intellectual community, in March 2007.

There’s more information on Tikilluarit here, and I will post details of events and exhibitions in the coming months.

I also recommend browsing the online portfolio of work by Roni Gross.

Typewriters

Typewriters: Print On Demand, curated by Angie and Simon Butler, opens at Gallery Space, Bath School of Art & Design this week. To celebrate the typewriter, here's a brief homage to the machines I have typed on in Denmark, Iceland and the UK this year. 

Mette-Sofie D. Ambeck's Mother's Adler (1960?)

Doverodde, Denmark

The Adler at Ord Kraft Festival, Aalborg, April 2013

(note the Danish keys)

The book that Mette-Sofie D. Ambeck and I typed on the Adler - 

which appears in Typewriters: Print On Demand.

Interlude - an Icelandic pencil sharpener

Underwood, Síldarminjasafn, Siglufjörður, Iceland

Not strictly a typewriter...

 but a World Famous 10 Key Calculator

to compile herring tallies.

There's a short history of these calculators here.

And finally, a typewriter from Angie and Simon Butler's own collection ...

the Olympia Splendid 33 (1968)

Angie and Simon brought the Olympia along to World Book Night Dinner in Oxford last spring,

where it was used to make collaborative bookwork, The Secrets of Metahemeralism 

(pictured below). 

The film of the event even includes a typing soundtrack.

Tracey Rowledge: Drawing in Arctic Water

Readers with an interest in the Arctic may enjoy my series of blog posts on the arts and climate change in the Huffington Post. The latest post discusses bookbinder and fine artist Tracey Rowledge's 'Arctic Drawings'. You can read it here.

How To Say 'I Love You' In Greenlandic at Bookartbookshop, London

Thanks to everyone who came along to the private view of my exhibition in the window of Bookartbookshop on Friday night. It was wonderful to see so many old friends and meet new ones.

Anna served canapés inspired by How To Say 'I Love You' In Greenlandic. The onigiri - or Japanese rice balls - looked like snowballs with colourful fillings. The Greenlandic language doesn't appear to have a word for 'rice ball' but I was pleased to find an equivalent so that we could provide a Greenlandic menu, with translations for the English-speakers present.

The exhibition continues until 29 November, to be followed by a new work by Tom Phillips, creator of A Humument, the altered book to end all altered books. Phillips' work has featured in some of my recent workshops, and I'm excited to see what he does next with the book form.

Altered Books Workshop: Albion Beatnik, Oxford

An altered book created by Mike Sims (Poetry Society Publications Manager) 

at a workshop during the Free Verse Book Fair in London. 

I'll be running an Altered Books Workshop in the Albion Beatnik bookshop in Oxford in December - details below. This will be a twist on previous workshops, as participants will be invited to pick their own book from the bookshop's shelves - and then turn it into an entirely new work.

Many thanks to Dennis Harrison for deciding to offer another bookish event so soon after the phenomenal series of poetry readings that was this month's The Sounds of Surprise festival (still going strong - come along!). Also a big thank you to the bookshop's resident bookbinder Lucie Forejtová, who runs Immaginacija and makes a beautiful range of handmade stationery. I've snaffled one of her coptic-bound appointment diaries for next year, and now I can't wait for January.

ALTERED BOOKS 
5 December 2012, 18.30

In this workshop we select existing books from Albion Beatnik's shelves and adapt them using cut-up, collage and mark-making techniques to create completely new structures and texts. For inspiration, we'll examine altered books made by artists and writers including Tom Phillips' A Humument and Jonathan Safran Foer's Tree of Codes. We'll discuss poetry beyond the text including visual elements, invisible elements and the role of chance in writing. Come prepared to think in three dimensions, and forget all you were ever taught about not scribbling in books.

Cost: £12 per person. Includes materials and a £5 voucher towards the cost of a book from Albion Beatnik.
To book your place leave a comment below and I'll get back to you!
Venue: Albion Beatnik Bookshop, 34 Walton Street, Oxford, Oxfordshire OX2 6AA

Escapism for Amateurs

As a huge fan of Sarah Nicholls' work, I was delighted when the latest in her series of free informational pamphlets arrived in the post recently. Escapism for Amateurs (pictured above and below) is an oblique homage to Houdini that follows in the wake of other useful publications such as A Guide to Leisure Activities for Introverts and There are Dangers to Being an R&B Heartthrob. I look forward to practising its precepts, including such valuable lessons as 'no performer should attempt to bite off a red hot iron unless he has a good set of teeth'. Quite. 

Nicholls is a Brooklyn-based visual artist who 'makes pictures with language, books with pictures, prints with type, and animations with words.' If you follow the links above, you'll find a selection of images demonstrating the vibrant colours and dynamic typography characteristic of Nicholls' work, not to mention its wry sense of humour.

How To Say I Love You In Greenlandic at Bookartbookshop

I'm delighted to be exhibiting How To Say 'I Love You' In Greenlandic: An Arctic Alphabet at London's wonderful Bookartbookshop. Readers who have yet to visit this cavern of bibliographic enchantments can feast their eyes on the panoramic view of the shop floor, below. 



The exhibition will open on Friday 16 November and runs until 29 November. 

There is a Private View on Friday 16 November from 18.oo - 22.00, during which copies of How To Say 'I Love You' In Greenlandic will be on sale, and a range of Greenlandic greeting cards will be launched. Refreshments inspired by the Arctic landscape will be served.

There will be an artist's talk and group discussion on the subject of Geopoetics and Artists Books on Wednesday 21st November from 1800. This is a free event but numbers are limited so please contact the gallery to book your place.

Location details below. Please check shop opening hours before your visit.

Book Artists Aloft

As the summer drew to a close, book artists Mette-Sofie D. Ambeck (Ambeck Design) and Mike Nicholson (Ensixteen Editions) visited me in Oxford. How would I entertain the two travellers, one fresh from the flatlands of Jutland, and the other, a vertigo-suffering Londoner?

We went as high as it's possible to go in this city of spires, climbing up the tower of the University Church of St. Mary. I hoped the candy-cane pillars, the gargoyles and the crumbling finials might interest Ambeck, whose latest book (pictured above) is a celebration of the stone-carvings found among the curious, shadowed pathways and tombs of Abney Park Cemetery in Stoke Newington, North London. Ambeck has worked with Tom Sowden in the studio at Centre for Fine Print Research in Bristol to replicate her photo-archive through laser cutting. In this process, the laser sears into the paper fibres, creating a ghostly image that is not only the perfect technique to represent the crumbling, eroded gravestones but also evoking mortality itself.

The clouds lowered as we climbed - on the east side of the tower our faces were stung with rain - from the west we saw patches of sunshine break through thunderous skies to illuminate the cornfields on the far side of the city. Pressed in against the ancient walls as other sightseers passed us on the balcony, we noticed an abundance of graffiti left by earlier climbers.

Deciphering the amateur carvings in the Tower's winding stairwell, the descent was giddying. The image below, from the cover of Mike Nicholson's new edition Glass Half-Full/Glass-Half Empty, was penned many days before our climb, but it captures the sense of disorientation we felt on returning to the cobbled ground, and to the present moment. 

Readers are encouraged to visit the Small Publishers Fair in London on 16th and 17th November, to take a closer look at both Ambeck's and Nicholson's books.

Sweet Pages

I’m ashamed to say that I have neglected to feature any edible book design in this blog to date. However, I have just discovered The Book of Decorative Cakes by Gwyneth Cole, a trade recipe book which nevertheless has royal icing typography and decoration on the front cover that any bookbinder would be proud of. I’m posting these pictures here for my friend Katherine Hyde, not only cake decorator and sculptor at betty bakery in New York – but also a paper connoisseur.

The quality of Cole’s cover art is not deceptive: there’s invention in all the cakes featured within, but I’m particularly seduced by a charming bookish mise en abyme on the last page. It tells the reader how to replicate, in icing sugar, the very page they are holding in their hands.

A close-up, below, shows the detailed sugar work, and a further reproduction of the same page spread: 

The Book of Decorative Cakes by Gwyneth Cole was published by Ebury Press in 1984. At the time of posting, there’s a second-hand copy available on Biblio. The others seem to have vanished into infinity…

Back in the saddle

I took a break from blogging last month after the epic effort of posting daily as part of my spring residency at Doverodde Book Arts Center in Denmark. Here's a round-up of what's been brewing during June.

How To Say 'I Love You' In Greenlandic

This evening the summer exhibitions open at The New York Center for Book Arts. There's a free drinks reception at 7pm - do go along if you're in the area. 

This year offers two great shows - Maria G. Pisano, founder of Memory Press, curates Book as Witness: The Artist’s Response. The artists, who use the book form to investigate death and destruction as a result of global conflicts, prejudice, terrorism, natural disasters, and individual losses, include Booklyn Artists Alliance, Combat Papermakers, Maureen Cummins and Art Spiegelman. 

Tell Me How You REALLY Feel: Diaristic Tendencies, organised by Alexander Campos, Executive Director, and the artist Rory Golden, focuses on artwork that has been inspired by the concept or content of graphic novels, memoirs, and travel journals with a strong visual presence. How To Say 'I Love You' In Greenlandic will be featured. The definitions of Greenlandic words that can apply to both the emotions and the landscape do indeed Tell Me How You REALLY Feel. The pochoir prints depicting icebergs which illustrate the book reference the recurrent use of the iceberg as a motif for the inexpressible sublime in illustrations to nineteenth-century Arctic travel narratives. 

Both shows run at the Center from July 11, 2012  to September 22, 2012.

Miriam Macgregor in her kitchen

Anyone interested in pochoir prints and hoping to find out more can read my interview with the grande dame of pochoir, Miriam Macgregor, in the Summer Issue of Printmaking Today. Last November I spent a week in the New Forest with Miriam and the American wood engraver Abigail Rorer, writing and sketching during the day, talking long into the evening. Miriam began pochoir in her sixties after a life of wood engraving, and her excitement in the process and sense of its possibilities are an inspiration.

The Night Hunter

The compendium 1,000 Artists' Books: Exploring the Book as Art has been some time in the making: it's a lot of artists' books to round up. Edited by Sandra Salamony, with advice from those wonderful artists Peter and Donna Thomas, it is now out from Quarry Books. I am delighted to see the work of many friends included, and interested to discover some artists whose work is new to me. Roni Gross of Z'roah Press has several book works included and The Night Hunter is one of them!

Watch this space for a companion volume to The Night Hunter in which Roni Gross responds to my poem The Hunter Teaches Me to Speak, currently in production as part of the Al-Mutanabbi Street project. 


DOVERODDE 

My exhibition Limfjord Lines has now come down after a month in the Doverodde Book Arts Center. However,  DOVERODDE, the book inspired by my residency is now on sale in the Center's shop, and sales via the internet are cheering. This was my first experiment with print-on-demand provider Blurb and although it is a very different aesthetic to letterpress I am pleased with the results.  

The book has been selected for the exhibition Sense of Place in Artists' Books, curated by Karen Kinoshita, which runs from October to December 2012 at the Architecture Library, University of Minnesota. 

Images of the Doverodde Book Arts Festival, including Arne Holstborg's raucous woven hearts workshop which brought proceedings to a close, are now up on Flickr

World Book Night - The Secret History Dinner

The annual collaboration with Sarah Bodman and Co. at CFPR Book Arts to produce an artist’s book in tribute to a particular novel is now complete. The book, print and video will launch on 23rd April, World Book Night.

To date we have made books for Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley and Douglas Coupland’s The Gum Thief. This year we featured Donna Tartt’s novel The Secret History. The dinner took place over Easter weekend, in an aptly situated venue in Oxford. Collaborators brought their typewriters and cameras, and food and drinks from the book were served throughout the night, including dangerous-looking mushrooms, an elaborate lentil dish, roast meats, frozen cheesecake, and even food inspired by Bunny’s tasteless wake at the Corcoran’s house.


The typed version of the group’s collaborative essay: The Secrets of Metahemeralism, cobbled together and triple-spaced in the style of Bunny Corcoran provides the core of a photocopied, editioned artist’s book, in tribute to the narrator Richard’s extra paid duties at college. The book will also include postcards, notes, scraps of paper, photos, etc. 


Contributors to the book were: Helen Allsebrook, Helen Barr, Sarah Bodman, Angie Butler, Simon Butler, Arthur Buxton, Nancy Campbell, Jenny Gal-Or, Hazel Grainger, Charlotte Hall, Anna Lucas, Kirsten Norrie, Simon Smith and EF Stevens. 

Angie Butler’s Letterpress Etiquette Network has printed a letterpress broadside edition of lines of text selected from the compositions (below).

Doverodde Book Arts Festival and Limfjord Lines

Ord Kraft Literature Festival, Aalborg

Take one typewriter ...

a rubber stamp ...

and a Danish book artist ...

and the result... 

UDKANT

a pop book

containing a poem 

Mette-Sofie D. Ambeck and I will be creating copies of this book 

and giving them away to the public at OrdKraft in Aalborg 

this weekend 19 - 21 April 2012.

'Udkant' or 'On the margins' is the theme of the

Doverodde Book Arts Festival

17 - 20 May 2012.

Residency on the Limfjord

During April and May 2012 I will be writer-in-residence at the Book Arts Center at the Limfjordscentret, located in a historic merchant’s building by the Limfjord in North Jutland, Denmark. This month-long residency will culminate in a solo exhibition at the Doverodde Book Arts Festival IV and Symposium which runs from 17 – 21 May. The theme of this year’s festival, which is organised by Mette-Sofie Ambeck, will be Udkant / On the Margins.

Borrowed Bookshelves: 7

Books arranged by height on the shelves of the Icelandic Poetry Centre

in Siglufjörður.