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…

Books in America

Illustration from A Tramp Abroad by Mark Twain (unidentified artist)

How To Say ‘I Love You’ in Greenlandic is currently on show at The Center for Book Arts, New York, in the exhibition Tell Me How You REALLY Feel: Diaristic Tendencies, curated by Alexander Campos, Executive Director, and the artist Rory Golden (until 22nd September). It has just been announced that the exhibition will then travel to Payne Gallery at Moravian College Pennsylvania, where it will be on show until the end of the year.

Doverodde has been selected for the exhibition Sense of Place in Artist Books at the Architecture and Landscape Library Gallery, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, curated by Karen Kinoshita (also on show until the close of 2012). The exhibition is part of Mapping Spectral Traces which serves to mediate and facilitate inter- and trans-disciplinary international dialogue to explore the role of the visual and performing arts in addressing such relevant concerns as ecological activism, ‘deep mapping’, place-based memory work, trauma, postcolonial geographies and related topics. 

Two Autumn Workshops

This autumn I will be teaching two courses in London:

THE POETRY SCHOOL
Following my workshop on artists’ editions of Wallace Stevens’ poems, I’ve been asked to teach a workshop at Free Verse: The Poetry Book Fair on 8 September.

As a nod to the many books that will be circulating at the event, I decided we could afford to be a little iconclastic. In Altered Books we’ll adapt existing books using cut-up, collage and mark-making techniques to create new structures and texts. For inspiration, we’ll examine a selection of altered books made by artists and writers. We’ll discuss poetry beyond the text including visual elements, invisible elements and the role of chance in writing. This workshop is now sold out.

UCL Department of Scandinavian Studies

To mark the cententary of August Strindberg’s death, UCL has organised a season of events called The Red Room — also the title of Strindberg’s most famous novel, named after the salon where he and his friends would meet in fin-de-siècle Stockholm. I’ll be delivering an altered books workshop on Saturday 6 October, looking specifically at Norvik Press’s new edition of The Red Room. Further information and booking available here.

Nowhereisland comes to Bristol

I will perform a new text commissioned by Tertulia and Spike Island Associates in Bristol on 7th September in response to Nowhereisland. The artist Alex Hartley’s project for the Cultural Olympiad has been described by Situations as ‘a work of land art for our time … above all sculptural – a provocative act of material displacement by a visual artist.’ My new work Dr Freezelove on Ice will consider Hartley’s ephemeral utopian project in the light of the work of climate scientists extracting ice cores from Svalbard glaciers and US military interventions at the North Pole.

Tertulia is a regular event for people working with or interested in language, writing and dialogue across disciplines, founded by Phil Owen and Megan Wakefield.

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

Guest Post: Andrew Lee on Asparagus

I was in South Cornwall recently. This little gem of a shop serves the local communities of Par, Tywardreath and St Blazey. (My friend Eve will laugh if she reads this, but I was never sure where I was in this conurbation!) I went in asking where the Post Office was and bought some sweet williams and fat asparagus. Although I never went back for any of the tempting produce advertised here, maybe next time?

 

Andrew Lee

Andrew Lee is an artist whose work has featured previously on these pages. And there's more on his website.

New Publication: Doverodde

Doverodde

Twenty short prose pieces about the harbour village of  Doverodde in Denmark, 

illustrated with photographs.

Bird Editions, Oxford, 2012.

Softcover: £12.95

Available to preview and purchase here.

* * * 

Doverodde shelters in an oxbow on the Limfjord, a glacial channel separating North Jutland from mainland Denmark. Nancy Campbell was Writer-in-Residence in Doverodde during the month leading up to the Doverodde Book Arts Festival in May 2012. The location lay behind the choice of theme for the Festival: On The Margins (or 'Udkant' in Danish).

'Despite the relative isolation of Doverodde, there was always something happening to justify walking away from my studio for a few moments – a boat launch, a flower market, a disagreement between dogs. Alongside work on poems about the region's geology and waterways, I began to collect notes about my everyday experiences in the village. These sketches developed into short prose pieces, published daily on my website for the entertainment of Doverodde’s residents and more distant friends. This selection from those writings provides a dose of life on the margins of Denmark.'