Cover image

Untitled
Kristina Selmeine
The Caversham Press, Balgowan, RSA.
2002
Edition: #1/3

Produced as part of the workshop on the intimate book held at the Frans Masereel Centrum, Kasterlee, Belgium in conjunction with The Caversham Press.

Two 1/2 gatefold / leporello fold structure. Cover folded as part of the book pages making four folds.

(This book is not included on the exhibition)

CURATORIAL NOTE

The curators have chosen books that specifically communicate their content through the structure of folded material. The fold allows for multiple readings and ways of negotiating one's way through the book's narrative(s). Most books on this exhibition are simple leporello fold-outs that present their narratives in a sequential manner. But some are printed on both sides of the substrate, gesturing to a circular narrative that has no formal start or end point. Other examples complicate the continuous folded substrate through cuts, internal folds and shaped pages. Such formal elements perplex the narratives, producing multiple / parallel readings, stories-within-stories and analogous visual elements. We acknowledge that in the curatorial process, the manner in which the individual cabinets hold and, in many instances, limit the expansive properties of the book, is telling. The JGCBA houses perhaps the world's longest uninterrupted book-arts vitrine (along the East wall) yet it is utterly inadequate for exhibiting Stephen Dupont's mammoth leporello-fold, double sided book titled Typhoon (2014). What leporello-fold books suggest is that their voices speak most coherently beyond the limits of what can be displayed.

Many Rivers to Cross
Conflict Zones, Boundaries and Shared Waters
Keith Dietrich (artist)
Heléne van Aswegen (bookbinding)
The Strange Press, Stellenbosch. 2011
Edition: #1/10

Many Rivers to Cross | Conflict Zones, Boundaries and Shared Waters is an artist's book comprising four volumes that focus on three major river courses in South Africa, namely the Gariep River (a small section of which is shown in the box), Great Fish River (partly opened in the top of the cabinet) and Vaal River (fully opened in the bottom of the cabinet). This publication is informed by the rich historical and archaeological arena in which successive power struggles played themselves out across these rivers; by the entangled conflicts of diverse human populations that inhabited our land around these rivers and by the complex relationships between colonial contact and terrain. In a country with extremely limited and fragile water resources, these three rivers also constitute important water courses that are linked in a web of shared waters or inter-basin transfer systems that play a significant role in sustaining water for industrial, agricultural and domestic use, serving as the lifelines for most of the country's population. With the rapidly increasing demands placed on their waters, and the toxic effluents being drained into them, these three rivers are at risk. Considering the conflict that has taken place along and across these rivers, Dietrich uses them as metaphors for the pain and suffering that our country has undergone. At the same time they represent the importance of shared water for the future hope and survival of our country. The images in the book map the body over the land. Suffering and hope are depicted as patterns and centres of energy superimposed over riverbeds, while bodily organs and circulatory systems mirror these river catchments as webs and folds of life. Volumes 2-4 are in accordion format; by extricating the pages from the flap on the back endpaper they are shown as a single illustration.

Volumes 2-4 are in accordion format; by extricating the pages from the flap on the back endpaper they are shown as a single illustration.

A Small Panorama That Mr James Chapman Could not Photograph
A Visual Narrative
Keith Dietrich
Artists Book, Johannesburg, RSA. 1997
Edition: Unique

Colophon: "The watercolour painting 'A Small Panorama That Mr James Chapman Could not Photograph' (1997) was originally a semi-circular wall installation measuring 2 x 4 meters. The work was bound into book form in 2001 for Mr Jack Ginsberg".

Title page plus four pages of text precede 20 pages of watercolours. Accordion-bound, hinged with linen strips. In a handmade drop-back box by Peter Carstens.

Speaking in Tongues
Speaking Digitally / Digitally Speaking
David Murray Paton (artist)
Heléne van Aswegen (bookbinding)
Artists Book, Johannesburg. 2015
Edition: #3/6

A 90-page accordion-fold (leporello) book with independent covers allowing the book to be opened in conventional recto-verso page openings, in extended sections or, with great difficulty, in its entirety. The book is printed in two 'chapters' one on each side of the paper. The first 'chapter' depicts a sequence of the artist's young son's hands subtly moving whilst playing an online game, the second 'chapter' depicts the artist's aging mother's expressive hand movements that animated a set of memories of her youth. The book contains no text except for the subtitles: Speaking Digitally introducing his son's hand 'chapter' and Digitally Speaking, introducing his mother's. Each set of hands is carefully registered to synchronise with its counterpart on the other side of the long sheet of carefully scored and accordion-folded paper; an exceptionally difficult technical feat. This double-sided visual dialogue is not only a more elegant and economic way of printing the book but helps organise the two chapters of the book as a conceptually continuous cycle without a defined front or back, and facilitates starting from either end, with all its possible page-turning and opening possibilities. The book is housed in a black fabric-covered gatefold box with an 8:24 minute video found on a tiny flash drive embedded in its base. The video is meant to be projected at the same intimate dimensions of the book - 153mm (h) x 210mm (w), when opened. The reader is encouraged to view the video whilst reading the book so as to reflect upon differences in tempo and duration in each of the two narratives.

Night and Day and Night
Nacht und Tag und Nacht
Folded Story 9
Warja Lavater
Basillus Presse, Basel, Stuttgart. n.d.
Gedruckt als Original-Lithographie im Atelier Emil Matthieu, Zurich.

Lavater (28 September 1913 - 3 May 2007) was a Swiss artist and illustrator noted primarily for creating accordion-fold artists' books that re-tell classic fairy tales with symbols rather than words (or even pictures). This leporello book is Lavater's 'Folded Story 9' and depicts two societies - one above ground, one underground - as they merge together. Men who sleep in tall buildings, travel deep down in the earth while those who work in tall buildings and travel deep down in the earth then sleep in tall buildings.

The Great Wall of Ten Thousand Lies
Tara Tidwell Bryan
Pterodactyl Press, n.p. 1987
Edition: #28/35

A miniature book, with relief-rolled etching and letterpress on Suzuki paper. 7.6 x 7.6cm and 7.6 x 152cm when extended. Housed in a box with printed papers.

Heavy Lifting
Felicia Rice (artist)
Teresa Whitehill (poet)
Inge Bruggeman (foreword)
Craig Jensen (bookbinding)
Moving Parts Press, Mendocino. 2022
Edition: Book: #34/60; Companion: 320

Heavy Lifting consists of two nested accordion-fold panels with folding instructions! It is the outcome of a close collaboration between artist/printer Felicia Rice of Moving Parts Press and poet Theresa Whitehill. It began in 2019 with an exchange in which a poem sparked a drawing that sparked a poem which led to a book structure. In 2020, during their early work on the project, Felicia lost her letterpress shop of over 40 years to a devastating megafire in the Santa Cruz Mountains, just as the death of George Floyd trained a blazing light on the many deep-seated inequities in America amid the global pandemic and threat of political totalitarianism. Rice states: "Heavy Lifting took flight in spite of and because of our personal and collective crises of this terrible time and tackles these issues in book form, performance, and dialogue in search of a tenable future." The innovative book structure of nested accordion-fold panels features poems by Theresa Whitehill in compelling conversation with Rice's prints. Inge Bruggeman writes in the preface to The Heavy Lifting Companion, "Heavy Lifting not only demonstrates Rice's innovative use of the artists' book format, it reveals the unique power of this art form to unfurl within the hands of the individual, thus beautifully connecting the individual's role to art, poetry, and the world around them." The book is accompanied by a film experiment on Heavy Lifting on a SD Card in a brown envelope, The Heavy Lifting Companion and the structured clamshell case which holds the components of the book in compartments.

This publication is the subject of an article by David Paton that will be published in The Blue Notebook (UK) during the run of this exhibition and is one of the reasons why we chose to exhibit it now.

Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions
Edwin Abbott (text)
Andrew Hoyem (illustrator)
Arion Press, San Francisco, CA. 1980
Edition: One of 275 copies

Hoyem's radical design and illustrations realize many implications of this satire about a two-dimensional world. Bound in aluminium boards with locking frame. The seventh book by the famed San Francisco Arion Press with 115 unnumbered accordion-fold pages.

From the Basilisk Press & Bookshop catalogue number 3: "Abbot wrote this instructive fantasy in which the characters are all geometric figures in 1884. Since then, it has been acclaimed as an early science fiction classic and reprinted about 25 times - certainly never before in an edition better suited to the uncommon nature of the text. Flatland is literally flat as it is printed on a long sheet of Saunders Mouldmade paper, which would stretch out to 33 feet (10.1 metres). Fortunately, it is neatly accordion folded into 18 x 35 cm panels, which makes for rational reading of the 14pt Univers text. Hoyem has redrawn Abbot's original diagrams and printed them in up to 12 colours. Protected by an aluminium slipcase."

The leporello is accompanied by the Dover Publications, Inc. book containing Abbott's text and images.

Unbuttoned/ Buttoned
Kitty Maryatt (preface)
Scripps College Press, Claremont, CA. Spring 2005
Edition: #75/102

A collaborative production by nine women. Printed letterpress with pop-ups and a volvelle, collage and moveable pages using brads, buttons, fabric, fringe, ribbon, and thread. Images carved from linoleum, some printed with rainbow rolls. Four-color images printed on an HP Indico digital printer. More colour with airbrush and pochoir, a stencil technique. Accordion fold with coloured ties. The title page has a changing title with a sliding tab manipulated by a decorated ribbon with buttons.

About My Mother
Beth Thielen
Artist's Book, 1996

The interlocking double leporello-fold structure provides for a complex reading experience. The central leporello strip interrupts the reading of the larger etchings not only in structural and visual terms, but also in haptic terms. Only when the entire book is laid flat on a surface does the reading become quieter and less intrusive. Drypoint etchings on Arches Black paper.

Shadow Play
Ann M. Kresge (artist)
Melinda Kennedy (poet)
The National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC. 1998

Shadow Play consists of six illustrated cutout shadow puppets, with movable parts, fastened to sticks backed with velcro, and mounted on the inner lids of the portfolio. It includes a volume constructed to resemble a puppet stage, with eight semi-transparent leaves. Puppets can be set in motion in front of, or behind the stage, by shining a light behind the puppets to project their shadows through the leaves. The accompanying booklet (a leporello-folded structure, describes, in poems, the puppet characters and suggests story types.

Various archival, acid free and Asian papers were used, including Abaca (banana leaf) paper which was handmade by the artist. Printmaking processes combine etching, relief and chine-collé.

Dido and Aeneas
Nahum Tate
Claire Van Vliet (artist)
Janus/Theodore Press, n.d.
Edition: One of 150 copies

The National Museum of Women in the Arts states: "Dido and Aeneas celebrates the 300th anniversary of the Baroque opera by Henry Purcell, which was first performed in London in 1689. Nahum Tate's libretto tells the drama of Dido, the betrayed and abandoned queen of Carthage who throws herself on a funerary pyre as the ship of her lover, Aeneas, leaves the harbor.

Each scene of the opera has text from the libretto sewn into the accordion book structure. The dark sky reflects the turbulent feelings of the despairing queen; the tops of the trees are symbolic of the grove where the lovers meet; and the masts of the ships signal the departure of Aeneas. The last section of the book takes us back to the royal palace, where the story begins, the sky in Carthage once again quiet.

The book includes a CD of the opera performed by the Taverner Choir and Taverner Players". The colophon states that "The book can be stood in a line or in a star-circle shape."

Fortune's Daughter
An Allegory of Greed or Midas or An Allegory of Prosperity.
Mark Wagner
Bird Brain Press, New York. 2010 (originally 2007)
Edition: #13/60

Wagner uses currency collage to interpret the story of King Midas, the king who asks for and receives the gift of the golden touch. It is a complex work of visual art, literature, printing, and bookbinding, crafted with original collage work in each copy. Wagner's one-of-a-kind and limited-edition books are interdisciplinary hybrids of art and literature, structure and design, printing and hand work. This book was 10 years in the making, and contains 284 lines of rhyming narrative poetry, and took 47 letterpress runs. Wagner states the following about the publication: "Its dos-a-dos structure has two front covers. The first, Fortune's Daughter: An Allegory of Prosperity, leads to an accordion-folded reproduction of the large-scale Fortune's Daughter collage. The second, Fortune's Daughter: An Allegory of Greed, leads to a mini-epic narrative poem retelling the story of Midas. The order in which the sides are viewed has a large impact on the way the experience of the reader. An Allegory of Prosperity, leads to an accordion-folded female figure meticulously rendered from deconstructed US one-dollar bills. The figure steps from a swirling landscape of flowers through an arched structure toward the viewer. An Allegory of Greed, leads to a mini-epic narrative poem retelling the story of King Midas, who asked for and received the gift of the golden touch. The golden touch is his undoing, culminating in the death of his daughter - unwittingly turned to gold in the final act. The poem's 284 lines of verse were written specifically as an accompaniment to the collage. … Allusions to illuminated manuscripts, sacred texts, American history, and commerce - among other concerns - result in a parable without a definitive end, a perpetual reflection on value, craft, greed and transformation."

Exquisite
Ann Lovett
A Sunburn Editions Publication, n.p. 1999

Lovett states: "In a time when genetic engineering and the sexual behavior of public figures dominate public discussion, the body continues to be a contested site in Western culture. As a result, the human image in contemporary art and culture is positioned at the highly charged intersection of the personal, the moral, and the political. As the technological demands of medical science increasingly dominate the public sphere, the traditional roles of religion and community as arbiters of social and moral choice in contemporary society have been supplanted. At the same time, the Cartesian privileging of mind over body and the intellect over lived experience has led to the primacy of scientific methodology and a consequent discounting of sensory experience and the voice of desire as sources of knowledge. No matter how much the body is culturally controlled and proscribed, it asserts its wayward and illogical nature; its inherent messiness and temporality ultimately defy classification and control. It is here where the insistent presence of lived experience and the voice of desire come up against and intertwine with the search for analytical explication and control that the most interesting territory is to be found.

A composite of medical images and interlacing texts describe the attempt to find clarity in the intricacies of physical and emotional experience and to reconcile those experiences with the analytical descriptions of science and medicine. The accordion format and composite figure are reminiscent of 'exquisite corpse' drawings, where each participant draws a section of the body without looking at others' drawings. I chose this format both to refer to this game popular with the Surrealists, and to reflect on medicine's fragmented and mechanistic view of the body."

The Writer
Richard Wilbur (text)
Charles Hobson (illustrator)
Pacific Editions, San Francisco, CA. 2004
Edition: #37/54

The full text has been printed letterpress by Charles Hobson on BFK Rives paper. These pages have been interleaved with vellum sheets printed with digital pigment prints and hand cut with the shapes of a starling in flight based on drawings by Hobson. The accompanying flip book, or "flutter book", containing a selection of words from the poem, has been bound as an accordion and scored so as to permit viewing in an extended manner. The volume containing the full text has been bound in boards and covered with a cloth spine. It and the flutter book are contained in a fabric clamshell box which holds at its back a digital pigment print hand coloured with pastel by the artist.

Typhoon
Stephen Dupont
Sydney, Australia. 2014
Edition: One of 5 copies

Australian reportage photographer, Dupont reveals the emotion behind this photo taken amidst the despair and destruction in the aftermath of Typhoon Haiyan (known locally as Yolanda) - one of the strongest tropical cyclones ever recorded, which devastated the Philippines on November 8, 2013, killing over six thousand people. The images in this book attempts to show the apocalyptic annihilation of a city. Dupont states: "You don't smell the rotting corpses and the garbage all around me. You don't see or feel the silence around me. There's an incredible emotion. There's an incredible amount of misery, a silent misery". This artist's book of black and white reportage photographs records the aftermath of the typhoon in the form of a horizontal concertina (intended to be viewed as a series of four panels). Many of the images are panoramas that depict scenes of near total destruction that Dupont (in reflective text from his journals) likens to the apocalyptic aftermath of a nuclear explosion. He arrived in Guiuan, in Eastern Samar, the point of Haiyan's first landfall, on 19 November and from 22-25 November moved on to Anibong in Tacloban City, Leyte Island, where three large tanker ships were swept inland, wiping out an entire neighbourhood. However amongst the scenes of human tragedy and devastation, from the opening image of a neatly handwritten wall chart proving an overview of the disaster in the emergency operations centre (in one of the few buildings left standing) to the final surreal image of a boy venturing out to sea beyond the debris in the foreground (using an upturned refrigerator as a canoe, and his thongs as paddles), there is a strong sense of survival, recovery and life getting back to normal. Like the almost impossible task of showing the effects of the devastation, the cabinets in which this book is displayed are equally inadequate in displaying the book's totality.

Living with Ghosts
Stefan Gunnesch
Edition Bildschriftlich, Leipzig. 2017
Edition: #3/5 [unique]

Gunnesch's trademark collages flow across the leporello producing uncanny presences. He describes himself as a "visual border crosser" who loves "exploring and getting lost in the making of new collages that are more like stories in themselves". Although this book is numbered #3/5, it is in fact unique given that the book is hand-collaged, not printed! The cover texts are white on white revealing an accordion-fold structure held in a chemise within decorated beige cloth binding. The whole is lodged in an open-ended Perspex case which is protected by two black rubber pads in a grey card wrap-around folder held with magnets, with the title on the cover. All of these elements are shown in the top cabinet.

Waves at my Side
Kumi Korf
VanDeb Editions, n.p. 2008.
Edition: #5/10

Of the book, Kumi Korf states: The piece is inspired by my childhood memories of riding the train alongside a huge cliff at the edge of the Japan Sea. The crashing waves coming close to the tall bluff felt precarious; as a child, needing to trust that the world around must be safe, I felt a foreboding of tragedy. The sea, the cliff, the locomotive with its black smoke, white steam, and shrieking whistles formed a strong memory." This intimate little book stretches out to a length of 3.8 metres! Waves on my Side is an accordion-pleated book, with intaglio prints on Japanese paper. The pages are images of waves on one side, when unfolded, and of railroad tracks on the other.

Sea of Buddha
Hiroshi Sugimoto
Sonnabend Sundell Editions, New York. 1997
Edition: #710/1000

The forty-eight photographs of the one thousand Kannon bodhisattvas sculpted in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and housed in the temple of Sanju San-gen-do, Kyoto, are printed in an edition of one thousand numbered copies. The complete edition represents one million bodhisattvas. Of the work, Sugimoto states: "The New York art scene in the 1970s was dominated by minimal and conceptual art, experiments in visualizing abstract concepts. It occurred to me that similar motives inspired the making of art in twelfth-century Japan. In a Kyoto temple, there is an eight-hundred-years old installation of a thousand-and-one Senju Kanon, the Thousand-Armed Merciful Bodhisattava Avalokitesvara figure, which is a three-dimensional representation of the Buddhist afterlife, the Pure Land Western Paradise. After seven years of red tape, I was finally granted permission to photograph in the temple of Sanjusangendo, the Hall of Thirty-Three Bays. In special preparation for the shoot, I had all late-medieval and early-modern embellishments removed, and the contemporary fluorescent lighting was turned off. Stripping the temple of these additions re-created the splendor of the thousand bodhisattvas glistening in the light of the sun rising over the Higashiyama Hills, perhaps as the Kyoto aristocracy of the Heian period (794-1185) might have seen them. Will today's conceptual art survive another eight-hundred years?"

Archipelago
Richard Penn
Artists Book, Johannesburg. 2014
Edition: Unique

The pen and ink drawings run over sixteen pages of the Moleskin black-paper journal which is held shut with an elastic band. As an animator and filmmaker, the book's leporello format offers Penn an equivalent of the temporal-sequentiality found in film. Penn's obsessive markmaking suggests the qualities of landscape and the possibilities of reading the groupings of marks in terms of the islands that form the subject of the book.

There is an Ocean
Joshua Saul Beckman
Women's Studio Workshop, New York. 1997
Edition: #40/100

The book is a combination of six prose poem/narratives about young men's encounters with bodies of water. At different intervals, these narratives are obscured by shifting swathes of blue thread sewn into the pages of the book, bringing to mind sensations of covering and uncovering, freedom, and constraint, of voices appearing and disappearing, and of the shifting concepts of time lived in an age where the risks of intimacy seem to have dangerously moved out of control. In the words of the artist, this book portrays the high stakes of letting oneself go, of the inherent tension and displaced youth of the young, (especially young gay men). In the Colophon Beckman states: "... The stitching of each book in the edition is unique, covering and uncovering different passages of the text..."

Altered Biology
Jean Lampen
Artists Book, n.p. 2022
Edition: Unique

The artist states: "I explore the strange and fascinating juncture of the serious and the absurd to create transformative and reflective perspectives on the persuasiveness of 'knowledge', brands and intuitive associations. What are the physiologies that shape our bodies, our beliefs, and our ontologies? How do we 'know'? … I make the mundane strange by forging together the sublime and the ridiculous to show how all commodities (including ourselves) are socially conditioned and inscribed. The artist's book allows for narratives to flow from one page to another; tangential issues thus become threads of themes that carry over as the book is perused."

Unfold / Enfold
Kveta Pacovska
Chronicle Books, San Francisco, CA. 2004

Kvĕta Pacovsk's double-sided accordion fold format is an innovative expandable book nearly 6m in length, peppered with geometric die-cuts, surprising pop-up elements, rich colours, squiggles, squares, and quirky faces. Sophisticated enough for adults and wacky enough for children, Unfold/ Enfold literally stretches the concept of book-as-object to the limit.

After Reasonable Research
Miranda Maher
Horse in a Storm Press, Brooklyn, NY. 1999

About this book, Printed Matter says: "This astounding document of the absence of peace in our time lists all open and declared armed hostile conflicts that have taken place between the year 1 and the year 2006. Printed in a tiny font and arrayed in two seemingly endless columns, these conflicts fill a mind-boggling twenty-two pages. The book is printed on accordion folded decorative paper, an uncomfortable reminder that the refinements of civilization are inseparably bound up with brutality." Janelle Rebel - from the catalogue of the exhibition Step and Repeat: Pattern in Artists Books - states the following about this book: "A dense axial timeline capturing twenty centuries from 1 A.D. to 2000 A.D. charts wars and armed conflicts from all over the world in 3.5 pt. type. With a thin red marker, Maher draws a single line through 329 A.D., the only year on record without a known conflict. On the cover she provokes the reader, "…perhaps they [sic] were periods of peace." The book is printed over an inverted pattern of elegant and royal fleur-de-lis. Such aesthetic choices give the reader pause: the finery enjoyed by a few (in the ruling class) comes at a price.

Rocks, Literati, & Invasion
Clifton Meador
Columbia College for Book and Paper, n.p. 2007
Edition: #9/10

Of the work, Meador reflects: "This one was near that town and there's this river that goes through middle of the town. The rocks on the outside looked like Chinese literati paintings to me, you know they're just amazing - these rock formations. I was struck by this idea of life imitating art, the backwards relationship, so the piece is really about reflection, there are rocks, literati and invasion. So the typography is supposed to suggest that." Accordion format with letterpressed title and colophon pages; interior pages archival Epson inkjet printed on Somerset velvet. Colophon: "Photographs taken in the summer of 2007 in Ganze Autonomous Prefecture, China. Printed and produced at the Columbia College Center for Book and Paper in an edition of ten copies." Bound in letterpress printed bookcloth. Physical Description: 8 unnumbered pages. Illustrations: 30 x 14 cm and unfolded to 30 x 111 cm.

Transformations I
1973-74
Ellen Lanyon
Printed Matter, Inc, New York. 1977

Printed Matter states: "a mysterious accordion-fold book that contains a succession of drawings in which objects metamorphose into animals and back again: from flower to bird to face… and so on." A first edition, softcover artist book in the form of a leporello with 23 panels of black and white illustrations by Lanyon.

Variations on the Dialectic between Mingus and Pithecanthropus Erectus
Lynn Sures (artist)
Rick Potts (text)
Pyramid Atlantic Art Center, Silver Spring, MD. 2005
Edition: #6/55

Inspiring this book is the musical work entitled Pithecanthropus erectus written and performed by twentieth-century musician Charles Mingus. Mingus speaks in the album liner notes about the stages of evolutionary development and the self-awareness of humans. Book artist Lynn Sures and paleoanthropologist Rick Potts use images and words to weave Mingus' musical tale together with the poignant factual story of early hominid P. erectus. The dialectic between Mingus and P. erectus addresses fragility, the power of creation, the hand played by chance, and the blank slate of the future. The four scored stages of his rise and fall are documented here by works created in direct visual response to the music: 1) evolution, 2) superiority-complex, 3) decline, 4) destruction. Sures produced watermarked handmade hemp sheets and abaca pulp paintings for the book. Her letterpress-printed woodcut images incorporate polymer plate text by Potts.

Mud Book
John Cage
Lois Long
John Russell (notes)
Callaway Editions, NY and David Grob Editions, London, New York & London. 1983
Edition: #479/500

Part artist's book, part cookbook, and part children's book, Mud Book is a spirited, if not satirical, take on almost every child's first attempt at cooking and making. Through the humble mud pie - add dirt and water! - Cage and Long encourage children to explore their imagination and to get their hands dirty, and they offer this warning: "Mud pies are to make and look at, not to eat." Littleton Bemis Public Library. Accordion fold in brown drop-back box with the title on the spine. "A facsimile of a book conceived ... in the late '50s ... John Cage was inspired to write a text which Lois Long cut to a length she could manage to illustrate. Working ... with gouache and some collage, she made a dummy ... It is this dummy that has been reproduced with such infinite care"--Print collectors' newsletter, v. 15, no. 1 (Mar.-Apr. 1984), p. 27. It consists of a strip formed from 19 whole sheets (13 x 25 cm.) overlapping and laminated to 18 whole and 2 half sheets (13 x 13 cm.) and folded accordion-style to form 18 double-thickness double leaves with single leaves at beginning and end. 29 pages contain illustrations of various sizes (two are double-page) and/or text. Eight contain text only (some with reproductions of mud stains), Three are blank. As many as sixty-one hand-pulled silkscreens were made! With a brown folded note by John Russell dated September 1981. Printed in Japan by Hiroshi Kawanishi, Takeshi Shimada, and Kenjiro Nonaka of Simca Print Artists.

Meeting of the Waters
Cruinnu na n-Uisci
Deirdre Kelly
Wild Pansy Press, Leeds, UK. 2016
Edition: #119/200

A new map of Ireland where the East and West coasts draw closer together, to create a sort of interior lake, a land locked mixture of sea and ocean. It takes us on a 'round trip' journey of the bays, heads and points which characterise the Irish coastline. A line which unites and determines the tension between water and land. The original collage was made from a single map of Ireland in homage to his innovative use of collage by the Czech visual artist and poet, Jiří Kolář. The title is taken from the Avoca river in County Wicklow, which starts life as two rivers, Avonmore (Irish: Abhainn Mhór, "Big River") and Avonbeg (Irish: Abhainn Bheag, "Small River"). Where these join, is a recognised place of great beauty hence 'the Meeting of the Waters'.

Words make the infinite finite Worte machen das Unendliche endlich
Romano Hänni
Basel, Switzerland, Romano Hänni Verlag. 2015
Edition: V: #44/86; VI: #144/187; VII: #244/290

A master of visual poetry, Hänni has been experimenting with unusual compositions of letter forms and symbols since the early 1980s. His intricate designs can seem somewhat whimsical but often are reactions to society, politics, and traumatic events. Creating things manually with the participation of all of the senses is very important to him. Each of these books was hand composed and hand printed in black, red, yellow, and blue ink. Consisting of three letterpress books: # VII, VI and V in the Words Make the Infinite Finite series. All are accordion structures with stiff paper illustrated wrappers, which when removed, allow the twelve pages of the contents to be unfolded into one continuous strip. With a paper band closure for the folded book. Includes a four page supplement featuring the title of the work and the colophon in both English and German.

Les Bijoux
Charles Baudelaire
Ronald King
Circle Press, London. 1996
Edition: #47/59

Baudelaire's version of the poem appears inside the fold, printed in blue ink. The design has been drawn in wire and printed at London Print Workshop on Khadi hand-made paper, the text set in Baskerville and printed letterpress " Designed and printed by Ronald King at Circle Press. A single sheet of heavy black handmade paper, embossed and printed, folded accordion-style between black paper boards printed in red. In black paper wraparound. The edition comes with a free variation in English by Kenneth White.

This Original Self
Sandra Turley
Women's Studio Workshop, Rosendale, NY. 2001

A delicate, but haunting series of portraits accompanies the reader through the search for the 'self-hidden' in the pieces of the missing past. The absence and loss of family identity associated with adoption is explored through the method of devoré printing (burn out that leaves a transparent imagery behind by burning away the natural fibres of the substrate. The work features lithographic texts and photographic portraits that are screen-printed onto the satin devoré material, resulting in transparent images. The portrait and the words within this book are never complete, sentences never begin or end, everything is fragmented and suggested. The book is bound in an accordion style in cloth-covered boards.

Substance of a Dream
Valerie Hammond
Artists Book, New York. 2013
Edition: one of 8 copies

Inspired by the idea of 'portable sculpture', Hammond's book is composed of floating paper heads which fall gently forward when the pages are opened and can be arranged in different sculptural configurations. Each page is a reproduction from the artist's sketchbooks; the disembodied heads are then laser-cut with the recollection of an intensely vivid dream. The cut-out letters produce lacey and layered transparency between pages; when lit, they are transposed to the book's pedestal. The words are more readable as shadows, echoing the dream's origins in the dim, enigmatic recesses of the mind. Evocative of many associations, from Freudian psychology to surrealism's appropriation of dream-like imagery, Hammond's book, like much of her work, is an ode to the navigation of memory and emotional symbolism within the elusive paths of the unconscious.

Memory Loss
Scott McCarney
Visual Studies Workshop Press, Rochester, NY. 1988
Edition: One of 500 copies.

India Dixon, Librarian, State Library of Queensland, states: "The viewer is bombarded with words and images that are fragmented and overlaid with one another in a way that invites closer inspection. The images themselves are a highly symbolic collage of disparate materials, printed in red, blue and black on one side of the concertina, and in blue, yellow and black on the other side, with medical diagrams and phrases interwoven with personal photographs. An ongoing theme of shadow and light can also be observed in the image choices, and the unsettling proliferation of snakes provides space for a variety of artistic interpretations." Of the work, McCarney states: "Memory Loss is about my brother who had an automobile accident in 1985 that left him with a traumatic brain injury. The book is meant to be experiential, putting the viewer in the space of having only sporadic access to a lifetime of memories. The book is an accordion structure with long pages held together with a cord which prevents it from opening to a flat sheet. The book can be seen from many angles: as a static piece of sculpture from a 'clinical' distance, or close at hand where manipulating the pages reveals personal struggles of head trauma"

Portage
William Kentridge
Mark Attwood (printer)
The Artists' Press, Johannesburg, RSA. 2000
Edition: #13/33

About Portage, Kate McCrickard (William Kentridge: Art in Print, January - February 2017, Vol. 6, No. 5 p7) states: "Such processions tramp through his films and installations and also across many of his prints, most strikingly the panels of his 14-foot-long (when unfolded) leporello book, Portage (2000). To make Portage, disjointed, silhouette figures were torn from black Canson paper and chine colléed to pages from the Nouveau Larousse Illustré Encyclopédie (ca. 1906). (To complete the edition, about 6,000 torn black fragments and three volumes of the encyclopaedia were used.) The solid shapes we see in the collage are the manifestation of shadows cast by Kentridge's stock troupe of characters. The treeman, Harry the tramp, pylon man, umbrella man, bowler, Sisyphus, the Ingoma Zulu stomper (… a frantic Zulu dance involving impressive high kicks, usually performed at transition ceremonies), the flag bearer, the political leitmotif of the porter and Tatlin's Monument to the Third International (Kentridge's personal symbol for hope) are drafted into this line dance of the downtrodden, an exodus set in motion by unnamed exterior forces. These marchers are puppet-inspired, gimcrack assemblages of children's toys, household objects and quotations drawn from the urban landscape such as advertising boards and pylons. Kentridge uses the opaque, torn black fragment to denote shadows and asserts that their blankness offers a lack of psychological depth that may be an asset—'understanding the world not through individual psychology is often appropriate and stronger.' ... Tearing breaks and bothers identity; it disrupts habit and opens up holes in our visual field, it upends our perception in an 'unwilling suspension of disbelief. The viewer has to work to see the loosely composed shapes in Portage as figures rather than as torn bits of paper, and we enjoy being fooled: 'It's not a mistake to see a shape in the cloud,' states Kentridge, 'that's what it is to be alive with your eyes open: to be constantly, promiscuously, putting things together'."

Cry Uncle
Frances Jetter
Artists Book, New York. 2008
Edition: #14/15

About the work, Jetter states: "In 2009, I wrote, designed and illustrated Cry Uncle which begins in the Orwellian Ministry of Love 'where they have ways to make you talk.'. My work focuses on telling stories in pictures. Political subject matter, not only to protest and document, intrigues me as an exploration of human nature. The way type looks and sounds as it becomes a character's voice interests me, as well as how language changes meaning by modifying scale or font. The zippered red mouth on the sack that hold the book is the beginning and end of the story; the torturer's lips are sealed". The phrase 'Cry Uncle' originated about 1900 as an imperative among school-children who would say, 'Cry uncle' when they had had enough of a beating. A canvas sack holds a portfolio covered with thin, creased, fragile-looking Nepalese paper resembling human skin. 11 images carved from 18" x 24" linoleum blocks, and the larger letterpress text from old wooden letters, were printed on translucent, handmade Japanese paper, allowing the viewer to glimpse the shadow image of what came before. Unfolded, the book is over 40 feet [c.12m] long.