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VERONIKA SCHÄPERS

Text: Italo Calvino, Carola Gerlach, Sigrid Siemund Idea, design, printing and binding: Veronika Schäpers Paper: Toshaban (waxed Ganpi paper), Mitsumata paper and rayon paper Cover: Kozo laminated Enduro Ice paper with embossed title Printed from polymer clichés ----- Multicoloured acrylic box with screen-printed title 18 pages + 7 loose sheets, 15 x 30.5 cm + 30.5 x 46 cm Edition: 15 Arabic numbered copies and 8 Roman numbered copies ----- Karlsruhe, Germany, 2023

CURATOR'S DEDICATIONS

The curator David Paton dedicates this exhibition first, to Rosalind Cleaver the Chief Librarian and heartbeat of the JGCBA who lost her battle against leukemia on 27 December 2024. Her absence is deeply felt but her spirit pervades the content of the exhibition, having been instrumental in the decision to make paper its central focus.

The second dedication acknowledges the destruction and tragic loss of Mosab abu Toha's Edward Said Library, an English-language public library in Beit Lahia, Palestine, in 2024.

Three Gorges Dam Migration
Ji Yun-Fei
Library Council of the Museum of Modern Art, New York. 2010
Edition: #67/108

Multiple print impressions in watercolor ink on Mulberry paper, mounted by hand onto multiple layers of silk and housed in a handcrafted box.

Yun-Fei Ji's Three Gorges Dam Migration, the seventh in the series of artist's books inaugurated in 2002 by the Library Council of The Museum of Modern Art, is a hand scroll, the traditional “book” form of old China. This ten-foot-long horizontal image, hand-printed in China from over 500 hand-carved woodblocks, depicts the flooding and social upheaval caused by the construction of the Three Gorges Dam, on the Yangtze River in the central part of the country. A gradually unfolding narrative, Ji's scroll records the sometimes banal, sometimes dramatic effects of social and environmental engineering. The work reflects Ji’s ongoing study of the human and environmental loss associated with one of the largest civil-engineering feats of recent times: scheduled for completion in 2011, the Three Gorges Dam will be the world's largest hydropower plant, generating enough electricity to serve four cities the size of Los Angeles. Meanwhile its immense reservoir has displaced at least 1,200,000 people and has submerged thousands of villages, aesthetically resonant landscapes, & valuable archaeological sites.

Le Miroir Volatil
François Righi
Robert Marteau - text by
The artist, Ivoy-le-Pré, France. Edition: #51/66

Kami-Kawasaki Washi paper has a history of over 1,000 years and was given the name because of its origin in Nihonmatsu City's Kami-Kawasaki. It has been used regularly as shoji paper (paper for sliding doors) because of its warmth and natural beauty derived from the Paper Mulberry, which is grown locally.

The emblems found on the ceiling of the oratory of the Hôtel Lallemant in Bourges, are transcribed by François Righi using a rotulian mirror by Jean Laborde, form the basis of the sequence of images engraved in this book, which is accompanied by a text (motto) by Robert Marteau.

2↑11
Veronika Schäpers
Anja Grunwald - two-point perspective
Nicole Blaffert & Franz Wamhof -photography
Jeremias Mechler & Jörn Müller-Quade - text encryption
The artist, Karlsruhe, Germany. December 2023
Edition: #3/25

Toshaban gampi paper, Bicchu gampi paper and Mitsumata paper M4. Cover is Kozo covered Enduro Ice paper. Gampi (Diplomorpha sikokiana) is a plant of the Zingcho flower family that grows naturally in the mountains. Paper made from gampi has a beautiful pearly luster. Mitsumata was used in Japanese paper making as early as 614, known for its fine fibers.

The starting point for 2¹¹ was a literary text: a short Japanese story Schäpers never got the permission to print. In the summer of 2022, she stumbled across the extensive preliminary work for the project, which I still found fascinating. It reawakened her ambition to find a way around the printing permission that was never granted. Schäpers made various attempts to use the text in a way that would produce a readable result without violating the copyright, and finally she decided to have it professionally encrypted by Jörn Müller-Quade, Professor of Cryptology at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. The original Japanese text and its English translation went through a complicated process. The result is a long sequence of individual terms. They are printed in Monospace font in the book and bear no relation to one another. That makes them particularly appealing, as they bring up a series of associations and suggestions for the reader.

Paper Botanists
Cultivators of Artifice
Claudia Cohen & Barbara Hodgson
Byzantium Press, Canada. 2021
Edition: #25/30

Hodgson and Cohen combine historic material with their own creations to explore the connections between paper and botanical arts with c140 sample leaves of herbaria, drawings, and prints, plus a folder with extra oversized sample leaves from eleven different sources. The leaves originate from broken volumes of botanical texts from the last 350 years or were created by the authors for the present book.

The focus here is on how plants have been historically represented by artists who struggled to capture realism while aiming for an aesthetic ideal. The prints include woodcuts, engravings, etchings, lithographs, photographs, marbling, and more. Explanatory text accompanies the imagery. The last five pages of the book comprise a comprehensive annotated bibliography.

Chasing Paper
Claudia Cohen
Heavenly Monkey Editions, Seattle, WA. 2007
Edition: #27/30

The third volume of Cohen's series of books on her passion for papers of all kinds. The book contains over 300 samples, from scraps to full fold-out sheets. The papers include money, pre-20th century wallpaper, consumable packages, marbled, handmade, and labels, all varying in sizes from small scraps to full sheets. Each copy is laced into a heavy paper wrap featuring multi-colour paper strips woven through the front board and issued in a cloth-covered clamshell box.

A tour de force of design, display and construction. The book includes a one-page preface by Claudia explaining her passion for paper of all sorts, and providing some context for the selections included.

Folding Paper
Technique Design Obsession
Barbara Hodgson
Claudia Cohen
David Clifford - printing
HM Editions, Seattle, WA. 2017

Hodgson & Cohen explore innovative and obscure art forms and crafts that exploit paper's unique characteristics. Far beyond origami, this book details techniques ranging from computational geometry, to toymaking, to industrial packaging. The book contains approximately 150 tipped-in and removable samples, plus 15 three-dimensional structures described in the book, providing the opportunity to actually hold what is being described, to see how it's constructed and works.

Presented in a box with a lift-off top, the book rests on top of compartments holding the 15 structures, along with a magical Chinese thread box. Folding Paper is a quarto-sized book, of 80 pages plus tip-ins, set in Monotype Fournier and printed letterpress on Arches Cover paper. The design and combination of materials are repeated on the box, with interior compartments arranged to snugly fit the samples included. Hodgson researched, wrote and designed the book over a two-year period. Before, during and after this process, Hodgson and Cohen folded their way through 450+ paper samples needed for the edition.

The World's Worst Marbled Papers
Theodore Bachaus (pseudonym)
Henry Morris
Bird & Bull Press, North Hills, PA. 1978
Edition: One of 400 copies.

10 double page marbled paper samples This book provides the first view of Henry Morris's mythical author, Theodore Bachaus, who gives us comments on a very bad lot of marbled paper he received.

This book is a collection of marbled paper samples, and while the books' purported provenance is false the assessment of the marbling skill on display is unfortunately not. It is subtitled “Being a collection of ten contemporary San Serriffean marbled papers showing the lowest level of technique, the worst combinations of colors, and the most inferior execution known since the dawn of the art of marbling. Collected by the author during a five-year expedition to the Republic of San Serriffe.” Each piece of marbling is designated a number and a title, printed on the back of the sample in the lower right-hand corner so that is read before turning the page to view the actual marbling. Some examples of these titles are “Bagnio Baroque,” “Late Vey-Izmir,” “Large Hibachi,” and “Hoi Polloi.” The book is a spoof as there is no country of San Serriffe and there is no Theodore Bachaus! The World's Worst Marbled Papers was born when Morris received a bulk order of remarkably cheap marbled papers from the firm Mer Cie. A friend commented that they were the worst pieces he had ever seen. Morris found a use for them, under the ironic guise of the “positive virtue in inferiority, when brought to its absolute lowest and most abysmal degree.” He published them pseudonymously, using for his cover the infamous “San Serriffe” prank played by The Guardian newspaper. On April Fools Day, 1977, the Guardian ran a 7-page travel supplement on “San Serriffe,” a tropical island republic in the shape of a semi-colon. Despite its satirical premise, The World's Worst Marbled Papers is a noteworthy inclusion to a study on the arts of book and paper making.

Marbled Paper
Karli Frigge
Handmade, n.p. 1985
Edition: #83/100

28 leaves of plates with 33 coloured mounted samples of 25 x 28 cm

Frigge has experimented with traditional methods, creating new genres of marbling which are often displayed for their beauty perhaps even more frequently than for the purposes of bookbinding. The marbled specimen shown here have been cut down from larger printed sheets. About her process, Frigge states: "My marbled paper must not be garish, or shy away from the pattern set for them. The eye must be able to pass over them lightly, without having to blink".

Smell of Winter
Robbin Ami Silverberg
Lee Marchalonis - assistant
Dobbin Books, Brooklyn, NY. (2014)
Edition: #6/10

Silk embedded Dobbin Mill abaca papers. The 1st & last signatures, made from translucent papers with embedded silk pieces of deep purples & whites, express the abstraction of cold through its colour tonalities and the crisp rustle of the turning pages.

Color, texture, and layering, along with scent & sound, are all utilized to evoke the feel of the smell of winter. A smaller central signature, also of translucent papers, displays photographs of shadows made on the snow & ice on a visit to Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, Salt Lake, Utah, along with an overlay printing of the handwritten recipe for the perfume. Nestled on these translucent pages are tiny slats of paper with the names of the chemical used in the perfume A spray vial of Snow perfume, is included in the clamshell, designed & produced with MCMC Fragrances, Brooklyn, in a limited edition of 12 spray vials especially for this artist’s book.

Xian. 线
Thomas Sauvin
Mei Shuzhi - design
2017
Edition: #102/200

Based on a Chinese couturier's sewing kit, the work, entirely made by hand, is a labyrinth of folded paper. The object is composed of fifty-nine tiny black paper boxes that reveal in turn photographic images of varying sizes. The paper retains its original folded shape, and its fibers memorize each fold and unfolding action.

Sauvin had dispatched several touts specialised in vintage photography, who search for unusual material in Chinese markets. In 2014 while one of them was in Baoguosi market in Beijing, he telephoned informing Sauvin of his discovery – “a strange album” – the couturier's sewing kit. When he contemplated this object, he saw more than mere paraphernalia necessary for housewives in 1960s China: he deciphered a similar kind of magic that surrounded cabinets of curiosities in the Renaissance period and Chinese materia medica closets, which comprised multiple drawers hiding well-kept secrets. This is how he has developed the idea of populating this quirky object with faithful facsimiles of vintage prints, which belong to the collection he has been acquiring from all over China for several years. Xian unfolds and discloses Chinese modern and contemporary memory by revealing images that function as reminders against oblivion, images that one simply needs to remove from their pharmaceutical drawer. Fifth publication of Sauvin – collector since 2006 – Xian does not designate only the couturier’s thread; it also reifies the thread of a story. One can freely remodel the plot as one opens the little and skilfully folded envelopes inside which, perhaps, other fragments of life will eventually blend together.

Tokyo Umbrella
Francis van Maele & Antic-Ham
Lester Capon & Peter R. Jones -binding
Redfoxpress, Dugort, Achill Island, Ireland. 2008
Edition: #3/69

Hand-made Hanji (traditional Korean paper) folded over the fore-edge Japanese style.

The artists state: “Graphic impressions from five days walking the streets of Tokyo, taking photographs of posters, advertisements, street signs, manhole covers, stickers, wall graffitis, shop windows, neon signs, packaging graphics. . . With our umbrella, expecting rain which never came”. The spine is on the (traditional] right hand edge of the book which initially confuses the western reader and is meant to be read (correctly) from ‘back’ to ‘front’. The bright black-and-red silkscreen prints in this book suggest the visual vibrance and energy of a Tokyo street scene.

Lilac Wind
Claire Van Vliet
W. R. Johnson - poetry
Janus Press, Vermont. 1983
Edition: #20/15

This work is an example of Pulp painting on a hand-milled paper sheet where the application of colored paper pulps with a brush, thinly or thickly make areas transparent or opaque, using different quality fibers from those of the base for different effects. Made at Twinrocker Handmade Paper Mill in Brookston, Indiana. Established by Kathryn and Howard Clark in 1971, Twinrocker was pivotal to the renaissance of hand papermaking in America.

The case is covered with a rough-textured deep lilac coloured cloth, with a finer textured, sky-blue cloth on the outer and inner edges, the interior of the case is lined with a pale lilac-gray, satin-type cloth. A purple-brown surfaced leather title label is vertically mounted on the spine of the case, with the title lettered in matt finish silver. The folding panorama of delicately coloured, lilac, gray & white, and other added shades suggest cloud forms against the blue-gray surface of the folded paper, which is cut along the top with semi-circular forms, with handmade paper edges giving a feathered appearance to some of the edges. The title: is derived from the third line of Johnson's poem: Death of Li Shang-yin.

00110100 Freedoms
Jan Owen
Artists Book, 2013

Cave Paper, Barcham Green and Hollytex (a white, non-woven, spunbound polyester fabric); woven Tyvek (synthetic flashspun high-density polyethylene [Olefin] fibers).

About this calligraphic Artist's Book, Owen states: “I make books to learn something. I knew the Four Freedoms listed by Franklin D. Roosevelt but not the full speech or the context and then wondered what it means today. His powerful refrain, "everywhere in the world, anywhere in the world" takes on new meaning in our digital world. We immediately see images of revolutions and atrocities, we hear voices of citizens from everywhere in the world, we study rocks from a far planet - all this with binary code that speaks all languages. While it seems like the world is growing smaller, soon we will need to say, "everywhere in our galaxy".

Hand Papermaking
A Book of Suspicions
Walter (Samuel Haatoum) Hamady
The Perishable Press, Mount Horeb, WI. 1964
Edition: 104 of 200

c80 pages telling all you ever wanted to know about setting up a small hand papermaking mill, with linocuts by Jim Lee illustrating every stage. This eccentric book is handset and printed on variously coloured sheets of handmade paper at Perishable Press. Experimental papermaking included after colophon and paper with differing colours on each side with pocket (on double sheet).

From the Front Matter: “Hand Papermaking: Papermaking by Hand, being A Book of Qualified Suspicions gathered unwittingly as after effects of those years so swiftly elapsed between 1964 and 1981 with a modest portion of the process retaining inherent mysteries while the greater part does indeed tell, without too much digression, how handmade paper is made directly from used rags of cotton and linen origins as well as other materials. The whole faithfully set down by Walter Hamady in a (hopeful) effort towards the clarification and fructification of those curious souls who strive to the lofty attainments exceeding those of the ubiquitous dilettante. This infinitely exciting offering is organized in three distinct sections logically intensifying the information in a most useful manner. The text is made much more attractive with a little help form Diderot and a lot of help from Jim Lee, who provided the doctored linoleum cuts. We are grateful to Hermann Zapf not only for designing this typeface but also for deftly prencrafting a proper title page. Though work on this effort has progressed (slowly) for years, this first edition is finished around and on both sides of the Winter Solstice."

From the Colophon: "…. Quite likely the discerning reader has noticed several Orthographic masquerades to cover for a depleted vowel or, to craftily stuff a few coïncidental unaffiliated accents into the flow of papier mâché technology and, hopefully, the effective reader will delight at the complete absence of hyphenation throughout, letting the eye glide uninterruptedly. . . ."

Signed by Walter Samuel Bunker Evans Hamady.

The Eclipse of the Moon
Lu T'ung
Paul Wong
Russell Maret
Carolyn Chadwick
Kuboaa, New York. 1998
Edition: APII/60

Paul Wong illustrated the book with xerox transfers and made the abaca paper between which the scroll & Joss papers are laminated. The book was printed by Russell Maret and bound by Carolyn Chadwick, each with a unique pulp painted paper chemise by Paul Wong.

The text, a translation of Lu T'ung's original poem from Tang-dynasty China, is from an early twentieth century woodblock edition of the poem, and xerox transferred onto Chinese scroll paper. The pulp painted paper chemise fits into a cloth slipcase with a magnet closure and a decorative board onlay on top.

Watermarks in Handmade Paper: Modern and Historic
Michael Durgin
Hand Papermaking Inc, Washington, DC. 2001
Edition: #5/150

A juried collection of seventeen watermarked sheets of handmade paper using many techniques. Five were formed on historic moulds and twelve were produced and designed especially for this collection.

The booklet has an essay by Helen Hiebert and statements from each artist involved in the making of the portfolio: Shannon Brock, Wendy Cain, Kathryn and Howard Clark, Fabriano Papermill, Paul Denhoed, Dard Hunter III, Rick Johnson, Kristin Kavanagh, Tom Leech, Katie MacGregor and Bernie Vinzani, Brian Queen, Robbin Ami Silverberg, Mina Takahashi, Peter Thomas, Cynthia Thompson, and Gangolf Ulbricht.

Sheets of Evidence
William Kentridge
Barbara Mauriello - binding
Susan Gosin & Paul Wong - paper maker
Dieu Donné Papermill, New York. 2009
Edition: #A/P2; Edition of 20

The book consists of eighteen 100% cotton watermarks which were developed and produced by Susan Gosin and Paul Wong at Dieu Donné Papermill, NY.

Princeton.edu states: “When you come to see a copy … and begin leafing through its pages of pristine hand-made paper, all you will see is just that: blank paper. The eighteen pages are, in fact, filled with drawings and text by Kentridge translated into watermarks with the assistance of Gosin and Wong. The concept was ‘to create a book whose surface revealed nothing, and instead encouraged the viewer to, not simply read between the lines, but to look beneath the surface.’ To create the watermarks, the drawings and text were scanned, digitized, and cut into adhesive-backed rubber watermarks, which were then adhered to wove moulds. Sheets were formed with short cotton linter pulp, pressed to 2300 psi, and stack dried on pellons at Dieu Donné Papermill, the non-profit artist workspace dedicated to the creation, promotion, and preservation of contemporary art in the hand papermaking process”.