CBAA the Association for Book Art Education

Capitalizing on the interdisciplinary nature of the field, this blog calls attention to criticism and theory about the book as a medium and/or subject in works of art and, more generally, about book art. It seeks to encourage dialogue, solicit comments, and create a generative space for new ideas from critics and theorists of various fields regarding the aesthetic, semiotic, haptic, cognitive, historical, and other features that distinguish these works and their function in ethical, political, and social matters.

To contribute to the list of underrepresented voices in the book arts, see CBAA Book Art + Social Justice Resource List.

<< First < Prev 1 2 3 4 5 ... Next > Last >>

THE “WHY” OF CREATIVITY // Peter Tanner

01 Sep 2024 12:00 AM | Virginia Green (Administrator)

Over the last few weeks, I have been begun a new semester of teaching an undergraduate introduction to literature and film analysis. My students are learning how to talk about, in Spanish, the various cultural currents and trends in the last century in Latin America. Recently we discussed the following basic questions:

Why do we as human beings tell stories?

Why do human beings make art?

When we talk about art what are we talking about? What is your definition?

Here are some of my students’ responses for your consideration:

We tell stories because they teach basic lessons in a fun way.

Humans create art because it is fun, and it is a good way to express our emotions.

When we talk about art we are talking about other people's creations.

I think the reason why we tell stories is because people can read the stories and know more about the world and the lives of others.

A reason why I think humans create art is to express emotions. When a person cannot say things with words, a person can express it with art.

When we talk about art, we are talking about the perspectives that art reveals to us. Each person has a different idea and perspective on art.

I believe we tell stories because we need to know the history of human beings to know what can help our problems today, and what won't help.

I believe that human beings create art because it is a type of communicating with people on a more directly human level.

Art for me is an expression of ideas, emotions, and stories shared by other humans in a type of communication that is more personal than just directly telling someone the reason why something happened. This way you can discover what others have experiences by looking at their experience through their creative expression.

We tell stories to remember and show people's different experiences. They show and help you to learn lessons. We tell stories to know people's perspectives. It helps to have empathy.

I believe that human beings create art to express opinions and emotions on specific topics.

I think that to be an art form it must be a creation that expresses opinions or emotions. Art is a way to show your ideas. It is a way of perceiving the world.

We tell stories to pass information and experiences to other people. We tell stories so that we can connect with other people and so that others can understand more about us.

I think that human beings create art to express themselves. That means expressing feelings, opinions, and understandings about the world that they live in and the experiences they have as well. It is a way to link thoughts in physical form so that others can also understand something about the artist.

When we are talking about art, we are talking about an artist's way of expressing themselves artistically, that is, in a different and unique way that is their own way.

These seemingly simple questions have inspired the creation of many a tome of poetry and prose, as well as countless texts regarding the interpretation and meaning of artistic works within their discursive and historic milieu. These same questions are important for us, as makers of art and as interpreters and critics of art, to rehash from time to time.

I think for some of us it has been years since we have thought about these questions that have defined our lives.

I would love to hear your thoughts, based on your experiences, to see if in all of our collected experience with art creation, art history, art criticism, we have established a more nuanced understanding of the reasons we do what we do.

Perhaps when we ask questions such as “Why do we as human beings tell stories?” “Why do human beings make art?” and “When we talk about art what are we talking about?”, we might as well be asking why we breathe.

If we stop breathing, we’ll die. If we stop making, discussing and writing about art, our individual worlds would die. Is it really that heroic or is there something else?

Let me know what you think.

Peter Tanner teaches Spanish Language and Literature at Utah State University and is Editor of Openings: Studies in Book Art. He has a Ph.D. in Latin American literature, an MA in Latin American Art History, and a BFA in Painting and Printmaking. His research focuses on artist books from Latin America.

Read more • Add comment
PEOPLE AS BOOKS / BOOKS AS PEOPLE // Levi Sherman

15 Aug 2024 12:00 AM | Susan Viguers (Administrator)

Many artists’ books explore the metaphor of the person-as-book or the book-as-person. There are the common clichés (to read someone like a book) and the shared anatomical vocabulary (spine, shoulder, head). At a deeper level, if we believe that a book enables communication between reader and creator, then it would seem to embody the creator in some way. And as the biblical reference in Johanna Drucker’s The Word Made Flesh (1996) suggests, the incarnated book is nothing new. Rather than offer a theory of the book-as-person, this blog post is exploratory: I survey works of contemporary art that deal with books, and especially with libraries, to see how the metaphor has been used.

Individuals as books

If we are told not to judge a book by its cover, it is because the analogy between books and people goes deeper than the spine or shoulder. After all, every person has a story. Perhaps the Human Library Organization has gone furthest in realizing this version of the person-as-book. While not framed as art, their events “where readers can borrow human beings serving as open books” to “have conversations they would not normally have” share obvious parallels with social practice art.[1] Tellingly, the organization’s slogan is “unjudge someone.” Artist duo Rebecca French and Andrew Mottershead instead lean into first impressions in their take on the human library book: Borrow Me (2006). The human books are tagged with labels like “sleeper” or “gossiper,” and, as expected, they perform versions of these stereotypical behaviors that one might encounter among library patrons.

Books as their creators

Just as people can stand in for books, so too can books stand in for people. For his first sculpture, Pense-Bête (1964), Marcel Broodthaers entombed the remaining copies of his final poetry book in plaster to signal the death of his literary self and the beginning of his career as a visual artist. Publication and person are also equated by Thomas Hirschhorn in his monuments to philosophers: Spinoza Monument (1999), Deleuze Monument (2000), Bataille Monument (2002), and Gramsci Monument (2013). Each of the increasingly complex public works includes a library of works by the philosopher, which viewers can read.

Libraries as their collectors

Thus far, we have dealt with the analogy between books and their creators. But books can also represent their collectors. Anyone who has felt proud, or more likely self-conscious, as a guest examines their bookshelves will sympathize with Craig Dworkin’s The Perverse Library (2012). Having enumerated his entire collection, Dworkin can project an imagined book that would, in some way, represent himself: “a 48-page perfect-bound volume by Clark Coolidge [New York: Sun & Moon, 1982]. No such book actually exists; its details are merely the projection of a statistical mean.”[2] Buzz Spector’s exhibition and book, Unpacking My Library (1995) similarly investigates how the organization of one’s books represents them — with a nod to Walter Benjamin’s essay of the same title.

Dworkin and Spector bare their own libraries, but others are more interested in the voyeuristic (or scholarly) appeal of other people’s books. Abra Ancliffe’s Personal Libraries Library (2009–) recreates the libraries of influential thinkers and makers, and allows readers to check out the books. The idea that you can learn something valuable from someone’s library had led Anne H. Young to argue that artists’ personal libraries should be preserved as writers’ often are.[3] An example of one such project is Donald Judd’s library, perfectly preserved in Marfa. I would argue that its digital presence (you can virtually browse every foot of shelving) combined with its physical presence (where viewers are not allowed to browse) are as much a monument as anything by Hirschhorn. Robert Smithson’s library has also been saved, and furthermore, is the subject of artist Conrad Bakker’s Untitled Project: Robert Smithson Library & Book Club, an impressive series of painted book surrogates.

Libraries as multitudes

For Dworkin, Spector, Ancliffe, and Bakker, the library stands in for an individual. But if a book can represent a person, then one can also see the library as a collective of many people. This is, indeed, the logic behind many memorials and monuments. Yinka Shonibare’s British Library (2014) is an installation of more than 6,000 books bound in the artist’s signature Dutch wax fabric. Many of the books’ spines are stamped with the name of immigrants or prominent opponents of immigration. The blank books are meant to represent future migrants. Shonibare’s follow-up American Library (2018) and African Library (2018) replicate the installation format but also include websites with archival documents and additional information about many of the people represented on the shelves.

Using a similar logic, Rachel Whiteread's Judenplatz Holocaust Memorial (2000) is in many ways the opposite of Shonibare’s libraries. It is devoid of color, anonymous, and signifies loss. The memorial is one of the best-known libraries in contemporary art, but it is preceded by Micha Ullman’s The Empty Library (1995). Both are voids that resist would-be readers — Whiteread turns her library inside out, as if it is a negative space cast from an absent positive, and Ullman’s empty shelves are sunk beneath the street, extending meters underground. A plaque added later to Ullman’s memorial bears the most infamous analogy between people and books: “That was but a prelude; where they burn books, they will ultimately burn people as well.” It is worth noting that Heinrich Heine wrote these words a century before the holocaust, and it is therefore no surprise that artists have used libraries to memorialize other conflicts.

Wafaa Bilal’s participatory installation 168:01 memorializes the University of Baghdad’s art library, which was burned during the 2003 US invasion. With rows of uniforms white books representing 70,000 lost volumes, it is through participation that the analogy between a person and a book is made. Donors can exchange one of the blank books for a new book requested by the university faculty. One book — one donor — at a time, the blank library gives way to culture. Another poignant work about a lost library derives its impact through the analogy of the book as person: Emily Jacir’s Ex Libris (2010–12). Jacir’s book presents books from the Jewish National Library in West Jerusalem that were looted during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, the Nakba. By photographing the handwritten inscriptions from the books’ frontispieces, often gifts from one person to another, Jacir reminds the reader of the individual behind the book.

Bilal and Jacir memorialize conflicts that destroyed people and books alike. However, the fact that both artists were drawn to the library shows how wrong it feels when books are assaulted. It may be unsurprising, then, that the analogy between the destruction of books and people can be reversed. Mohammad Sharaf’s installation The Cemetery of Banned Books (2018) envisions a mass grave of books to criticize the banning of 4,300 books in Kuwait. The rectangular tombstones echo the shape of a book, and each is inscribed with a title and stamped with “Banned in Kuwait.” The installation was, predictably, dismantled by the authorities.

The Human Library Organization. “Unjudge Someone,” May 1, 2024. https://humanlibrary.org/.

Dworkin, Craig. The Perverse Library. York: Information as material, 2010.

Young, Anne H. “Preserving Artists’ Personal Libraries: Providing Insights into the Creative Process.” Art Documentation: Journal of the Art Libraries Society of North America 35, no. 2 (2016): 339–51.

Levi Sherman is a PhD student in Art History at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and the founder of Artists’ Book Reviews.

Read more • Add comment
FANDOM AND CREATION // Icarus Key

01 Aug 2024 12:00 AM | Susan Viguers (Administrator)

The fine arts world, to be quite frank, looks down on books and printmaking as a creative medium. They’re strongly and obviously tied to commercialism (though we can look to the beautifully decorated Sistine chapel and remind painters that Michelangelo too was paid to promote the church’s agenda), and for an artist who is used to spending hours on a one of a kind piece, the idea of an edition—with each copy an original work of art—is antithetical to how they operate. Still, as easy as it is to understand their logic, it doesn’t make the pill any less bitter to swallow. And it doesn’t solve the problem of printmaking and book making as skills going under-acknowledged and under appreciated. Fortunately for this, we live in a time where humanity is more connected than ever.

My first experience with the internet was through media fandom, a portmanteau of the words fan + kingdom. Think of fandom like sports fans; there are many levels of obsession but ultimately it’s a group of people excited about a mutually loved piece of media. Online, people will share (fan)art and (fan)fiction based on the original stories and characters, as well as musings, theories, and breakdowns of the source material, all for free.

What does this have to do with book arts?

I engaged with fandom using my graphic design skills to layout “fanzines.” The name is archaic as the modern fanzine is more artbook than zine, but the communal collection of art and stories has strong ties to historical zinemaking and printmaking history. And it’s through these spaces I learned that there is a real hunger for that history in younger artists who might not have access to a more traditional art education. Outside of fanzines, artists create casebound books out of fanfiction to show off online that captivate people, and digital artists share fledgling attempts at linocut with familiar pink Speedball Easy Carve and a cheap set of tools. People want to express their love of someone’s work through their own creation, and do so even with the most basic knowledge gleaned from youtube tutorials or elementary school art projects.

This is the space I want to share my work. To that end, I have created Threadhunters, a comic that utilizes traditional printmaking to create comics. Think Frans Masereel, only instead of wordless woodcuts I am utilizing multiple printmaking methods and digital typesetting before running it through offset lithography, in the tradition of classic American comic books. The book, for this project, does not matter so much as the tools I’m using to create the mark and tell the story. But the story and the art will draw attention and curiosity to the methods being used. It will generate discussion and interest in creation, and as someone who is interested in passing on the tools of the trade, I can help guide younger artists in how to safely use these tools and engage with the larger historical narrative they’re taking part in.

I also take part in these spaces because of their accessibility. Young people (and many other people, but my focus here is on those still growing up) cannot afford our expensive, handmade books. And as a storyteller, I focus on giving people the language they need in order to express themselves, especially in matters such as gender identity and mental health. Language that I myself did not have growing up. It would be almost hypocritical of me if I did not seek out a way to share my stories in as accessible a way as possible. And the internet in general creates a way for me to share this comic and similar stories widely and freely, both by hosting it online for free and offering print on demand copies for $10 versus the $40+ of the traditionally printed and bound copies.

Threadhunters (v.1, p. 13) offset lithography

The internet is not an easy place to translate a book, but neither are formal gallery spaces. For me, it’s more important to share the story, as well as the mechanical process of creation, than it is to show off a beautifully put together codex that can’t be touched because it’s under plexiglass. There is space for both, but I have learned that the internet and the people who desire to learn are far more accommodating and far more interested than traditional spaces.

Icarus Key is a recent MFA graduate of the University of Arts. He hopes to use printmaking and narrative storytelling to empower the next generation to tell their stories and engage meaningfully with the community around them. His work will be updated on instagram at @happysadyoyo.

Read more • Add comment
NOTES TOWARD A TYPOGRAPHY OF CARE, PART 2 // Emily Larned

15 Jul 2024 12:00 AM | Susan Viguers (Administrator)

At an exhibition opening just hours after writing my previous post, I ran into my former professor John Gambell. I told him about my interest in the Yale Typesetting Checklist as an act of care. He replied, “Oh! I got that from Geoffrey Dowding. He was a crafts teacher in London after WW2 and wrote several books about typesetting. I still have several designers who set type too tightly because of it.”

An AbeBooks search yielded a first edition of Finer Points in the Spacing and Arrangement of Type by Geoffrey Dowding available from a bookseller in the UK. The slim volume has just arrived. Scanning the book quickly, I cannot find a checklist within it. Did John mean he had taken the main ideas from this book, and turned them into the Yale checklist? Or is a typesetting checklist in one of Dowding’s other books?

But before I get further into it: the possibility that somebody else had written theYale Typesetting Checklist had never occurred to me. It is true John didn't put his name on it. I was the one who did that before sharing the handout with my students. Yet, I hadn't assumed that my former professor had invented the checklist, either. Certainly the lineage of typographic convention (and education) traces back centuries to incunabula, and to the scribes even more centuries before. Yet, the way this knowledge had been passed down often failed to resonate with me as a student. Often typography manuals discuss “ideals,” and achieving “mastery” or “perfection.” As I suspect is true with most of us who enjoy making things, I like attending to the process of making, of caring-while-working, of the lived experience of sustaining (and being sustained by) a state of engagement and focus. Fixating on a perfect outcome makes me anxious and miserable. When I think of my own effective teachers: what had struck me about John was how much he cared about type. He had visceral reactions to our awkward work. I was awed by how sensitive he was to small details that were invisible to us students. He saw differently.

Years later, to enjoy and be effective in teaching typography myself, I realized I needed to identify a framework that aligned with my values.* Achieving perfection and mastery was not it. “Seeing differently” sounds wonderful, but isn’t that more of an endpoint than a process? How does one learn to see differently? By caring. And slowing down. Attending to details. The Yale Typesetting Checklist shows a way.

Reading Dowding's books, influential to my own mentor, is a way to dig into a genealogy of my education. So, for a preliminary reading of Finer Points in the Spacing and Arrangement of Type, here is a concordance of care, including its corollaries, careful, and careless:

“But in the opposite direction there is, and always has been, abuse: the pernicious system of piece rates for the job, for example, does not conduce to careful text setting & the proper division of words, but only to a maximum number of ens per hours ‘standard’ and thus to disturbingly large amounts of white space in the wrong places, i.e., between the words—the antithesis of good composing & sound workmanship.” (xii)

“From the time of invention of printing from movable types in Europe, that is, circa 1440, up to the present day, one of the hall-marks of good printing, and of the good printer, has been the care and attention paid to the setting of text matter.” (1-2)

“A carefully composed text page appears as an orderly series of strips of black separated by horizontal channels of white space.” (4)

“If he has organized his job well, there will be a set of house rules in the hands of all who work for him, but, with the greatest care, such rules can never be exhaustive, and much will depend on his being lynx-eyed and uncompromising in enforcing the standards he has set himself.”- H.P. Schmoller” (7)

“Extra thin spacebands were used, and normal care was taken to see that word spacing was reasonably even and close, by the judicious breaking of words at the ends of lines.” (7)

“In arranging text setting care must be exercised to ensure that the type and the measure are so related that the eye has, firstly, no difficulty in swinging easily to and for without any suggestion of strain: and secondly, is not hindered in finding the beginning of the following line.” (9)

“Colons and semi-colons are often carelessly spaced also.” (20)

“The introduction of unnecessary punctuation marks and their frequently careless setting makes for fussy and ugly typography.” (22)

“Even a casual glance through a book or newspaper reveals initials used in this manner but in many instances it also discloses appallingly careless methods of setting.” (30)

“Only two of the many treatments of initial letters have been mentioned, but they indicate the care with which the setting of initials should be treated.” (32)

“This care in setting & printing, nullified when extra space is inserted between paragraphs (for there is some show-through even on reasonably good paper), adds to the beauty & clarity of the pages by heightening the contrast between the lines & their interlinear whiting.” (33)

“Care is necessary in adjusting the leading of the lines so as to give visually even spacing between them.” (43)

“Careful placing laterally, either to the left or the right of the mechanical centre, is necessary to make lines which begin with A, C, G, J, O, Q, T, V, W, Y, and c, e, j, o, q, v, w, and y or end with A, D, F, K, L, O, P, Q, R, T, V, W, Y and b, c, e, f, h, p, r, v, w & y, appear centered.” (43-44)

* If this notion strikes you as unfamiliar or unconvincing: “We know that the consequences of our motives for teaching and learning are significant: Keith Trigwell and Mike Prosser have shown that the instructor’s intentions in teaching (“why the person adopts a particular strategy”) have a greater impact on student learning than the instructor’s actual strategies for teaching (“what the person does”) (78). Their research has shown that approaches to teaching that are purposefully focused on the students and aimed at changing conceptual frameworks lead to deeper learning practices than teacher-centered, information-driven approaches (Trigwell 98). The implications are that the instructor’s fundamental beliefs and values about teaching, learning, and knowledge-making matter.” —A Guide to Feminist Pedagogy

Emily Larned has been publishing as an artistic practice since 1993. She is currently Associate Professor of Art in Graphic Design at the University of Connecticut, Storrs.

Read more • Add comment
NOTES TOWARD A TYPOGRAPHY OF CARE* // Emily Larned

01 Jul 2024 12:00 AM | Susan Viguers (Administrator)

Recently I’ve been thinking about typography as a practice of care.

By typography, I mean both the communications function of type, as well as its crafted details. The “communications function” entails attending to the meaning of the text, coaxing it out, making it visible, giving it physical form. By “details” I mean everything from creating and managing spaces (whether between letters, words, lines, paragraphs, or margins), to the use of dashes, to considerations of when one might use old style vs. lining vs. tabular figures.

For a contemporary analysis of care, I turn to Matters of Care by María Puig de la Bellacasa, who draws upon the thinking of feminist theorists before her, including Joan Tronto and Bernice Fischer. While this book makes no mention of typography, I find it rich with resonance.

De la Bellacasa offers Tronto’s definition of care as “everything that we do to maintain, continue, and repair ‘our world’ so that we can live in it as well as possible” (3). ‘Our world’ contains design artifacts; individual design artifacts, such as books, also create their own world. De la Bellacasa emphasizes that “‘caring about’ and ‘taking care of’ need to be supported by material practices” (4), that caring necessitates acting; one cannot design without doing something. She notes that “feminist interest in care has brought to the forefront the specificity of care as a devalued doing, often taken for granted if not rendered invisible” (53). The labor of typographers and graphic designers is ubiquitous, yet largely anonymous. Evidence of their work surrounds us, and yet as workers they remain largely uncredited and invisible.

I came to the notion of “care” as a lens to think through how to teach typographic rules that feels personally authentic to me as a feminist practitioner. As my students will attest, I care a lot about typographic detail. And my eagerness to teach conventions gives me pause. Many contemporary students and instructors alike are skeptical of Eurocentric inheritances, weary of their weight, and seek alternatives. New texts in this area, such as matriarchal design futures: a collective work in progress, by Heather Snyder Quinn and Ayako Takase, advocate for “changing the rules, unlearning the systems and structures under which we have been trained” and advise students against “checking off boxes and working to ‘please the professor’” (n.p.). My zealous presentation of a handout called the Yale Typesetting Checklist (distributed by a beloved former professor, Yale University Printer and Senior Critic John Gambell, now retired) hardly seems in line with this pedagogical approach. I relish teaching this checklist, yet I identify as a feminist design educator who values creating an environment where students explore, experiment, identify their influences, follow their interests, and develop their own research and methods. How do I reconcile my love of this traditional checklist with my dedication to feminist pedagogy?

Learner-centered teaching is knowledge and skill sharing, something long considered a part of feminist practice and process. Certainly there is power in understanding how and why things work, and being able to shape material to get a desired outcome: to know how to polish something. When students take a raw paragraph into InDesign and iterate various ways to shape and detail it based upon a desired outcome, the text gains character, liveliness, identity; the text becomes more itself. De la Bellacasa offers that “collective reenactment of committed knowledge [is] a form of care” (16), which suggests to me that typographic shaping is a way of caring for a text. One cannot care without knowledge and without action. The point to remember is that there are many types of knowledge, many ways of knowing, many ways of caring, multiple ways of acting.

So in teaching the checklist, the question becomes “how to care in ways that challenge situations and open possibilities rather than close or police spaces of thought and practice”(67)?

How to teach skills and principles while creating space for invention? What could this mean for a typographic checklist?

In the original checklist, one item is “to render all underlined titles of literary or artistic work in italic type.” I offer to my students that this is a reminder to treat titles differently: italics is a quiet and effective approach. Other options could be to underline a title (creating custom underlines is one of my favorite InDesign tricks), or make a title bold, or a different typeface, or a different color.... the reminder is to attend to the difference of the title, and not flatten it to the rest of the surrounding text.

Another item in the checklist outlines the usage of hyphens, en dashes, and em dashes. Dashes are glyphs, symbols, meaning-givers, like the letter A: you use the sign you need to communicate what you need to communicate. While I may be satisfied with conventional dashes and have yet to seek alternatives, I think of Samuel R. Delany inventing his own punctuation mark “⋮” for simultaneity. So in dashes there could be room too for invention, if students have the desire and care to create them.

Instead of a rigid list of rules, the checklist becomes a jumping off point for (re)considering every design choice. Does caring for a particular text mean adhering to the conventional, or inventing the unconventional? In discussing the value of the checklist, my student Tomaso Scotti offered “When details are cared for, people notice.” He elaborated that even if a layperson may not be able to identify why or how a design artifact appears cared for, they still recognize the designer’s attention. This “caring for” is a world-building, and world-maintaining, an outlook of attention and responsibility, an ethics of praxis: a cycle of theory, action, and reflection. If you consider a book (or any design artifact) its own world, “to maintain, continue, and repair ‘our world’ so that we can live in it as well as possible” offers a feminist lens through which to think through what we do as typographers, one checklist point at a time.

* this post presupposes that typography is a book art relevant to all students and practitioners of the book.

Works referred to:

de la Bellacasa, María Puig. Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017.

Quinn, Heather Snyder and Ayako Takase, matriarchal design futures: a collective work in progress, Chicago and Providence: self-published, 2024.

Emily Larned has been publishing as an artistic practice since 1993, when as a teenager she began making zines. She is currently Associate Professor of Art in Graphic Design at the University of Connecticut, Storrs.

Read more • Add comment
THE ZINCS: CAPTURING A BYGONE WORLD – PART TWO // mahala kephart

20 Jun 2024 12:00 AM | Susan Viguers (Administrator)

Used in commercial printing from the 19th century through the mid-20th century, the 20,000 photoengraving blocks in the J. Willard Marriott Library collection would have been used in the production of a variety of printed materials, including books, pamphlets, newspapers, announcements, invitations, greeting cards, and advertisements. Under the direction of Book Arts Program faculty, book arts program volunteers and student assistants have been responsible for most of the cataloging efforts to date.

At first, the collection was organized by grouping, like subject matter (such as birds, images of people, or ships) together on galley trays. This organizational strategy, however, required moving and reorganizing all of the galley trays as blocks were put away. As the number of cataloged blocks grew, this practice was, pun intended, shelved. Now blocks are filed away and given a cabinet address based on their original galley tray. This means that carefully labeled “birds” will be scattered through the galley tray cabinets. Cabinet address and inventory numbers are noted on the original print proofs as a backup inventory control measure.

With the rare exceptions of zinc cuts that exceed an 8.5 x 11” footprint, scans appear in the physical catalog at true size. Large zinc cuts appear at a reduced size, with appropriate notation. Zinc cuts that are damaged are proofed and scanned, with damage notes added to the catalog. Moving to a digital catalog will require physically measuring each zinc cut with digital calipers since size will no longer be obvious to the potential end user; notations about damage or other issues will also transfer to the digital catalog.

Zinc cuts can be fiddly to print, requiring some amount of make-ready temporarily attached to sections of the wood block underneath the metal plate. Nails are sometimes visible in the printed image; usually this can be fixed using a nail set and light tapping with a small hammer, being careful not to strike any other part of the plate with the nail set or the hammer. In cases where the nails are not possible to hide, damage notations are made in the catalog. A galley tray usually contains between ten and fifteen blocks, carefully arranged to maximize use of the space (sometimes fitting them back presents a Tetris-like challenge). The blocks are square or rectangular but are occasionally irregularly so (like Utah’s state boundaries compared to those of Wyoming or Colorado). A proof printing session can proceed most efficiently if the blocks from one tray are printed from largest to smallest (and the next tray from smallest to largest, and so forth); this greatly reduces setup changes.

In addition to the multi-step, manual process of printing the photoengravings and preparing them for digitization and search engine optimization, one of the serious challenges of cataloging the images in the collection has been the sheer volume of subject matter present. Only about a fifth of the collection has been cataloged, so many more gems sit waiting to be found. Some images provide interesting insight into long-ago mechanical or logistical processes in factories, below deck on ships, or in the loading of ships from dockside. There are dramatic scenes that are quiet; dramatic scenes that are full of action; and other dramatic scenes that seriously beg the question of what was going on in the accompanying text.

As electronic platforms have advanced in functionality, some early versions of key wording in the studio were lost in computer and software upgrades, a long pandemic hiatus, and other incompatibilities. Moving the existing data as well as updating and standardizing descriptive material under the umbrella of the Marriott Library’s Digital Collections team should ensure data integrity, continuity, preservation, and backup going forward. Additionally, this move will create a road map for future staffing needs and standardize information about the project to ensure smooth knowledge transfer and strategic planning.

The accompanying illustrations offer the very briefest introduction to the wonderful variety and not-yet fully explored creative potential of the J. Willard Marriott Library Photoengraving and Zinc Cut Collection housed in the Book Arts Studio at the University of Utah. We look forward to being able to share this resource more broadly with book artists near and far in the coming years.

mahala kephart, flutist by training and retired university development administrator, is a long‑time volunteer and student in the University of Utah’s Book Arts Studio. Work on printing and cataloging the photoengraving and zinc cut collection has proven to be a surprising marriage of the analog and digital worlds.

Read more • Add comment
THE ZINCS: CAPTURING A BYGONE WORLD – PART ONE // mahala kephart

01 Jun 2024 12:00 AM | Susan Viguers (Administrator)

The Book Arts Studio housed within the University of Utah’s J. Willard Marriott Library is home to a collection of approximately 20,000 photoengraving blocks that capture and preserve a surprisingly rich array of images from a world gone by.

The vast majority of the pieces in the collection were originally part of the collection of the Newcomen Society in North America. Established in 1923, its members were leaders from a variety of fields (industry, invention, transportation, communication, energy, mining, agriculture, economics, banking, insurance, education, and the law). Newcomen Society members addressed gatherings of their peers in talks focused on the history, triumphs, and challenges of their particular enterprise; these talks were held across the US and Canada.

Eventually the Newcomen Society in North America established a physical campus and headquarters in what is now the Philadelphia suburb of Exton, Pennsylvania. The campus, designed by architect Briton Martin, included offices, guest houses, a chapel, a bell tower with carillon, as well as many antique model steam engines. Also located on the campus was the Thomas Newcomen Memorial Library in Business History which housed some 2,700 volumes.

The business model of the Society also included Newcomen Publications, Inc. and an on-site print shop. The print shop produced a long-running series of pamphlets that served to document the presentations given at meetings. The booklets, which were generally paid for by the entity being recognized (the business or organization highlighted in the publication, whose leader had given one of the meeting addresses), were produced using a consistent design strategy for decades, and were illustrated first using both commissioned and antique engravings; later publications were illustrated primarily with photographs. With more than 2,500 institutions and organizations having been honored during the four decades the Newcomen Society was active, the number of commemorative booklets produced by Newcomen Publications, Inc., was significant.

At its height, the Newcomen Society of North America had a membership roll of 17,000. Membership, however, declined significantly in the last part of the 20th century. The campus was sold; the collection of photoengraving blocks came to the University of Utah; the collection of antique engines was auctioned; and the Society officially disbanded in 2007. The organization’s remaining archives are housed in the National Museum of Industrial History located in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.

The University of Utah’s collection contains other photoengravings and zinc cuts, as well. These likely came from newspaper printers in Salt Lake City (the Salt Lake Tribune and Deseret News), as well as the University of Utah print shop. The provenance of individual pieces in the collection, however, has not been fully documented.

The images on the physical objects are both photoengravings and line art that were etched onto thin zinc (sometimes magnesium or copper) sheets that were then trimmed and affixed to blocks of wood with small nails. The distance from the base of the block to the highest face of the engraving was calculated to 0.918 inches, the US industry “type high” printing standard.

Cataloging the University of Utah’s collection began in earnest when the Book Arts Studio moved to its current location in the J. Willard Marriott Library in 2009. The engravings are housed in designated galley tray cabinets in the studio. The cataloging process involves cleaning and polishing the metal part of the block (this operation is largely limited to engravings that are extremely dirty, dusty, or appear to be stained or damaged); taking a proof of the image by printing it onto paper on a flatbed press; scanning the resulting proofs; assigning keywords and galley tray addresses to the scanned images; and, finally, adding an inventory number to the physical object.

From 2010-2023, the resulting “Zinc Cut Catalog” information was made available through physical notebooks housed in the Book Arts Studio. Beginning in 2024, the physical catalog will be phased out and the photoengraving catalog eventually made available through the Marriott Library’s Digital Library Collections.

More about this exciting development our next post.

Sources:

Swearingen, John E. The Growth of Standard Oil Company (Indiana): 1889-1964. Princeton, NJ: Newcomen Society of North America, 1964.

“Public Relations: The Newcomers,” Time Magazine, July 21, 1952, https://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,859909,00.htm, accessed February, 2024

Wikipedia. “Newcomen Society of the United States.” Last modified March 2, 2024. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newcomen_Society_of_the_United_States

mahala kephart, flutist by training and retired university development administrator, is a long‑time volunteer and student in the University of Utah’s Book Arts Studio. Work on printing and cataloging the photoengraving and zinc cut collection has proven to be a surprising marriage of the analog and digital worlds.

Read more • Add comment
PART TWO: WARREN LEHRER'S LIFE IN BOOKS // Brian Davis

15 May 2024 12:00 AM | Susan Viguers (Administrator)

Warren Lehrer’s A Life in Books (2013) is one of my favorite contemporary novels. A Life in Books is Lehrer’s first novel, but as many of CBAA’s readers surely know, Lehrer has been composing artist books and experimenting with typography and multimedia since the late 1970s. Readers familiar with Lehrer’s earlier works as well as the history of artists books and book history more generally will find A Life in Books is not only an evocative love song to the book as object but a masterfully original and emotionally driven work of visual storytelling. A Life in Books also happens to be an exemplary multimodal book-archive.

Warren Lehrer, A Life in Books, 2013, Goff Books. Front cover.

The full title to Lehrer’s novel is A Life in Books: The Rise and Fall of Bleu Mobley, The Long Awaited Memoir and Retrospective Monograph Featuring All 101 of Bleu Mobley’s Books.As its long title suggests, Lehrer’s novel is both a fictional memoir and a retrospective monograph written by a fictitious author and bookmaker named Bleu Mobley. Narrated from the confines of a prison cell, A Life in Books is Bleu’s 102nd and last book, transcribed from audiotapes, compiled and edited by a writer named Warren Lehrer, the real Lehrer’s fictional doppelganger. While I do not have the space to elaborate on how the novel explores issues of fictionality or matters of textual authenticity, nor do I wish to spoil the ending for those unfamiliar with the novel, I don’t think it’s too much of a spoiler to say that Bleu publishes a work of Fiction that he markets as a work of Non-Fiction, a kind of satirical hoax, written with the intention of exposing war crimes committed by the U.S. government—and that it is this literary scandal that eventually leads to Bleu’s imprisonment.

As a literary compendium of sorts, A Life in Books documents Bleu’s creative universe. It includes excerpts from 33 of his 101 published books, photographs of each of his 101 personally designed book covers, as well as book reviews, catalog copy, and artifacts from his personal archive—all woven together with Bleu’s life story. Much like Lehrer himself, Bleu experiments with all kinds of bookish forms. He creates letterpress books, scrolls, dos-à-dos books, accordion books, works of biblio-circuitry, VR book-installations, poetry on toilet paper, a mini television built into a book, flying poster poems, bookish furniture and children’s toys that look like books, and of course, Bleu cuts across virtually every popular genre at some point along the way. In other words, this is not merely a novel about the life of a writer and bookmaker, it’s about the institution of literature and the history of modern publishing. Each of Bleu’s books also reflects a technological stage in the development of printing and, given that many of the events narrated in Bleu’s memoir pertain to actual historical events, both Bleu’s life and his books index real historical events, too. Even the title of the novel is metonymic: Bleu doesn’t merely spend his life making books, his books stand in for his life—his life in books. As such, A Life in Books is paradigmatic of the more maximalist or encyclopedic variant of multimodal book-archives.

Diagram in A Life in Books explaining the book’s format.

Around the time when the book was published, Lehrer adapted several of Bleu’s books into short films. Embracing the expansive nature of the project, Lehrer took the 101 book covers he designed for A Life in Books, as well as the textual artifacts he produced that became the foundation for the novel, and exhibited them across the U.S. as a retrospective survey of Bleu’s extraordinary publishing career. In the spirit of archiving, I like to view this travelling exhibit less as a component of Lehrer’s book tour for A Life in Books, which it obviously was, than as a traveling book-art installation that showcases the Bleu Mobley archive.

Photo from the exhibition A Life in Books: A Bleu Mobley Retrospective. Photo credit: Warren Lehrer.

Just as some of Lehrer’s book titles from the 1980s end up being a part of Bleu’s oeuvre in A Life in Books (e.g., French Fries and i mean you know), Lehrer has recently taken some of Bleu’s stories and remediated them into standalone books. For example, Jericho’s Daughter (2024), which Lehrer co-authored with Sharon Hovarth, is an anti-war retelling of the Biblical tale of Rahab and takes the form of a bifurcated, dos-à-dos binding. Riveted in the Word (2024) is an interactive digital book, soon to be available at the Apple Store, that incorporates kinetic typography and an original soundtrack to explore a writer’s attempt to regain their language faculty after a stroke. Both books first appear in A Life in Books, albeit in different forms. That Lehrer continues to find ways to further elaborate on Blue Mobley’s textual universe is not simply a matter of postmodern recycling, it’s a testament, I would argue, to just how generative archival practices can be within the domain of book art and literature.

I encourage readers unfamiliar with Lehrer’s work to check his stuff out and, for those already familiar with his work, I highly recommend looking into the two aforementioned titles which are set to be published in June of this year.

Brian Davis teaches English in the Upper School at Stone Ridge School of the Sacred Heart as well as undergraduate courses in writing, literature, and film at the University of Maryland. His writing has appeared in Frontiers of Narrative Studies, electronic book review, Orbit: A Journal of American Literature, among others.

Read more • Add comment
PART ONE: THE RISE OF MULTIMODAL BOOK-ARCHIVES // Brian Davis

01 May 2024 12:00 AM | Susan Viguers (Administrator)

Most of my writing during and after graduate school has argued that contemporary multimodal literature, for the most part, employs an archival poetics.[1] Books like Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves (2000) — which is arguably the most influential example — as well as Steve Tomasula’s The Book of Portraiture (2006), Leanne Shapton’s Important Artifacts (2009), Reif Larsen’s The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet (2009), Anne Carson’s Nox (2010), Doug Dorst and J. J. Abrams’s S. (2013), Warren Lehrer’s A Life in Books (2013), Thalia Field’s Experimental Animals (2016), Matthew McIntosh’s theMystery.doc (2017), Rian Hughes’s XX (2020), and many, many others, not only exploit the material and expressive possibilities of the book as object, they function as physical sites for compiling and organizing heterogeneous collections of textual artifactsfor narrative and other expressive purposes. I call these aesthetic objects book-archives and examine them through the lens of archival poetics, a poetics of documentation and preservation, of curation and transmission.

In addition to employing a variety of literary modes and linguistic registers, book-archives often include reproduced photographs, paintings, drawings, handwriting, newspaper clippings, x-rays, maps, diagrams, charts, and other kinds of textual artifacts and ephemera. Makers of book-archives tend to also organize their books according to archival techniques and principles such as collation (the combining and comparison of objects), cataloging (the listing and inventorying of various things), annotation (commentary and diagrams of objects), cross-referencing and intertextuality (the citation of texts in other texts), indexicality (how textual objects point to specific places and contexts in the world), and conceptual metonymy (how textual objects stand in for larger psychosocial complexes, spatiotemporal continua, and other textual objects).

Given the physical dimensions, design potential, and portability of books, book-archives often take on the form of compendiums and dossiers. On the one hand, there are the more maximalist or encyclopedic book-archives like House of Leaves and A Life in Books, which recapitulate entire schools and traditions of literary history and printmaking. On the other hand, there are the more minimalist book-archives like Nox and Important Artifacts which are more modest in terms of their scope of documentation and narrative scale. At both ends of the spectrum, book-archives employ archival principles and techniques.

The emergence of book-archives as a contemporary mode of writing and bookmaking occurs at the intersection of literary-cultural history and material-technological development. In recent decades, a wide variety of literary modes and genres, including encyclopedic fiction, metafiction, artists books, electronic hypertext, visual literature, and graphic narratives, among others, have tended to coalesce in individual works, and this convergence has come at a time when the technological affordances of new media, including software like QuarkXPress and Adobe’s InDesign and Photoshop, become readily accessible and fairly easy to use. Nowadays, authors and designers are able to incorporate practically all forms of media into their books. No longer limited to the pen, typewriter, word processor, or letterpress, writers are able to integrate virtually all types of inscription and media into a single object—the book—using various design software on their personal computers. This convergence in large part explains why we have seen the book-archive as a mode of writing and bookmaking emerge when it has.

The rise of archival poetics also overlaps with various responses to supposed threats brought on by digital technology to print and media culture, reading practices, public discourse, social trust and cultural memory. Central to multimodal book-archives are matters of textual authenticity—that is, of determining whether a textual artifact is real or fake, genuine or a copy. And of course, issues of authentication typically tip over into questions about authorship and attribution as well.

So while artificial intelligence and social media, for instance, have created real and pressing concerns pertaining to matters of authenticity, book-archives have tended to respond to these matters by drawing attention to how subjectivity, knowledge, discourse, and cultural memory are increasingly configured through distributed networks of people and artifacts in different social and institutional spaces. Book-archives, in other words, use the book object as a vehicle for interrogating some of the most pressing issues of the twenty-first century.

In my next blog post, I will attempt to tie some of these threads together with a discussion of Warren Lehrer’s A Life in Books

1] Those interested in reading more about archival poetics and multimodal literature may wish to read my interviews with Warren Lehrer and Bill Bly, both published at electronic book review. I have also published articles on Anne Carson, Bill Bly, and Mark Z. Danielewski.

Brian Davis teaches English in the Upper School at Stone Ridge School of the Sacred Heart as well as undergraduate courses in writing, literature, and film at the University of Maryland. His writing has appeared in Frontiers of Narrative Studies, electronic book review, Orbit: A Journal of American Literature, among others.

Read more • Add comment
AI AND AB (ARTIST BOOKS) // Peter Tanner

15 Apr 2024 11:19 AM | Susan Viguers (Administrator)

Recently I have been fascinated to learn more about how to use AI for teaching purposes. I have found it to be a great resource, always disclosing to my students that I am using it so that they use similar best practices and cite its use. To demonstrate some of what AI can do I asked ChatGPT a few questions. It is interesting to see its answers and how they represent ways that the information we share with AI influences the results it can provide. For clarity’s sake all the questions below are from myself and all the answers in all their redundant glory were generated by the ChatGPT’s AI.

+++++

Peter Tanner Question (PT Question): What is ChatGPT and what can it do?

ChatGPT AI Answer: ChatGPT is a conversational AI model developed by OpenAI, based on the GPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer) architecture. It's designed to generate human-like text based on the input it receives. ChatGPT is trained on a vast amount of text data from the internet, allowing it to understand and generate responses across a wide range of topics and contexts.

Here are some of the things ChatGPT can do:

1. Answer Questions: ChatGPT can provide information and answer questions on a wide variety of topics, drawing from its extensive training data.

2. Engage in Conversation: ChatGPT can engage in text-based conversation, responding to prompts and interacting with users in a manner similar to human conversation.

3. Generate Text: Whether it's writing stories, poems, articles, or even code snippets, ChatGPT can generate text in a coherent and contextually relevant manner.

4. Assist with Writing: ChatGPT can help with writing tasks by suggesting ideas, providing feedback, or generating content based on specific prompts or requirements.

5. Language Translation: While not perfect, ChatGPT can assist with language translation tasks by converting text from one language to another.

6. Creative Exploration: ChatGPT can be used for creative exploration, generating ideas, brainstorming, or providing inspiration for artistic or design projects.

Overall, ChatGPT is a versatile tool that can assist with a wide range of tasks involving natural language processing and generation. However, it's important to keep in mind that while ChatGPT can produce human-like text, it doesn't have understanding or consciousness like a human does.

+++++

PT Question: What is an artist book?

ChatGPT AI Answer: An artist's book is a medium of artistic expression that uses the book format as its primary means of presentation. Unlike traditional books, which focus primarily on conveying written content, artist's books emphasize the visual and tactile experience of the book object itself. They can take many forms, including handmade books, altered books, unique or limited-edition works, and even sculptural or multimedia creations.

Artist's books often blur the boundaries between visual art, literature, and design. They can incorporate a wide range of materials, such as paper, fabric, metal, wood, and found objects. Artists may use various techniques such as painting, printmaking, collage, photography, and typography to create their books.

The content of artist's books can vary widely, ranging from narrative storytelling to abstract expressionism to political commentary. Some artist's books explore themes of identity, memory, or social justice, while others experiment with the structure and format of the book itself.

Overall, artist's books offer a unique and immersive artistic experience that engages the viewer on multiple levels, challenging conventional notions of what a book can be.

+++++

PT Question: Can AI help create artist books?

ChatGPT AI Answer: Yes, AI can certainly play a role in the creation of artist's books, either directly or indirectly. Here's how:

1. Content Generation: AI can be used to generate written content for artist's books. For example, a language model like GPT-3 could be prompted with themes, ideas, or specific text passages to generate narratives, poetry, or other textual elements that can be incorporated into the book.

2. Design Assistance: AI tools can assist artists in designing the layout and visual elements of their books. For instance, software programs equipped with AI algorithms can help with layout composition, image editing, and typography selection, ensuring a visually appealing and cohesive design.

3. Collaborative Creation: AI can facilitate collaborative creation processes between artists and machines. Artists can interact with AI models to explore new ideas, experiment with different styles, or generate content collaboratively, leading to innovative and unexpected outcomes.

4. Automated Production: AI-driven automation technologies can streamline the production process of artist's books by handling repetitive tasks such as image processing, text layout, and even physical bookbinding in some cases, allowing artists to focus more on the creative aspects of their work.

5. Inspiration and Exploration: AI can serve as a source of inspiration and exploration for artists, providing access to vast amounts of data, images, texts, and other resources that can spark creativity and inform the conceptualization and execution of artist's books.

While AI can provide valuable assistance in various aspects of creating artist's books, it's important to recognize that human creativity, intuition, and artistic sensibility remain essential throughout the creative process. AI should be viewed as a tool to augment and enhance human creativity rather than replace it entirely. Ultimately, the synergy between human and machine capabilities can lead to exciting and innovative outcomes in the realm of artist's books.

+++++

PT Question: What are key artist books from United States?

ChatGPT AI Answer: The United States has a vibrant tradition of artist's books, with numerous influential works that have contributed to the development of the medium. Here are some key examples:

1. "The Birds" by Edward Ruscha: Published in 1972, "The Birds" is a seminal work by American artist Edward Ruscha. It features black-and-white photographs of various species of birds, accompanied by simple, descriptive text. Ruscha's use of photography and text in a minimalist format has had a profound influence on the genre of artist's books.

2. "A Humument" by Tom Phillips: Tom Phillips' "A Humument" is an ongoing project that involves altering and reinterpreting the pages of a Victorian novel, "A Human Document" by W.H. Mallock. Phillips paints, collages, and obscures the original text, creating a new narrative and visual experience. The project blurs the boundaries between literature and visual art and has inspired generations of artists.

3. "Diary of a Victorian Dandy" by Duane Michals: This artist's book by Duane Michals combines photography and handwritten text to create a fictional narrative about the life of a Victorian-era dandy. Michals' innovative use of sequencing and storytelling techniques has made "Diary of a Victorian Dandy" a landmark work in the genre.

4. "Seven American Deaths and Disasters" by Kenneth Goldsmith: Published in 2013, "Seven American Deaths and Disasters" is a provocative artist's book by conceptual poet Kenneth Goldsmith. It consists of transcriptions of radio and television broadcasts related to seven iconic American tragedies, including the assassination of John F. Kennedy and the September 11 attacks. Goldsmith's appropriation and recontextualization of media texts raise questions about representation, memory, and collective trauma.

5. "House of Leaves" by Mark Z. Danielewski: While not strictly an artist's book, "House of Leaves" is a groundbreaking novel that incorporates innovative typographic design and unconventional page layouts to create a complex and immersive reading experience. Mark Z. Danielewski's experimental approach to storytelling challenges traditional notions of narrative structure and has inspired artists and writers alike.

These are just a few examples of the diverse and influential artist's books that have emerged from the United States. They demonstrate the country's rich artistic heritage and its ongoing contributions to the field of book arts.

+++++

PT Question: What was the first artist book?

ChatGPT AI Answer: Pinpointing the "first" artist's book can be challenging due to the broad and evolving definition of the genre and the long history of artists experimenting with book formats. However, one early example often cited as a precursor to the modern artist's book is the "Hypnerotomachia Poliphili," published in 1499.

The "Hypnerotomachia Poliphili" is a Renaissance-era book that combines text with lavish woodcut illustrations. It tells the story of a protagonist, Poliphilo, on a dreamlike journey through a landscape filled with classical architecture, mythological figures, and erotic encounters. The book's intricate design and integration of text and image make it a landmark work in the history of book arts.

While not a contemporary artist's book in the modern sense, the "Hypnerotomachia Poliphili" exemplifies many characteristics of the genre, including the integration of visual and textual elements, the exploration of unconventional narrative structures, and the use of the book format as a vehicle for artistic expression. It has inspired generations of artists and designers and continues to be celebrated for its beauty and innovation.

+++++

PT Comment: All the previous answers were generated by the ChatGPT AI. For many of you and myself, the repetition that we read can be grating, but that is important to note because it separates us from the AI. But also think about what these answers represent: An AI provided the definition of the artist book. That represents a non-research-based consensus found on the internet. It created a list of the most important books in the history of artist books in the United States, but it did not choose Twenty-six Gas Stations, which may perturb many readers. What should be readily apparent is that while there are vast amounts of information available for AI to use, there is a great deal of serious academic research that is not available for access by either AI or Google’s search engines. AI can only present us with an amalgam of the data that we have fed to it. The adage “garbage in garbage out” comes to mind. AI can generate many types of information. However, as humans and specialists in our fields we are the content authorities. The metadata is a proxy, not “the” thing.

+++++

PT Question: Who is Peter Tanner?

ChatGPT AI Answer: As of my last update in January 2022, I don't have specific information about an individual named Peter Tanner who is widely known or recognized. It's possible that Peter Tanner could be a private individual, a professional in a specialized field, or someone who has gained prominence after that time. If Peter Tanner is associated with a particular field or area of expertise, providing more context could help in providing relevant information.

Peter Tanner teaches Spanish Language and Literature at Utah State University and is Editor of Openings: Studies in Book Art. He has a Ph.D. in Latin American literature, an MA in Latin American Art History, and a BFA in Painting and Printmaking. His research focuses on artist books from Latin America.

Read more • Comments (1)