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.

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CULTIVATING ECOLITERACY WITH ARTIST BOOKS, PART I // Karen Viola

01 Jun 2025 12:00 AM | Susan Viguers (Administrator)

Riding a Manhattan-bound train to spend a day with artists’ books, I pored over digital versions of zines which described a sacred, wounded land in New Mexico: “Fracking, fracking, burning bright/In the forests of the night:/What immortal hand or eye,/Could frame thy fearful symmetry?” [1] These artists knew their book art history. William Blake is often considered to be the first book artist.

After William Blake, from The Magic of This Place Greater Chaco Art Zine

This essay is concerned with what such handmade creations can do in the face of environmental injustice. And how they do it. As the human species reckons with ongoing climate and biodiversity collapse, the book as an expressive, intimate, and accessible art form can be a totemic, much-needed tool for cultivating ecoliteracy and building resilient communities.

The work of book artist Sarah Nichols exemplifies one such an ecocentric approach, and it is her meticulously crafted but modestly priced pamphlets under the quirky series name Brain Washing from Phone Towers which lured me to the Center for Book Arts for the intimate, visceral encounter all such objects offer. The ‘pamphlet wars’ peaked in the 17th century when those with the talent and access to a press could distribute their cultural critiques and competing religious or political ideologies to a hungry ‘reading public’ that was not unlike the insatiable consumers of social and news media today. Pamphlets were often printed on both sides of one sheet then zig-zag folded into a booklet. Nicholls honors this centuries-old tradition with her own pamphlets which as she states are “produced via obsolete technology,” but she is also interested in cultivating a “reading private” by distributing editions to a serendipitous network of artists, friends, or like-minded fellow citizens.[2] As book art scholar Levi Sherman elucidates in his review, “Even the subscription model operates within the gift economy; the subscriber nominates a second person to receive free pamphlets. In place of metrics, feedback, likes and tags, the relationship between author and reader is mediated through the publication itself.” [3]

Sarah Nicholls, pamphleteer extraordinaire

I was able to engage with a number of Nicholls’ titles in the Center’s collection which addressed various ecological topics such as bees, rising seas, and the history of weeds. She sets the metal type by hand, letter by letter like seeding an urban garden, her pages propagated with luminous, hand-carved block prints. Her text has a matter-of-fact, friendly tone, like being in the company of a thoughtful tour guide which with one fell swoop guides her audience through the past, present and future of particular places explored by bike or on foot. I found her Homesteading for the Urban Coyote to be particularly striking, its cover featuring an intricately carved coyote face printed with a bronze-tone ink divided in half by the stitched fold of the blood-red cover stock. One eye stares at us, daring us to open. The narrative begins with a personal recollection of a photograph and the event it captured: the rare sight of a coyote on the roof of a Long Island City bar. The coyote, considered a menace, was apparently reported to the cops but slipped away easily, and that was that. Nicholls reflects on how coyotes have been gradually establishing residency in the city via the Bronx since 1990s, and how urbanization has fragmented wilderness, disrupting its complexity. She advises readers: “If you do encounter an urban coyote, stay very still and be grateful, not scared; your understanding of your home just became slightly larger than before.” As the narrative unfolds, so do the accordion pages of animal renderings and lushly patterned foliage, all bleeding off the edges of the paper as if nothing can, or should, contain them. Nicholls’ letterpressed words press on: “They’re all abstractions,” she says of the wilderness stories we tell ourselves, which “erase all the squatters, foragers, wanderers, and native peoples who lived in landscapes that explorers and writers pretended were empty.” [8]

Detail from Sarah Nicholls’ Homesteading for the Urban Coyote

While ‘obsolete’ technology is celebrated by many contemporary book artists, it is hard not to appreciate the innovations in photography and printing processes throughout modern history that have widened audiences and increased accessibility, culminating in a digital age where anyone can do it themselves. Zines, like the pamphlets of yore, have emerged as an iconic, subversive publishing platform and art form for marginalized group movements within an unsustainable economic system which demands unrestrained extraction of the land.

Artist and educator Jeanette Hart-Mann directs the Land Arts of the American West program at the University of New Mexico which is focused on engaging with local communities directly impacted by water and land justice issues. In 2018, she partnered with artist Asha Canalos and the Greater Chaco Coalition to lead a team of students in creating three collaborative art zines which feature evocative drawings, poetry, stories, diagrams, and appalling data about the extent of extraction on sacred lands and the damage to human health and ecosystems caused by fracking.[5] The group set up camp with all their needed art supplies at Angel Peak Campground in the center of the third largest natural gas field in the country, and within 48 hours they created the artwork for the zines—an unforgettable, completely embodied experience.

The Greater Chaco Art Zines: The Magic of This Place; In Balance/Imbalance; and Thank You, I Love You, I Am Sorry

The idea to make the zines was based on knowing that many members of the impacted community had no cell or internet service, so they became, literally, a “touch point” of communication between elders and younger people. Over 5,000 copies were distributed to both local and nationwide communities and organizations. One of them was actually censored by the New Mexico Museum of Art and New Mexico Department of Cultural Affairs and the artists were never told, which only fueled their fight.[6] In 2019, larger advocacy groups including the Sierra Club and WildEarth Guardians filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration ’s illegal approval of 370 drilling permits, which the Biden administration shockingly defended in September 2022. But on February 1st, 2023, for the first time, the 10th Circuit ruled in favor of the citizens and the land, halting the drilling. Later in June, Secretary Haaland announced that all public lands within a 10-mile radius of the park will be protected from new mining leases for 20 years, and in April of 2025, The Chaco Cultural Heritage Area Protection Act was signed into law. It seems to me from this chain of events that the Greater Chaco Zine project, in more ways that are possible to measure, made a difference.

Homeward bound, I stared out the train windows, pondering urban coyotes, fracking in sacred canyons, and the labors of love I had encountered that day which enlarged my understanding of community resilience and what part humble, artful books might play—small and devotional offerings that can be held in the palm of a hand that invite readers, urgently, to slow their pace and consider what matters the most. Our survival depends largely on our capacity to form intimate bonds with each other and with the living land which sustains us all, and all artists, including book artists, are called to act. They are the canaries in the coal mines and fracking wells of capitalism, yet they are resilient, flocking together, singing their chorus brightly to the forests of the night.

Notes for further reading:

1. The Magic of This Place – Greater Chaco Art Zines. https://greaterchacoartzines.org/the-magic-of-this-place/. Accessed 29 May 2025.

2. About - Brain Washing From Phone Towers. https://www.brainwashingfromphonetowers.com/about/. Accessed 26 Mar. 2023.

3. “Artists ’ Book Reviews.” Artists ’ Book Reviews, 31 Dec. 2019, https://artistsbookreviews.com/.

4. Homesteading for the Urban Coyote - Sarah Nicholls. https://www.sarahnicholls.com/portfolio/homesteading-for-the-urban-coyote/. Accessed 26 Mar. 2023.

5. Greater Chaco Art Zines – Resisting Environmental Racism and Censorship. https://greaterchacoartzines.org/. Accessed 29 May 2025.

6. Hart-Mann, Jeanette, and Asha Canalos. “Creating Social Change Through Art: The Greater Chaco Art Zines.” Natural Resources Journal, vol. 60, no. 2, 2020, pp. 309–36.

Karen Viola is a book artist and writer in Ithaca, NY. Her work is grounded in research and a sense of kinship with the land. She has an MA in Liberal Studies focused on creative ecoliteracy, a BFA in illustration, and a professional background in designing innovative books for children.

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FOR THE RECORD // Kathleen Walkup

15 May 2025 12:00 AM | Susan Viguers (Administrator)

Sorting through my library recently, I came across a book I had forgotten about, The Printer’s Relict. Subtitled An Example to Her Sex, the book was written by Eleanor P. Spencer and published in Baltimore by the Amphora Press in 1937. The press was founded by Elizabeth Mann in 1933; further information is elusive.

The Printer’s Relict is a modest chapbook. It’s ten printed pages are classically formatted, with attention to typographic detail. It’s also surprisingly full of information about Anne Catherine Green and Mary Katherine Goddard, two of the three dozen or so women printers from the American colonial era. The book’s title (an archaic definition of relict is widow) suggests that Spencer was exploring the approach that most women in the printing trades took to becoming active, as does a note at the end of the short text: “No one except Mr. McKinstry (in The Press of Chautauqua) has tried to analyze the position and importance of the printer’s wife.” Still, it is interesting that of the two women she focuses on, one, Goddard, was never married.

Spencer doesn’t include her sources. How do we know the information is accurate? And why bother to find out? Because real history does matter. If Eleanor Spencer hadn’t done her work, or Elizabeth Anthony Dexter, or Lois Rather, or Janet Bogardus, or Leona M. Hudak, or scores of other women, we would be in even more ignorance about the real history of women’s literally countless roles in the history of printing.

This is also true of artists’ books. While it’s early in the life of the field to claim a canon, it is vital that, when we put Ed Ruscha at the top of any list, we can’t forget about Alison Knowles. Dieter Roth? Certainly, but don’t leave out Dorothy Iannone. Johanna Drucker’s The Century of Artists’ Books? A critical voice in the history. But so is Joan Lyons’ Artists’ Books: A Critical Anthology and Sourcebook, published a decade before Drucker’s book. Lyons’ anthology is a self-proclaimed “first in-depth look at the territory.” Perhaps most surprisingly, the essays are still relevant today and are to some extent a movement toward canon formation, although Lyons never makes that claim. Again without making an explicit claim, Lyons’ anthology acknowledges the presence of women in the field through her choice of essayists (Shelley Rice, Lucy Lippard, Betsy Davids, Barbara Moore, etc.) and her visual examples at the front of the book (Madeline Gins, Janet Zweig, Joyce Weiland, Susan E. King) whose work appears among the usual male suspects. These voices and images help to offset Clive Phillpot’s inclusion of only one woman in his long essay, “Some Contemporary Artists and Their Books.” And even that woman, Helen Douglas, is listed only through her partnership with Telfer Stokes.

One of my earliest works is misattributed in two different print publications. Maybe this shouldn’t matter to me, but I would like to see those mistakes righted. As my late friend, poet Chana Bloch, once wrote, “The past keeps changing.” That is why we need to continue to seek out the history, correct the record, go over old ground and re-examine what has been written.

This work is just beginning when it comes to the inclusion of people of color and queer people into book and printing history. We have a long way to go with these histories, but the record is out there; we just need to seek it. And while document digitization, Google searches, peer-to-peer sites like Wikipedia and now AI make the job of research much easier, the necessity for in-person visits to archives, combing through bibliographies for hints of possible sources, de-coding nineteenth-century handwriting and the like is still with us. Mercifully, we are mostly spared the bilious perusal of microfilm.

In 2022 I curated an exhibition at San Francisco Center for the Book, Possibilities: When Artists’ Books Were Young. The show included the books of thirty-two artists whose primary work is or was books or whose work included them. A friend who came to the Center to help design the exhibition phoned me the day after she saw the work for the first time to point out that all of the artists in the show were women. Yes, I acknowledged, I know.

“But it doesn’t say that in the title.”

How sad and how infuriating that we are still having this discussion.

Kathleen Walkup is currently an independent curator and writer living in the Hudson Valley. She is Lovelace Family Professor Emerita of Book Art, Mills College.

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NOT A ZINE, NOT AN ARTIST BOOK: A SECRET THIRD THING // India Johnson

29 Apr 2025 8:19 AM | Susan Viguers (Administrator)

At zine fests these days you’ll spot plenty of exciting publishing projects that are not exactly “classic” zines, but they aren’t exactly artist books either. Amelia Greenhall of Anemone has proposed the term “artist publishing” to describe this not-quite-a-zine but not-quite-a-book territory. For me, “artist publishing” is a capacious term that would include a wide spectrum of publishing activity by artists, but it seems useful to have a specific term for the category of print publications. For now, I’ll refer to it as third thing publishing. There are a handful of preoccupations that characterize this type of artist publishing: materiality, equipment access and maintenance, scope, audience building, and sustainability.

Materiality

Third thing publishing has a higher production value than many zines but isn’t as long or as formal as a book; usually a booklet. Experimentation with formats is balanced with a certain practicality. Like zines, third thing publications generally start their lives as a standard size piece of office paper and make use of consumer-grade binding equipment intended for office settings. You might spot the occasional pamphlet stitch, too. While classic zines might be printed on the cheapest copy paper and artist books might use mouldmade or handmade paper, third thing publishing embraces machine-made paper tailored for the project. Again, third thing publishing tends to seek a balance between what’s practical/affordable for the publisher and what looks/feels fun or unusual for the reader.

Third thing publishing involves a little extra time and effort. A publication might strategically deploy a cutout or a belly band or a round corner; material qualities that make you think “what a nice touch.” There are even some letterpress-printed projects that have a lot in common with the approach of third thing publishing. The corresponding price point for third thing publishing is usually higher than a classic zine, striking a balance between quality and affordability—enabling personal collecting without private wealth.

Equipment access and maintenance

The heyday of zines as we know them coincided with widespread adoption of photocopiers in schools and workplaces, making it feasible to self-publish by stealing copies after hours. The rise of hand-printed artist books (and academic book arts programs) coincided with the ability to salvage letterpress equipment in the 1970s and ‘80s. Third thing publishing is often Riso focused, and that usually involves a salvage operation too. When artists repurpose office equipment, we’re usually asking it to do things it wasn’t designed to do, so the Riso discord server is a wealth of peer-to-peer tips and advice, a lifeline for artists all over the globe who are fixing up duplicators for artmaking.

Equipment ownership and equipment maintenance, alongside equipment sharing and collaboration, are the default in third thing publishing — and not just for print. Most Riso printers need light bindery equipment, like stitchers, collators, and tabletop stack cutters. The entire setup can still fit in an apartment, enabling lower overhead costs.

Scope

Historically, zines have had defined genres (perzines, fanzines, cookzines) and often very specific audiences. Zinesters might use a zine/artist name or produce an ongoing/serialized project, only sometimes describing themselves as a press or distro. In third thing publishing, press names and clearly defined publishing scopes are common but paired with larger (and less elite) audiences. For instance, Anemone focuses on DIY culture and the climate, Midtones Photo Magazine spotlights photographers of color across mid-America, and our own press, Late Night Copies, publishes informal research-based writing on a handful of subjects.

Audiences

Scope goes hand-in-hand with audience. Third thing publishing is curious about specific topics. Audiences are interested in those topics or invested in independent publishing—or, ideally, both. (These are typically not the institutional or wealthier individual collectors of artist books.) Crucially, there is an entry point into these third thing projects even if you’re not an artist/zinester/publisher yourself. Third thing publishing deliberately cultivates a readership, and readers are often future contributors and collaborators. Publishers connect directly with readers at fests and fairs and through webshops, subscriptions, workshops, launch parties, social media, newsletters, fundraisers, and participatory projects. Third thing publishers speak about their work, teach, participate in exhibitions, contribute publications to reading rooms, etc. Third thing publishers consign and wholesale and, with print runs of 100–1,000, may push against the limits of what an individual can circulate without a distributor.

Sustainability

Third thing presses are interested in sustainable creative labor. They want to cover their costs, maybe pay their contributors, maybe pay themselves, and have money for the next project. With some notable exceptions, most publishers break even. Many share business strategies with one another and reject the idea they are competing with one another. The goal is to grow the audience for everyone. At the point of sale, readers may not understand how the costs of equipment and compensating contributors means a publisher might just break even on a $12 or $15 or $20 publication. Third thing publishers must balance labor, equipment, and materials costs with the reality that readers who buy indie publications have limited disposable income.

In Conclusion

I would appreciate having a word to describe a publishing practice that results in something that is not quite a book and not quite a zine. If you would too, leave a comment or write your own blog post to keep the conversation going.

Thanks to Melissa Murch-Rodriguez and Rachel Hays for their thoughts, which are integrated into this essay, and Aiden Bettine, who helped me write it on a long road trip to (what else?) a zine fest.

A longer version of this essay first appeared in the newsletter Papereaters.

India Johnson is a Minneapolis-based artist. Along with Aiden Bettine, Johnson runs Late Night Copies Press and a new community print shop, the Workshop for Independent Publishing.

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GROUNDING THE IMAGINATION IN ARCHIVAL RESEARCH // AB Gorham

15 Apr 2025 12:00 AM | Susan Viguers (Administrator)

Investigating book collections and archives for content and structural inspiration is integral to a research-based artistic practice. This semester at the University of Nebraska Omaha, I decided to frame my undergraduate Book Structures class around archives. In mid-January, Patricia Silva posted to the Book Art Listserv a request for a list of artist books that utilize archives in some way. I was nearly finished designing my class for the semester and this list filled in many gaps in my own list of archival-adjacent works. Working with existing collections and archives isn’t only for academically based work; it has been a source of inspiration for projects for a long time, including projects that are made specifically about reference libraries, such as REF, an artist book by Shift Lab. This type of Archival Based Research Methods for artistic inspiration were new to my undergraduate students and the first step towards more independently driven research.

For their first assignment, my students looked at ways to create their own archives as artist books and bound as single pamphlets of Mohawk paper folios that they had manipulated in some unique and intentional way. The students needed to create a visual sequence and could tear, fold, puncture, layer, fold, cut, pierce, lump, register, crumple, jumble, fray, roll, scratch, clump, burn, dampen the paper to get these results. This book became A Material Archive of Action and asked students to think about the paper substrate as the main conveyor of the book experience.

For their second assignment, my students worked directly with images from the Public Domain Archive and created a lenticular accordion book based on those images. The resulting artist books were excellent examples of the structural possibilities of a lenticular accordion (fragmenting imagery, one book that allows for two perspectives) and gave students the opportunity to work from existing archival and out-of-copywrite images as inspiration. They worked outside of their own aesthetic tendencies while giving those archival images new life.

For the third artist book assignment, I worked with Tammi Owens who is the head the Director of Research and Instruction Services, the Fine Arts Librarian, and an associate professor at the University of Nebraska Omaha's Dr. C.C. and Mabel L. Criss Library. Tammi had taken a book arts class a while back and so had a greater understanding of the possibilities of connections between materials and content. Together we came up with an assignment that asked students to Use The Archive To Ground Their Imaginations.

This means, Grounding Their Imaginations in the following ways: 1) in academic research to have a touchstone to reality; 2) in existing historical texts to provide historical context, timelines, stories; 3) in the materials and book structures from the past to provide structural precedence; 4) in scientific fact to enable larger, more imaginative leaps that are based in logic.

Here are the steps we asked students to follow: 1. Go into the stacks, grab up to five books and bring them back into the room. Try to have them be from different eras in history. 2. Find something that you love and use the Form and Content Analysis Worksheet to conduct a SLOW LOOK of the book. 3. Narrow down what aspects of the book you would like to emulate, be inspired by, modify and use—start sketching! 4. You can use any aspect of the book but consider that we will be displaying your book and the library book side-by-side. 5. Final output will be an artist book and a small piece of writing for the exhibit text.

The initial free-for-all supermarket-sweep-type of book gathering was frenzied and fun. We visited the folio section of the book collection and filled our arms with giant books about the circus, magic tricks, and early maps and comics. Students then settled on a book that they wanted to work with for the remainder of the assignment. The next few weeks back in the classroom were dedicated to learning either the drumleaf or flatback binding structures and paper marbling, as well as preparing the exhibition installation.

The resulting artist books are colorful, structurally formal, and deeply connected to the library books. Asking students to conduct this object-based research in a library kept them away from predictable search engines and pinterest boards and asked them to create their own path forward in this artistic pursuit.

Images show students installing the exhibition in two cases in the library, plus some examples of their third assignment:

AB Gorham is Assistant Professor of Book Arts and Papermaking at University of Nebraska Omaha and serves at Chair of the CBAA Publication Committee. Her poems have been published in Puerto Del Sol, The Call Center, American Letters and Commentary, DIAGRAM, and Gulf Coast, among others. Her artist books are collected nationally.

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THE UNFORGETTABLE ART OF ILLUMINATED MANUSCRIPTS // Caitlin Cass

01 Apr 2025 12:00 AM | Susan Viguers (Administrator)

As an artist who often considers how the unfurling of a gatefold can make a section of narrative more memorable, I was delighted to learn that many Medieval people saw books as mnemonic devices. In her classic text on the subject, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture, Mary Carruthers examined how books were used to foster memoria or trained memory. She wrote: “It is my contention that Medieval culture was fundamentally memorial, to the same profound degree that modern culture in the West is documentary” (1). Medieval Europeans recognized a properly trained memory as a crucial component of good character, citizenship and piety. Actual words on the page were seen as far removed from the truth itself. Words needed to be internalized to become meaningful, or as Carruthers put it: “A work is not truly read until one has made it a part of oneself…” (2). In this culture, stuck between the earth and salvation, meditating on illuminated manuscripts and carefully encoding mental images into a mental arca (storage chest) were integral parts of designing a memory that could survive into the afterlife, like Noah’s Ark.

Biblia. Pentateuchus [Pentateuque dit d’Ashburnham ou de Tours]

In an illuminated manuscript known as the Ashburnham Pentateuch, Noah’s ark was painted to look like a giant storage chest. Carruthers notes that such chests or arca were often used as a metaphor for memory. Using locational memory techniques, people would store concrete bits of information in different parts of their imaginary chest. In the twelfth century, theologian, Hugh of St. Victor wrote a treatise that mapped biblical teaching onto an imagined blueprint of Noah’s Ark (3). He associated the many rooms in the ark with locations on the route of the Exodus. Hugh endlessly complicates the design of this ark, even hiding concepts in the cubby holes he imagines on its exterior. There are no physical images in Hugh’s treatise, outside of those described in the text. Still, his work reflects the close relationship between words, images and memory evident in illuminated manuscripts.

Medieval manuscripts are full of visual mnemonic devices that help the reader encode their contents in memory. Scribes wrote sins in red ink and used marginalia to emphasize important passages. Sometimes the large letters at the beginning of blocks of text functioned as rebuses to help the reader remember key parts of the passage. In the Cuerden Psalter (ca. 1270) each psalm begins with an elaborately illuminated initial. These contain images that reference key words in the psalm. For example, in the initial for Psalm 72 a man on his knees uses low stools to support himself and another man walks hunched over with a walking stick (4). These men were painted to help emphasize the line: “but as for me, my feet were almost gone; my steps had well-nigh slipped” (5). It’s worth noting how strange this image is. Unique imagery was considered a necessity in memory arts. As Carruthers puts it: “What is unusual is more memorable than what is routine” (6).

Manuscript painters made the margins as unforgettable as possible. In one striking example from the fourteenth centu ry Hours of Saint-Omer a couple appears to be having sex while a bird pokes the man from behind him (7). Even this is a mnemonic. Michael Camille’s explains that the man is diving back into the womb prodded by a bird. The image references Psalm 87:5 in the text below: “This man and that man were born in you. The habitation of all delights is within you” (8). Camille argues that this particular Book of Hours was created for a women named Marguerite and the illuminations were geared specifically at her as a female of childbearing age. This page certainly would have helped her remember Psalm 87:5.

Which leads me wonder: will I ever really known a text as well as Marguerite?

(1) Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990, 2008).
(2) Ibid., 11.
(3) Hugh of St. Victor, De Arca Noe Morali, 1125-1130.
(4) Book of Hours, France, Saint-Omer, between 1320 and 1329, MS M.754 fol. The Morgan Library.
(5) Carruthers, 287.
(6) Ibid., 168.
(7) Book of Hours, France, Saint-Omer, between 1320 and 1329, MS M.754 fol. The Morgan Library.
(8) Michael Camille, Image on the Edge: The Margins of Medieval Art. ( London: Reaktion Books, 1992, 2003), 50.

Caitlin Cass makes comics and art installations about failing systems and irrational hope. She is the creator of Suffrage Song (Fantagraphics, 2024) which was named a Best Art Book of 2024 by Hyperallergic. Caitlin teaches Illustration at the University of Nebraska Omaha and is currently working on a graphic history about the visual culture of disaster.

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TOWARD A TAXONOMY OF USES OF HANDMADE PAPER IN ARTIST BOOKS // Emily Tipps

15 Mar 2025 12:00 AM | Susan Viguers (Administrator)

When I studied poetry in graduate school, I remember learning various ways a line break could function in verse. These ways were enumerated and described technically. A line break could create a pause within a phrase, establish a moment of tension, serve as punctuation, work as a lever tipping one idea into the next, produce a visual effect on the page, etc. While I understand such a breakdown cannot be exhaustive (or account for mystical occurrences in art), I appreciate the analysis for its utility. I could choose my line breaks for reasons beyond intuition or rhyme scheme!

Similarly, I am interested in considering and articulating the ways handmade paper functions in artist books—what it does and how it does it. The rest of this post examines one book held in the Rare Books Collection at the J. Willard Marriott Library for its particular employment of handmade paper—the beginning of a study I hope to continue through observation of examples in the collection.

Steph Rue’s Lectio Divina is comprised of three accordion books, letterpress printed on handmade abaca paper, treated with collage, embroidery, and sumi ink washes, and housed in a sturdy abaca wrapper. The text itself is a “sacred reading from the fourth chapter in the Gospel of Mark” (from the colophon), and concerns a tempestuous crossing in a boat and a questioning of faith. But the real focus of the work is the contemplative, meditative practice of Lectio Divina or “divine reading” itself.

Instead of mitigating or resisting its reactivity to water, Rue embraces handmade paper as a reactive surface. Throughout the book, the abaca waves and cockles in response to changes in moisture. Where collaged text elements are adhered, the substrate paper furls out from beneath them; this creates a relief effect that emphasizes the stability of the text portion on the wavy ground of paper—the prayer as the steadfast throughline of the meditation. The sumi ink too has certainly contributed to the paper’s lively surface. Commercial papermaking often seeks to suppress such effects, including sizing, additives, and finishing processes to ensure a consistent surface. These papers tend to react erratically to moisture, or to lack the strength to withstand it.

The evidence of water’s influence on the paper also points to handmade paper as a reflection of content. “A great windstorm arose, and the waves beat into the boat, so that it was already filling.” The storm at sea is echoed in the captured motion of the water in the paper. The reader may trace her finger over the relatively flat text and the waves of the surrounding ground of sumi-washed paper and read the chop and swell of the storm, bringing her sense of touch into the contemplative process.

The apparent chaos of the waves in Lectio Divina works in part because it is ordered by a skillful hand. The careful creasing and alignment of folds in the accordion reveal an intentional maker. Rue has created the boundaries within which the paper is allowed to expand and contract to such interesting effect. The clean and precise folds also demonstrate handmade paper as durable material, which is on display elsewhere in the book too. The resilient abaca fibers support a running stitch making its way in a straight line across panels and folds of the accordion, the regular rhythm of the thread reiterating the text in a pulse: “be still. be still.”

Rue trusts in this durability for her enclosure as well—a four-flap with a button/string closure and an additional pair of flaps inside that convert the opening process into a content-relevant ritual. When opening the book, it become apparent that this simple paper wrapper will serve to protect the book as it passes through the hands of any number of contemplative reader.

In Lectio Divina, handmade paper has a distinct voice and multi-faceted purpose (conceptual, aesthetic, and practical)—none of which could be achieved so successfully with commercially produced paper. It is an excellent example of handmade paper as reactive surface, reflection of content, and durable material.

Emily Tipps is a Librarian and the Program Manager for the Book Arts Program and the lead binder for the Red Butte Press at the University of Utah’s J. Willard Marriott Library. Emily is also the proprietor of High5 Press. Her work is exhibited and held in collections nationally.

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UNGOVERNABLE BOOKS: IS TANGIBILITY MORE RESISTIVE THAN DIGITALISM?// Sara Luz Jansen

01 Mar 2025 12:00 AM | Susan Viguers (Administrator)

In a moment when many of us in the States are feeling the pull towards political and social activism I’ve been thinking a bit about the role of printed matter. Physical print may be much more resistant to corporate scrutiny than online publishing.

I wonder if physical self-publication, in the form of zines, books, artist books, broadsides, etc., can escape some if not most of the scrutiny of surveillance, shadow banning, AI use, algorithmic assessment and erasure that much of online self-publishing through social media and other platforms must endure and combat. I’m thinking of the recent ban of TikTok, motivated by political aims and corporate pressure that effectively removed a huge number of people’s voices and their web of connections in an instant. The internet is a beautiful beast, a churning of information, reinterpreted information, misinformation and a fascinating forum, but more and more our interest and attention is being harnessed for its buying power. Social media, though in many ways an incredible tool for sharing information, is implicated in the corporate and political interests of the platform’s owners and content is available for their use and data mining.

Physical books are exempt from this particular use and scrutiny. Printed matter finds itself in a resistive position, able to work outside the layers of corporate censorship, tides of popular opinion and law. This of course is not new. Late to the game, the Western world made use of movable type to produce books with the production of the Gutenberg Bible around 1450, and hot on the heels of its publication the process was commercialized around 1470 as the first publishing houses in Europe began popping up. With the commercialization of publication, the ability to self-publish became defined in a new way, as in opposition or alternative to the considerations of business.

The longevity of printed and paper matter over digitally published matter is not certain, but it seems to be more resistant to the whims of a platform. Physical content must be laboriously and physically removed, burned or purged to be eliminated from the corporate or government structure (as is happening in public and school libraries). Though there are many alternatives to posting on major social media platforms with more ethical terms of use or even coding and publishing on your own website, the pamphlet, broadside and zine remain platforms for all voices with a definable impact within a community. There is a long history of self-publication as activism, to avoid editorial procedure, publication rejection or just for fun. The reach of printed matter may be small, but the power of localized voices to build community and efforts to organize offline and under the radar should not be underestimated.

Sara Luz Jensen is an Instructor for the Book Arts Program, University of Utah. Under the small-press imprint Fingertips Press, she produces books and printed matter, many of which are in collaboration with writers and artists. Sara Luz’s work is held in public and private collections and is exhibited nationally.

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VISUALIZING THE CONSPIRACY: HOW COMICS AND ARTIST BOOKS MAKE (AND BREAK) THE TRUTH // Kelly Lindberg

15 Feb 2025 12:00 AM | Susan Viguers (Administrator)

Almost a month into Trump’s second term and almost five years after the pandemic started, I’d like to recommend a comic that I’ve paired with artists’ books that resonate with the current state of the country. We’ve been in a world overwhelmed with misinformation, disinformation, and deepfakes for quite some time now, and it often feels like the world is changing too fast for any of us to keep up. To cope with these current events, I’ve recently read every single issue of the comic The Department of Truth, which I first discovered by attending my local comic shop Bat City Comic Professional’s Fresh Start Book Club, all of which I cannot recommend enough.

Writer James Tynion IV, artist Martin Simmonds, letterer Aditya Bidikar, and designer Dylan Todd are the brilliant team behind the creation of the comic The Department of Truth, whose first issue was released on September 30, 2020. The series is based on the premise of an alternate America, one in which Lee Harvey Oswald is alive and spearheading the government’s “Department of Truth,” an organization designed to push the nation’s agenda by propelling mass belief of “Truths,” and where every conspiracy theory that exists is in fact real. Tynion says that the inspiration for The Department of Truth began with the 2016 presidential election (read what he says in an interview with Polygon).

Pg. 79 of The Department of Truth: The Complete Conspiracy Volume One, Martin Simmonds, Image Comics

Pg. 199 of The Department of Truth: The Complete Conspiracy Volume One, Martin Simmonds, Image Comics

I choose to recommend The Department of Truth to the book arts community because of how much depth and care was put into the creation of this series. In a fantastically enlightening interview with the creators, The Nation points out, “A reader experiencing The Department of Truth for the first time will likely make connections to the collage-heavy art movements of the 19th and 20th centuries, like surrealism or Pop art. The most direct influence seems to be Brought to Light, a ‘graphic docudrama’ anthology by Alan Moore, Bill Sinkiewicz, Joyce Brabner, Tom Yeates, and Paul Mavrides from 1988, whose style was partially influenced by the propaganda comics the CIA once issued in countries like Nicaragua to disrupt leftist movements.” Simmonds tells the interviewer: “My relationship with collage goes back to my love of comic artists Bill Sienkiewicz, Dave McKean, and Jon J Muth, mixed-media artist Robert Rauschenberg, and graphic designer David Carson, among others.”

Excerpt from pg. 195 of The Department of Truth: The Complete Conspiracy Volume One, Martin Simmonds, Image Comics

Pg. 309 of The Department of Truth: The Complete Conspiracy Volume One, Martin Simmonds, Image Comics

While I’m amazed by Simmonds’ artistry throughout the whole series, a favorite of mine is issue #7 of the comic, a flashback story actually illustrated by guest artist Tyler Boss, who tells the story of a young “Doc” Hynes who writes a publication, “Resist the Men in Black!”, which he purposely distributed to government organizations through the mail. This publication is heavily influenced by early science fiction fanzines (the Ringling library collection has an issue of Astounding Science, which is not a fanzine but is a sci-fi magazine from 1938).

Pgs. 172, 174, The Department of Truth: The Complete Conspiracy Volume One, Tyler Boss, Image Comics

I think that fans of the comic will appreciate many artists’ books that also were made in the response to the current political climate, and vice versa. The revolutionary Louise Odes Neaderland was one of the many artists who responded to the Trump era with her art, creating both “Trump Circus” and “Trump Wallpaper Borders” in 2017. Another favorite of mine that we have in the Brizdle-Schoenberg Special Collections Center by Neaderland is the Nuclear Fan.

Photograph of the opened box of Trump Wallpaper Borders

Photograph of the Nuclear Fan, Louise Odes Neaderland, provided by the author

Fred Hagstom’s The Blue and The Red “uses archival photographs from the January 6th attack on the capitol, coupled with comments by the Capitol Police, convicted rioters and politicians who spoke in support of the attack. Much of the text comes from congressional or court testimony, while the quotes from politicians come from media sources" according to the artist himself. As Jane Anne Carlin points out in Artists' books as catalysts for social change, “Approaching conversations about difficult issues using the artists’ book as a jumping off point causes us to slow down, reflect and to think deeply.” This deep thinking also allows for the capability of differentiating fact from fiction, a skill we all need to harness.

Photographs of pages from The Blue and The Red, Fred Hagstom, provided by the author

Photograph of materials in the Brizdle-Schoenberg Special Collections Center at Ringling College of Art + Design

My final selections are Living in Denial, U.S.A. by David Stairs, which gives the author's personal reactions to U.S. economic statistics against a background of Oregon maps. Capitalism’s Collapse by Dale Edwin Wittig, in which Wittig ruminates on a near-apocalyptic vision of a crumbling global capitalism with hand scrawled captions and graphic illustrations, and Whereas... we declare by Tatana Kellner and Ann Kalmbach, which compiles the text from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), proposed to the United Nations by Eleanor Roosevelt in 1948, with drawn images and statistical information about immigration.

Photographs of pages from Living in Denial, U.S.A. by David Stairs, provided by the author

Photograph of pages from Whereas... we declare by Tatana Kellner and Ann Kalmbach, provided by the authors

You can read the first issue of The Department of Truth for free online through Image Comics. For combatting misinformation, I’d also recommend reading How to Win the War On Truth : an illustrated guide to how mistruths are sold, why they stick, and how to reclaim reality by Samuel C. Spitale, illustrated by Allan Whincup.

Works Cited

Carlin, Jane Anne. "Artists' Books as Catalysts for Social Change." Art Libraries Journal 44, no. 1 (01, 2019): 2-8, https://ringlingcollege.idm.oclc.org/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/scholarly-journals/artists-books-as-catalysts-social-change/docview/2173848142/se-2.

Hagstrom, Fred, and publisher Strong Silent Type Press. The Blue and the Red / Fred Hagstrom. Saint Paul, Minnesota: Strong Silent Type Press, 2024.

Keljera, ML. “A Comic That Captures the Antic Energy of a Post-Truth World.” The Nation. March 2023. https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/qa-department-of-truth-comic/.

‌Kellner, Tana, Ann E Kalmbach, and publisher Women’s Studio Workshop. Whereas... We Declare / KaKeArt: Tatana Kellner & Ann Kalmbach. Rosendale, NY: Women’s Studio Workshop, 2018.

Neaderland, Louise Odes. The Nuclear Fan. 3rd ed. Brooklyn, NY: Bone Hollow Arts, 1999.

Neaderland, Louise Odes. Trump Circus. Brooklyn, NY: Louise Neaderland, 2017.

Neaderland, Louise Odes. Trump Wallpaper Borders. Brooklyn, New York: [Louise Odes Neaderland], 2017.

Stairs, David. Living in Denial USA. Mt. Pleasant, Mich., D. Stairs, 2005.

Tynion, James, Martin Simmonds, Aditya Bidikar. The Department of Truth. Portland, OR: Image Comics, 2020-ongoing.
Wittig, Dale. Capitalisms Collapse / Dale Edwin Wittig. San Francisco, California: Red Hammer Press, 2017

Kelly Lindberg is an Instructional Design Librarian at Ringling College of Art + Design, who has always had an interest in zines and comics. She often incorporates her passions into her job of teaching information literacy to students.

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WORKING AT THE BRIZDLE-SCHOENBERG SPECIAL COLLECTIONS CENTER // Olga Nerciu

01 Feb 2025 12:00 AM | Susan Viguers (Administrator)

As I walked down the aisles, enclosed with shelves of meticulously placed books, each enveloped and assigned a long code of letters and numbers, I would scan through them, looking for the right one, the numbers would hint at where to look. “Bingo!” Take it, scan it, register in the system, display on the shelves, scan it again, put it back. This is how my shifts started as a Brizdle-Schoenberg Special Collections Center student worker. It did not take long to learn how wrong I was to reduce our collection’s items to their mere numbers.

I am Olga, motion design sophomore at Ringling College of Art and Design from Moldova. In fall 2024, I started working as a Special Collection student assistant, undertaking a wide range of skills and responsibilities, from organizing and registering books, to creating merchandise and even writing a blog! By my side, I always have Muling Tzai, another student worker from Taiwan, and Cheri Marks, Special Collections Librarian and Archivist (my boss). Our Special Collections Center specializes in rare artists’ books, publication projects, art prints, zines and many more items. We are driven to introduce the general public to both niche and recognized artistic creations via hands-on object based experience. I myself was amazed by the variety of items in our collection: broadsides, campus materials, democratic multiples, documentation of time-based and performance projects, engravings, exhibition publications, experimental writing, fine press books, flip books, handmade editions, historic facsimiles, parlor toys, photographs, pop-up books, prints, rare books, zines, and more.

My favorite part of Brizdle-Schoenberg Special Collections Center is the unique tactile experience we give access to. Anyone coming to our center can literally touch art and connect with the artist on the other side of the page. I believe that utilizing primary sources is a game changer in any scholarly research. Engaging with original physical materials rewards with more insights into a particular subject, compared to internet/digital research. Touching or closely observing an artifact allows researchers to feel a deeper connection to the material. For example, examining an ancient manuscript provides a sense of its age, authenticity, and craftsmanship.

Images by Olga Nerciu, spreads from Giving Fear a Proper Name, Detroit (c. 1984) by Susan Kae Grant, 2025.

My favorite artwork to interact physically with Giving Fear a Proper Name, Detroit by Susan Kae Grant. It follows the artist’s journey as she moved to Detroit, supported by images from her dreams, nightmares and daily experiences, interpreted in a symbolic manner. I was stunned to find strands of the artist’s hair, human teeth, accompanied by pictures of body parts, nails and particles of dirt and sand. The overwhelming experience of the book could never have been felt through digital research. Seeing the book and touching it, even smelling it, submerged me into the artist's world, where I was guided by mysterious pieces of her writing to undergo the same experiences and storylines.

Hence, experiences are made to be shared. Artworks such as Giving Fear a Proper Name, Detroit inspire us to hold exhibitions, led by conceptual themes that unite various art pieces and artists, bringing a holistic experience of an era or movement to our audience. Our visitors are welcome to interact with the items and witness the line blur between a book and a work of art. Our Special Collections Center is open to collaborations and exhibition ideas proposed by faculty and students! I am always curious to observe my colleague Muling creating branding identity for our exhibitions, setting the mood for it. Thanks to her, our visitors always leave with a cute sticker, postcard or brochure to remember the event.

I find myself again, walking down the aisles on my weekly shift, looking straight through envelopes, through long codes of letters and numbers, seeing each book now as a story, a person, an entire universe for me to dive into. This is how my shifts are, as a Brizdle-Schoenberg Special Collections Center student worker.

Olga Nerciu is a Motion Design student at Ringling College of Art + Design and is a Special Collections Assistant at the Brizdle-Schoenberg Special Collections Center in the Alfred R. Goldstein Library at Ringling College. She is from Moldova, and works under the supervision of Cheri Marks, CBAA member and Special Collections Librarian and Archivist.

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PUBLISHING A MANIFESTO / PUBLISHING AS A MANIFESTO, PART 2 // E Tonatiuh, trans. Mónica Mejía

15 Jan 2025 8:17 AM | Susan Viguers (Administrator)

Today we, as publishers, seek to collectivize our findings, link them, knead our techniques and processes so that they overflow, expanding their radius of action through accompaniments, more or less personal and yet alive, real or at least latent. We have the will to dismantle our practices in favor of a strengthening of differences, in search of a thousand different forms of editing; of all possible worlds.

Image by Mónica Mejía, production of La Escuela del Dolor Humano de Sechuán, published by Biblioteca Popular Bruce Lee, Cali-New Orleans 2024.

It is no longer about the word. We do not seek to convince through that firmness because the word fixes the ideas and the gesture leaves them open to interpretation. In any case, neither the author nor the editor ever knows if the reader or spectator read the book they published, so we bet on the infiltration of languages and theories from other disciplines to search for mail-readings or score-texts or the phenomenology of the book as an exhibition space, as a sculptural piece. We turn our face away from the preeminence of the text, the preeminence of the eye, the preeminence of the object, the preeminence of the fetish, the conservation of things, to make way for the free experience of the entire body in obsolescent time and space, because everything, ultimately, is obsolescent. We deeply love the ambiguity of our publishing identity, which rather than fleeing from the commercial-industrial circuit, flees from the processes that wish to fossilize it, from the habits installed in each of the actors in the productive chain of the book, which we now also consider an affective chain. We take the book down from its pedestal and take it to live alongside the map, alongside the instructions, alongside the pamphlet, the graffiti, the poster, the leaflet, the manifesto, the vindication of an attack.

The reality of our projects implies—as has always happened with fragmentary projects—self-management and administration, oftentimes of the precariousness that forces us to do the most we can with the little we have, a precariousness that can be understood as a format, as the structure that involuntarily promotes new editorial shifts, future divergences of our work. In general, we do not “live from” our work, we “live for” our work. And behind this there is a reflection on pleasure without guilt.

Image by Gina Spitiani, La Escuela del Dolor Humano de Sechuán workshop. Collaboration between Casa Omedeto and Biblioteca Popular Bruce Lee. Armenia, Colombia 2023.

We question our ways and those of others in our intimacy because we understood that our editorial projects are also bodies; we share tools, machines, time, drink and food because we are not just concepts. We do not speak through a coherently constructed editorial catalogue, we speak through every corner of our practice because our practice is our weapon and no practice is more or better than another in any case. We do not want to accumulate publications, we throw ourselves into the discovery of other editorial and publishing practices because editing a process as hard, as linear and hierarchical as the industrial editorial process is an example that everything, in reality, is prone to editing. And this is a major policy.

We do not understand radicality as the sharp end of our practices, but as a mobile and permeable border that adjusts each time we advance in the decomposition of our models. In this way, we all have different thresholds of radicality, thresholds that at some point will have to negotiate with other ways of understanding editorial practice and the world in general. We resist, we resist to cease to resist.

Finally, and perhaps in a more indolent way, we no longer even think in terms of books and publications. The game is no longer, and perhaps never was, about publishers, authors, content or readings; alongside this classic model of publishing there is now a broken shell from which laboratories, collectives, editorial workshops have been born, interventions, actions and gestures that are molecularly editorial and publicational, but which are the children of the plasticity of each mind and each practice involved in the projection, development, production, circulation and conservation of publications. At all these points there is a possibility of political expression. Publishing a manifesto is not the same as publishing as a manifesto. Our weapon is our practice.

This essay was published in Spanish by Casa del Tiempo, number 5 October-November 2022. Cultural magazine of Universidad Autonoma Metropolitana, Mexico.

E Tonatiuh Trejo. Graphic communicator from the Faculty of Art and Design at Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. He is founder, editor and designer of the Editorial Laboratory Esto Es Un Libro. He has collaborated in magazines such as Perros del alba, RegistroMX, CinePremier and Revista404. He was editor of the magazine Sensacional de Cineastas and founding partner of the Refud bookstore. www.estoesunlibro.com

Mónica Mejía, from Cali – Colombia, has been collaborating with the artisanal publishing collective Biblioteca Popular Bruce Lee since 2015. She works at Antenna, a literary and visual arts organization in New Orleans, coordinating Antenna Press, and Paper Machine, Antenna’s print shop, book bindery and community space.

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