I caught the last day of the Rosemarie Trockel show at the New Museum last Sunday; not only was there a surprise collection of artist books on the fourth floor, there was also a natural history-ish installation on the second floor, which included other things made by other people that Trockel liked. Which is how I accidentally saw the above, one of the etchings made by Robert Havell for James Audubon’s Birds of America. A nice coincidence, considering I had just finished the great biography of Audubon by Richard Rhodes. Things that I’ve learned from this include:

Fights conducted by letter take a long time. Audubon started off life as a businessman, then failed, which prompted him to take off across the newly-acquired American wilderness, without his family, shooting, collecting, and drawing birds in order to produce his masterwork. Then he went off to England for several years, to find a publisher, produce the edition and to raise subscriptions for the project. His wife Lucy was amazingly supportive in the face of all of this, but inevitably the distance between them took a toll. Letters between the two could take several months to arrive, if they arrived at all and didn’t get lost along the way. Going back and forth about when and where they would live together again took years, and misunderstandings multiplied over time. If you think that email arguments are crap, just think about that.

Genius bird enthusiasts travel in style. When Audubon sailed from England to New York in 1836, he brought with him “a menagerie of 260 live birds, three pointers, and a ‘brace of tailess Manx cats’.” Only 15 birds survived the crossing, but ‘the cats are well.’

The big money has never been in bookmaking. Only about 160-170 subscribers stuck with the original project until the end, which meant that despite all his hard work, when the original edition was completed, Audubon was only slightly ahead, and still owed the printer Havell for the last 15 sets. Rhodes estimates the cost of the edition at upwards of $2 million in today’s dollars. This was all money raised by Audubon himself through subscriptions and sales he solicited himself; he received no grants or gifts.

If you have any interest in birds or natural history or American history, it’s a great book.

This year I’ll be working on a new book project: a field guide to extinct birds. There, I’ve said it, now it has to happen. At this point I’m thinking about producing it in three versions: a deluxe letterpress edition in a box with accompanying prints; a digitally-printed version with a letterpress wrapper; and an animation that you can watch for free-which will actually be different content, but complimentary, talking about migration.

I’m interested in the field guide since it’s one of those kinds of books that probably aren’t going to continue to exist in paper form for much longer-digital apps just seem like they will do the job of helping you identify a birds much quicker and easier that a field guide can, what with video and sound and all. But whenever I see birders in Prospect Park, they’re still carrying their dog-eared paper books with them. I have a feeling that the average birder is pretty attached to whichever field guide they began birding with. And the ways that people have come up with to classify and represent birds in two-dimensional form so that an amateur can identify them is interesting, and the ways that has evolved over the years is interesting, and amateur scientists are always interesting, and so on…

To start off, I’ve been collecting field guides of my own, and drawing up a reading list on the history of birding in America. Here’s some of the guides I’ve been accumulating:

And here’s what is going to be an invaluable help, Extinct Birds, by Errol Fuller, who has apparently written the definitive book on the subject, covering more than eighty species that have disappeared since 1600. He’s also written a book called Dodo, and one on the Great Auk. Apparently the Great Auk book is partly about the bird itself, and partly about all of the stuffed auks in collections around the world, all of the egg specimens, and the collectors who have collected these items. I’m super excited to get my hands on that one.

I’m still not totally sure where I’m going with it at this point, but there will be birds, there will be some history of birding, and some discussion of the process of extinction. Good start, no? Aside from Errol Fuller, I’ve been reading up on John James Audubon. Here’s a great biography, if you’re interested.

This past weekend was the NY Art Book Fair, which means I got to table-sit amongst the finest in artist publications, and their legions of fans. Look at all of these people who came  to Queens just to look at paper books with pages and obscure content in person!

It makes me think there’s still hope. And this was on the less crowded third floor. Below us was a hot sweaty madhouse. Is there a portal to hell in PS1? Because it’s always so damn hot at the book fair.

I promoted the Center and its programs and sold some pamphlets, and talked to nice people that I like. I bought this, my one and only purchase, which I love:

From Lubok Verlag, whose books I always love and have been coveting for the past two fairs.  From their website:

Since 2007 a series of original graphic linocut books is published by Lubok Verlag. For each volume publisher and artist Christoph Ruckhäberle invites about 10 contemporary artists to realize their own artistic signature in linocuts. The artists happily accept the challenge and often use the Lubok series as an experimental field. The results are correspondingly manifold….Lubok books thereby continue a russian tradition of the same named popular broad sheets: inexpensive originally printed graphics that were sold on funfairs well into the 19th century. Like then art should become available for broad sections of the population, should become democratized without losing the pleasure of an original, its colours, its haptics and its smell.

My book, by the way, smells wonderful. Look at the beautiful press they print on!

I love everything about this. I should start sending them pamphlets. This is what the insides look like:

The names of the artists are printed on the fore edge in red:

Wonderful.

The artist residency programs that I run at the Center for Book Arts need support! We’ve been running an online campaign this summer to help raise funds to allow artists come to the Center for a year and take classes and hone a craft and use the studios to make new work. As of this morning we met our goal! (That means we actually get the money.)

Huzzah! I’m off to celebrate with some pie, but you can still give to the campaign until 7pm tonight. Here’s the link:

http://wedid.it/campaigns/25-help-fund-our-art-residencies

And here’s the video we made to promote the program:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=QQDfejBYuN4]

I’m working on a field guide. Field Guide to What? Still remains to be seen. So far I have a structure that I might like, and some images that I do like, but may not work, and some bits of text, and an idea of what to do with them. And I’m not sure how each of the parts relate to each other.

I also have the above flock of birds, they’re quite nice so far.

After finishing this I had hundreds of prints left over, and wasn’t sure what to do with them. I played around with them for awhile before decided I would make three different boxed sets of the entire text, which would be loose sheets, so they could be read or displayed in any order, and then a few different books which would reorder different sections of the text. I was excited to see all of the prints out on the table and they’re lovely to play with.

I liked being able to reconfigure the text and see it in different ways.  It took about two weeks to put them all together; there’s a video here of the binding process:

[vimeo http://vimeo.com/35671324]

The commitment to make an immutable, finite set of bound pages can lodge a protest against the tyranny of time, and its mechanistic sidekick, timeliness. To make books by hand is to opt for slowness, rumination, patience, commitment to ideals, and for length. Good relationships are also made slowly.

Harry Reese and Sandra Liddell Reese

Turkey Press website.

I almost bought this today, in honor of my brother, who Must Rise Above It, unfortunately. It’s one of Penguin’s Great Ideas series, which all have these fake letterpress covers, which I’m a little mystified by. You can read the essay that gives this book its name here. It’s a fun rant.

My favorite book in the current exhibit at my place of employment is this one:

by Christien Meindertsma, which indexes the myriad of products and processes a single pig can be used for- products ranging from ammunition, paint, glue, heart valves, brakes, chewing gum, to porcelain, cosmetics, and conditioner. There’s a great graphic in the beginning which diagrams the part of the pig each product comes from, and the book as a whole is organized around the various parts-bone, blood, meat, etc, with some satisfying die-cuts to mark each section. I love that it is about the uses of a specific pig, and not just pigs in general, and that the introduction talks about the traditional food uses of every part of the pig in Sicilian cooking, and how the global industrial approach to a pig takes that to an extreme you could never have imagined. But mostly I just love the replica of the ear tag on the spine that identified Christien’s particular pig.

You can see more of her work, and more images of the book here.

I went here last week:

Where it was sunny and warm, and there was neither ice nor snow. For the Codex Bookfair and Symposium, a biennial event in Berkeley, CA, featuring the finest in publication materials. I was mostly bowled over by the fact I didn’t have to wear a coat, and I could run without a hat. I saw many beautiful books and talked to many lovely people but, as I tend to do, took no documenting photographs of the experience, except for this one of the trees. What kind of trees are they? Anyone know?

I made progress before I left on this:

Which is going well, and I now have all of the text set, except for some bits I think I’ll re-set. There are parts that look fine in print, but the breaks don’t make sense in animated form. Or the font is wrong, or that e is upside down and I didn’t catch it until it was too late. There’s a few more blocks I want to carve, and a few more colors I want to try. But most of it is in good shape at this point.

I am worried about the pacing/readability issue, but I’ve found a very honest person who I’m sure will give me very honest feedback as far as that goes. The problem is, I read very quickly, and I also already know what the text says, so when I’m scanning these images in and arrange them in a sequence I think the pacing is a bit too quick in many cases for someone Other Than Myself to get it all.

After seeing much work at Codex I thought more about having a boxed edition of prints, a small edition, with a copy of the animation inside, so you can read it either way, digitally or physically. I also think now that certain parts of the text would make nice poster-size editions, and that this block should be used in some other form.

I also have finally started setting up a shop, which you can see here, so as to make available all past printed projects for sale at reasonable prices. I am generally much better at making work than at selling work, or selling my work, though otherwise perfectly capable of running other people’s businesses. I think I should maybe work on that, in the interest of income diversification.

Here’s my somewhat haphazard report from the NY Art Book Fair, which took place last weekend at PS1:

1. Opening was hot. Why is it always hot? Every year, never fails, it’s just too hot.

2. The Center’s table was in a nice quiet corner, which might be something you don’t really want to be in at a fair, but for me it was better than being in the crowded crowded hallway right next to us. Panic attack level of crowded. Teeming hordes of people came to the fair, I think more than last year, and last year was big too. And even in the quiet corner the teeming hordes came to visit. I didn’t see quite as much as I had planned on, partly because the teeming crowds of people kind of got in the way of the books, and partly because every time I left the table I spent money. But much of what I saw I liked, and many people I liked came and saw and talked, and all in all I had a grand time.

This is Jen, who helped out. Thanks Jen! She’s holding a copy of the IFS, Ltd. Book Trust Prospectus, which we traded an exhibition catalog for. IFS were the best dressed of the barter-for-book-project exhibitors.

Here is a link to Susan Mills’s books, which were lovely and smart and humble all at the same time. Interior Sky is my favorite.

She was next to Women’s Studio Workshop, who had a copy of Heidi Neilson’s new book Orbital Debris Simulator. In 3-D!

Lubok Verlag: German publisher selling GREAT lino cut books; I really liked the serials they had of collected artists.

This is a book by Elisabeth Belliveau, don’t get lonely, don’t get lost, it’s surreal and feminine and funny. There’s a whole bit about famous dead women writers and their dogs. It comes with an animation, which I love!

This is a book which I looked at while the table-sitter was not there, and liked. Then I came back to buy it when the table sitter was there, and he was really annoying, so I had second thoughts, and didn’t like it as much. Then I came back again, and the annoying table sitter was quiet this time, so I liked it again. It has interesting staples and multicolored handwritten tangles of text and a theory of everything.
Otherwise, I spent too much money and made some progress on a scarf. I hands down had the best time at the event than I have in past years.  It seemed like a greater range of vendors, and different kinds of vendors mixed together, which I think worked well. There’s a more official review of the event in the New Yorker here, if you’re interested.

I do think that it’s unfortunate that it was the same weekend as every other print event in NYC, the Editions/Artist Book  Fair in Chelsea, as well as the biennial Book Arts Fair and Conference at Pyramid Atlantic down in Maryland. There’s plenty of other weekends that all of these things could have happened, and it overwhelms the capacity of organizations and other people involved in the field.

Center for Book Arts has a table at the biggest book fair I’ve been to, all weekend long at PS1. I’ll be present on Sunday, smiling at strangers and working on that new scarf.  I’ll make an effort to take some photos this time around to share with the internet.

If you visit the fair, bring snacks and water, take as many breaks as you need, maybe stretch before. There’s a lotta books to see.