4o. Festival Internacional de Libros

Me alegra saber que el festival fue todo un éxito y que mis libros de artista Home Sweet Home, Foreclosure, y Pagoda fueron mostrados en la librería Central del Raval en Barcelona.




Este es un enlace al blog que Julia Pelletier, directora del festival, mantiene del festival y de sus libros.

Book and Paper Artists in San Juan, PR

What a great surprise to see bookmakers exhibiting their work at the Morro Castle during an arts and crafts show on July 12, 2009.

Here is a picture of El Morro's fortified walls:

Gilberto and his girlfriend:

and Katherine with me:

Proposal for a Book Arts Center

I've been in conversations with some Prairie Book Collaborative (PBC) members and Drake University faculty about the creation of a book arts center in Des Moines. Yesterday, I met briefly with Joe Lenz, Dean of Arts and Sciences at Drake, and asked about the possibilities to have Drake sponsor the center. He is receptive and gave me some suggestions. The key issue to stress is that the center would help Drake advance its mission of involvement and service to the community.

We basically need to write a proposal to the Drake Center for the Humanities, get approval and funding for our plan, pilot and evaluate the plan, and if successful, search for external funding. I propose we start next academic year (2009-2010) with a series of workshops lead by PCB members and Drake faculty.

I am willing to draft a proposal for a pilot that includes workshops in binding, writing, printmaking, papermaking, etc. I wonder if there are any takers.

Please write a comment and let me know what you think.

Center for Book Arts Report

View more presentations from Eduardo García Villada.

Book Arts Dialogues 2008

Book Arts: Dialogues and Languages
August 25- September 28, 2008

The purpose of "Book Arts: Dialogues and Languages" is to familiarize Drake University students with the collaborative process among writers, printmakers, and bookbinders that takes place in the production of fine print books. For this reason, a cycle of short lectures was planned for the month of September, 2008, and it included a workshop and demonstrations on the topic of printing, bookmaking, and writing, giving special attention to works written in languages with non-Latin alphabets. Here is a video archive of the events:

Peggy Johnston - Book binding




Rick Von Holdt - Fine printmaking




Miwa Okamoto - Japanese Callygraphy




Qi Shi - Chinese Callygraphy

Neighborhood Book - An experiment

This Winter 2009, I decided to experiment with the development of a short workshop to teach a concertina (or leporello) book structure. The inspiration comes from the work of Kate Farley in her "Two Sides of the Same Street" book.

I invited three students to help me "de-bug" the instructions for making a book using the interlocked concertina structure. We meet for two hours on a Saturday morning, and students created their first "Neighborhood Book" sample. At the end of the morning, we also did a swap of decorative papers.

We all worked on a "Neighborhood Book" idea and made an edition of two, and a month later we met to swap one of the books. We all kept one copy of our own original book, and collected a copy of a classmate's book.

Here we are (in order of appearance) describing our "Neighborhood Books":

Deb Anders




Chris Kading




Eduardo García




Mindy McCoy