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

Wareable books

This month I have been working on a series of miniature books mounted as jewelry pieces. I will be showing them at a local community art gallery. I made them using instructions from a How-To Wiki I found in iGoogle. I used several materials for the text blocks and book covers, that include German text and hand-made paste paper. There is no theme for the series, except that they are wearable books "Sin son ni ton".