Deconstructing that artichoke and other bookmaking tales

If you only knew...

Someone (you know who you are!) recently sent me an article from the New York Times, How To Publish Without Perishing, and I only wish the author, James Gleick, knew about artists books. He talks about books as physical objects. And that's as far as he goes. He's so right, books are physical objects, but they are not just containers for information, which is what he meant. A book can be so much more: the materials, the design, the structure, the imagery. All these elements can be combined in an infinite number of ways to express an infinite number of ideas. He even talks about the smell of the paper and the crack of the spine, but he doesn't see the book as a potential for a work of art, beyond the literary work that is.

And then he talks about the codex. It's true the codex was a brilliant invention, but what about all the other forms. Particularly, the Japanese invention of the side bound book. It's really just as good as the codex. Especially since Japanese paper can be so thin. Accordions and scrolls are useful too when thought of in relation to art, but not so much a huge literary tome.

He ends the article describing a book as "a thing of beauty. Make it as well as you can. People want to cherish it." That I agree with, but if only he knew...

Brand spankin' new type!

I've been working on a Tarot card project with my friend Judith for the last half year or so. She wrote enough short prose poems to fill a deck and I carved six linoleum blocks--one for each suite in the minor arcana, one for the major arcana, and one for miscellaneous items such as title page and colophon. I'm using Centaur 14 pt., which is the only type I own (yep, for those of you who are thinking, is she hand setting all that type? I sure am!), but for the Queen, King, Prince, and Princess cards, I wanted to use 14 pt. Arrighi for the italic titles. I was going to just borrow the letters I needed from the SF Center for the Book, but, well, their 14 pt. Arrighi has had a lot of use, and my Centaur 14 pt. has not, and being the perfectionist that I am, I decided I needed to buy new type from M & H Type. Luckily, M & H is only a short drive away for me, so I could just swing by after work and buy one set of uppercase and one set of lowercase (I also bought some more spacing, but that's far less sexy.).

Some of you might be wondering why I didn't just get the Centaur italic. Well, for those of you into obscure type knowledge, Centaur was designed without an italic, so Arrighi is the traditional pairing for the italic. Maybe someone reading the blog knows why, because I can't remember. I know on the computer you can assign Centaur italic to your text, but not so, in lead type. I was explaining all of this to my friend Danielle last night, and even though she is not a book artist or even a graphic designer, she didn't fall asleep and actually appeared interested. She said she was going to find a computer with Centaur and apply the italic.