New York: Béatrice Coron, 2016. Number 3 of 5 copies. In this fun production, book artist Béatrice Coron collaborated with musicians Van Gage and Cortez to create both a book and a CD of their music! In addition to her paper cutting of musicians playing instruments, singing, and dancing Coron also wrote the song's lyrics, which are handwritten on one side of the black Arches paper silhouettes. This book was based on Coron's design for a public art installation in Kiest Park, Dallas, to honor the Vaughan brothers. Unfortunately, the installation was never built; however, elements from the design are incorporated into this book including silhouettes of Texan blues musicians. The paper silhouettes and the CD are housed in a black folder with a blue title label to spine and front cover. In fine condition. Folder is 6.5 x 6.5 inches. The paper-cut measures 6 x 24 inches when opened. Coron describes her book work: "For the last 20 years, I have been exploring visual storytelling in artist books, paper cutting and public art. Collecting memories from individuals and communities, I stage narrative allegories in silhouette to create a dialogue with the viewer in playful fantasies. These visual chronicles record archetypal stories that transcend time and space. I have been fascinated by the relation of people to their space and the sense of belonging. Using papercutting where everything is cut from a single piece of Tyvek, the profusion of individual stories makes a coherent whole world." [From her website]. Cristina Favretto, Head of Special Collections at the University of Miami describes Coron's "work in her artfragments" portfolio: "There is a palpable joy in the work of Béatrice Coron, the kind of joy we felt as children in unwrapping a particularly enticing holiday gift. But...for Béatrice the gift is a sheet of Tyvek...or paper, and the stories to be unearthed and unleashed within and through the medium." ARTB/081921. Fine. More

San Diego: Anne Covell, 2019. Number 12 of 18 copies signed and numbered by the artist. Anne Covell is a book artist and hand papermaker living in San Diego, CA. She has studied Asian and Western papermaking techniques with Timothy Barrett, and has taught for numerous professional organizations including the Morgan Art of Papermaking Conservatory, Penland School of Crafts, and the University of Georgia study abroad program in Cortona, Italy, among others. Her work has been exhibited internationally and can be seen in a growing list of private collections, special collections libraries, and museums worldwide. Anne writes: "History of a Felling was first conceived during the winter of 2014 while at the Penland School of Crafts on a winter residency in letterpress. The images were made on-site from polymer plates created from film ink hand-painted on Yupo paper. The project was filed away while the concept evolved into a body of work that would become Covell’s graduate thesis, “Towards a Just Landscape,” in 2015. In the intervening years, the US/Mexico border would draw global attention for the deeply contentious debate over the compulsion to secure the southern border though the construction of a border wall. It seemed a particularly poignant time, by comparison, to revisit the history of the US/Canada border felling, and so the project came out of storage. In many ways the southern and northern US border conflicts remain as isolated as their geographical latitudes; however, their ethical and environmental costs deserve equal scrutiny. Over 150 years later, the deforestation continues. Nature inevitably begins to rebound - trees, shrubs, and grasses grow - and every six years the swath is cleared through exhaustive manual labor." Anne has created a lovely tunnel book that opens to reveal a multi-layered forest of delicate trees printed in light brown on a cream background of Sakamoto paper. The images were printed from photopolymer plates made from original drawings by the artist. Housed in a brown cloth portfolio with a discussion and description of this book. In fine condition. 5.75 x 4.75 x .5 inches (closed) 5.75 x 4.75 x 18 inches (open). ARTISTSB/012121. More

Gainesville, FL: Crooked Letter Press, 2014-2015. Hardcover. Number 35 of 50 copies signed and numbered by the book artist. Crooked Letter Press is the imprint of book artist and graphic designer, Ellen Knudson. Ellen is currently Associate in Book Arts at The University of Florida. She holds an MFA in Book Arts from The University of Alabama. Ellen has been a book artist for 17 years and a professional graphic designer for 20+ years . She has taught letterpress printing and Book Arts at The University of Florida, The University of Alabama, and graphic design at Mississippi State University and Wayne State University. Her work is in the collections of San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Yale University, The Library of Congress, and many other national and international collections. Ellen Knudson describes her perceptive and imaginative book as composed of mysterious structures, imagined genomes, and fictitious chemistry - that are "ALL TRUE." She explains that Made Up is a non-scientific science book about the imaginary cellular composition of the human body. The artist, who wrote, designed, and letterpress printed this work has identified both positive and negative human attributes such as anger, curiosity, fear, joy, knowledge, and trust among others. She has then created colorful replicas of the cells that host these attributes to show their composition and their effects on the host body. There is also an often witty description of each type of cell, its qualities, and its effect on other cells. Bound in brown paper covered boards with a cell-like design and a tan linen spine. Titling in gilt to spine. Bright yellow endpapers. The book is printed on Mohawk Superfine 100# text weight paper. The typefaces used are Spectrum and Franklin Gothic Condensed printed from photopolymer plates. The cell images are multi-block and reduction linoleum prints. The structure is a drum-leaf binding. It is housed in a brown cloth clamshell box with an opening cut into the front cover that reveals part of a cell's image. In fine condition. Measures 6 x 12 inches. Unpaginated. PRI/030923. Fine. More

Kingston, NY: Maureen Cummins, 2022. 1 of 30 copies. A delightful play upon the traditional catalogue raisonné, this book makes visual reference to scrapbooks, archives, and exhibitions. The text, which culminates in a list of works printed from 1985 to 2021, is comprised of one-page vignettes that speak to a variety of subjects: growing up with books, the artist's early art training and interest in book illustration, apprenticeships and early projects, the influence of travel, research, and history in her practice, and a variety of topics which illuminate - for students, researchers, and collectors alike - the nature and scope of an artist’s life. The text of Retrospective is juxtaposed against a variety of images: actual and reproduced bookpages; a diary page from age 18 describing Cummins's desire to be a book illustrator; documentation of early art projects, edited-out images from editions; and photographs of seminal places in her career, including the Yolla Bolly Press, where she apprenticed; her first printshop, in Brooklyn; the American Antiquarian Society, where she was an artist-in-residence, and Kinngait Studios, a printshop in the Eastern Arctic that she made a pilgrimage to. The structure of the book is staggered pages which fan out like a card deck, allowing the reader to see a slice of each image simultaneously. This presentation creates a blur of color and pattern that invites the reader to explore. Housed in a wooden box that was specially designed and crafted by Jim Lee. The box contains a side piece which lifts up for easy access to and handling of the book. The cover of the box, constructed out of plexiglass and laser-etched by Sarah Pike, allows the book to be displayed even when it is safely stored. Size: 8.5 x 32 inches. 66 pages. More

Maureen Cummins, 2018. Number 17 of 35 copies signed and numbered by the book artist, Maureen Cummins. Secretary deconstructs the life and death-by-suicide of the artist's mother, Dolores Cummins, a brilliant woman, aspiring artist, and housewife for twenty-five years. It is this story that inspired Cummins's later book Crazy Quilt, as well as all the subsequent work that she created around marginalized populations. This book is the first of several around this common theme that Maureen has become well-known for. Secretary is made even more powerful by the structure and composition. It was letterpress printed on sheets of Asian lined paper resembling a steno pad, with titling redacted by hand in graphite. The type used appears to have been typed on an old typewriter. Each section of the book is preceded by a ghostly photographic image of Cummins's mother from that period of her life, reprinted from originals in the artist's possession. The text pages are bound in the style of a stenographer's notepad. It is housed in a stiff grey paper folder. Maureen Cummins is a noted creator of artists' books. Her work is held in over one hundred permanent public collections internationally and has been included in exhibitions at the American Craft Museum, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, and the Rotunda Gallery (amongst others). She has received over a dozen grants and awards and has been an artist-in-residence at numerous venues, including the American Antiquarian Society and the Irish Museum of Modern Art. In fine condition. Measures 8.75 x 14.5 inches. ARTB/100119. More

San Francisco: Deeply Game Publications, 2019. Number 28 of 40 copies signed by the poet and book artist. Sara Press is a photographer, printmaker and book artist based in the San Francisco Bay Area who distributes her works and those of others through Deeply Game Publications. Many of her projects examine peculiar areas of overlap between nature and culture as well as the relationship between creativity and the scientific method. Her work can be found at the Library of Congress,the National Museum of Women in the Arts, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, and many university special collections. At the core of this beautiful and thought provoking book "are two photographic series, interwoven. On the white pages, images of modern childhood in all its fragility, awkwardness, & ambiguity conjure loveliness with all its potential for heartbreak. Layered with these are cameraless images of light itself, which has crept through a stack of sensitized paper. Transcending scale, they might be wildfires, supernovae, or solar flares. Dispassionate foils to our human conceits, the timeless principals of physics contrast with the flickers of human joy and sorrow. Nevertheless, the human scale holds its own in this balance: what we stand to lose is still important, even if only to us....The photographs comprise an inner book, wrapped in a soft cover that can be peeled away to reveal the spine’s stitching (the book’s own vulnerability). Encasing this is a folio featuring Nick Flynn’s poem, “Cartoon Physics, Part 1”, a bittersweet meditation on childhood and scale, obliviousness and oblivion. Cartoon Physics was conceived in the wake of the 2016 election, and created after a subsequent wildfire destroyed thousands of homes in my community." [artist's statement]. The text is letterpress printed on Mohawk Superfine paper. Measures 6.25 x 8 inches. Unpaginated. [48 pages] PRI/112921. More

Sebastopol, CA: Deeply Game Publications, 2022. Hardcover. 1 of 20 copies. Sara Press says of her book: "What if there was a standard-issue handbook that resolved grief, discord, paradox and ancestral trauma? As young artists, we dreamed of a world where there were no rules, but in this time of internal & external chaos, we wish there were more definitive answers. During a particularly difficult year, we traded sketchbooks back and forth, completing each other’s empty hands with objects that communicated our struggles and sought solutions. We know nothing is simple, but we indulged ourselves with the fantasy that things could be. We knew our drawings, born from questions, would contain all the answers if seen in the right combinations. So we indexed them with the moral authority of any other handbook grasping at truths, and solved all the world’s problems." Sara and Tiana's book addresses such problems as dealing with intolerable grief, dismantling capitalism, how to raise a child, and when to shut up, among many other topics. Each problem refers to one or more drawings of hands. The book is accompanied by a life-sized gypsum cement hand that cradles it for display in different ways. Book is bound in grey cloth with titling in black to cover. Minor rubbing to back cover otherwise fine. The text is letterpress printed and the water color pencil drawings of hands are digitally printed with Indigo Electroink on Mohawk Superfine paper. Housed in a brown cardboard box with the title inserted into a metal slot on the front. An inventive work in fine condition. Measures 5 x 7 inches. 84 pages. ARTISTSB/060222. Fine. More

Sebastopol, CA: Deeply Game Publications, 2020. Hardcover. Number 16 of 20 copies. Signed by the book artist. From the preface: In the 19th and early 20th centuries a great many people were fooled into believing that "spirit photographers" were able to pierce death's veil to document the ghosts of lost loved ones. "These photographers, also known as mediums, used double exposures and other tricks to manufacture the supernatural encounters. Their popularity attests to the power of love and loss in people's lives then and now. The hauntings were real, even if the ghosts were not. We are haunted still, and not just by love and loss. This book makes visible some of what bedevils us - psychological demons; social & factual distortions; the force & folly of the culture around us." For this compelling book, the artist produced plates using paint, camera, and ink to create specters - haunting figures - immaterial subjects that comprise both fact and fiction, encompassing both the rational and absurd. The apparent spectral images in the plates are able to be identified using a fold-out guide that provides keys to the bedevilments that haunt each image. Key words (or "bedevilments") include: fake news, extinction, lonliness, police murder, rage, social distance, xenophobia, climate change, demise of democracy, etc.). The relevant key abbreviations are printed on the white page across from each of the images. The painted images in the plates were based on spirit photographs by Ada Deane, William Hope, Edward Wyllie, and others. Bound in dark blue cloth with silver titling to front cover. Letterpress printed using News Gothic and Century Schoolbook fonts designed by Morris Fuller Benton. In fine condition. Measures 8 x 11 inches. [38 pages] ARTISTSB/040623. Fine. More

San Jose, CA: Prose and Letters Press, 2004. Hardcover. Number 24 of 50 copies. Signed and numbered by the artist. This printed book is based on a unique hand painted book by the artist. Bound accordion style in Lokta paper covered boards with hand painted gold accents and leather and bead closure. The inspiration for this book was the Lithuanian-American archaeologist, Marija Gimbutas (1921 - 1994), known for her research on the Neolithic and Bronze age cultures of Europe. Gimbutas theorized that the first writing predated Sumerian businessmen by a few thousand years, and instead grew out of symbolic marks on ritual objects made to venerate the Great Goddess in Old Europe. Artist, Cari Ferraro, was heavily influenced by this theory and created an alphabet style based on Marija's catalog of marks which she has used in this book. The background painting on all of the pages uses symbols found in the 5000-year passage grave Newgrange in Ireland, whose meaning has never been fully understood. The design is intended to feel like a cave wall with ancient symbols and writing. The text reads "The first writing/ not merely scribble/ devised by accountants to track livestock or record property/ the first writing/ made to track the moon/ inscribe spirit/ praise for the great mother." An attractive book. [10 pages] ARTB/042108. Fine. More

Freeville, NY: Carol Schwartzott, 2007. Hard Cover. 5 of 25 copies signed and numbered by the book artist. This is a particularly beautiful version of the famous Rubaiyat. In her artist's statement Schwartzott writes that as a collector of Rubaiyats she began to toy with creating her own version in 2006. "The book is divided into seven segments, each separated by a divider of hand-marbled Japanese paper. The first contains the title page and introduction and the last an artist's statement, bibliography and colophon. The remaining five are dedicated to the seventy-five quatrains of FitzGerald's first edition. Each contains a vellum window, reminiscent of a Persian archway that opens to reveal my version of a miniature painting." Bound in light blue Japanese cloth with an intricate wood cut out to front board. The pristine interior was laser printed with archival ink onto Mohawk Via vellum and Moab Entrada paper. The prints were then finished with color pencil, paint, gold and silver leaf. Housed in clamshell box covered in the same cloth as the book. In fine condition. Unpaginated. ARTB/122122. Fine. More

Mexico: Michoacan University of Saint Nicholas of Hidalgo, 2020. Hardcover. Second edition. Number 20 of 20 deluxe copies, issued in a special box with additional items including a ceramic mask of a stag and booklet (Antología del Proyecto) about the participants and the production of this elaborate collaboration. The text of Chamuco is printed in English, Spanish, and P'urhepecha. It includes 10 linocuts and 10 poems printed in three languages. Portrayals of the devil range from members of ICE to sex workers to millionaires. This project happend in two stages as part of a university collective project between young artists, poets, and craftspeople at the Universidad Michoacana de San Nicolás in Mexico and students at Stanford University in the USA over several years. This book was produced during the second stage and showcases poetry and linocuts from only participants in Mexico. "The characters from the book Chamuco, visually inspired by the polychromatic pottery of the artisans of the Ocumicho community in Michoacán, México, were engraved by 10 artists from the Michoacan University of Saint Nicholas of Hidalgo; these are accompanied in this book by the verses expressly written for this project by six poets from the same university" (page 3). The project was coordinated by master print-maker and art professor, Ioulia Akhmadeeva. Chamuco is bound in black cloth covered boards with silkscreened illustration and paper title label to front cover. It is letterpress printed with linocut illustrations on De Ponte Tamayo 300 gm paper. In this deluxe edition, "Chamuco" is accompanied with a small red paperback booklet titled: "Chamuco. El Diablo anda suelto ... Antología del Proyecto" that is limited to 500 unnumbered copies. It includes biographies of each participant, color photographs of ceramic depictions of the devil that inspired the students to create their art and poetry for this book, reproductions of the poems in all three languages, and more. The text in this booklet is in English and Spanish, with exception of the poems, which are reproduced in P'urhepecha as well. Chamuco is 24 pages; Size: about 10 x 9 inches. Booklet: 129 pages; Size: about 7 x 6 inches. Ceramic sculpture size: about 4 x 4 x 3 inches. ARTB/030923. Fine. More

Moscow: Emil Goozairow, 2022. Number 1 of 6 copies (in this binding), signed and numbered by the artist. A fascinating offering from book artist Emil Goozairow. Goozairow is a Russian artist who paints and draws, produces movies, and creates exceptional handmade books that are printed on rare types of paper and published in limited editions. His techniques create unique designs that often are made with natural materials alone or in combination with relief decorations made from metal or polymeric clay. He creates books that he describes as "pop up," “kinetic carousel," “liporello” or “3D origami.” He also writes fairy tales, stories and mystical scenes. In this complex book the artist has drawn and illustrated the letters of the English alphabet from A to Z. Each letter was originally done in watercolor and ink. There are puzzles and drawings, and illustrations for each letter of the alphabet associated with a theme of the ABCs. The book has a special hexagonal folding design that Goozairow calls a "Bee Book." The binding is 3-D printed in the shape of a tower. It has been handpainted in red, green, and gold. The book is held closed with red braided cord strap. In fine condition. Measures about 2 inches across and stands about 4 inches tall. ARTB/052323. Fine. More

Moscow: Emil Goozairow, (2020). Hardcover. A miniature book. "Everyday - walking along the deserted shore of glimmering sea, Agathon finds strange instruments and apparatus. Then he brings the finds in his room on top of the tower and it adds to its extensive collection." Both boards are covered in padded brown velvet and attached to a brown velvet spine. 3-D printed, hand-painted gears are embedded in both covers. Each spread features illustrated pop-ups and text about Agathon and his devices. [10 pages.] Size: about 3 x 3 inches. Goozairow is a Russian artist who paints and draws, produces movies, and creates exceptional handmade books that are printed on rare types of paper and published in limited editions. His techniques create unique designs that often are made with natural materials alone or in combination with relief decorations made from metal or polymeric clay. He creates books that he describes as "pop up," “kinetic carousel," “liporello,” or “3D origami.” He also writes fairy tales, stories and mystical scenes. ARTB/021921. Fine. More