El Sobrante, CA: Lisa Kokin, 2025. Softcover. Lisa Kokin is a well-known visual artist and book artist who also creates art with sewing and alterations, as well as with button work and assemblage. She also is known for acting as a mentor and coach to people in the arts. Her work is in collections across the U.S. She writes about her work: "One-of-a-kind books have played a major role in my work since the 1990s, and I find that I go back to making books in between working in other formats. Each time I return to books I try to invent a new way of working and a fresh approach. Making books gives me a feeling of comfort, perhaps because I grew up with them and reading is an important part of my life. 'Bookscrapping' began in 2024 when I started to play with the many scraps and 'failed' pieces lying around my studio. I have always been interested in fragments, both for their metaphorical associations and for the way that new compositions appear independent of my control. In this way, chance plays a major role in the work. Pieces want to be joined and I am the vehicle for their joining. I know that sounds a bit mystical, but that is the way the process goes, on a good day. CONAsemic text, flags, and oblique social commentary are present in the work despite the absence of actual text. Things are falling apart domestically and globally, and many people are worried. Bookscrapping is a method of joining disparate parts to form wholes, a kind of hopeful metaphor for our troubled times. And, of course, it is a pun on scrapbooking. I can never resist a good (or bad) pun."

Hessianic, an accordion-fold book, "is made of a coffee sack given to me by a friend. I was enamored of the text and the texture of the sack, but it sat in my studio for awhile before I knew what to do with it. Cutting it into fragments and making asemic text, as well as combining it with industrial felt, I made a quirky book, the title of which is a play on words. In the UK, hessian is the word for burlap in the UK. I liked how it rhymed with messianic. Sometimes I just go with my love of words and puns." This would be an important addition for a library that collects handmade stitched and woven creations done by masters of the medium. And Lisa is a true master of stitchery and design, as is evident in this work. It is a complex work with multiple - about 24 - fold-out pages that display her intricate designs and patterns created in various fabrics and styles that are different on each page. The book's white fabric cover has the title stiched in black, accompanied by two stiched design objects made with red cloth and fuzzy white fabric. The work is housed in a large fabric folder with buttons on the flap to allow it to be held closed. Burlap coffee sack, industrial felt, mixed fibers, adn buttons. and has the title Hessianic stiched on the top side. In fine condition. Envelope: 17 x 18 x 1.5 inches; book: 13 13 x 1.5 inches closed. ARTB/061626. Fine. More

Athens: Dorothy Simpson Krause, 2021. A unique book with original watercolors. Dorothy Krause is a painter, collage artist and printmaker who incorporates digital mixed media into her art. Her work is exhibited regularly in galleries and museums and featured in numerous current periodicals and books. In her artist's statement she says: "My work includes large scale mixed media pieces, artist books and book-like objects that bridge between these two forms. It embeds archetypal symbols and fragments of image and text in multiple layers of texture and meaning. It combines the humblest of materials, plaster, tar, wax and pigment, with the latest in technology to evoke the past and herald the future. My art-making is an integrated mode of inquiry that links concept and media in an ongoing dialogue – a visible means of exploring meaning.

In 2019, when the artist was in Athens, she began a book with watercolors of the landscape and collaged images of Athena. Returning home, she decided to explore her relation to the archetype and wrote a narrative, contrasting her comments with excerpts from Jean Shinoda Bolen’s Goddesses in Everywoman. Because she felt it presumptuous to compare herself to Athena, she printed narrative from Bolen's book on 4 vellum sheets and "hid" them by inserting them between the drum-leaf pages. Channeling Athena has 10 watercolor and collaged pages, and the 4 vellum inserts in a drum-leaf binding with a cover of vintage white leather over board. Affixed to the cover is a cream colored plaster medallion with a raised profile of a Greek head and the letters AOE ("Of the Athenians"). A lovely book in fine condition. Measures 7.5 x 6" inches. Unpaginated. ARTB/051923. Fine. More

Philadelphia: Thomas Parker Williams, 2021. A unique artist's book from noted artist Thomas Parker Williams. It is part of the series "Wordless - Painted and Drawn that Narratives," which Williams conceived, designed, illustrated, bound and for which he constructed the cases. Thomas Parker Williams began creating artists' books in 1998 while also painting. As of 2009 he has limited his art practice exclusively to artists' books. In that year he also began collaborating with his wife, photographer Mary Agnes Williams. In 2013 they started Luminice Press, incorporating letterpress printing into artists' books and broadsides. The artists' books draw on a range of conceptual sources in creating their books, including mathematics, music, literature, theology, philosophy, astronomy, natural sciences, and Eastern thought. He often creates videos and composes music to accompany his books that may be found on his website (www.thomasparkerwilliams.com). Books by Williams or the Luminice Press may be found in over 70 public collections around the country including the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Williams describes his book in an artist's statement: "12 is a visual essay with an original music composition that explores creation from realistic representations of original cultural myths to abstract representations of molecular activity leading back to the singularity that created the Big Bang."

This fascinating book is 12 sided, with 12 movable panels on cold press watercolor paper with tear resistant paper hinges. The panels are 10 x 10 inches. The book opens to 31 inches in diameter. The panels are painted and drawn on each side with dry pigments in alkyd medium, oil based enamels, acrylic inks, watercolors, and colored pencil. The book is housed in a custom case with a hand-painted design that measures 10.5 x 10.5 x .75 inches. In fine condition. ARTISTSB/050422. Fine. More