Washington DC: Abstract Orange, 2021. Number 9 of 10 copies of this inventive work by Lauren Emeritz in honor of Emily Dickinson. The artist's statement: "This book was based on the poetry of Emily Dickinson and released on her birthday, December 10th. The book started as visual interpretation of the words 'Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul' with a thing of feathers perched in a box." The simple construction mimics that of a case-bound book, with a spine and fore-edge but it is actually a box. The box is made of basswood and the spine is white birch wood veneer. A gentle wire clasp holds the book shut, but not locked shut. "Inside the box is "the thing with feathers. "The 'thing' is not a bird with a beak and feet, but a grouping of brightly colored orange feathers. They do not represent a specific bird, but rather a fictional idea of a thing with feathers. The feathers are made from cut paper that is scored to looks like feathers and held together by a simple wire. The cover is a bright, glowing yellow with the title in orange letterpress printed type, and a wooden “inlay” with the author's name. This represents that the while the poem is by her and she was the inspiration for the piece, the piece is not just about her, but the idea of hope [artist's statement]." In fine condition. Measures 5.25 x 7.25 x 1 inches. ARTISTSB/041223. Fine. More

Michoacán, Mexico: Ioulia Akhmadeeva, 2021. Hardcover. Number 2 of 5 copies. This beautiful work is from Russian born book artist Ioulia Akhmadeeva, who has resided and worked in Mexico since 1994. She is a full professor of the book arts at the university in Morelia, Michoacá. The text of the book is a Spanish poem by González on the transitory nature of life, using the life of a rose as metaphor. The "poetry talks about the ephemeral life of roses. [The author compares a rose to three ages of women with supporting illustrations of roses and portraits of women. The variety of] page formats supports the narrative about the ephemerality of life itself" (Akhmadeeva). The poem is inkjet printed on small floral themed papers that are bound with Ioulia's full page evocative and mysterious engravings. Printed on kozo paper and handmade paper with dried rose petal inclusions. Bound in beige patterned yotsume toji silk covered boards with metal corners. In fine condition. Measures 9.25 x 12.5 inches. 24 pages. ARTISTSB/043022. Fine. More

Chelsea: Ashendene Press, 1932. Hardcover. One of 328 copies on paper. There were also 25 copies printed on vellum. This magnificent book was one of the last issued by the Ashendene Press. The Ashendene Press was founded by St John Hornby (1867–1946). It operated from 1895 to 1915 in Chelsea, London and was revived after the war in 1920. The press closed in 1935. Its peers included the Kelmscott Press and the Doves Press. Hornby became friends with William Morris and Emery Walker, who helped inspire his work. These three presses were part of a "revival of fine printing" that focused on treating bookmaking as fine art. Ashendene books were carefully printed with large margins, and despite their lack of extravagant decoration, they were considered spectacular works of art. [Wikipedia] In the bibliography of the Press, its founder, St John Hornby stated that "in my humble judgment it is one of the most satisfactory of the books of the Press." In his history of the Ashendene Press, Colin Franklin writes on page 187: "qualities which separately had triumphed in many Ashendene volume were assembled as before the final curtain of an opera. Short chapters and sections showed the poetic setting of Subiaco which best suited that type....Red headings and shoulder notes, frequent and varied intervals assist the reading of a miraculous text." Bound in bright orange vellum with four silk ties and gilt titling to spine. Slightest tiny wear to corners with original white vellum showing, otherwise fine. Printed on Batchelor paper in red and black with beautiful hand drawn initials in green and blue done by Graily Hewitt and his assistants Ida D. Henstock and Helen E. Hinkley. The colophon credits them along with H. Gage-Cole, the pressman, and the compositor A.J. Fisk. Top edge is trimmed with the other edges uncut. Missing the original slipcase and nicely housed in a custom brown cloth box with gilt title to spine. A wonderful copy in fine to near fine condition. Measures 7.5 x 11.5 inches. 182 pages. PRI/011823. Fine. More

Philadelphia: Alice Austin, 2019. Number 15 of 20 copies. This tunnel book of the Grand Canal draws attention to the negative effects of tourism on Venice's rising water levels and ecosystem. Created from a series of lino-cuts, each page has been hand-cut and assembled into the tunnel book structure, giving the viewer a periscope-like view of the famed Grand Canal. The artist describes the scene as follows: "a chaotic mix of local fauna, gondolas, traghettos and bridges vying for space on the waterway, contrasting with the ominous visage of a cruise ship lurking on the horizon. The outsized scale of the ship emphasizes the threat these monsters impose on the delicate environment of this unique place — flooding the streets with mass tourism, and literally flooding the small canals with their enormous wakes. The cover panel is in the shape of an eye, reflecting upon the voyeuristic nature of tourism. The first panel shows an egret patiently hunting for fish amidst the chaotic scene. A quatrefoil-laced building facade typical of Venice provides the background. The second panel has a winged cherub and a traghetto (ferry) making its regular crossing of the Grand Canal, as the figures in the gondola stand in the customary Venetian way for the short trip, ready to bound off the second the boat docks. The third panel features the famed Rialto bridge, with a rower guiding a sandolo, the type of small rowboat used by the locals.  The fourth panel shows the characteristic vase-shaped chimneys of Venice. The fifth panel is an enormous cruise ship ominously looming over the buildings and canal, impossible to miss. The sixth panel is the back side of the tunnel book - The Lion's Mouth, or bocce dei Leone - depicting letter boxes found that were placed in prominent locations, where citizens could slip a note betraying the names of enemies of the Republic. The side panels show rowers in racing gondolas training for the Regatta Storica." It is printed on Mohawk heavyweight paper and housed in a marbled paper covered clamshell box with magnet closure and paper title label to spine panel. The paper was marbled by the artist. Alice Austin is a printmaker, book artist and painter living and working in Philadelphia. She has been on the faculty at the University of the Arts, teaching book structures, and has also taught workshops at the Center for Book Arts in New York, Ballinglen Foundation in Ireland, The Scuola Internazionale di Grafica in Venice, and other institutions. She earned a BFA from the Philadelphia College of Art and has been an active member of the Guild of Book Workers since 1998. She worked as a rare book and paper conservator for over 20 years at the Library Company of Philadelphia. Alice has also been awarded several artist residencies in Europe, and her work is widely held in private, public and special collections worldwide. Size: 6 x 11 x 1.5 inches closed, 13 inches open. Box size: 6.5 x 11.5 x 2 inches. Fine. More

Brooklyn, NY: Anne Beck, 2000. Hardcover. Anne Beck is an interdisciplinary artist working collaboratively & independently in a wide variety of media from paper, print & book making to painting & textiles to social practice. Through her work, Anne explores the roles of amateur naturalist and lay surveyor of the current landscape – collecting specimens & recording data, cataloguing that which seems useful, and investigating further that which seems impermeable. This is all in the context of envisioning a sustainable path forward for herself and the planet, which is often a playful exercise in the face of absurd & complex circumstance. Anne lives & works in Northern California. She also a core member of The Printmakers Left, an international collective working together for over 20 years now on artist books, printed matter & installations. She is also half of the collaborative team behind The Rhinoceros Project exploring the communal & revolutionary power of sewing circles & hand papermaking. This provocative work is a unique manuscript. It begins with whimsical pictures and apocalyptic visions of a high-tech synthetic mechanized culture and evolves into a loose social history and critique. The pages were originally painted in a studio in Williamsburg, Brooklyn as individual paintings but then coalesced into this evocative book. The images are varied in design and image, and sometimes mysterious as there is no text. They were hand painted and drawn with casein, acrylic, gouache, watercolor, ink, graphite, and collaged intaglio on heavy watercolor paper. The endpapers are hand-made cotton rag paper. It is handsewn and casebound in found gray suede printed with a black outlined map of the American West. In fine condition. Measures 12.375 x 8,75 inches closed. 56 pages. ARTSB/040623. Fine. More

New York: Béatrice Coron, 2002. Paperback. Number 3 of 3 copies. The skilled paper cutting in this book by well known artist Béatrice Coron is here inspired by a poem by Joachim du Bellay. du Bellay (1522-1560) was a French poet, critic, and a founder of the Pléiade. He notably wrote the manifesto of the group: Défense et illustration de la langue française, which aimed at promoting French as an artistic language, equal to Greek and Latin. In this poem printed here, he writes of the glory that once was Rome, but which as happens in the world, falls and what remains are its monuments and the Tiber River that continues to flow to the sea. 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 her work in Coron's "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." Hand-cut on one sheet of white Arches paper. Housed in a clamshell box painted gray and gold on its cover with a cut out design that reveals the poems title. In fine condition. Size: 5.75 x 6.25 x .75 inches when closed. ARTB/081921. Fine. More

Gainesville, FL: Crooked Letter Press, 2020. Hardcover. Number 14 of 40 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 (CA), Yale University (CT), The Library of Congress (DC), and many other national and international collections. From the artist's website and colophon: "Rule of Thumb is a moveable book about the historical human obsession with ourselves and with approval from others. In the last 10 years, we have become obsessed with living online instead of actual living. We seem to only care about how many "thumbs up”, likes, or hearts we can accumulate on social media platforms. We practice a psychological social separation. We live virtual lives. Now, with the proliferation of the COVID-19 virus, we are living with the physical reality of "social-distancing". How will we make it back? Can we make it back? I hope we will realize how much we don't want to live without one another." Rule of Thumb considers the ways in which humans have used our thumbs to, at best, twist reality, and at worst, ruin ourselves. The serious questions addressed in this book are approached through a seemingly whimsical description and movable depiction of various expressions with the word thumb - the pricking of my thumb, rule of thumb, sticks out like a sore thumb, under my thumb and more. These are accompanied by information about the phrase's origin and a few relevant quotations. Printed on and constructed from Colorplan paper (350gsm, Natural). Letterpress printed from linoleum blocks and photopolymer plates. The orange and red binding is a storage book binding with a green concertina spine made from Tyvek hand-tinted with acrylic inks. It is housed in a red portfolio with thumb images and with soft flaps (made using directions by Peter D. Verheyen). The spine of the portfolio and the book cover are foil stamped in matte black foil. In fine condition. Measures 6.5 x 11 inches. Portfolio measures 7 x 11.5 inches. Unpaginated. ARTB/030823. Fine. 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

London: Eragny Press for Halcon and Ricketts, 1900. Hard Cover. One of 226 copies of which 200 were for sale.This is one of 175 paper copies. There were also 10 vellum copies. Founded in 1894 by Lucien Pisarro and his wife, Esther, the Eragny Press became well known for its distinctive designs, woodcuts, and printing. The press originally printed books using Charles Rickett’s Vale Press type face; however, in 1904, after the closing of the Vale Press, Lucien began publishing his own books and printing them with a typeface of his design called Brook Type. This title beautifully exemplefies the style and distinctive qualities of the Eragny Press. It is printed on handmade papers with the Vale watermark using the Vale Press typeface. Printed in red and black with striking decorated initials. The frontispiece has a woodcut portrait of Villon done by Lucien Pissaro with an ornate border of leaves designed by Lucien and engraved by his wife Esther. Bound in floral patterned paper covered boards, with a gray paper spine with gilt titling. The spine has faded with some loss of cloth to head and tail, and it has been repaired along its right edge. The corners are bumped and there are light marks on the covers. Slight offsetting to pastedowns and the rear free endpapers. The text pages are generally in very good condition, with a bit of light spotting to the title page. Gift inscription in ink dated 1916, Measures 5.25 x 7.25 inches. 88 pages plus 3 page list of titles. PRI/061323. Very Good. More

Santa Cruz: Foolscap Press, 2002. One of 200 copies. This is an unusual and lovely scroll book, which, according to the Press, follows the written record of a wondrous monument standing in Athens. The Tower has been explained by scholars from antiquity to the present, yet the Tower of the Winds was and still is a mystery to those who study it. The work is original to the Foolscap Press both in content and exterior form, and was created as a biblio-artifact, both a book and an object. The book is in a pre-codex form, allowing the reader to scroll through history viewing the subject along a panorama 25 feet in length. In addition to reproducing historic texts, there are illustrations of the Tower by James Stuart and Nicolas Revett, two important early British architects. The work is printed in Adobe Herculanum type on Zerkall Book and hand made papyrus from Egypt. It is housed in a formed sculptural / architectural case. Each case is a rigid cylinder hinged with cloth and lined with a map of ancient Athens. Issued with handling instructions. It is a stunning and inventive work from this press. Scroll is in fine condition. PRI/102022. Fine. More

Emil Goozairow, 2022. Hardcover. 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. Number 4 of 5 copies, signed and numbered by the artist on the rear cover. An inventive pop-up book with a rhyming poem (in English) by Goozairow illustrated with full color pop-ups on each page. The poem begins: "Wonderfooler Whowhereus, He's not moose, but not a goose. He's not stupid, he's not smart, but he has a tender heart. No one knows where he lives, not on the roof and under the eaves. Not in the forest, not in the flop, not at the bottom, not at the top." Not quite a miniature, but a small book - in a diamond or parrallelogram shape. Bound in illustrated paper covered boards with brown velvet spine and color title to front cover. [10 pages.] Size: About 4.25 x 2.75. ARTB/052523. Fine. More

Red Cliff, CO: Helen Hiebert Studio, 2019. Number 20 of 25 copies signed and numbered by the book artist. Helen Hiebert is a noted paper artist who constructs installations, sculptures, artists’ books and works in paper using handmade paper as her primary medium. She teaches, lectures and exhibits her work internationally and online, and is the author of the several how-to books about papermaking and papercrafts. She says of this beautiful and complex work: "I’ve been fascinated with light for as long as I can recall. As a child, I always looked for rainbows, and I enjoyed trying to identify every color, from red to violet. Sir Isaac Newton was the first person to articulate the science of a rainbow. In 1665, he observed that when white light passed through a triangular prism, it dispersed into seven colors: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet. This book explores the wonder of that interaction between color and light. As you flip through the pages, you will see 24 analogous colors (each new hue sharing some of the color of the page next to it). It’s my attempt, as a paper artist, to capture the essence of a rainbow within the pages of the book. My medium is handmade paper, and for over 25 years, I have been exploring the properties of abaca, a fiber from a non-fruit bearing banana plant. I processed the abaca fiber to create a translucent paper that resembles frosted glass. I spent a long time contemplating how to achieve a rainbow of paper and performed several color-mixing experiments. My process centered around determining how to accurately produce the spectrum by mixing pigments into wet paper pulp. After several trials, I ended up matching 24 colors on a chart that gradually change from red to orange, yellow to green, blue to indigo and finally to violet, with several colors in between each hue. All 54 pages plus the cover are stitched together into a single signature allowing the soft deckled edges of the colors to meet at the fire-edge, blending and transitioning from one to the next as colored light does in the rainbow." The front and back text pages show the abaca paper in its natural hue. The cover is a cotton/abaca blend with a pulp painting in abaca. Text was letterpress printed by Tom Leech at the Press at the Palace of the Governors in Sante Fe from polymer plates made by Boxcar Press. The typefaces are Dante and Futura. Claudia Cohen created the blue cloth covered box with white and colored spine label. In fine condition. Box size: 12 1/2 x 9 1/2 x 1 inches. Book size (closed): 12 x 9 inches. More