#Book Arts

[mellific]

continuing my research into "what is the most bullshit thing you can call a 'book'", i present: one sheet of paper and three pinback buttons.

pretty excited by these, i've wanted to do a turkish map fold zine for a while and the little case is cut from the same sheet of paper so the whole zine can be printed on one 8.5x11 page. i'll have these at seattle art book fair at washington hall next weekend!

[nico-nico-suavecito]

published in FRUITSLICE

preorder my book

[celestialfoxe]

favorite pages from the little book I made for myself based on The Terror <3

[sosnastudios]

I Sing the Salmon Home: Poems from Washington State is an anthology of poems collected by Rena Priest inspired by the cycles, spirit, and wisdom of salmon. The book is bound bradel-style in salmon parchment drummed over mirrored boards, depicting salmon as they transform on their journey from saltwater sea to freshwater waterfall. The edges are graphite, with the top edge gauffered in the style of salmon scales.

Salmon parchment made and naturally dyed by the binder. Board. Original text block. Hook Pottery endsheets. Reflective mylar film. Graphite edges. Embroidery thread.

Part of the Guild of Bookworkers Traveling Exhibition: Night Circus, opening in Boston, MA in October, 2024.

[mcromwell]

Time for some new guts in the Trash Book! Folks have asked about the construction so here's a peek. It'll last the year.

Download the 2024 book here.

[maddie-w-draws]

finished binding my new sketchbook! first time doing a decorative pattern for the coptic binding instead of straight lines but i learned a lot from it

gnome place like it sticker designed by @elle-arts

stan and ford stickers designed by @sovonight

[syzygy-press]

marbled papers from a workshop i took! this process was so fun! i wish i had a proper setup to do it at home

[cyclesprefectpress]

[image description: photos of The Disco Elysium Tarot, printed letterpress in an edition of one from handset lead type and linoleum blocks. It is a complete 78-card tarot deck printed primarily with white text and illustrations on medium grey cardstock, in a custom dark grey hardcase box with a hand-marbled orange and yellow endsheet. The backs of the deck are decorated with an illustration of a sprig of may bells, and a quote from Smallest Church in Saint-Saëns: "None of this matters at all." The interpretive meaning of each card is expressed on its face with a small excerpt of the game's text. The Minor Arcana are divided into four suits of Harry's Attributes—Motorics, Psyche, Physique, Intellect—and each card in that suit is a quote from a skill under that Attribute. The Major Arcana are assigned quotes from other sources like NPC dialogue or Thought Cabinet problems & solutions. Pips for the Minors are counted with diamonds like the game's skill points; each actor or title is printed with their in-game color, but made shiny & metallic with bronzing powder.

each piece of text was set in handset lead type, assembled from individual pieces for each letter and space, and printed relief on a chandler & price clamshell press. end description.]

🎊🎊 Desert Bus for Hope starts for 2023 on nov. 11th and i have made an item this year for the craftalong that will be up for giveaway between 6am-12pm on Monday the 13th! 🎊🎊 It is a full tarot deck based on Disco Elysium and it has several pieces of my heart & soul in it but NOT my blood because i put a bandaid right on that :) donations for this and any other auctions & giveaways for Desert Bus go to Child's Play Charity.

notes: i did not make a whole new interpretive model for this deck, apologies, that was outside of my scope. it's generally compatible with a Rider-Waite model, with Motorics for Wands, Psyche for Cups, Physique for Swords, and Intellect for Disks. (full distribution of text listed by card, linked below. any spelling or transcription errors you find there, i promise i fixed them in print—that's copied from my digital mockup which was copied hastily from screenshots.)

i also do not track hours on these kinds of projects because that way lies madness, but i will say: i knew how much time it would take to print it. it was a lot but i was not worried about it, i know how to print. i was very worried about how much time it would take to absorb the sheer amount of text, and distribute it across the cards, and really get an array i believe in. i was right to worry, and i have absolutely had a few anxious nightmares about discovering the Perfect excerpt that should've gone in and i missed it, and the suit of Intellect made me want to lay on the floor a few times, but still! i believe there's many versions of a deck you could make from this game and this one is a good one.

i think the Minors fit really well with the double-edged sword of Harry's skills, their advice, their priorities. the circular way the Fool-World assignment works out makes me smile every time. The colors on The Star came out so nice. i think Justice fulfills some of my favorite things about Kim's character & purpose in the story. i worried sometimes that editing to such short clips would lose too much of the politics of the game, but of course you can't really take them out and they're especially present in the Majors—the Devil and the Hierophant, The Star and The Sun. i've wanted to design a tarot deck for years and i love this game deeply and i let this idea percolate for a few months and it never stopped making me laugh so here it is, & given a beautiful purpose :)

i also literally could not have done this without xyrilin's Disco Reader and the FAYDE On-Air Playback Experiment to navigate the dialogue and skill checks. Really couldn’t have tied the whole concept & colophon in its final bow without the Disco Reader :)) thank thank thank, they're so fun to investigate that it was honestly very difficult to focus on my task instead of veering off and exploring every branch in an extremely disorganized way.

actual printing went well honestly, very few problems! i think that means i'm getting pretty good at planning one of these monstrosities, although perhaps it also means i'm not challenging myself enough. hmm. no that's silly there's 78 ding dang cards in this thing. anyway the drop & replace formes worked well, no registration issues. mum convinced me to overprint another half a deck's worth of cards when I was printing backs & borders and of course she was right :/ there were a handful of cards that actually had better line breaks and fewer lines total in true type than in the digital mockup, so i needed all the spares I had to put those new short quotes into the appropriate border breakage. next time i will not question her.

handset in Garamond, Eden Bold, and secret Neuland.

WIP : full text card assignments

bonus photo of the kind of trash notes i always take to plan things like how many borders were printed with space for short excerpts vs long excerpts, and how many of those are majors vs. minors, because they have a slightly different frame at the bottom edge, etc.

[image description: they are truly garbage notes, i tell you. half of it is written at angles to the other half, many numbers in the math problems are not labeled, mistakes are scribbled over. it gets me there but it doesn't look pretty. end description.]

[simply-sithel]

because he's a poet by red0aktree [link]

Bound for the @renegadepublishing Tiny Book Bang. Typeset by @mythrilthread. Bookcloth hand dyed by @epitomereally for her Everything is Relative to You project... and I think she gave me the end pages as well...? Edges are buff 'n rub wax.

[thelavendernarwhal]

Do you want to hear a story?

This has to be the most ambitious bookbinding project I’ve ever done, but damn, am I proud of how it turned out. I previewed this something like 2 months ago, but here the completed physical volumes of Fallen Stars by @corishadowfang.

I’ve followed this fic since its first few chapters and it successfully made an OC one of my favorite Kingdom Hearts characters, so suffice to say, I highly recommend.

[mellific]

flipthrough of the moth book with new construction technique for longevity! didn't want to get into actual hardcover materials so sdlkfjdsf i'm using 80lb cardstock for the cover boards and strathmore toned tan paper (80lb text) from a sketchbook for the binding. i will have some these at sabf as well.

huuuuge shoutout to michael mcginnis on youtube for the bookbinding technique and spine measurements which worked like a charm.

[nocnitsa]

Willy Pogany

[etherati]

I'm having so much fun, people.

This is Ten Second Tidy by Somethingmoresubtle, one of my favorite post s2 trephacard fics mostly for its complete irreverence and willingness to lean into the absurdity of three idiots cleaning Dracula's Castle all on their own, while also being entirely sincere and genuine in the emotional bits.

Wooqu purple bookcloth, cover paper from local art store, gold metal HTV. Printed on French parchtone white in 80lb text weight, though I think they may have mislabeled the grain direction 😬 Cover font is Good Dog Plain, body text in High Tower Text, title headers and drop caps in Manuscript. Chapter header is just a screencap from the show put through infinite Photoshop filters. Hand wound headbands. Typeset in Word.

[rptv1]

illustration by Willy Pogany for The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám

[uwmspeccoll]

It’s Feral Friday! 

Sometimes getting feral simply entails pondering the familiar from an unconsidered perspective and finding fascination in the everyday. This week we’ve selected a work from our Book Arts Collection that does just that. Sarah Peters’ The Moon Has No Weather is a book that posits the earth’s natural satellite as its own archivist—a celestial body with no atmosphere whose physical history is preserved on its windless, waterless surface.  

Inspired by an installation of Peters’ work at the Minnesota Center for Book Arts, The Moon Has No Weather was produced during her residency at the Women’s Studio Workshop and published as an artist’s book in 2013 in Rosendale, NY. The text was letterpress printed in Fox typeface (designed by Chad Kloepfer) on Magnani Arturo paper. The book also includes hand-marbled Hahnemühle Bugra, Thai Mulberry, and handmade abaca papers, as well as selected pages from scientific lab books and a 1984 Polish electronics manual.  

Wanna learn more about how this book was made? You can follow along with Peters’ production process here. Wanna learn more about the thought process behind it? Check out this 1885 text The Moon: considered as a planet, a world, and a satellite (also available for loan through the UWM library catalog).  

--Ana, Special Collections Graduate Intern

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