The Sign of the Owl

One of my knowledgeable readers (Jack Ginsburg) has alerted me to the fact that Joshua Heller has a wonderful interactive web site about the Second Encyclopedia of Tlön (see my last post).  It comes up automatically when you go to the Joshua Heller Rare Books web site.  Once the page that shows the full encyclopedia [...]

A continuation of my last post, this one will conclude my discussion of interesting books I saw at the Hybrid Book Fair.
Second Encyclopaedia of Tlön 
The ability to charm and amuse without descending into empty frivolity or clever cynicism is an enviable talent. It requires a unexpected turn of mind coupled with a serious intelligence. [...]

Well my email inbox tells me that readers are clamoring for more about the Hybrid Book Fair.  Sorry for the delay – I got back from the conference and promptly flew away again.  But now I’m back and have added some images to my last posting on the Fair and have the next installment below.
Robin [...]

I’ve just finished my first day at the Hybrid Book Conference and Book Fair (hosted by the University of the Arts in Philadelphia) and so far it has been filled with interesting panels/presentations and a great book fair.  Since I’m reviewing the conference for CAA Reviews, I’ll hold off on my comments about the program [...]

I’ve been home sick with a cold and in my fevered state have come up with my dream class to teach to  book art students. The subject would be  the history of color—which may come as no surprise to anyone who knows me and my fascination with this topic, but I believe there really is [...]

Last November I had the honor of judging the JAB-sponsored Critic’s Award for the Pyramid Atlantic Book Fair. Artists’ books take such a wide variety of interesting forms, I ended up giving two awards, one to  Anatomy of Insanity by Maureen Cummins and one to Karaoke by Masumi Shibata. The former is a visual interpretation [...]

We left off our discussion of absence with Stalin’s revisionist approach to history and the question of whether or not he succeeded in erasing the past through willful obliteration.
This leads me to our last book which is about different kind of historical absence, one not imposed by a political agenda and layers of ink, but [...]

In the last post we explored a book which centered around the personal experience of absence. Following is the continuation of the transcription of my CBAA presentation, Figuring Absence, in which I now explore the political experience of absence.
I’d like to turn now to a very different kind of absence. Ken Campbell and David King’s [...]

We left off the last post with the idea that belonging is a core part of our experiences of absence. Following is the continuation of the transcription of my CBAA presentation, Figuring Absence.
So let us now turn to Sophie Calle’s book Exquisite Pain which takes up both of this idea of absence as it relates [...]

I’ve had several people ask me for a transcript of my talk from CBAA so for the final installment of my conference notes, I offer a (somewhat amended) transcription of my talk Figuring Absence, Using Theme-based comparison to Look at Artists’ Books. It is long enough that I am going to divide it into several [...]