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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

In which is reported more from the CBAA conference including new scholars studying book art,  established faculty teaching book art,  the use of point of view in artists books, and some odds and ends of notes that don’t fit anywhere else.
Studying Artists’ Books

One of the exciting things about CBAA was seeing the number of students [...]

The word-of-the-day is movement.
Not a ground-shattering word, but one the book art field might benefit from employing more liberally.  I’ve recently returned from a stimulating four days at the New York Contemporary Artists’ Books Conference/New York Art Book Fair, where I had my eyes opened to a lot of interesting works and ideas, many of [...]