I originally wrote this snapshot of the Poetry Takeaway as the last installment of three Harriet posts about the many events of the Poetry Parnassus, a 2012 London event that gathered poets from all 204 Olympic nations and which I served as Translator in Residence. With the Summer Olympics over the Olympic-themed essay didn’t make much sense for Harriet, but since I consider it such a great project I thought I’d go ahead and showcase the Poetry Takeaway here. You can read about Chilean collective Casagrande’s Rain of Poems or Tishani Doshi’s Everything Begins Elsewhere on Harriet. You can read my poem for London Paralympian Oksana Masters on the Huffington Post. —DS

Photo: Simon Veit-Wilson/New Writing North

Tim Clare came up with the idea for the Poetry Takeaway two years ago, to exploit a loophole in the Edinburgh Fringe Festival’s stage assignment system, which is awarded by lottery. Stalls offering free goods and services—like poems—did not have to pay to set up along the Royal Mile, so Clare bought a folding table and chairs and put out a sign advertising free poems. The journey of over 1,500 customer-commissioned poems began with just one, written by Clare himself, at the 2010 Ediburgh Fringe.

Soon thereafter Clare partnered with Tom Searle, of show + tell, the London-based arts organization that now hosts the Poetry Takeaway, to buy a van on eBay.  “[That] was the first real plunge into Oh my God, we’re committed now,” says Clare. Because of his admitted dearth of design experience—“hence” he says, “the original version’s being a camping table set up next to a bin”—Clare and Searle partnered with designers Niall Gallagher of House of Jonn, Nicola Read of the 815 Agency, and Ellen Turnill-Montoya of Ellen TM to design everything from the Takeaway’s attractive red, white and blue exterior to its mock-burger-style poem packaging.

Photo: Southbank Centre London

Takeaway Poets have included Dan Cockrill, Rob Auton, Katie Bonna , Jonny Fluffypunk, and Dominic Berry, who Searle commends for really listening to their customers, for “really [trying], to quote Henry James, ‘to be one of those people on whom nothing is lost.’” The first three poets above, along with several others, worked the Poetry Takeaway at the Poetry Parnassus, and judging from the long lines—I was unable to commission a poem despite heading down to the van early each afternoon, finding them sold out already—they succeeded in attracting an important new crowd to the events of the Parnassus, most of them local employees on lunch break, London tourists visiting the Eye, and families walking the Thames.

Searle explains his continued enthusiasm for working the Takeaway:

Working on the Poetry Takeaway is the antidote to reading online comments sections—it really brings the best out in people, and you have a series of fascinating, intimate conversations with strangers. People will open up about their problems, about the things they hold most dear, tell you anecdotes from the most important moments in their lives. It’s a real privilege to get to chat to them and hear their stories, and it makes you feel like we live in a pretty special world.

Sounds good to me! Young British poet Holly Hopkins—who was unable to fill her Takeaway shift because of an unfortunate dental accident involving several Parnassus poets and a foosball competition—even suggested the Takeaway might offer some important job experience for the young poet’s future:

My dad always said my stalwart rejection of both accountancy and the civil service (his preferred career options for me) would one day lead me into wearing a greasy uniform and asking customers, “Do you want fries with that?”

The event itself, which featured an exhibition as well as projected animations and live caricature drawings by featured artists, was extremely popular, and even at its emptiest hundreds of gallery viewers meant there was hardly enough room to move through the exhibit. Bangladesh Cartoonist Association President Mehedi Haque introduced the exhibit by assuring that “Cartoon is nothing new in Bangladesh,” and explaining that the medium serves—and has historically served, as in 1972’s Liberation War—an important role as a universal form of communication considering Bangladesh’s low literacy rate.

A page from Syed Rashad Imam Tanmoy’s The Catch.

Festival stand-outs include 25-year-old Syed Rashad Imam Tanmoy, an associate editor at Unmad and editorial cartoonist at the Daily Sun, whose playful style maximizes the narrative potential of illustrating, Md. Tarik Saifullah, whose cartoons lament the rapid urbanization of Dhaka, and Jahanara Nargis, one of only two women featured, whose exhibited cartoons employ everyday object as political metaphors.

The Dhaka Art Center exhibited an untitled solo show by Indian artist Samir Aich (b. 1956), from 9 – 19 November 2013. His first solo show in Bangladesh, Untitled featured the Kolkatan’s works in acrylics, oils, and pastels, often on found paper, including art opening invitations and magazine covers. His strong line work enables him to distort biological forms into compelling, often haunting portraits, which remind me of Francisco Toledo’s paintings in their brusque sexuality, but with a better sense of humor and a more consistent playfulness that seems borne out of a deeper questioning of forms and systems.

Samir Aich, Mixed media on paper, 135.7 cm x 88.5 cm, 2010.

Orhan Kemal’s In Jail with Nâzim Hikmet (Everest Publications, 2012), translated by Bengisu Rona, was first published in Britain in 2010 by Saqi Books. The Turkish edition, at 12.50 TL, features a more attractive design than its British counterpart. In it, in a Bursa, Turkey prison in 1940, aspiring poet Orhan Kemal, serving a long sentence for allegedly inciting Turkish soldiers to mutiny, meets his idol, Nâzim Hikmet, Turkey’s most famous poet and communist who advised him to abandon his poetry for prose. Kemal is now regarded as one of Turkey’s most important novelists (d.1970). his brisk, enjoyable prose, well-rendered into English by Rona, recounts several prison workshops and literary salons, and is interrupted by poems by both authors, including particularly satisfying translations of Hikmet’s poems “Orchestra”:

Look!
Hey!
Dumb-cluck!
Chuck your twanging noise-box.
That three-stringed fiddle
with three feeble nightingales
chattering on its three strings,
it’s quite useless

and “Mechanization”:

Trrrum,
Trrrum,
Trrrum!

Trak tiki tak!

I want to be mechanised!
It comes from my brain, my flesh, my bones!
I’m driven mad by the desire to take over
every dynamo I can lay my hands on!

The book earns the entirely warranted praise of Maureen Freely—Nobel winner Orhan Pamuk’s translator from the Turkish—who deemed it “A jewel of a memoir—beautifully translated.”

Özel Dersler/Private Lessons, available from Robinson Crusoe 389 in Istanbul, collects British-Turkish artist and Nazim Hikmet-namesake Nazim Hikmet Richard Dikbaş’ portraits, on graph paper, of a wide range of faces, each captioned in handwritten Turkish. The captions, presented as short, somewhat odd speeches from Dikbaş’ simple but disturbing characters, are often humorous with a tinge of creepy, and suggest a strange educational system dominated by institutional control—perhaps a government-subsidized boarding school or asylum, from the perspective of both students and teachers: “Man, I said to myself, they allow smoking, so why not take things a step further? This is how the Introduction To Gambling In Math Class project began,” “Meanwhile, performances continue of ‘The Armpits of Someone from the Past,’ a play we wrote and staged collectively,” “Careful,I exclaimed, there’s a load of students looking forward to the exam papers in this briefcase,” and “Then there was the school anthem, but let’s leave that for the next one.” Sixty of the sixty-four illustrations were exhibited at the 12th Istanbul Biennial, in 2011, and this compact, handsome edition was published in May 2012. Read more about Nazim Hikmet Richard Dikbaş at art:21.

Meanwhile, on this side of the Atlantic, City Lights has published their second Bilge Karasu novel, A Long Day’s Evening, translated by Aron Aji with Fred Stark. The novel, according to translator Aji’s preface, “is one of those rare works that alter a nation’s literature.” Karasu, a translator himself, introduced his own peculiar experimentalism to Turkish literature by, for example, not using the conjunction ve [and] in the original, superficially because of his stalwart rejection of any vocabulary borrowed from other languages—ve comes from Arabic—and, on a deeper level, Aji suggests, because “the gesture carries an existential significance as well.” The novel recounts the personal consequence of Leo III’s outlawing of all religious paintings and icons on monk Andronikos in the 8th century before ending with a semi-autobiographical short story set in 1960s Istanbul.

Paul North’s translation of Answer to an Inquiry (Ugly Duckling Press, $20), a short story presented as illustrated book, presents Walser’s terse second-person with an increasingly uneasy mania, culminating in self-violence. Friese Undine’s black-and-white engravings mimic a children’s book—dark, realistic, and decidedly contemporary, with computers, satellites, and televisions. North’s postscript “Note to the Reader” praises Undine’s images for their “develop[ing] a violent tendency in the text that might otherwise have been obscured by the reverence into which Walser’s writing has recently fallen.” He compares the book to Frans Masereel’s illustrated novels, whose work this resembles in the best way, while simultaneously standing on its own as a creepy liturgy. Its greatest success? That it transcends homage or text-plus-this-somewhat-arbitrary-extra-illustration to engage with and extend the original work—Undine’s work, as Paul North’s translation, is literature itself.

Two Bo Press miniatures with a cobbler's hammer and orange for scale.

I learned about Bo Press from the Miniature Book Society’s website. Founded and run by Pat Sweet, a former theatrical costumer, the press publishes a wide range of miniature (under 3″ in any direction) and micro-miniature (under 1″ tall) books in the arts, literature, and sciences. In addition to the Press’ open and limited edition books, Sweet handcrafts miniature globes, orreries, tellurions, and boxes. Sweet’s editorial selections prove her bibliophilia: selections include This Is Not a Book, which contains the cover designs of dozens of books-within-books, ranging from The Phantom Tollbooth‘s Rules and Traffic Regulations Which May Not Be Bent or Broken to An Attempt at a Uniform and Pragmatic Classification of the Neuroses  from Tender is the Night. Sweet’s wunderkammer-in-a-book, Small Wonders, contains slide images from a traditional cabinet of wonders, completed with a folded map tucked in its back cover. The idea of the wunderkammer came up several times over the course of our conversation, which reveals Pat Sweet to be a passionate curator and dedicated craftswoman. 

We corresponded by email over the course of several weeks. Though the below interview contains my most intentional questions, I found Pat to be an incredibly entertaining conversationalist. In her own words, she’s in the miniature book business for “the drugs and cute boys,” but I have a feeling there’s slightly more to it than that. 

First things first. How did you get interested in miniature books? 

Book of Wonders

I’ve always been interested in books, both as a reader and a (small-time) collector. I’ve always been attracted to miniature things, in a vague sort of way. My light-bulb-over-my-head moment came when I decided to build a dollhouse.

First of all, it had to have a library. I figured I could buy fake books to put on the shelves, so as I was searching the Internet for building supplies and furniture, I looked for books, too. I knew there were such things as miniature books, but I’d rarely seen them. I found three types: decorative (from $1 to $5, blank or with blurry microscopic print), manufactured (about $9 to $20, those little gift books you see at the checkout at bookstores), and real (handmade, which at the craft end cost as much as a full-sized hardcover, maybe $25-$35, and at the art end, $100 to $500).

Another thing to consider was that miniature books came in two size ranges. Ones for dollhouses were in 1/12^th scale to match the size most dollhouses and their furnishings came in. But there were larger books, too, up to 3” tall, for collectors. I wasn’t going to be able to afford to feed my full-sized library and a miniature one, too, so I was stuck with the fake books. But to someone like me, who loved books, they were trashy.

How did that interest lead you to found Bo Press? Is there a different impulse that leads someone to produce rather than collect?

I started buying some of the mid-range micro-miniature books, and fell in love at once.  At $25 a pop, it was still pricey, and so one day I thought, You know, I could probably make these.

It wasn’t such a stretch. I’d been a theatrical costumer all my working life, and making strange things from re-purposed materials was second nature. And as a designer, I knew Photoshop. I found some tutorials on the internet and started up the learning curve. At first, I planned to reproduce my real library in miniature for the dollhouse, but after a couple of week’s practice, I thought, You know, I bet I could sell these. I got an eBay account, and I was off and running.

At that point I still thought of myself as a miniature book collector. I’d started buying artsier books, in a wider range of sizes, but as I got better at binding and started putting content into my books, and started getting paid for them, all my collecting desire disappeared. I admire and covet other people’s books, but making my own is much more fun.

Napoleon's Retreat and Minard's Map, Limited to an edition of 20.

How do miniature books embrace the physicality of the book? How does their size displace our ideas about what a book is?

This is a question I’ve thought about ever since I started making miniature books. It’s part of a larger question of why people like to look at miniature things. I bought them solely for their subjects and binding; it never occurred to me to read them. I don’t think I’ve ever really accepted miniature books as books. In a way I still think of them as toys, or models. After 60+ books I still don’t get ISBN numbers for them, even when I’ve sweated over the content for weeks.

There’s a real shock of scale when one sees something very large or very small. Think of those pictures of tourists standing next to a sculpted foot the size of a car. Especially with miniatures that are intended to be naturalistic, like a 6” tall Sheridan highboy lying in the cabinetmaker’s hand, there’s a kind of uncanny valley experience as you decide which thing you’re seeing is “real.”

How do miniature books engage in an increasingly electronic reading culture?

Damned if I know. Perhaps only as objects. Unless someone is working on a 1/2” Kindle.

That would be awesome, like a Tamagotchi for books! Your books obviously spring from your love of books and book culture. What do you read? 

At this point in my life, history. I read a lot of science fiction when I was young, and when I got out of college I overcame my dread of the classics and read a lot of 19^th-century English novels. I still read Vanity Fair and Kim at least once a year, and work my way through Trollope’s Barsetshire and Parliamentary novels. As far as collecting, I look for James Branch Cabell editions illustrated by Frank Papé, anything about Louis XI of France, and George Ade.

We talked earlier about some miniature books by Robert Coover and David Mamet. What are your favorite miniature books? What are some of the most literary ones in your collection, or that you know of?

My favorite miniature books are ones with fine leather bindings I’ll never be able to reach and letterpress printing I’m too intimidated to attempt. My craft heroes are Robert Wu, Jan Kellett of DeWalden Press, Gabrielle Fox, and Jan and Jarmila Sobota.

There are plenty of miniature books containing whole readable novels and plays. The Spanish publisher Del Prado make beautifully printed classics. I have a copy of their Tartuffe that’s just lovely. Even though I make mostly illustrated books, the most literary book I’ve done was a collaboration with the owner of a first edition of The Lysistrata (with the Aubrey Beardsley illustrations) to publish a miniature replica of his copy. It was by far the most time-consuming and finicky work I’ve ever done.

How does Bo Press find new titles? It’s an eclectic list, to be sure, but that’s its great strength, I think.

My list of titles is a bit of a dog’s breakfast. I get ideas from following other ideas: I did a book called Specimens that consisted of objects with amusing names preserved in laboratory glassware., which led to a book called Small Wonders, which was a book of small (possibly fabulous) curiosities presented on microscope slides, which made me think of other collections of (possibly) fictional things, which led to a book called This Is Not A Book, which was a collection of bindings for fictional books.

I make books in basically three genres: poetry and songs, maps, and curiosities. Within those categories, I make books that I would be unable to resist buying, and I hope that other people have the same reaction.

At the Flea Circus, Contains 8 Pop-ups, Limited to an edition of 50.

The wunderkammer comes up in our conversations again and again. Could you talk about the idea of the wunderkammer, and how it applies to your craft as miniature book craftswoman?

I know the real cabinets of curiosity and wunderkammers were the prototypes of natural history museums and owned by amateur scientific enthusiasts, but what I think of as a wunderkammer is based on my experience as a child visiting the Smithsonian and the Museum of Natural History in New York. I didn’t understand the significance of half the things I saw, but that imperfect understand helped my imagination grow far more than any scientific knowledge would have done. In everything I make, I’m trying to reproduce that coup de foudre I still feel when I see something that stops my breath, tingles my spine, and makes me see a thing for the first time with a tiny spark of recognition. Something that makes me think, “This is wonderful. I can’t look away.”

More technical questions. How do you go about making a miniature book? How are they bound? Where do you work? How big are your editions? 

A Chained Library of Cthulhu Mythos Books

I make miniature books the same way bookbinders make large ones; it’s called case-binding. The pages are printed and folded into signatures or gatherings of sixteen pages each, then each signature is sewn to the one next to it, glue is rubbed into the folds, and stiffeners and reinforcements are glued onto the spine. The cover, or case, is made separately, and the boards are spaced so that there is room for a hinge on either side of the book that allows the covers to open easily. Glue the first and last pages of the book to the inside of the case, and you’re done.

There are more complicated and historic binding methods, which I’ve only read about because I have no real bookbinding training. Someday I’ll learn to weave my own headbands and tool my leather covers.

Bo Press world headquarters is my spare bedroom. I spend half my time sitting at the computer deep in Photoshop and the other half at my work table that’s surrounded by a nest of little spare tables, stacks of drawers, cubbyholes, nooks, crannies, and piles of paper, little boxes of pins and needles, watch gears, jewelery findings, wooden beads (for globes), glue, watercolor paints, piles of leather and shagreen, trays of paper scraps, grosgrain ribbon (for headbands), wooden hand models and about a million binder clips.

Most of my books are open editions, which means I’ll make one any time somebody buys it. If no one buys a copy for a couple of years, it quietly disappears from the website. I’ve lost whole books to computer crashes more than once. Some books I’ve limited to twenty or fifty copies, either to add some class or because the book was hell to make.

What books—big or small—are you reading now? 

I just finished the new enlarged paperback edition of Turin and Sanchez’s Perfume: The Guide. Loving catalogs as much as I do, I read this cover to cover. A delirious mishmosh of connoisseurship, chemistry, snark, and obsession. One review made me buy $200 worth of Chanel’s 31 rue Cambon, possibly the best money I’ve ever spent on myself.

I’d do a miniature book on perfume if I could figure out the scratch-and sniff-technology.

That would be great! 

August 2011

Erica Baum’s dog-ears are just that—the dog-eared corners of adjacent pages spliced together into complete squares like conjoined twins. The resulting pieces allow for a multiplicity of interpretations, which Kenneth Goldsmith compares to the traditional verse form leonine. His concise and very complimentary introduction facilitates engagement with the text-boxes, and Béatrice Gross’ afterword contextualizes it within the contemporary art tradition, using Mallarmé’s fan poems as a starting point. The book’s simple presentation—including its drab, anti-book design cover—allows the reader to focus fully on the work itself, which encourages meditation on the multiplicity of interpretations suggested by each dog-ear box. Baum’s simple titles (like “Geisha,” at left) incorporate notable words from the work they describe, and the varied textures of the papers, made visible by their blown-up size, pay tribute to the physicality of the much-maligned and much-beloved habit of the dog-ear itself. Dog Ear encourages multiple readings—even the dog-earring of especially interesting pages.

Mourning Diary, Roland Barthes, tr. Richard Howard (Hill and Wang) $25

Following the death of his mother Henriette, who died just three years before his own death in 1980, the great critic and semiotician Roland Barthes began to document his mourning on note cards, which ultimately totaled 330, dated though September 1979. Barthes brief notes chronicle his despairs and triumphs, portraying a very self-conscious mourner, aware equally of mourning’s pointlessness and inevitability. Barthes’ clarity of thought is evident, and his intelligence does not falter in mourning; his notecard annotations often approach aphorism.

November 16

     Now, everywhere, in the street, the café, I see each individual under the aspect of ineluctably having-to-die, which is exactly what it means to be mortal.—And no less obviously, I see them as not knowing this to be so.

November 26

     What I find utterly terrifying is mourning’s discontinuous character.

December 9

     Mourning: indisposition, a situation with no possible blackmail.

The book includes facsimile notecards and a photographical chronology of Barthes’ relationship with his mother, which illuminates his highly unusual relationship with Henriette, with whom the writer lived for most of his adult life.

Richard Ford continues to prove the worthiness of his reputation as our finest contemporary translator from the French. Ford suggests that “Mourning Diary can be correctly read only by a concomitant reading of [Barthes’] ultimate books,” which he wrote “à la fois.” That is probably true, but the immense readability and emotional rawness of the Diary in seclusion make it worthwhile alone, too. His afterword also recounts the firs time he met Barthes’ mother, traveling together by helicopter to meet Howard’s close friend Barthes for Christmas. He argues that Madame Barthes was indeed as perfect a mother as her son suggests—better proof of the translator’s friendship with Barthes than of the subjective fact itself.

As the excerpts above prove, Barthes’ honesty is so complete blackmail would be impossible, discontinuous but continuously haunting, intimate, real.

Forty Lies, John Gallas, w. illustrations by Sarah Kirby (Carcanet Press) £12.95

As liars go, John Gallas is pretty talented. He begins his seventh collection with Umberto Eco’s famous epigraph: “It is the job of the poet to invent beautiful falsehoods,” then proceeds to craft forty mostly beautiful falsehoods, ranging in subject matter from “In 1968, in Mexico City, Mongolia’s first silver medal was won by Munkhbat Jigjidym in the middleweight (up to 87kg) freestyle wrestling” to “23 March 2005: Associate Professor Hulya Tezcan. This lecture provides a fascinating look at some eighty talismanic shirts… which were believed to ward off all sorts of evil spirits and restore the health of the ailing” to “Laika was the first living creature to orbit space…and…the only creature knowingly sent into space to die.” Each cites its source—the titles above are listed as “Entry in ‘World Sports’ magazine,” “From the Turkish University lectures schedule,” and “From the ‘Memorial to Laika’ website,” respectively. Gallas occupies a curious space between American Conceptual Writing and Flarf groups and more mainstream poets—the only book that comes in recent memory to explore similar territory is David Breskin’s Supermodel. The poems themselves are fun, mostly lighthearted, and each is accompanied by illustrations by the printmaker Sarah Kirby, which look like wood- or linocuts. Most illustrations appear to have been produced after their poems, but the more interesting ones interact with the text more directly, like the Laika poem, the text of which is slowly overtaken by Kirby’s five-pointed stars, and “A pensioner has committed suicide in Turkmenistan…,” a noose of text with Kirby’s cut block framing hanging feet. The book’s occasional missteps—Gallas’ concrete poems aren’t as strong as his others, and some of his more outrageous titles rely more on their novelty than lyricism—are easily forgivable in light of the quality of the collection in its entirety.

The “disgusting” Christian Chaudhari offers a crash course on all things Ai Weiwei, in the first zine from Friction House Publishing, distributed by Archinect. Chaudhari sums it up himself: Newly Released is ”mega-bitchin.” It’s my favorite zine ever.

Last year the Minnesota Center for Book Arts celebrated its 25th anniversary by commissioning 25 book artists to create a broadside each, packaged together in a limited edition of 25 sets and presented alongside a chapbook with brief essays by Director Jeff Rathermel and Dr. Betty Bright in a seaweed gray-green clamshell with an elegant metal 25 mounted in its bottom edge corner.

From Start to Here: 25 Years of Minnesota Center for Book Arts ($750; 7 copies available) is easily the most diverse and exciting multi-artist book arts portfolio from 2010, showcasing a wide range of book arts techniques including typeset and letterpress printing, hand papermaking, calligraphy, wood engraving, reductive linocut, and many others. Rathermel’s essay celebrates the state of contemporary book arts, sometimes derided for its lack of a definitive identity, by relishing the freedom that that very murkiness allows:

Over 1,900 years after the invention of paper in China, about 570 years since the advent of movable type in the West, 253 years after the birth of William Blake, 114 years following the publication of the Kelmscott Chaucer, 47 years after the initial printing of Ed Ruscha’s Twentysix Gasoline Stations and 12 years subsequent to the death of Dieter Roth, the book arts and artists’ books remain at an ambiguous junction. And this is good.[/wpcol_1half]

[wpcol_1half_end id="" class="" style=""]Bright sketches a thumbnail history of the center, housed since 2000 in Open Book, the 12,000 sq. ft. facility it shares with The Loft Literary Center and Milkweed Editions. Bright’s outlook on the future of book arts in the face of electronic books and online publishing is refreshingly optimistic, eager to explore the possibilities new mediums allow and the increasing demand for a more fully realized physicality of the printed book.

The broadsides within range from the elegantly simple, like newly retired Coffee House Press Publisher Alan Kornblum’s nine line poem about the small publishers’ possession of “The hands/of a juggler//And the guts/of a burglar,” and Paulette Myers-Rich’s black-and-white photograph, which achieves a stunning quality of detail with its depth of blacks and grays, to the more unconventional, like Anna Tsantir’s minimalist overlapping splotches of black, Julie Baugnet’s Rothko-reminiscent poetry broadside, Amanda Degner’s stonewashed denim paper, and my personal favorite, Wendy Fernstrum’s manic multi-colored tribute to MCBA and letterpress. Other standouts include Sara Langworthy’s leaves of grass, which explore the natural world alongside an almost Bahaus play with geometric figures over a deeply textured beige paper, Monica Edwards Larson’s teasing alphabet, Jody Williams’ comics-recalling seascape and creatures, Cathy Ryan’s Pop-Art-meets-Georgia-O’Keeffe flowers, Regula Russelle’s Escherian Fugue 7, Bridget O’Malley’s circular labyrinth, overgrown with its paper’s fibers, and Mary Jo Pauly’s meta broadside within a broadside, featuring the press on which it was printed. That I’m compelled to list so many is proof of their accomplishment. Only Diane von Arx’s annoys, with its polar bear and cursive Anne Frank quote ringing an oddly maudlin note.

These simple descriptions do little justice to the project—and even the photographs below only capture the folio’s physicality in the shallowest sense. Like all book arts objects, these deserve to be seen in person, touched. They boldly embody the diversity of contemporary book arts, appropriately celebrating the 25^th anniversary of the Minnesota Center for Book Arts.

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Click first image to scroll through selected broadside images.

Hopscotch: Snapshots of Art Books on Calligraphy, Islam, and Text

Islamic Art, Luca Mozzati (Prestel) $85

Covering fourteen centuries of Islamic art, this aptly-and-authoritatively titled monolith of a book is slightly larger in dimension than a vinyl record, though its 320 pages, containing over 400 full-color images, make it far heavier. The book’s art is arranged geographically, covering three continents. Accompanied by essays by on topics from architecture to geometric forms to specific historical periods dominated by , the art objects featured include paintings, miniatures, ceramics, textiles, carpets, metal works, and calligraphy.

The Aura of Alif, ed. Jürgen Wasim Frembgen (Prestel) $60

Munich-based Wasim Frembgen offers an alif to ya introduction to the art of Islamic calligraphy in one of the most interesting coffee table books of late 2010. Adorned itself with a transparent dust-jacket band, the book features a wide range of calligraphy-adorned everyday objects, including ceramics, leather, metal, stone, textiles, and wood. My favorite images feature heavily stylized, almost-Escherian calligraphy, like Figure 25, of an Amulet Scroll with Qur’an from Iran or North India (Lucknow), from the 18th -19th century. Jamal J. Elias’ essay “Truck Calligraphy in Pakistan” is another favorite, featuring brightly colored Bedfords with Islamic calligraphy-adorned crowns.

Ten Poems from Hafez, Jila Peacock (Sylph Editions) £30

Produced for an exhibit at the British Museum in 2006, master calligrapher Jila Peacock’s ten calligraphy animals fully reproduce her own translations of Hafez’ poems in the two-dimensional forms of their respective namesake animals. The flexibility of the Arabic alphabet, when in Peacock’s capable hands, allow for a sophistication of word art that makes John Hollander’s “Swan and Shadow” look amateurish at best. Like all Sylph Editions titles, characterized by works in which text and image interact with each other, Ten Poems has been elegantly produced, “care given equally both to content and to form.”

Art, Word and Image: 2000 Years of Visual/Textual Interaction, John Dixon Hunt, David Lomas, & Michael Corris (Reaktion Books, distr. U Chicago P) $55

Hands down the most exhaustive work yet published on the subject, Hunt, Lomas, and Corris begin their study in Classical Greece, move through Medieval and Renaissance Art, and end digital media-saturated present day. The book is quite literary, with Joseph Viscomi’s chapter on Blake’s illuminated work, Jeremy Alder’s on Paul Klee’s poem/paintings, and Michael White’s on Kurt Schwitters. With over 300 images, most in full color, the book itself is something of an anomaly: neither fully coffee table art book or art history text book, but a combination of the former’s beauty and the latter’s utility.

DS