Hans Silvester :: Man reading a book with sika deers, Nara Park, Japan, 1960′s / source: Twitter
“The daily routine of most adults is so heavy and artificial that we are closed off to much of the world. We have to do this in order to get our work done. I think one purpose of art is to get us out of those routines. When we hear music or poetry or stories, the world opens up again. We’re drawn in — or out — and the windows of our perception are cleansed, as William Blake said. The same thing can happen when we’re around young children or adults who have unlearned those habits of shutting the world out.”
— Ursula K. Le Guin
Things We Carried Into Space, artist's book, 2021
Things We Carried Into Space is an artist's book that meditates on what we carry with us into the galaxy. The images, based on x-rays of spacesuits, represent the physical apparatus we need to survive, and the text touches on what we carry inside those suits: our hopes, our prayers, our memories, our songs, our names.
Things We Carried Into Space was printed on a Vandercook Universal III at the In Cahoots Residency in 2021. The images are pressure printed and the text is letterpress printed using poylmer plates. The typface is gil sans. The book is a drum binding with a hardcover case.
Things We Carried Into Space, page process
I am obsessed with x-rays of spacesuits. I love the ghostly quality of the images. I've always wanted to make a book based on spacesuit x-rays, but the concept never quite came together until I was accepted into the In Cahoots residency program for 2021. I paired a newer draft of the poem with pressure prints based on the x-rays. I decided to pair pressure prints based on the x-rays with a poem I'd written in grad school, "Things We Carried Into Space."
The first step was to design the page layout on the computer using Affinity Publisher. As you can see in the image above, the layout uses an older draft of the poem.
I traced the outline of the x-rays and cut out paper shapes to create the plates I would use for pressure prints. Crumpled tracing paper and binding thread gave the plates added texture.
At In Cahoots, I printed the pressure print plates in a light teal. The text was printed using polymer plates in a slightly darker shade. There are fourteen pages in the final book. Every single page is a pressure print, with type printed on every page except the end pages, which are yellow.
Daunt Books, in Marylebone, London, is an Edwardian beauty of a bookshop specialising in travel. Fiction, non-fiction, and travel volumes are sorted alphabetically by geographical location. When you peruse the 'Japan' section you will find Japanese authors, books that are set in Japan, and books that are about Japan. Trust me, it's awesome. (photos:various on IG, none are mine)
I've been spending far too much of my time trying to learn medieval illumination techniques
one of my first semi-successful attempts at fore edge painting! done on an old paperback of aesop's fables.
+ some glamour shots:
Norwich pattern books
These happy-looking books from the 18th century contain records. Not your regular historical records - who had died or was born, or how much was spent on bread and beer - but a record of cloth patterns available for purchase by customers. They survive from cloth producers in Norwich, England, and they are truly one of a kind: a showcase of cloth slips with handwritten numbers next to them for easy reference. The two lower images are from a pattern book of the Norwich cloth manufacturer John Kelly, who had such copies shipped to overseas customers in the 1760s. Hundreds of these beautiful objects must have circulated in 18th-century Europe, but they were almost all destroyed. The ones that do survive paint a colourful picture of a trade that made John and his colleagues very rich.
Pics: the top two images are from an 18th-century Norwich pattern book shown here; the lower ones are from a copy kept in the Victoria & Albert Museum in London (item 67-1885), more here.