Assembled by the brain trust of THE THING Quarterly's, Jonn Herschend & Will Rogan, The Thing The Book is a magical tribute to our favorite physical object, the printed book. More than 30 "creative visionaries" were asked to contribute with each being assigned a different traditional element of a book. From endpapers to ribbon bookmarks to page numbers, no part of the codex is left untouched. Here's a taste: Ed Ruscha got the bookplate; Jonathan Lethem got the footnotes; Miranda July got the erratta slip; Lawrence Weiner got the thumb tab; John Baldessari got the epigraph; Rick Moody got the endnotes. There are also plenty of essays and...
Of Interest: Burn the Diaries, How Literature Saved My Life, Storytelling Through Textiles and The Writer’s Garden
Burn the Diaries by Moyra Davey and Alison Strayer. Illustrated with photos by Davey. "The dross of the diary, the compulsion to scribble, the delusion that we can hold on to time. The inversion of this neurosis is the anxiety of being read, the fear of wounding and, just as strong, the dread of being unmasked." Comprised of texts from Moyra Davey and Alison Strayer Burn the Diaries is a meditation on the act of writing and much more. Using the works of Jean Genet Davey explores the story of her life in text and photographs. She then shares them...
Unbinding the Book: A New Era of Book Creation
Kate Morrell Unbinding the Book is a collaboration between the independent publishing platform Blurb and the visual arts studio Jotta. The challenge: push the boundaries of how books can be experienced, by evoking the storytelling properties of print and the way in which images evoke a narrative, whilst bringing to life the materiality, form and physicality that make books so alluring and different from their digital counterparts. [vimeo width="640" height="300"]http://vimeo.com/106487007[/vimeo] Nine artists and designers were commissioned to get to work creating a "book". Here is a sampling of some of the great stuff that has materialized so far: -Exploring the temporality and tactility...
A New Fine Press Edition of “Leaves of Grass” by Walt Whitman
“A holy book of the nation, along with the Bill of Rights and Declaration of Independence,” - poet laureate Robert Hass on Leaves of Grass To mark their one-hundredth publication the noted fine press publisher Arion Press has chosen the 1855 first edition of Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman. Chosen in part as a tribute to the publisher's predecessors Edwin and Robert Grabhorn, whose masterpiece was their 1930 edition of the Whitman poem. “I thought Arion Press might do something with Whitman’s poetry that was different as to the text and yet pay tribute to the 1930 edition by using a similar format,...
A Tectonic Pop-Up Book
The supercontinent Pangaea that connected South America and Africa broke apart 200 million years ago. What a better way to convey the moving and shaking of the earth within a physical object than within the confines of a movable book. In ‘The Pangaea Pop-up’ Lesson at TED-Ed, animator Biljana Labovic explains how she and her team of animators created a pop-up book to visualize Pangaea -- and how you can make your own. [youtube]http://youtu.be/RZR_b753ZJ0[/youtube] Previously on Book Patrol: America's National Parks: Pop-Up Style Waldo Hunt and Pop-Up Books: A Brief Overview Pop-Up Books Meet Photoshop Maurice Sendak's First...