Since the dawn of printing with moveable type printers have used various design elements to embellish the printed page.Design elements of the ornaments include typographic fleurons, dingbats, headpieces, tailpieces, scrolls, trophies, lunettes, calligraphic and heraldic devices, cupids and wreathes.BibliOdyssey has a tremendous post on this long-standing relationship of word and image and often overlooked aspect of book illustration. He has also put together a Flickr set with over 80 examples of the craft.
‘The Hairy Times’ of Diane Jacobs
The Hairy Times. Handmade paper from the New York Times & Los Angeles Times, human hair, letterpress text, 2005For her Hairy Times installation Diane Jacobs chooses "hair to explore the contradictions and controversies inherent in our current political climate." The installation ranges from the two items featured here to pieces featuring an oil drum, bubble gum machine and coffee grinder.The Hairy Times which was created from shredded New York Times and Los Angeles Times papers, "manifests the media's failure to ask the hard questions and hold the government accountable. The ramifications of this neglect and deceit are made evident in...
Alphabet Book Party at the Internet Archive
The folks who make up the Collections Team at the Internet Archive have put together a nice survey of 100 years of Alphabet Books.12 books are featured beginning with The Royal Alphabet (1808) and ending with Oliver Herford's A Peter Pan Alphabet (1907). For over 200 years the alphabet book has been used as an educational tool but as you can see in this survey the form has become much more adult friendly over the years.The Alphabet Book at Wikipedia
Book Art Gets a Room of Its Own
The exhibition is titled Sitting Room and is curated by Tom Sowden and Lucy May Schofield.The goal of the exhibit is to let the artists books "become the tactile and interactive objects that they are usually conceived as being. Take them out of glass cases, out of libraries and away from the artist’s book fairs, resituating them in an environment that was conducive to reading and engaging with the books."They attempt to re-create a "sitting room from a time when books were read rather than TV being watched...A space to relax, ignore work and absorb the books"The inaugural exhibition in...
The Book Carvings of Kylie Stillman
Common Oak, 2007From the trees come the paper and on the paper comes the printed words and from the binding of paper comes the book. Australian artist Kylie Stillman brings us full circle with her incredible book carvings. In Stillman's world the trees come from paper and the birds that once lived in those trees are back nesting between words.Pictorella Finch, 2003In her 2007 installation Little Room Stillman creates a profound environment reuniting the trees and the birds with the paper that originated in their habitatLee Kottner says of Stillman "her carvings remind me of the elaborate fore-edge paintings in...