Sometimes it’s art for art’s sake. Sometimes it’s an experiment in the marriage of content and form. Once it was an artisanal niche, but today it’s trickling into the mainstream.
We’re talking about book art—that is, a craft that considers the tangible book as more than a binder for the words it contains, but as an object of art in and of itself. It's an art form that celebrates the physicality of books at a time when eBooks and the digitization of reading has emphasized the disembodiment of texts, flattening all novels, tomes, and furniture assembly instructions into virtual, fully re-flowable digital files, able to conform to the settings of any given eReader, but completely devoid of any bodily identity of their own.
Perhaps in response to the homogeneity of the digital book experience, a renewed emphasis on the inimitability of the physical book finds itself in vogue with high profile writers and literary influencers. Take, for example, the Pale Fire-esque meta-novel from Doug Dorst and J.J. Abrams, The Story of “S”—a book stuffed with marginalia and artisanal extras. Or consider Jonathan Safran-Foer’s most recent book, The Tree of Codes, with Swiss cheese-like pages, each one uniquely die-cut to expose different layers of text—a project Vanity Fair described as “delightfully tactile."
Tactility is a trait under siege in the world of books today, but projects like the aforementioned constitute a collective rebuttal against the creeping susurrations of the bygone era of the book as object: tangible, spatial, and unique. But these mainstream experiments in trade publishing hardly exist in a vacuum. These forays into the book art world are a staging ground for a trend in publishing that merges the production scale of a trade book with the craftsmanship of fine art.
Codex is a Berkeley-based foundation that has been preserving and promoting contemporary book-making arts and the rich history of bookbinding for the past several years. The foundation has helped artists, writers and printers explore new techniques for reimagining the book medium and, to date, has hosted four book fairs and symposia showcasing the very best of this binder-busting art form.
Their recently released art book, Book Art Object 2 is an ambitious compendium showcasing 300 diverse projects from the third biennial Codex Book Fair in 2011, the theme of which was "The Fate of the Art". Screen prints, die-cuts, concertina-style pages, stencils, scrolls and vellum abound in this 512-page volume, which also features papers presented at the 2011 symposium, penned by creators and keepers of book art from across the globe.
This art anthology is the second of Codex's publications, following their first acclaimed collection, book art object, by six years. Des Cowley, of the State Library of Victoria in Melbourne, described the second volume as “an essential illustrated reference for libraries and anyone interested in the future of the physical book,” while artist, designer and typographical historian, Robert Bringhurst had this to say of both collections: “No one who cares about books and their fate in the present world should be without them.”
Check out Codex's Flickr album
of their most recent 2013 Book Fair.
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