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If you discover a link is no longer working, or if you know of sites not listed here that you think would be of interest, please let us know by e-mailing cbbag@cbbag.ca. CBBAG would like to keep this list accurate. Inclusion of links on this website is at the discretion of CBBAG.

NOTE: Appearance on this page does not constitute an endorsement of any kind by the CBBAG. Please refer to the
External Links Disclaimer.

Links are organized into the following categories:

Bookbinding | Calligraphy & Inks | Conservation | Leather & Vellum | Paper Making | Paper Decorating & Marbling | Schools | Organizations | Type & Printing | Wood Engraving | Book Artists & Presses | Miscellaneous ( Book Dealers, Exhibitions & Collections, Reference, Etcetera)

This listing is also available in alphabetic order.

Calligraphy & Lettering

Ink Corrosion Homepage The site offers detailed information on iron gall ink, ink corrosion, current research, and conservation techniques
Inks a page of ink recipes and more from "The Household Cyclopedia"
Making Permanent Gallotannate Ink by Evan Lindquist; 3 other pages about old ink lettering

Conservation & Preservation

Abbey Publications Ellen McCrady's newsletter of conservation and bookbinding and The Alkaline Paper Advocate
American Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works
Archival Products, also check out the Newsletter

Harmatan Leather
Hewit & Sons Ltd, suppliers of leather for nearly 200 years. Also, Skin Deep,Hewit's magazine about leather and books.
Making of a Medieval Book and Parchment Making, The Getty Museum exhibitions
Pergamena Handmade Parchment, a U.S. producer of deerskin, goatskin, and calfskin parchment
Sofic Paris, velvet goat, boarded goat, natural calf, anilin calf, and cow leather

Paper Decorating & Marbling
30 Examples of Marbled Paper
Rockingstone, rare and vintage papers, based in Netherlands

Suminagashi, the ancient art of Japanese marbling
Traditional Turkish Marbling, a web site prepared by Alparslan Babaoglu
Valet, Alain, marbling papers

Schools
Note: also see the Organization links below, as many offer workshops and courses.

A list of schools, colleges, universities, and other teaching institutions can now be found on the CBBAG Educational Opportunities Page.

Organizations
Note: some organizations may also be listed within the various categories above and below this section.

American Bookbinders Museum, sharing the history, tools, and process of bookbinding

See also Digital Type links for digital typefounderies and designers.

Albee, Grace, an American printmaker (wood engraving), 1890-1985
Bewick, Thomas (1753-1828), The Bewick Society web site
other Bewick sites include Bewick wood engravings
Bull, David, wood block printmaker in Japan, includes the Classical Technique of Woodblock Printmaking, also check out the index to his newsletter for several interesting articles about visits to a papermaker, a brushmaker, a blockmaker, and more
DePol,John,wood engraver
DePol, John: How to Make a Wood Engraving;
also Finding Aid: The John DePol Collection of American Wood Engravings and Related Material at Rutgers University
English, Andy, printmaker (wood engravings), with a section on how-to and a gallery
Gill, Eric, and the Guild of St Dominic a conference at the University of Notre Dame in November 2000
Greentree Graphics Wood Engravings Gallery
Lawrence, T.N., & Sons, artists and printmaking supplies
McCurdy, Michael, fine wood engravings from a modern master.
Phillips, Walter J., watercolour artist and woodblock printmaker also, The Technique of the Colour Wood-cut
Westergard, Jim / Spanish Fly Press
Wood Engraver's Network
WoodEngravings.com, a gallery of wood engraving prints and printmaking

Note: some artists are listed under their last name, others under their press name, so if you don't find someone under their name, check their press name.

Alembic Press, The of Claire Bolton, with a collection of typecase layouts
Alice Travel Cie, publishing books by artists
Aliquando Press, The of William Rueter
Ampersand Press of Alessandro Zanella in Italy (information on the press)
Antonic, Jelena
Arion Press, The, of Andrew Hoyem
Art Jazz Books of c.j. grossman
Artists' Books Review, a publication devoted exclusively to exploring the difference between artists' books and fine press books, and how they fit into the realm called The Book Arts
atelier für papierdesign of Peter Baumgartner
Baldwin, Pat, Pequeño Press, Waterleaf Mill & Bindery.
Barbarian Press, The, of Jan and Crispin Elsted in Mission, BC
Barrow, Amanda, printmaker and book artist
Barton, Carol, Popular Kinetics Press
Beautiful Angle, an underground letterpress shop in the city of Tacoma
Blades, Joe, Broken Jaw Press
Bloodroot Press, of Jean Buescher Bartlett
Book Arts Press supporting the history of books and printing and related subjects
Book@rts, the books of Jules Siegel
Book and Letterpress Artists Featured on ChicagoPublishes
Book Arts in Quebec:carrefour des arts du livre
Bruggeman, Inge, INK-A! Press
Cabbagehead Press of John Risseeuw
Califia Books, distributor of artists' books, letterpress, and fine press editions, San Francisco
Chax Press, of Charles Alexander
Coron, Béatrice, papercuts and bookart
Coviensky, Mira, book artist and workshop leader
Convivio Bookworks, formerly Red Wagon Press Cowan, Vicki, at Studio Q
Cranberry Press of Mark & Marilyn Nero
Daiber, Steven C., Red Trillium Press
Dautricourt, Joelle , French artist working on Hebrew and latin letter and artist books since 1979
De Milo Design studio and letterpress
De Walden Press, Jan Kellett's Hand Crafted Miniature Books
Deep Wood Press of Chad Pastotnik, with separate pages for press room and bindery
Editions, site of Ed Hutchins' books
Elsner, Gretchen, pop up books, paint maker, printer, cloth pop up books
Ergo Pers Artists' Books, publisher of artists books and illustrated books (primarily Dutch)
Esslemont, David, Solmentes Press, artist, designer, printer, bookbinder and publisher
Flying Fish Press, limited edition artists' books by Julia Chen
Flying Paper Press, Jody Williams
Fournier, Jacques, Éditions Roselin
Frog Hollow Press, of Caryl Wyse Peters
Gaylord, Susan Kapuscinski, author, teacher, workshop leader
Groebner, Sandy
Grunge Papers, The, letter press printing and papermaking by Grant F. Wilkins
gycouture [design] of Guylaine Couture, Montreal, Quebec
Hanmer, Karen, artists' books and installation
Hayner Art, "Under Freak Conditions", a collaborative mixed meida book by Carl Heyward & Deborah Hayner
Hensel, Susan: Book Art
Hewett, Geoffrey & Karen, book artists (& musician)
Heyeck Press, The - Home Page
Hoffman, Judith, one of a kind artist's books made from metals, paper, and found objects, also on-line tutorials
Holman, Shireen, printmaker and book artist
Huebsch, Rand, artist's books
Intima Press, artists books by Mindy Belloff
Indian Hill Press fine, letterpress-printed books, broadsides and cards
Karen's Whimsy: Altered and Handmade Books
Koch, Peter, Printers
Langerman, Elaine
Lasqueti Press, artist books and fibre studio of Linda M. Cunningham
Lewis, Amanda , artists' books, calligraphy, paper decoration
Lilliput Press
Lin, Hannah of Farmdog Studios
Lizard Press of Melissa Kaup-Augustine
Loewy, Florence / Books by Artists
Lumiere Press of Michael Torosian, limited edition books on photography
MacCallum, Marlene, of Persnickety Press
Marsville Press, letterpress invitations and social stationery
Martin, Emily, and the Naughty Dog Press
Martin, Judith
Mayapple Press books by Judith Kerman
Michel, Karen, altered books
Miklaf, Yehuda, and the Shalom Yehuda Press, Israel
Minsky Online Home Page many examples of fine work by this pioneer book artist
Mission Creek Press artist books and handmade paper by Roberta Lavadour, includes a tutorial on making paper at home
Montgomery, Micheline
Morrish, David, Dead Cat Press
Moving Parts Press of Felicia Rice, fine art and literary publishing
Mystical Places Press publishes limited edition, hand-crafted miniature books celebrating the spirit and aesthetics of the natural environment
NetRing: Artists' Books and Book Art
Nies, Sabina U., SUN Book Arts
Obata, Gen, Books
Old Stile Press, The, of Nicolas & Frances McDowall
Oudheusden, Kez van, Handmade Books Online
Owen, Claire, Turtle Island Press
Palimpsest Press, Kingsville, Ontario
PB+J Press of Peter Bartl + Jane Merks
Piggins, Maureen, artist's books
Poltroon Press
Private Presses in Israel
Red Howler Press of David & Gretchen Moyer
Rook's Books - Home
Rummonds, Gabriel, author of Printing on the Iron Handpress maintains this site for handpress printing
Running the Goat, books and broadsides, St. John's, Newfoundland
Russell, Laura, Simple Books Ltd.
Ryckman, Joyce, artist's books
Sabuda, Robert, pop-up books page from his web site
Schaer, Miriam, book artist
Serif & Pixel Press with papermaking and calligraphy pages
Shanty Bay Press of Janis Butler & Walter Bachinski
Sheehy, Shawn, artist's books, pop-up engineering, workshops, Paperboy Press
Shinnick, John, New Wave Publishers
Simms, Meliors, Book Artist in New Zealand
Sjoblom, Kara
Spring, Jessica, and Springtide Press
Sramek, Peter, photographer and book artist
St James Park Press of James Freemantle, United KingdomStahlecker, Bonnie, Frogman's Press & Gallery

Stein, Alan, The Church Street Press, Parry Sound, Ontario

Teichert, Alice
Thee Hellbox Press of Hugh Walter Barclay
Thomas, Peter and Donna
Treyf - Online Projects and Bookworks by Rob Kovitz using appropriated images and texts recombined in a highly subjective manner
Tryst Press, The, of Rob Buchert, home of fine letterpress publishing and design; also handmade paper for sale
Walker, George, Biting Dog Press, wood engraver, book artist
Walking Bird Press of painter and book artist Tara Bryan
Wilde, Denise Carson
Wunderer, Gerd J., German book artist
Yuen, Marlene, artist's books and comics
Zybooks a showcase for contemporary artists' books, mail art projects, events, links...

E X H I B I T I O N S & C O L L E C T I O N S

Abecedarium Gallery, exhibits and represents artists working across a variety of disciplines with particular focus on contemporary book arts, works on paper, collage, and assemblage
Aberdeen Bestiary, The, University of Aberdeen Library
Art of the Book, The, rare printed books at the University of Liverpool
Arts of the Book Collection at Yale University, Sterling Memorial Library
Bibliothèque nationale de France (en français), or, Bibliothèque nationale de France (in English)
Bibliotheca Schoenbergensis, an exhbition at the University of Pennsylvania
Bienes Center for Literary Arts, The, includes an Exhibition of Movable Books and Ephemera
BGSU Popular Culture Library: PCL GALLERY with pulp paperback covers and more
Bodleian Library: Browse Images of Manuscripts
Book of Kells, The, at Trinity College, Dublin
BookFest, New York City's annual artist-created, artist-sponsored book event
British Library, The, with collections, exhibitions, digital library
Cary Graphic Arts Collection at Rochester Institute of Technology
Charlotte M. Smith Collection of Miniature Books
Colophon Gallery: The Illustrated Book a survey of genres by Richard Minsky
Colophon Page, The, with a variey of exhibitions online
Color Printing in the Nineteenth Century, an exhibition
Dead Sea Scrolls history and images.
de Grummond Children's Literature Collection at USM, The, with links to related sites and other children's literature collections
Denison Library a description of the Special Collections at Claremont College, including Papermaking and Fred W. Goudy
Diamond Sutra, The, the world's earliest dated printed book, at The British Library
Digital Image Archive of Medieval Music Virtual Restoration
DScriptorium is devoted to collecting and distributing digital images of medieval manuscripts
Dutch Paper Biennale with examples from a variety of paper artists, in Dutch and English
Ee.3.59: The Life of King Edward the Confessor
Flasch's, Joan, Artists' Books Collection
Fore-edge Paintings from the collections of the University of Florida
Herzog August Bibliothek collections of artists books, manuscripts, etc. (in German)
Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, a site celebrating the 500th anniversary of the book
Invisible Paintings Foredge paintings at the National Library of Canada.
Ishill, Joseph, and the Authors and Artists of the Oriole Press
Johnston-Lavis Literature Collection, rare books on volcanology and geology which were formerly owned by the volcanologist, Dr. Henry James Johnston-Lavis (1856-1914), held at University College, London
Master Bookbindings exhibition Arte y diseño en el libro Maestros encuaderna dores 1920 - 1970
McCune Rare Book Collection at the JFK Library, Vallejo, California; books available to be read by visitors
MFLIBRA - Livres Anciens - Old Books en français
Monastery Library at Strahov A beautiful baroque library in Prague, the Czech Republic (this site has a Flash-animated, multimedia opening page)
MOST Books view the most beautiful, most outrageous, most controversial, etc, books in the Special Collections at U. Virginia
Nat'l. Museum of Women, Exhibition Schedule in the Arts, Library, & Resource Center.
Olde Mill House Gallery a working letterpress museum in Homosassa, FL
Paper, Leather, Clay and Stone: The Written Word Materialized an exhibition of the visual and tactile
Plantin-Moretus Museum, The
Pop-up World of Ann Montanaro, The, in the Special Collection of Rutgers
Princeton University Library Rare Books and Special Collections Portfolio images available for reproduction
Printer's Devices a database
project MOBILIVRE-BOOKMOBILE project, an annual touring exhibition of artist books, zines, and independent publications
Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Columbia University Libraries
Renaissance Dante in Print (1472-1629)
Roycrofters, The, Webpage
San Francisco Public Library Book Arts and Special Collections
Science and the Artist's Book at the Smithsonian Institute
Stratford Book Festival, Stratford, Ontario, an annual event established in 2001, combining book arts exhibits and authors' festival.
SU Book Art, an Exhibition of Student work at Syracuse University Library's Department of Special Collections
Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library at the University of Toronto
Tibetan Book of the Dead literature and artwork on prayer, ritual and meditation
Toronto Public Library - Osborne Collection of early children's books
Tres Riches Heures du Duc deBerry, Les, a dozen large images from this celebrated manuscript.
University of Delaware Special Collections, Printing and the Book Arts
University of Melbourne Special Collections links page to related rare books sites
University of Oxford Early Printed Books Project
University of Pennsylvania Special Collections-Schoenberg Exhibit
University of Rochester Library, The Department of Rare Books, Special Collections & Preservation
University of Texas, archive of bookplates at
University of Virginia Book Arts Collections, Printing, Calligraphy, Wood Engraving, and Book Illustration
Victoria and Albert Museum - Book Art in the National Art Library
William Morris, U. Michigan Special Collections
Williamson Gallery pre-war Czech avant garde design
Women & Texts catalogue of an exhibition at the University of Leeds curated by Special Collections at the U. of Calgary Library
Women in the Book Arts: A Selection
Women of the Book - Introduction

Abbey Library of St. Gallen, a virtual library providing access to the medieval codices
Bibliographic Society of Canada
Bibliophile Mailing List, The, a mailing list archive, forum, and literature links.
Book and Paper Arts multimedia bibliography for kids
Book Arts Web Reference & Bibliographies
BookWire information on books, publishers, libraries, etc.
C18-L (18th century studies) Links to Libraries
Community of the Book, The, Organizations and Programs (names, addresses, web sites)
Copyright in Canada, a copyright in Canada primer to answer your copyright questions
Elements of Style, The, classic work by William Strunk Jr.
Essentials of Book Collecting, from Robert Lucas, antiquarian bookseller
History of Books, a reference guide from The New York Public Library
History of Writing Technologies, A
IPL The Internet Public Library
KBC Online Book Related Information Links
Media History Project, The, from petroglyphs to pixels
On-Line Books Page, The, an index to over 6000 on-line books, w/ search tool.
ORB--Book Index (Online Reference Book for Medieval Studies) several illustrated essays on Medieval and Renaissance Book Production: Manuscript and Printed Books
Southwest Missouri State University Libraries links to booksellers
Traister's, Daniel, Home Page History Of Books and Printing, an extensive list of online resources
Type Books a bibliography of type, design, calligraphy & related books
University of Houston Libraries Special Collections list of web resources for librarians, scholars, archivists
Victoria University--Libraries & Archives at the University of Toronto
Warburg Institute, The, University of London, book printing and illustration online bibliography and other links.

Al and Malka Green Artists' Health Centre, created by artists for artists, located in the Toronto Western Hospital
Art and Books Website, for an art course at Charles Sturt University, with vairous links to other book arts sites
Arts et MÚtiers du Livre Editions Bibliophilie, reliure, estampe, calligraphie
Bodart, library supplies, furnishings, and electronic ordering systems
Book_Arts-L Archives an archive of the Book Arts mailing list.
Book Information Website Antiquarian books, bookarts, book history, fine printing auctions: completely devoted to the art and history of printed information.
Book Lovers, Fine Books and Literature
Book Publishing and Marketing Information from PLACES FOR PUBLISHERS - Your Book Publishing Resource
Bookbinding Now, Susan Mill's biweekly podcasts of interviews with book artists
Bookplates, About, from the Art in Miniature website
Books and Book Collecting
Books2Eat, the annual (April 1st) International Edible Book Festival
BookfestWindsor (formerly the Windsor Festival of the Book) Windsor, Ontario
Boomerang Newspaper and Printing Museum by Roy M. Chatters
Coach House Books a Canadian institution for 30 years, specializing in short run fine printing
"Dance Of Death" Decorative Initials by Holbein (from Psymon Web Bindery)
"Dance Of Death" Decorative Initials by Holbein (Medieval Macabre web site)
also, Holbein's "Alphabet of Death" from the same site
Digital Librarian on book collecting, a list of links (also other lists on archives, manuscripts, and more, accessible from this site)
Education in the Book Arts in New Jersey - hand chart, or, Preaching What We Practice (click on the hands for artist book images)
Electronic Beowulf, The, digital forensics of an ancient literary masterpiece
ExLibris Webring
5th annual New Jersey Book Arts Symposium, photos from the event (Res Ipsa Loquitur: The Thing Speaks For Itself)
First Contact an ArtBook by Fons Bloemen
Flexagon Page by Kathryn Huxtable
Franklin, Benjamin, and his Printing Press
Gaspereau Press, a Nova Scotia owned and operated trade publisher, publishing short-run editions of both literary and regional interest
Green Heron Book Arts offers book and papermaking kits; click "About" for the Gallery: Faculty Show for the Oregon Book Arts Guild Focus on Content Conference
Gutenberg Museum
Hamilton Wood Type Printing Museum
How a Book is Made a site for kids from HarperCollins.
International Printing Museum, The, in Buena Park, Ca.
International Standard Paper Sizes
Is It a Book? exploring the possibilities for affecting the perception of text or, nonlinearity in literature and the book arts
McClain's Printmaking Supplies
Non Toxic printmaking resources for printmakers and educators
Piccolo Gallery and Printing Museum, The, Nairn, Scotland
Polaroid Image Transfers - Tools and Techniques by Holly DuprŽ (with links to the book in a .pdf format)
Porcupine's Quill, Inc., The, a small, literary publisher/printer in Erin, Ontario
PostModern Culture online magazine with a review by Tom Vogler of Dressing the Text exhibition
Printworks Magazine, including an Art Links page
Ten Things You Didn't Know about Your Books by Adrian Johns
This to That a site to solve gluing problems
Turkish Book Arts (hosted by the University of Guelph)
Type on the Edge of History; In Search of the Wild Photon, &c., by Peter Fraterdeus
Van Vliet, Claire, a biography and bibliography of this innovative book artist and printmaker, in celebration of the U. of Virginia Libraries' four millionth volume
Woodburytype, an obsolete method of continuous-tone printing
World of Ex-Libris, The, a historical retrospective
Writing and Publishing Program, The at Simon Fraser University, British Columbia

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If you discover a link is no longer working, or if you know of sites not listed here that you think would be of interest, please let us know by e-mailing cbbag@cbbag.ca. CBBAG would like to keep this list accurate. Inclusion of links on this website is at the discretion of CBBAG .

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The Chelsea Bindery Show the Processes of Book Binding

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The Art of Suminagashi Japanese Marbling | Craft Therapy | Apartment Therapy

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Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)

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The History of Making Books: Build a Printing Press at MIT

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Artist and designer Ben Denzer has made books from meat, toilet paper, ketchup packets, and lottery tickets, among much else. Now it's your turn to make an atypical book, in anyway you like, and using any materials you choose.

INSTRUCTIONS

Make a book that is atypical in terms of its form or material.

A book doesn't have to look, feel, or even taste like what you typically have on your shelf. Look around your house or neighborhood. What do you find? And how can you make a book from those things?

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Make an Atypical Book - The Art Assignment

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Make a book that is atypical in terms of its form or material. A book doesn't have to look, feel, or even taste like what you typically have on your shelf. Look around your house or neighborhood. What do you find? And how can you make a book from those things?

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Coptic Bookbinding Tutorial (And More!) 

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Coptic Bookbinding Tutorial (And More!) 

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This YouTube account is excellent for beginner bookbinders. Lots of great tutorials about making all kinds of books. She’s not an historical purist, per say, but her instructions are easy to follow and she often uses tools and materials you might have around the house.

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How to Make a Sketchbook | DIY Coptic Stitch Bookbinding Tutorial | Sea Lemon

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Experimental studio rooted in the paper arts

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This is a great recipe for some DIY ink for dip pens, for any so inclined! -Julie M.

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Contents

1. Ink Ingredients

2. Dextrine Syrup

3. Red Ink

4. Black Ink

5. Resources

Making homemade ink (to use in your homemade quills!) is easy, cost-effective, and fun. Good, authentic, anachronistic ink at its simplest requires only a liquid dye, which can be produced from organic materials, such as flowers, fruits, and vegetables. Some inks are slightly more complex, requiring a binding solution viscous enough to suspend powdered pigent, (such as ash or other ground natural pigments). Finally, inks produced using natural ingredients will require a preservative to preclude spoiling and mold growth (such as salt, alcohol, iodine, vinegar, etc.). For the purest, smoothest, longest-lasting ink, I will be using all three components in my recipes. Soon you'll be making your own homemade ink!

As mentioned above, the simplest inks are nothing more than liquid dye, such as the dye we will produce in our beet ink recipe below. However, including a binding agent in your ink is important for many reasons. A binding agent gives longevity to your writing, allowing the ink to keep its vibrancy for a much longer period of time. A binding agent also increases the viscosity of the ink, which prevents it from bleeding or soaking through the paper, fingering into the grain of the paper and destroying the accuracy of your stroke. Finally, the increased viscosity from the binding agent also makes the ink flow much more smoothly from the pen, resulting in greater control when writing.

Many sites suggest the use of gum arabic as the binding agent in your ink. This may be a good option for some, but I dislike the increasing rarity of gum arabic. Moreover, buying an ingredient ready-made lessons the anachronistic authenticity of the ink, which is part of the awesomeness of homemade ink. As such, I have found a great alternative, which works just as well (if not better) than gum arabic as an ink binder, which is cheap and easy to make, and which is authentic to historical ink recipes: Dextrine Syrup.

Materials

Corn Starch

Baking Sheet

Metal Spoon

Tincture of Iodine

Water

Dextrine is a sugary, yellow powder (sometimes called "canary dextrine" due to its color) which is incidentally also used as a filler/binder in homemade fireworks. Here, we will be manufacturing it with the intent of creating dextrine syrup, for use as an ink binder.

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees Farenheit. Take a measurement of corn starch (about a quarter of a cup makes enough dextrine syrup for 4-6 batches of ink, although you may make more and store the powder for future use), and spread it out onto the baking sheet. Cook the corn starch in the oven, checking the starch every 30 minutes until you begin to notice a change in the color, however slight.

At this point, use the back of the metal spoon to crush any lumps which may have formed (or may continue to form throughout the rest of the baking). Take a small amount of the powder and disolve it into a small amount of hot water. Add a few drops of iodine, and look to see if the iodine briefly changes color to a dark blue/black color. If the color change occurs, there is still starch present, and the dextrine is not complete. Continue checking the starch every 5-10 minutes, crushing any lumps and testing it with iodine, until the starch reaches a nice, uniform, canary-yellow color and the iodine starch test returns negative (or the iodine does not change color when introduced to the powder mixture).

What this process does is molecularly break down the starch chains in the corn starch, turning them into shorter, sugary starch chains in a process called "lysis." When lysis is complete and all the starch chains have broken down, dextrine results. You can package the dextrine powder in a zip-lock bag for long-term storage, or you can use all of the powder to create dextrine syrup immediately, depending upon your ink needs. Congratulations, you have now successfully created dextrine powder!

A few warnings before we continue: first, the lysis process using this low-heat method will produce a more pure dextrine, but it can take as long as eight hours to complete. You may use a higher temperature (as high as 450 degrees Farenheit) in order to decrease the total cooking time to a mere 1-3 hours; doing so, however, will likely produce a less pure dextrine, as some of the powder will begin to burn before the rest of the powder will have completed lysis. Make sure you check the corn starch much more often if you use higher tempteratures, as you don't want the powder to burn.

Also, it is nearly impossible to create 100% pure dextrine at home using this method, but this is the only authentic in-home method available, especially for the average anachronism enthusiast (who typically does not have access to a full chemistry lab). As such, your iodine will almost always change color to indicate the presence of some long starch chains, but do not distress! This dextrine is by far pure enough for our purposes, and the dextrine syrup which it produces will still act as an excellent binder for our inks. Simply cook it until you are personally satisfied with its purity, according to your own standards.

Ok, the final step to creating the dextrine powder is simple, if not standardized. Add a small amount of hot, nearly boiling water to the dextrine powder (do not use boiling water, as you do not want to risk burning the dextrine), and stir to dissolve. Use your best judgement as to the amount of water; you are looking for an end product the consistency of thick syrup. Don't worry if it is too thick or too thin; ballpark is good enough here. Use the back of the metal spoon to crush clumps and stir to help dissolve, microwaving the mixture for seconds at a time to keep the temperature up to allow for easier dissolution.

Once the powder is sufficiently dissolved into the water, add a few drops of tincture of iodine for preservation purposes. Congratulations, your dextrine syrup is complete! Allow the mixture to cool to room temperature before transferring it to your air-tight storage container. The mixture may be refrigerated for storage when not in use to extend its shelf-life even more, but be sure to bring the mixture back to room temperature before using it in ink recipes. Speaking of ink recipes, let's move on to the main attractions.

Materials

2-3 Beets

Dextrine Syrup

Salt (optional)

Vinegar

Tincture of Iodine

Small Pot

Mesh Strainer

Water

To begin, cut the stalks from the beets, leaving a couple of inches of stalk intact. You may skin the beets at this juncture, which will create a lighter, more pure red. I prefer to leave the skins on, giving the ink a deeper and more earthy red. Cut the beets into 1-2 inch cubes, place in the pot, and add enough distilled water to cover the beets. Place the beets over high heat until the water begins to boil. Reduce the heat to medium-low and simmer for approximately an hour, or until the dye reduces to the amount of ink you're looking to make. The longer you boil the beets, the more intense the dye will be. Be careful not to cook for too long and lose all the liquid to steam; if this happens, add more water and begin the process over again.

When you're satisfied with the intensity of the dye's color, use the pour the dye through the mesh strainer into a bowl. Toss the solids (or eat them if you prefer; I personally find beets offensive), and pour about 4 tablespoons of the dye into your air-tight jar/ink well. Then, add dextrine syrup 1/8 tablespoon at a time until the ink is the desired consistency (this will depend on the consistency of your dextrine syrup, but I use about 1 tablespoon of the syrup in my mixture). Stir the ink to integrate the syrup into the dye, and test the ink's performance with your homemade quills to make sure you're satisfied with the result. Then, add a splash of vinegar and a few drops of iodine to help preserve the ink. If you're using homemade quills, you can add a pinch or two or salt for extra preservation, but do not add salt if you plan to use this ink with steel fountain pens.

You now have a beautiful, purplish-red ink to illuminate your very own letters and manuscripts. Note that really any organic plant matter with a deep color can be used in this recipe. Blackberries, yellow onion skins, and red cabbage are just a few other options, and each will produce their own unique color. Mrs. Stewart's Liquid Bluing performs admirably as the dye in this recipe in order to create a deep, beautiful blue ink as well.

Materials

Ash or Lampblack

Water

Dextrine Syrup

Vinegar

Salt (optional)

Tincture of Iodine

Mortar and Pestle

Mesh Strainer/Sifter

A smooth, deep, dark, black ink is not easy to accomplish. But after much research, scouring the internet for every black india ink recipe available, I've finally found one that works well. India ink is slightly more complicated than the previous inks we've seen. This is because we've been working with dyes to color our inks, but india ink uses pigment. What's the difference? Dye particles are so small they disperse completely in water, coloring the liquid evenly. Pigment particles are harder to work with because they're bigger, meaning you need to have a thicker liquid capable of evenly suspending the pigment particles throughout the mixture. Don't fall prey to this difficulty and use bad ingredidients in your ink, though; be ware of the recipes that call for egg yolks or corn syrup or honey, as these ingredients make ink that spoils quickly and doesn't dry. All you need for good, traditional india ink is ash, water, and our favorite binding agent: dextrine syrup! Let's get started!

You can buy lampblack online, but then again you can also buy ink online, so buying things online seems to defeat the purpose here, doesn't it? At any rate, if you want to make your own ash, read the next paragraph. If you're buying lampblack, you can skip ahead.

For my ash, I collect old papers and junk mail for burning. I don't have a shredder, so burning is a good way to destroy documents. Sit in a well-ventilated area, and keep a bucket of water handy just in case. Rip the papers into half- or quarter-sized sheets, and burn them one or two at a time in a fire-safe container (preferably one with high sides). When the fire is near to going out, add another sheet or two to keep it going. When you're out of paper, allow the embers to burn completely, as this will produce a finer ash. Transfer the ash to a mortar and pestle, and grind it to a fine powder. There may be pieces of paper that did not burn fully; take these out of the powder and discard them. Sift out any remaining pieces of paper, and return the pure ash to the mortar.

With the ash/lampblack in the mortar, and a small amount of water, just enough to wet the ash through. Grind the ash and water together with the mortar and pestle until you have a smooth paste. Add more water as necessary. Sources differ on how long you need to mix and grind until the ash is adequately mixed in the paste. While some claim you should mix as long as a week (!), I find that 15-30 minutes is good enough. At this low time, the ash particles may have the tendency to clog your quill after a while, but I prefer washing out my quill with clean water to grinding ash paste for days on end. Mix until you're satisfied with the result. Now add dextrine syrup as before; this time, though, you'll need more than before. Again, there is no exact measure, but add the syrup 1/8 teaspoon at a time, testing each time until you reach the desired consistency. Add your preferred preservatives as before, and you're done! You will likely need to agitate the ink before each use, either by shaking or stirring, in order to redistribute the pigment throughout the medium.

I've compiled the following brief list of resources which were helpful to me in my homemade ink endeavors. Utilize them as you see fit; they will surely help you to create the best homemade inks possible. If you have any questions which are not covered in my tutorials or these links, feel free to contact me and I will do my best to help. Cheers!

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Contents Ink Ingredients Dextrine Syrup Red Ink Black Ink Resources Making homemade ink (to use in your homemade quills!) is easy, cost-effective, and fun. Good, authentic, anachronistic ink at its simplest requires only a liquid dye, which can be produced from organic materials, such as flowers, fruits, and vegetables.

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I see someone already posted a Sea Lemon video, but she also has a lot of videos with tips on different binding methods and materials!

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Tutorials that focus on a specific method/stitch. Apply these methods to anything in my DIY Book Projects playlist!

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60 Second Documentary on Jason Logan (author of “Make Ink”) 

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60 Second Documentary on Jason Logan (author of “Make Ink”) 

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A good overview of the Medieval Manuscript creation process from the Getty Museum

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A good overview of the Medieval Manuscript creation process from the Getty Museum

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This video doesn't go into great detail, but contains a good overview of the steps of making a book according to European medieval practices. -Julie M.

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Tap the "New" button to create a new font-project.
* If the app is freezing, please refer to this article.

Select a glyph to edit, and draw it on the canvas area. Tap the button to adjust the zoom level.

You can set the pen style and radius with the pop-up menu and slider.

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iFontMaker - Create your font in 5 minutes on your iPad

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Tap the "New" button to create a new font-project. * If the app is freezing, please refer to this article. Select a glyph to edit, and draw it on the canvas area. Tap the button to adjust the zoom level. You can set the pen style and radius with the pop-up menu and slider.

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FontStruct is a free, font-building tool funded by advertising and some generous sponsors.

With FontStruct you can easily create fonts using geometrical shapes.

You create " FontStructions" using the " FontStructor " font editor.

Once you're done building, FontStruct generates TrueType fonts, ready to download and use in any application.

You can keep your creations private, but we encourage users to share their FontStructions. Explore the Gallery of fonts made by other FontStruct users. Download them, or clone them and make your own variations.

The easiest way to get started with the FontStructor is to watch the intro screencast or read the quick start guide.

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FontStruct | Build, Share, Download Fonts

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FontStruct. Build, Share, Download Fonts

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‎LetterMpress is a creative environment that lets you design beautiful compositions with vintage wood type and art cuts on a virtual hand-driven printing press. LetterMpress gives you the experience of producing your designs on a letterpress - placing and arranging type on the press bed, inking, an...

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Speedball® Block Printing Kits - Speedball Art

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Whether you're new to block printing or a seasoned pro, Speedball's Block Printing Kits make for a simple and convenient way to stock up on your block printing supplies. Featuring a selection of our most popular block printing materials, Speedball has the kit to match your printing project's, classroom's or studio's needs perfectly!

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This is a link to an artist with some classes (not free) and a breakdown of materials and their uses (free) for linocut. Her instagram (@riseandwander) has some awesome reels that break down the at-home printing process very well.

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Tools & Materials

A comprehensive list of everything used in the Rise + Wander studio, with links and a bit of commentary to help guide your art supply explorations.

Tools and materials are, by far, the most popular questions we get each day. Below, you'll find a list of everything used most regularly in the Rise + Wander studio. These opinions are based on personal experience, and it's important to remember that experimenting on your own is crucial. Your personal preferences might vary wildly, and it's up to you to determine what works best for your technique and style.

As you scroll through, please note that if you order through the links below Rise + Wander can earn a small commission from the seller's affiliate program. This in no way influences the items shared here, but is a way to make it easier for you to shop, while also helping to compensate for time, research, etc. Win/win!

And, on that note, here's the fine print: Rise + Wander is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for us to earn fees by linking to Amazon.com and affiliated sites. We also participate in Blick's affiliate program. This said, the following opinions are based solely on real experience and preferences, written with no regard to the affiliate programs.

The Basics to Get Started

When you're just starting out, the wide variety of printmaking supplies on the market can feel overwhelming - especially if you're creating on a budget. This first list is a pared down collection that lets you start printing right away with quality supplies that will last you quite a while, and also give you great results without breaking the bank.

Speedball's lino-cutter has an interchangeable head that lets you try out multiple gouges, so you'll know where to invest when you're ready.

Speedball Speedy Carve is a great rubber to start with, as it's smooth, yet firm. The Tan Linoleum is another great option, but a little harder to carve into for beginners. Both are durable and last without crumbling.

Speedball's Professional Ink is oil-based, but with very easy clean-up. I always recommend starting here, even though it's more expensive than the water-based inks, because it'll give you amazing results right away and give you a great printing experience.

Speedball Soft Rubber Brayeris an easy go-to. Just remember to get a size that matches the block sizes you'll plan to work on (not too small, not too big).

Arnhem 1618 or Legion's Stonehengecotton rag papers are both great options for paper, and come in different pre-cut sizes or full sheets.

A bench hook or anacrylic sheet are great options for rolling ink out, but aren't necessary items. Many people start out using flat-bottomed glass dishes (I know I did).

Speedball Barenisn't a necessity, as you can easily use your hands or the back of a wooden spoon, but it can make getting clean prints a little easier sometimes.

The Full Printmaking List

I spent my first years of printmaking using Speedball's lino-cutter, which comes with interchangeable heads and a comfortable plastic handle. Replacement heads are easy and inexpensive. I highly, highly recommend it to anyone looking to start printing, as it's highly affordable, extremely easy to use and care for, and can last you many years. This is also the best way for you to explore different gouge shapes without breaking the bank.

When I finally decided to invest in a set of premium tools, I chose Pfeil's set Cand am endlessly happy with the upgrade. I chose Set C because it included all the gouges I use most often, but it's important to really consider what you personally will need. A little pricey, but worth it. Keep in mind these require sharpening.

Most recently, I have started to use Flexcut's palm tools with comfortable wooden handles and sharp, sharp blades. I find them to be the most comfortable tools I've tried yet! These also require sharpening, but luckily Flexcut also has a really easy-to-use sharpening kit for maintenance.

I alternate between both rubber and linoleum blocks, depending on the project. Each has its benefits, as well as its quirks. I buy all three different types from Blick.

Battleship Gray Linoleum is wonderfully inexpensive and can be found in extremely large sizes (24"x36" mounted). It tends to be a slower process, as the material is harder and more prone to cracking if you're not careful. The blocks can also harden over time if not properly cared for, especially with frequent use. I like to buy the pre-mounted blocks, as a personal preference; the mounting makes them really easy to handle while printing and stay perfectly flat.

Blick makes a two-toned rubber called Ready-Cut that's a bit more expensive, but still very reasonable. It also comes in a variety of sizes, with its largest being 12"x18". It carves smoothly and easily, with only a little snagging here and there if your tools aren't sharpened properly. It has become my preference lately.

Speedball makes a pink rubber called Speedy Carve, which is the smoothest to carve, extremely durable, (you can come back after years and years, without any quality difference in printing), and just a dream to work with. It's a little pricier to buy, but really worth it. Unfortunately, they're a little more limited on sizes, with the largest being right around 12"x12". Also, don't be confused by their similarly named materials (they are worth trying, but not the same thing); remember to look for the pink rubber!

There are so many different options available, and this is one area it's especially important to experiment for yourself to determine what you enjoy carving and what will print best for you. You want to ensure you enjoy the experience from start to finish!

I use Speedball's Professionalline of water-miscible, oil-based relief printing ink the most often, as it provides excellent coverage and is ridiculously easy to clean up (just as easy as water-soluble). You spray some Windex on to the block, brayer, and inking plate, and it washes off in seconds. I kind of think they've created magic over there at Speedball.

But, if you're just starting out with printmaking, I definitely recommend buying either Speedball's water-soluble ink or the Blick version. They are a little cheaper and will work great as you experiment and explore. Speedball has a lovely water-soluble ink starter set with multiple colors to try out - and have fun mixing!

Please understand that for many projects, you're completely fine to use water-soluble ink - and if you're doing anything with kids it's probably preferable (and less expensive when the kiddos invariably waste it). There is a bit of a misconception that oil-based is automatically better. Water-miscible works really, really well with great coverage and viscosity. That said, oil-based is especially important for mixed-media projects, like adding watercolor, as the ink won't bleed. It's also important for creating beautiful highly-pigmented archival pieces.

Next to material, I find inks to be one of the most finicky elements of printmaking - one printmaker might swear by a certain brand, while another has nothing nice to say about it. This is an area I really encourage you to branch out and experiment before settling on a favorite. All sorts of factors can affect what works for you personally, from your style to your climate.

I have many Speedball brayers, and have used both hard and soft rubbers. The general rule is that hard brayers are better to keep ultra-fine details in tact, as soft brayers are more likely to bring ink into those fine carving lines. If you're using softer rubber on fine detail, it's important to build up light layers of ink to avoid flooding the image. I like to keep a variety of sizes on hand to use according to the block size.

Right around when I upgraded my gouges, I decided to buy a Speedball Baren for Block Printing. I'd been using my hands exclusively for a year (that old wooden spoon trick never did much for me) and wanted to be able to apply firmer, but still even pressure. I bought the simple Speedball baren, and it has definitely helped. I don't know why I waited!

This is the item that took the longest to find something that really worked for me. I tried many brands and types, with different results. I was often smitten with the beautifully textured papers or those with all the interesting details... but in the end, I love 100% cotton rag that's velvety soft and smooth. For most projects, I use some variety of Legion Paper's Stonehenge lineor Speedball's Arnhem 1618. Along with ink, I think paper can be one of the biggest variations between artists. It really depends on an individual's preferences and vision for the work.

Full disclosure, I'm the opposite of a brush snob. I once purchased a bundle of ten used brushes at an antique shop for $1 and fell in love with them. I typically use palette knives for many of my acrylic works, but my go-to brushes tend to be the Utrecht Manglon Synthetic Brushes. They're reasonably priced, are comfortable to use and work well, hold up to a fair bit of abuse, and generally last quite a while.

Now, if I'm totally honest, though, I do have favorites. Escoda brushes.I have a good handful of these in different shapes and sizes, some for watercolors and some for acrylics. These are a bit pricier (for good reason, they're amazing!) and I treat them like little bristled divas to ensure they last me forever.

I love Golden's acrylic paints. Full stop. Period. Mic drop. Enough said.

Except, of course, I'll say more. I use the heavy body line most often, as it's buttery smooth and rich in pigment. The colors are beautiful and they lend themselves well to my heavy paint swipes. They're beautiful and dry quite quickly. There's a nice starter kit you can purchase to try them out.

But as much as I love the heavy body line, I also love the slow-drying OPEN line for landscapes, when I want to manipulate the paint longer. They also have a softer texture.

And, finally, the fluid line has its place in my work and I do enjoy the nice and easy flow for some aspects of projects.

Clearly there are a number of options just within one brand, so be sure to check out these, but also try out others. Walk into an art store (with coupons, obviously) and select a few different brands and types to try. Don't commit and buy all your favorite colors until you're positive this is the paint you love.

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A comprehensive list of everything used in the Rise + Wander studio, with links and a bit of commentary to help guide your art supply explorations. Tools and materials are, by far, the most popular questions we get each day. Below, you'll find a list of everything used most regularly in the Rise + Wander studio.

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How I made my master thesis

A little film from the process of making "Av Handling". I always find it the most fun to se how something was made, the actions done on the way to a finished product.
And of course - I had loads of fun making this!

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How I made my master thesis - Ane Thon Knutsen

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How I made my master thesis A little film from the process of making "Av Handling". I always find it the most fun to se how something was made, the actions done on the way to a finished product. And of course - I had loads of fun making this!

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A New-brunswick artist, Peter Powning, has some wonderful pieces in a series he is calling "Books as Objects," and thought of this class immediately when I saw this post shared by the UNB English department on Facebook.
Here is a link for any so inclined to take a peak:
https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=3888827134537346&id=1151892708230816&sfnsn=mo

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Here's a technique that I learned about last semester; it's mostly used in zines. For people looking to do very colourful printing, this is a fun and relatively modern technique... though I'm not sure if there are places with risograph machines open where you guys are (definitely not something people can do at home).

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Four artists with a long history of Risograph printing give advice on how to kickstart your first Riso print project.

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INTRO TO BINDING: JAPANESE STAB BINDING TUTORIAL (flexible cover with three-hole stitching)

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For those interested in making books, Japanese stab bindings are an ideal place to start. They are simple, don't require many tools, and are endlessly customizable. Today we'll be starting with the easiest of the stab bindings, a simple three-hole binding.

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Virtual Book Arts Fair (Feb. 24-28) hosted by Printed Matter in NYC

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Virtual Book Arts Fair (Feb. 24-28) hosted by Printed Matter in NYC

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Collection of Artists’ Books at MassArts

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Collection of Artists’ Books at MassArts

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The Art of Bookbinding : Joseph William Zaehnsdorf : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

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Book digitized by Google from the library of Harvard University and uploaded to the Internet Archive by user tpb.

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The Colour (Poetic inky newsletter by Jason Logan)

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The Colour (Poetic inky newsletter by Jason Logan)

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Hi my name is Jason Logan I am the founder of the Toronto Ink Company and author of Make Ink. I am curious about science and alchemy and foraging about place based art making and the space between craft, fine art, physics, therapy, gardening and historical plant lore that natural colour winds its way around.

Subscribe to get full access to the newsletter and website. I will include recipes ideas and some notes on various colour adventures. Never miss an update.

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You won't have to worry about missing anything. Every new edition of the newsletter goes directly to your inbox.

Join the Revolution

Be part of a community of pigment collectors, plant lovers, foragers, inkists, makers and people curious about taking back the means of art production and rewilding colour. Maybe these are your people or maybe you are just curious.

To find out more about the company that provides the tech for this newsletter, visit Substack.com.

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The Colour | Toronto Ink Company | Substack

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Hi my name is Jason Logan I am the founder of the Toronto Ink Company and author of Make Ink. I am curious about science and alchemy and foraging about place based art making and the space between craft, fine art, physics, therapy, gardening and historical plant lore that natural colour winds its way around.

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iBookBinding - Bookbinding Tutorials & Resources

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Top 15 Japanese Stab Binding Tutorials on the Internet - iBookBinding - Bookbinding Tutorials & Resources

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We have decided to do a post on the top 15 of the best Japanese Stab Binding instructions and tutorials we could find on the web (also known as the Traditional Chinese Binding Method)

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Ukiyo-e Technique (video from Feb. 7 class) 

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Ukiyo-e Technique (video from Feb. 7 class) 

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Smithsonian's National Museum of Asian Art

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The Ukiyo-e Technique: Traditional Japanese Printmaking

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We love Lego! It's so versatile you can even print letterpress style with it!

Create a 2-D, 8 bit style image out of Lego. Participants will create their own image with Lego pieces snapped onto a base plate and then ink and print a small edition of their creations.

Workshop Registration Information

To register you can come to the studio in person or contact us by phone or email. A deposit of 50% is required to hold a spot in any workshop. The deposit can be paid by cash, cheque or Visa/MC or direct deposit. Cheques can be made out to Akemi Nishidera and mailed to KOZO Studio/Gallery.
The studio is open Fridays and Saturdays between 2 and 6 pm if you wish to visit and pay in person.
Email: kozostudio@gmail.com
Tel: 416-214-1882
You may also book a private workshop for 1 to 4 people. Please contact Akemi for details.

Letterpress using 'Lego' is perfect for young creators! no need to learn all about furniture, picas, points, em spaces and lines. Just snap the pieces on the grid, roll the ink on and crank the handle on the Vandercook SP15 flatbed press. The young creators will learn to hand ink their 'Lego' plates in order individualize colours.

*max 4 participants, minimum of 2

Hallowe'en Lego-press for Young Creators

Print Lego-press with a Hallowe'en theme!
Saturday Oct. 22 from 9:30 am - 12:30 pm

Postponed! New date
Sunday Nov. 13th from 10am - 4pm
Create a small 2 colour edition prints using 'Lego'! The first part of the morning will be spent mapping out the two separate colours on a grid and creating the plate and printing the first colour. The latter part of the day will be for creating the plate for the second colour, registering it and printing.

*max 4 participants, minimum of 2

*max 4 participants, minimum of 2*
Cost: $ 105.00 plus $ 13.65 HST (materials included)

Sunday Oct. 2 from 1 pm - 5 pm
This 4 hour workshop is a basic introduction to letterpress printing. Participants will get an overview of the different types of presses used for letterpress printing and dabble in the craft of letterpress printing. We will use vintage metal and wood type and vintage cuts (images) from my collection to create a simple form for an edition of single colour cards, gift tags, stationery or post cards. You will then be guided in inking and printing your form on the Craftsman press and/or the Showcard flatbed press.
*The Introduction workshops are great if you are curious about letterpress or are not sure if getting into letterpress printing is for you!*

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We love Lego! It's so versatile you can even print letterpress style with it! Create a 2-D, 8 bit style image out of Lego. Participants will create their own image with Lego pieces snapped onto a base plate and then ink and print a small edition of their creations.

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Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center

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The story of Black Mountain College begins in 1933 and comprises a fascinating chapter in the history of education and the arts. Conceived by John A. Rice, a brilliant and mercurial scholar who left Rollins College in a storm of controversy, Black Mountain College was born out of a desire to create a new type of college based on John Dewey's principles of progressive education. The events that precipitated the college's founding occurred simultaneously with the rise of Adolf Hitler, the closing of the Bauhaus school in Germany, and escalating persecution of artists and intellectuals in Europe. Some of these refugees found their way to Black Mountain, either as students or faculty. Meanwhile, the United States was mired in the Great Depression.

The founders of the college believed that the study and practice of art were indispensable aspects of a student's general liberal arts education, and they hired Josef Albers to be the first art teacher. Speaking not a word of English, he and his wife Anni left the turmoil in Hitler's Germany and crossed the Atlantic Ocean by boat to teach art at this small, rebellious college in the mountains of North Carolina.

Black Mountain College was fundamentally different from other colleges and universities of the time. It was owned and operated by the faculty and was committed to democratic governance and to the idea that the arts are central to the experience of learning. All members of the college community participated in its operation, including farm work, construction projects, and kitchen duty. Twenty minutes east of Asheville, the secluded environment fostered a strong sense of individuality and creative intensity.

Legendary even in its own time, Black Mountain College attracted and created maverick spirits, some of whom went on to become well-known and extremely influential individuals in the latter half of the 20th century. A partial list includes Willem and Elaine de Kooning, Robert Rauschenberg, Josef and Anni Albers, Jacob Lawrence, Merce Cunningham, John Cage, Cy Twombly, Kenneth Noland, Susan Weil, Vera B. Williams, Ben Shahn, Ruth Asawa, Franz Kline, Arthur Penn, Buckminster Fuller, M.C. Richards, Francine du Plessix Gray, Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Dorothea Rockburne and many others who have made an impact on the world in a significant way. Even now, decades after its closing in 1957, the powerful influence of Black Mountain College continues to reverberate. For more information view our resources.

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Black Mountain College: A Brief Introduction - Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center

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The story of Black Mountain College begins in 1933 and comprises a fascinating chapter in the history of education and the arts...

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Images extracted from the latter half of Choregraphie, a book first published in 1700 which details a dance notation system invented in the 1680s at the court of Louis XIV. Its author, Raoul-Auger Feuillet, was maître de danse of the French King. In 1704 another maître de danse, Pierre Beauchamp, filed a formal complaint, arguing that Feuillet had taken credit for what was in fact Beauchamp's invention. The system, which survived in modified forms into the 1780s, is now known as Beauchamp-Feuillet notation. It indicates the placement of the feet and six basic leg movements: plié, releveé, sauté, cabriole, tombé, and glissé. Changes of body direction and numerous ornamentations of the legs and arms are also part of the system, which is based on tract drawings that trace the pattern of the dance. Additionally, bar lines in the dance score correspond to bar lines in the music score. Signs written on the right or left hand side of the tract indicate the steps. Voltaire ranked the invention as one of the "achievements of his day" and Denis Diderot devoted ten pages to the subject in his Encylopdédie.

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Collection of Dances in Choreography Notation (1700)

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Images extracted from the latter half of Choregraphie, a book first published in 1700 which details a dance notation system invented in the 1680s at the court of Louis XIV. Its author, Raoul-Auger Feuillet, was maître de danse of the French King.

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Vicious Cycle on view at CEPA Underground Gallery from April 13 - June 15 Opening Reception: Friday, April 13th from 7-10 PM In Vicious Cycle, MacNeil draws connections between the physical and psychological impressions left by traumatic experiences.

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In 1963, when he was just twenty years old, David Hammons moved to Los Angeles from his hometown of Springfield, Illinois. For the next five years he studied art while attending several schools in LA, among them Chouinard Art Institute (now California Institute of the Arts) and the Otis Art Institute, where he took a drawing class with the painter and printmaker Charles White. Prior to meeting White, Hammons says he had never encountered a successful black artist, and thus White made a great impression on the young artist. Hammons was particularly drawn to White's figurative work that possessed "an agonized kind of look." (1) During this nascent period of his artistic practice, Hammons became involved with the Black Arts Movement (BAM), centered in the Watts neighborhood from 1965 to 1976. Work associated with the BAM was characterized as image-based and socially motivated, or as art historian Kellie Jones notes, "[it was] figurative and commented on U.S. racism." (2) Hammons was among the leading figures to come out of this movement in the late 1960s, frequently exhibiting at the Brockman Gallery and Gallery 32.

From the start Hammons's work was politically driven and rooted in the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements-perhaps an inescapable aspect of his coming of age in and around Watts during the 1960s. It hardly seems insignificant that Hammons started making his first mature works of art, his body prints, in 1968-one of the most violent, politically charged years in recent American history: Martin Luther King was assassinated, President Nixon was elected, and protests against the Vietnam War reached unprecedented levels, escalating in the U.S. with the riots at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. It is not surprising then, that all of the aforementioned events would inform the subject matter of Hammons's body prints. One could even say the body prints-specifically those that incorporate imagery of the American flag-were the most overtly political works Hammons would make over the course of his fifty-year career. As time progressed, Hammons's work would become increasingly ambiguous and resistant to easy interpretation, despite consistently retaining a unique brand of irony and critical edge.

In the body prints, Hammons marries his interests in graphic art and performance. In order to make the monoprints, he coated his body (along with his clothes and hair) in margarine and then rolled his torso and limbs onto a large piece of illustration board, printing the image by pressing his body onto the smooth surface of paper, often arrayed on the floor. About this very physical act, he has stated, "When I lie down on the paper which is first placed on the floor, I have to carefully decide how to get up after I have made the impression that I want. Sometimes I lie there for perhaps three minutes or even longer just figuring out how I can get off the paper without smudging the image that I'm trying to print." (3) Upon leaving his impression, he sifted powdered pigments over the coated paper, capturing color across the printed area. Once the image was set, he sprayed a fixative over the surface, which could also have the effect of intensifying the color. Later he added embellishments, such as the American flag, employing printing techniques such as silkscreen and lithography. Because of the unpredictable nature of the printing process, he printed his body first, adding the silkscreened elements later, once he had determined where the additions would work in relation to the corporeal imagery. By paying close attention to the textures created by certain fabrics, he was able to achieve a high degree of detail in the final print. If he wanted a lighter impression, he would roll his coated body against paper hung on the wall.

This printing technique is not without precedent in art history. One might recall Robert Rauschenberg and Susan Weil's experimental photograms with architectural blueprint paper from the 1950s, Yves Klein's Anthropometries from the early 1960s, and Jasper Johns's hand and face prints, also from the early 1960s. It is Johns, however, whose technique most closely relates to Hammons's; he similarly coated his skin with baby oil before making impressions of his body on mechanical drafting paper. Johns's visages, which seemed imprisoned beneath the paper, were revealed when he rubbed them with strokes of charcoal. (Moreover, it seems germane that nearly a decade earlier Johns also famously interrogated the American flag, recreating it with encaustic and torn fragments of newspaper.)

In contrast, however, to these noted precedents, Hammons's work is distinctive in its incorporation of highly charged political subject matter that throws into question the relationship between being an African American and an American citizen-a dissonant reality that was in the process of being intensely challenged during the time that the body prints were made. Hammons has stated: "I feel that my art relates to my total environment-my being a black, political, and social human being. Although I am involved with communicating with others, I believe that my art itself is really my statement. For me it has to be." (4)

In Boy with Flag (1968), one of his earliest body prints, Hammons's figure is visible on the right side of the paper in profile, his chest pressing up against a section of the American flag that vertically dominates the left side of the composition. In works such as this one, Hammons uses the flag as a structuring device; its proximity delineates the body and its surrounding space. Hammons envisions an uneasy relationship between the two: The flag becomes an object the body must push against and resist, lest it subsume the African American subject. We see this tension perhaps most clearly in the work Black First, American Second (1970). For this print Hammons used black illustration board, rendering the background dark and murky. Twinned impressions of the artist's body-again in profile with one higher than the other-are shown wrapped in the undulating form of the flag, as if they are hugging it for safety, in what one perceives as an ironic gesture. Yet the two bodies tightly compressed by the flag create an awkward spatial composition, further suggesting that the flag might also be smothering and constricting the figures. In the body prints, the American flag pressurizes the human form, as if it is the agent of disfiguration and distortion, and even a metaphor for agony and torture.

The subject of torture is rendered most explicitly in Hammons's body print Injustice Case (1970) where we see the artist, again in profile, violently bound to a chair and gagged. The print is superimposed against an actual American flag that looks sullied in comparison to the stark white sheet of paper. Hammons erased the remaining pigment marks from the background to create the clean, crisp image. The portrait recalls the searing courtroom sketch of Bobby Seale, co-founder of the Black Panthers, during the 1969 trial of the Chicago Eight. After being denied the right to counsel of his choosing, as well as the right to defend himself in court, Seale was bound and gagged in the courtroom in response to his repeated vocal interruptions. He was later sentenced to prison for four years for contempt of court. Due to the unconstitutionality of the proceedings, however, Seale's sentence was eventually overturned. The trial was widely publicized, and the broadly disseminated drawing became a sign of the injustice of the American legal system for African Americans at that time. Hammons's use of the American flag in this work challenges the purity associated with the flag and its attendant virtues of "liberty and the pursuit of happiness," conflating it instead with the inequity of actual black experience. Likewise, the translucent quality of the print, which resembles a photographic negative, conjures the latent absence of political rights, while the form serves as a material trace of Hammons's own bodily presence.

Hammons throws the iconic nature of the American flag into question in his body prints, in a patent unraveling of the patriotic symbol-a deconstruction facilitated by the presence of his own black, male body, which he incisively uses as an agent of political indictment. In the ironic America the Beautiful (1968), America is anything but beautiful. Rather, Hammons portrays it as an unsettling yet enigmatic presence to behold-a signifier of the American grotesque. To make this frontal impression, Hammons needed to print each side of his face, so that the two profiles could merge into a single, distorted visage with obliterated eyes. The American flag draped over Hammons's head, in a pose evocative of the religious cloak (or shroud) of the Virgin Mary, augments the haunting quality of the image. In this print, we see, perhaps, an apotheosis of the "agonized look" Hammons so revered in White's work. The black figure, here, becomes a ghostly body (again both absent and present): a harbinger for American hypocrisy that at once represents the disenfranchisement, discrimination, and prejudice for an African American body politic.

By the mid 1970s Hammons had moved on from the body prints, and in 1974, he resettled in New York, where he has made his home ever since. His move to New York coincided with the end of the body prints, and henceforward his work became less graphic and, in general, less overtly political. He would later continue experimental printing techniques in his basketball drawings, bouncing a dirty basketball over a large sheet of paper on the floor to create a hazy, abstract pattern. Furthermore, his interest in rethinking stereotypes and racial identity persisted in his seminal works U.N.I.A. Flag (1990), and African-American Flag (1990), a clever amalgamation of the stars and stripes with Marcus Garvey's nationalist palette of red, black, and green-a new insignia (with all of its latent irony) for an African American nation.

Apsara DiQuinzio is curator of modern and contemporary art and Phyllis C. Wattis Matrix curator at the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA).

Notes:
(1) Ebria Feinblatt, ed., Three Graphic Artists: Charles White, David Hammons, Timothy Washington (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1973), 7.

(2) Kellie Jones, "Thoughts on Art in Los Angeles," in LA Object & David Hammons Body Prints, ed. Connie Rogers Tilton and Lindsay Charlwood, (New York: Tilton Gallery, 2011), 45.

(3) Feinblatt, Three Graphic Artists, 8.

(4) Feinblatt, Three Graphic Artists, 7.

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CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts

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In 1963, when he was just twenty years old, David Hammons moved to Los Angeles from his hometown of Springfield, Illinois. For the next five years he studied art while attending several schools in LA, among them Chouinard Art Institute (now California Institute of the Arts) and the Otis Art Institute, where he took a drawing class with the painter and printmaker Charles White.

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Ane Thon Knutsen: Letterpress Process Timelapse

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Ane Thon Knutsen: Letterpress Process Timelapse

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Hva er det jeg ser på?

Dokumentasjon av de 3 månedene det tok å sette og trykke Virginia Woolfs The Mark on The Wall (1917). I denne adapsjonen nærleser jeg novellen, ord for ord, og oversetter den fra boken (Two Stories) til et eget rom (Fra døren i eget trykkeri til overlyssalen på Kunstnernes Hus). Novellen kan leses i kronologisk rekkefølge, trykk for trykk, på døren midt i bildet.

The Mark on The Wall er den første novellen Virginia Woolf publiserte på eget forlag, skrevet mens hun lærte seg selv å sette løse typer. Novellen er et produkt av en forfatter dypt involvert i bokens tilblivelse. Den er kjent for å ha mange koblinger til boken som objekt, og drar paralleller mellom veggen og boksiden. Woolf visker ut grensene mellom subjekt og objekt, fantasi og virkelighet. Med en egen trykkpresse fikk hun makt over publiseringen av eget arbeid og alle forutsetningene for manifestasjon av tanker i fysisk format.

Lytt til refleksjoner.

Novellen dveler i fantasiens frihet og grenseløshet. Den konkluderer aldri, men insisterer på refleksjon. Dette essayet består av refleksjoner og spørsmål gjort langsmed trykkeprosessen, med både gamle og nye tanker som flyter opp av arbeidet. Du kan velge om du vil lytte med eller uten filmen. Lydboken tar ca 30 min, timelapsen ca 2 t 18 min. Lest av Ane Thon Knutsen.

FAQ

Dette er den siste av en rekke adapsjoner av novellen, og hovedverket i mitt doktorgradsarbeid i Grafisk Design ved Kunsthøgskolen i Oslo. For å se tidligere arbeider, .

Satt og trykket med Adobe Caslon Pro av Carol Twombly, 14 cicero, fet, versaler, CNC-frest i valchromat på Fellesverkstedet. Trykket på 45/48 g A3 avismakulatur i kjelleren min på en Triumpf korrekturpresse, arvet av Otto Stenersen Boktrykkeri, Oslo.

Prosjektsammendrag på norsk og engelsk:

Installasjon åpner på Kunstnernes Hus 22. januar klokka 19:00 og står til og med 27 januar 2019. Gratis & åpent for alle.

© 2019 Ane Thon Knutsen
Nettside av Ylva Greni Gulbrandsen

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Dokumentasjon av de 3 månedene det tok å sette og trykke Virginia Woolfs The Mark on The Wall (1917). I denne adapsjonen nærleser jeg novellen, ord for ord, og oversetter den fra boken (Two Stories) til et eget rom (Fra døren i eget trykkeri til overlyssalen på Kunstnernes Hus).

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Every year, for one night only, the grounds at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery transform into an outdoor music venue, attracting internationally-acclaimed acts. In the past it's been Wilco, The National, Beck-2019 was Death Cab for Cutie's turn.

This unique campaign for the event included promotional materials and merchandise, beginning with a four-color, silkscreened gig poster. Directly inspired by the band's lyrics, it casts a lone fish as the classic underdog hero, hanging in despite the odds-an apt metaphor for the City of Buffalo.

A second poster-a gift for VIP attendees-was letterpressed in collaboration with the Western New York Book Arts Center (WNYBAC). The typography used throughout the campaign was extracted from specimen sheets printed at WNYBAC. It's featured in type lockups for Alright, Alright, Albright!, a special beer brewed for the event by Labatt Brewhouse. Lastly, a limited-edition tee shirt and custom stamp, both inspired by an architectural detail from the museum-a spiral-bearded-sun-god-looking dude-were created.

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Rockin' At The Knox 2019 Campaign > Work > White Bicycle - Buffalo, NY - Design Studio

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Every year, for one night only, the grounds at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery transform into an outdoor music venue, attracting internationally-acclaimed acts. In the past it’s been Wilco, The National, Beck-2019 was Death Cab for Cutie’s turn. This unique campaign for

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Since 1949 the A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts have presented the best in contemporary thought and scholarship. The program is named for Andrew W. Mellon, founder of the National Gallery of Art, who gave the nation his art collection and funds to build the West Building, which opened to the public in 1941.
Jennifer L. Roberts, Elizabeth Cary Agassiz Professor of the Humanities, Harvard University, is a scholar of British and American art from the 18th century to the present day. Her scholarship approaches the history of art through its intersections with print history, material studies, the theory and practice of making, and the history and philosophy of science. Roberts is author of Mirror-Travels: Robert Smithson and History (2004), Jasper Johns/In Press: The Crosshatch Works and the Logic of Print (2012), and Transporting Visions: The Movement of Images in Early America (2014), and coauthor of the textbook American Encounters: Art, History, and Cultural Identity (2007).

She is currently serving as the Johnson-Kulukundis Family Faculty Director of the Arts at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard. Roberts gave the Wyeth Lecture in American Art at the National Gallery of Art in 2013, and University of Cambridge's Slade Lectures in the Fine Arts in 2019.

Printing is an art of physical contact, involving transfer under pressure between surfaces-a direct touch that can evoke multiple forms of intimacy. And yet it is simultaneously an art of estrangement: it requires the deferral, displacement, and distribution of artistic agency, and it trades in reversal and inversion. The double implication of the term "pull" speaks to this paradox: prints arise from a certain towardness, an attraction between material bodies, but "to pull a print," in studio parlance, means to peel it from its matrix, breaking the plane of generative contact and releasing it into a field of dissemination.

Although printmaking today is often considered to be a marginal, anachronistic practice, this fundamental paradox of print makes it remarkably timely, and accounts for its outsized-if largely unacknowledged-role in contemporary art of all media. Strategically downplaying the traditional emphasis on replication as the essence of print, these lectures will focus on the material and spatial metamorphoses of the printmaking process and trace their social and conceptual implications: pressure becomes a tool for confronting questions of oppression; reversal creates structures for negotiating difference; the paradox of the pull serves to reframe our seemingly dematerialized social life. Focusing on American and European art since 1960, the lectures address the work of such artists as Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Corita Kent, David Hammons, Hock E Aye VI Edgar Heap of Birds, Christiane Baumgartner, and Glenn Ligon.

Director's Introduction

Before pressing play, watch a brief introduction by the National Gallery's director, Kaywin Feldman, about this year's lectures and the enduring A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts series.

Watch the Lectures

Watch all six lectures from Contact: Art and the Pull of Print.

The A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts were inaugurated in 1949. Endowed by a gift of the Old Dominion Foundation and the Avalon Foundation (creations of Paul Mellon and his sister, Ailsa Mellon Bruce, respectively) the lecture series was founded "to bring to the people of the United States the results of the best contemporary thought and scholarship bearing upon the subject of the Fine Arts."

Contact: Art and the Pull of Print engages extensively with the National Gallery's collection of prints from the 20th and 21st centuries. Learn about key works from our collection discussed by Jennifer L. Roberts throughout the lectures.
Learn more about the A. W. Mellon Lectures and view past presentations and subsequent publications.

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These lectures, given by Jennifer L. Roberts, focus on the material and spatial metamorphoses of the printmaking process and trace their social and conceptual implications: pressure becomes a tool for confronting questions of oppression; reversal creates structures for negotiating difference; the paradox of the pull serves to reframe our seemingly dematerialized social life.

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Fun Video of How a Contemporary Book is Made in a Commercial Setting

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Fun Video of How a Contemporary Book is Made in a Commercial Setting

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Have you ever wondered how a book becomes a book? Join us as we follow Marlon James’s “Moon Witch, Spider King” through the printing process.

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Art by Rowan Red Sky

Also in this issue

Mud Plot

Trees have a person-like presence in my Indigenous belief system, which is built on Haudenosaunee traditions and collaborative urban Indigenous community practice. Indigenous folks call Toronto, where I live, "The Meeting Place." People from many different cultures come together here to share ceremony, songs and the teachings of everyday life. Trees live among us as conscious beings, capable of communication and mutual cooperation with the landscape and other creatures. They make community with human and other-than-human beings. Living in downtown Toronto is not living in a forest, but the city has its own ecology.

Trees have a long history of mapping and storytelling. Traditional Anishinaabe songs, ceremonies and stories are recorded on birch bark scrolls. The scrolls have been interpreted and recreated over generations, much like how medieval European manuscripts have been copied by hand to pass down knowledge over centuries. In Haudenosaunee tradition, the eastern white pine is a potent cultural symbol. Historically, pictures of white pine were woven into wampum belts to represent peace agreements between nations, and today the image still symbolizes the unity of the contemporary Haudenosaunee community.

In the late nineteenth century, Mohawk-Canadian poet E. Pauline Johnson inscribed a poem on a strip of birch bark and gave it to Peggy Webling, a British actress and playwright visiting from England. Some historians believe Pauline wrote the poem "To Peggy" with romantic intent. Pauline calls Peggy "An English rose" ... "From lands where roses are." She describes her own lands as "These where the birch tree flings / His ragged coat / These where the wild pine sings / With dreamful note -". The words are erotically suggestive; in Victorian traditions, the rose is a symbol of romantic love, and Haudenosaunee oral traditions add layers of meaning to the message.

More recently, Métis/German/Syrian artist Julie Nagam has used birch bark to map memories and reveal hidden Indigenous geographies. She uses a combination of old and new technologies and land-based knowledge, titling her artwork with coded phrases like where white pines lay over the water. In Haudenosaunee tradition, the phrase suggests a place where you go to release your grief. Nagam used a sewing machine on birch bark to map the area where the salmon run up the Niwa'ah Onega'gaih'ih (Humber River) every summer. The "Little Thundering Waters" is one of two major rivers on either side of Toronto. I'm familiar with this spot, too. We don't know each other, but this shared place connects us. Nagam's work is about home, migrations and reclaiming the land.

I was considering these thoughts on birch bark, tree traditions, maps and technology while strolling through my neighbourhood this past January. I wanted to explore Indigenous birch bark for myself, but birch is not a readily available material in my downtown neighbourhood. My options were: buy it online and ship it to Toronto, strip a very small and underaged ornamental tree in someone's front yard, or consider how I could work with different trees that are more readily available in my urban environment.

Under and between expanses of loop-de-looping freeways and train tracks, I found a patch of low-growing buckthorn trees. Dark purple berries still clung to the branches. Berries had dropped and been squished into the pavement beneath the trees to reveal a rich green colour in their juices. This tree is a colonizer from Europe, labelled invasive and often fated for destruction and removal. Under these motorways, most people don't notice them.

I read some books about medieval European manuscript painting and learned that buckthorn berries can be made into a vibrant olive-green ink called "sap green." I made up my own easy recipe for buckthorn berry ink after reading several medieval recipes:

Take a palmful of dark purple buckthorn berries, harvested ripe in the autumn or winter.

Boil the berries in one cup of water for a few minutes and strain.

Dissolve a teaspoon of alum (a preservative and colour enhancer) into the ink.

Keep in a glass jar, refrigerate.

By adopting this European practice, I am Indigenizing my relationship with my home environment. Although the tree material I'm using originally came from Europe in the late 1800s, it's possible for me to relate to the tree in a way that honours my Indigenous ancestral traditions and what I've learned from my urban Indigenous community. In time, the tree will likely be removed. For now, I accept that the tree is here, and I work with it to assert my Indigenous values in my colonized environment.

Harvesting the berries doesn't directly harm the tree, but will slow the dispersion of the invasive species' seeds into the surrounding bush. Working with other parts of the plant can be passively beneficial to the tree, as well. Skillfully removing bark calls for pruning off damaged and diseased low-lying branches. This improves their health, despite their "invasive" status in North America. The harvested bark can be boiled into a reddish-orange dye. My ink-making practice becomes a reciprocal relationship with the tree in our shared environment.

The properties of the liquid ink are delightfully transformative. In the jar, it is an opaque, grey-black colour. On paper, the grey dries into a transparent, vibrant olive green. Using my new homemade sap green ink, I combined poetry, illustration and book design to create an adventurous exploration through imagined forests and meadows full of stories inspired by Haudenosaunee oral tradition.

The land is pictured as a woman, whose hair is the grassy meadows and rugged mountain forests, reflecting the Haudenosaunee story of the Earth Mother. The words and images throughout the book describe the relationships between beings that came together to make the Earth-animal and plant, mud and water, fire and smoke. When I draw with homemade ink, my story becomes part of my neighbourhood ecosystem and the wider tradition of Haudenosaunee storytelling.

Rowan Red Sky is a graduate student studying art history at the University of Toronto. They paint murals and make illustrations that draw from their Indigenous culture to express ideas about land, gender and well-being. Maps, the animacy of the land and the performance of stories inspire their work.

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Art by Rowan Red Sky Also in this issue Trees have a person-like presence in my Indigenous belief system, which is built on Haudenosaunee traditions and collaborative urban Indigenous community practice. Indigenous folks call Toronto, where I live, "The Meeting Place." People from many different cultures come together here to share ceremony, songs and the teachings of everyday life.

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Bookbinding Workshop 8 - Dos-à-Dos Binding

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Dartmouth Library Book Arts Research Guide

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Dartmouth Library Book Arts Research Guide

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Skip to Main Content

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Book Arts Workshop Program Manager

About this Guide for Book Arts Resources

There are many ways to explore book art, history and culture here at Dartmouth. This guide offers resources such as instructions and video tutorials, links to information about book materials, artist book collections, printers, type designers, paper engineers and so much more! The Library houses three amazing physical resources for book arts.

Check them out below!

The Dartmouth Library Book Arts Workshop

Sherman Art Library

Rauner Special Collections Library

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Research Guides: Book Arts: Book Arts in the Dartmouth Library

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Skip to Main Content It looks like you're using Internet Explorer 11 or older. This website works best with modern browsers such as the latest versions of Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Edge. If you continue with this browser, you may see unexpected results. There are many ways to explore book art, history and culture here at Dartmouth.

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One afternoon during the symposium at the Arnamagnæan Institute, Copenhagen, our group of paper conservators, literary scholars, archivists, and digital humanists attempted to twist and clip small pieces of wire onto a mould to make a watermark. Having abandoned several more ambitious designs, I settled on a watermark in the shape of a boat: a half-moon shaped base, topped with a single sail. The wobbly result only vaguely captured some essence of boat-ness, but, as my freshly-made sheet of paper dried on a sheet of blue felt, I began to dwell on the aquatic connections between watermarks and the act of papermaking. It was by generating these interdisciplinary modes of thinking - in this case, moving between the material realities of papermaking, and the creative impulses of my own literary training - that the Paper in Motion workshop formed new connections between its participants' differing areas of research.

Figure 1 Boat, watermark (Wilson, 2022)

Where did the word watermark come from? In its first uses, a 'water mark' had nothing to do with paper at all, and literally signified the level reached by water either at high tide or against the side of a boat. Thus in 1578 the explorer and travel writer George Best described ships being 'heaued vp betwéene Ilandes of Ise, a foote welnéere out of the Sea, aboue their watermarke' ( A True Discourse of the Late Voyages of Discoverie, for the finding of the passage to Cathaya, 1578, sig. G3 v). By 1679, John Dryden assumed that everyone was familiar enough with this sea-faring term to deploy it metaphorically, describing Aeschylus as a man who was 'always at high floud of Passion, even in the dead Ebb, and lowest Watermark of the Scene' ( Troilus and Cressida, 241, ll.25-6). The creative affordances of watermarks led Thomas Dekker to write that the fear provoked by a ravaging tempest was only assuaged by a rainbow: 'had not the Rainebowt beene a watermarke to the world, Men would haue looked for a second Deluge' ( A Knights Conjuring Done in Earnest, 1607, sig. B v). The watermark here retains its earlier meaning of the water level, but is transferred onto a cosmic scale in which the rainbow, whose appearance signals the end of the downpour, is imagined in spatial terms as 'a watermarke to the world'.

None of this would impress many bibliographers, in whose field the term 'watermark' is useful in its most practical and precise sense. Philip Gaskell explains that watermarks are 'pictures or letters fashioned in wire and sewn with knots of fine wire to the surface of the mould so that their images appeared in the paper along with the chain and wire marks' (Gaskell 1972, 61). The OED gives the first use of 'watermark' in this sense to Thomas Hearne (d.1735): an antiquary, diarist, and friend of John Bagford. In 1708 Hearne received a letter from Bagford asking for 'translation of any passage in Greek or Latin relating to the antiquity of paper, parchment, or ink'. Bagford was apparently 'curious in his observations of bindings' and 'has sent specimens of old paper (for water-marks, etc)' ( Remarks and Collections of Thomas Herne, vol. 2, 98. The manuscript in question is Rawl. 21.3). Watermarks here become clues in a trail of bookish detective work, through which Bagford and Hearne might together begin to construct a history of the book.

The simultaneous use of 'watermark' for these two different senses - the traces of a body of water at its most brimming, and the imprint of a moment in paper's production - are a reminder of water's significance to the making of paper sheets. While water does not directly cause watermarks (the impressions on the sheet are not left by running rivulets of water, but by the disturbances to the distribution of the fibre caused by the wires), water is essential to the making of paper sheets on which watermarks are reproduced in the first place. Pulping rags (a process sped up by the invention of the Hollander beater which, despite its name, originated in Germany at the beginning of the eighteenth century (Hunter 1974, 163)) requires a great deal of water. Paper sheets emerge almost magically from the watery contents of the vat; and, when it has been pressed and dried, paper needs to be re-dampened before it can be effectively printed on.

Water is key to the making of paper, but water is also one of paper's greatest enemies. The great flooding of Florence library in 1966 destroyed thousands of books; meanwhile rare book libraries and archives maintain their collections in temperature- and humidity-controlled environments to prevent deterioration. The reason you can't bring coffee, or even water bottles, into many reading rooms is not to enforce some kind of performative mind-over-body sense of studiousness, but because an accidental smattering of liquids onto books leaves potentially destructive traces that, repeated over time, renders those books unreadable or even unusable.

In 1620, the prolific writer and self-coined 'water poet' John Taylor wrote a poem entitled The Praise of Hempseed which dwelt on the perilousness of water to paper. Having sung paper's praises as a versatile writing surface for 'Philosophers and ex'lent Poets' (E3 v) as well as a substrate for texts on laws, astronomy, and 'physick', Taylor's imagination soars above the writing desk to the post- or non-textual affordances of paper. He describes a journey down the river Thames in a paper boat - a journey which, unsurprisingly, has near-fatal consequences:

Our Boat a female vessel gan to leake

Being as female vessels are, most weake[...]

The water to the Paper being got

In one halfe houre our Boat began to rot [...]

Our rotten bottom all to tatters fell

And left our boat as bottomless as hell (sig. F r).

The very vehicle which is supposed to take Taylor and his companion to safety proves, because of its materiality, nearly fatal:

The tossing billows made our boat to caper,

Our paper forme scarce being made of paper (sig. E2 r).

Taylor's paper boat threatens to revert to its watery beginnings: a swirling mass of insubstantial stuff from which its sheets initially emerged. Paper is water/marked both as water drains away to form a sheet on the mould and, as the imaginary world of this poem makes clear, when a sheet's fleeting moment as malleable writing surface or reading matter disintegrates into a soggy end.

In 1630, The Praise of Hempseed was reprinted in John Taylor's Workes: a large folio volume of sixty-three texts in which the story of the paper boat is placed alongside Taylor's other travel narratives to York and Edinburgh, along with satirical poems, and epigrams, and sonnets. The pot-shaped watermark legible in Taylors' Workes is, I think, that identified in Gravell as Pot.436.1. Gravel's image of this watermark is from some letters between one William Booth in the Netherlands and his brother John in London, dating to 1628. The watermark identifies the Booth brothers' letters and Taylor's Works as originating from the same paperstock: they are marked with the stamp of a shared starting point. If The Praise of Hempseed tells one tale of paper in motion from London to Queenborough down the river Thames, its watermark impresses upon us another kind of travel narrative undergone by this sheet. That narrative begins in a watery vat where the future Works are mixed in with other potential texts, and continues on to the printing houses of Elizabeth Allde, Bernard Alsop, Thomas Fawcet, and the bookshop of James Boler where Taylor's writings are printed and sold.

Watermarks tell stories about the paper trade but they also invite us to think about the literary affordances of those bookish realities, and of the ways in which water imaginatively leaves its mark on the texts imprinted on paper's sheets. Making watermarks at the Paper in Motion workshop taught me something about the process of paper production - the fiddly difficulties of sewing wires onto a mould - and, at the same time, opened up new readings of Taylor's The Praise of Hempseed and the creative affordances of textual materiality as it preoccupied early modern writers.

Biography: Georgina Wilson is Early Career Research Fellow at Fitzwilliam College in Cambridge. She obtained her doctoral degree in Oxford with a thesis on Paperscapes: Navigating Books in Early Modern England. Her current book project-titled Paper and the Making of Early Modern Literature -deploys literary theory, close reading, and book history to tell a precise yet comprehensive story about the role of paper in the book trade and the early modern imagination.
Sources and references:
George Best, A True Discourse of the Late Voyages of Discoverie, for the finding of the passage to Cathaya (1578)

Thomas Dekker, A Knights Conjuring Done in Earnest (1607)

John Dryden, Troilus and Cressida in The Works of John Dryden: Vol. 13 eds. Maximilian Novak and George Guffey (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984)

Philip Gaskell, A New Introduction to Bibliography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972)

Dard Hunter, Papermaking: The History and Technique of an Ancient Craft (Dover Publications: New York, 1943. Repr. 1974)

Remarks and Collections of Thomas Herne, ed. C.E. Doble (Oxford Historical Society: Clarendon Press, 1886)

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One afternoon during the Paper in Motion symposium at the Arnamagnæan Institute, Copenhagen, our group of paper conservators, literary scholars, archivists, and digital humanists attempted to twist and clip small pieces of wire onto a mould to make a watermark.