(That would be the Small Publishers' Fair, at the Conway Hall in London, way back on Saturday 21 October.)
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My favourite book artists, for want of a better term that would encompass these two rather different makers, one dedicated to image, the other to type. Both subtle and refined perfectionists.
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From Helen Douglas (weproductions), now able to print directly on, or rather into, fine tissue paper from a computer, which extends the potential of her work. Glyph, a single-section pamphlet, 3 folios sewn in a plain card cover. The prints are square, photographs of a water surface (pond? or even a flooded meadow) with short points of grass or reeds poking though, and reflecting. They are colour images but (?)highly exposed and appear almost black while the water has 'evaporated' completely: the effect is reminiscent of textual marks (as suggested by the title). I'm a sucker for anything like that. Meanwhile, the depth and recession achieved by the tissue (and perfect registration of the image of course) is enhanced by the way that the ink has gone right into it so that the verso of every image is a mirror-version almost as sharp; thus again this is like a proper book -- with text on every page -- not just a sequence of prints on rectos only. Like everything Helen does, Glyph is beautiful and exact.
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I still haven't put away the one I bought from Helen at last year's Fair: Loch. A series of circular vignettes (but largeish -- 8 cm. diameter); photographs printed b/w, in this case bringing out linear patterns: verticals, horizontals and zig-zags, of water ripples and reeds, with here a white swan, there a reflected tree ... They resemble enlarged wood engravings of microscopic slides, and fingerprints, and planets; floating on a tall page. The leaves are bound in a folded Japanese format and stiff black boards with a white title label. This book is a whole meditation kit, all you need; and anyone who doesn't buy it, for a mere £8, is missing something. (Pictures are on the website as above.)
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From Colin Sackett.
typd. Another tall thin book (20 x 10 cm.); an exercise in minimalism, which rings changes in hues tonally somewhat reminiscent of Neapolitan ice-cream (khaki, Wedgwood blue, black, pink), on a short text (further shortened by omission of letters) reiterated across the gutter of each opening. It's a very pretty book, but the exploration is austere.
TransLATER Sacket (I have no idea if that's the title: it's on the front cover that way). The (sur)names of Henry Moore, Hans Arp and Herbert Read are cycled with the words French, English, Lost and Found, to create new formulations that look like titles (Read FRENCHMoore; Arp LOST work, etc.) in the typography of (??)Penguin books of the '50s: bold sans caps; with also an element of HMSO government publications, in the coarse grey paper and buff wrappers.
onsixpagestoday is one of Colin's more copious texts: a double-column alphabetical sequence throughout, in a handsome italic sans face, of (most often) fifteen-letter phrases; but some are longer if roughly the right length in points. E.g.: dealinginletttters, ebayarmsdealer, goingdownthetip, pickitupdropitoff. A blurb I can't lay hands on referred to something like 'a bad-tempered auctioneer', and the cover image is of a cattle market (empty). I have no idea what motivated this fascinating book.
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From Moschatel Press I bought two of quite a few 2006 titles. By Laurie Clark, Ragged Robin, a sequence of 6 coloured drawings of that flower, in specimen portrait mode (i.e. not as growing in the ground). Though it might seems that the book form here is merely a handy container for a set of images, a sequential dynamic is at work, to do with the number of flowering heads and buds.
By Thomas A. Clark, Names (132 x 92 mm.) of which mainly I couldn't resist the dust-jacket, with its colour photograph of a green woodland with silver birches, shrubs and bracken. The names in question are those of things in the natural world. During my day-and-a-half away in the country this weekend, I have been thinking about how impossible it seems to bring the non-verbal experience of nature, place and landscape, into the poem machine. I think I need a precomposed corpus to work from. But this little poem perhaps points to simple vocabulary as already text, for 'gather[ing] things around you' etc., which of course it is.
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I bought books by three of this year's Poetic Practice MA students at Royal Holloway. Sophie Robinson's lovesic is roughly 12 cm. square, full of messy text and imagery generated by the look of it from several media/techniques including hand drawing, manual typewriter, photoshopped image and physical collage. Very Writers Forum, and we like that. The text is all 'mucus-hearted and gloopy-headed' (till the very end, when it goes into a nice 2-page spread of a single line repetition) but I seem to recall that Sophie gave a very convincing reading of it at the Fair. Bright pink cover.
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In Octets, Kirsten McGarrie (as far as I know) invents a new poetic form, and it's not everyone that does that. Each page has 3 parallel versions of the same triplet, which starts out life as a set of (very unusual) 8-letter words (e.g. toplofty, arbalest, dystocia etc.), then a numeric version based on assigning values to the letters, a=1, z = 26 (e.g. 88.89.87); then these in turn are converted into binary octets: (e.g. 01011110.01000001.01100110). The book has a narrow calendar format. 12 x 22 cm. , with black tape at spine, cream covers. I'm not sure that this is very profound work, but I've never seen anything quite like it, and I enjoy its aesthetic very much. The font looks like an enlarged version of the old typewriter face I used to be fond of as Letter Gothic.
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Graeme Estry's poem in new york is a 'kitbook', to be cut and folded from a single A4 sheet of blue paper, ending up around 48 x 74 mm. Paging one way through, you read all the poems, the other way, see the photographs. It's low-tech and modest, but ingenious too, and the cutting and folding instructions are clear and economical (even I could get it right, and I'm diagram-blind). And the pictures and text are exactly as good as they need to be.
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I also earmarked Rosheen Brennan's book to buy, but then forgot to, so can't describe it well now. It combined photography, text overlaid in such a way that it looked as if it was part of the photographed scene, and then cut-outs that gave you a different look at the same material. Very well conceived, and not badly executed considering the ambitious design and short time available: the Fair is only a few weeks after the beginning of their first term, but course leader Redell Olsen insists that the students all get a book made and editioned in time for it!
