A People’s Curriculum for the United States

POLITICAL PUBLIC POSTER PEDAGOGY

This portfolio was produced in celebration of the first People’s Curriculum for the United States Workshop, a political, pedagogical, public poster project. Facilitated by Drew Matott and Kyle Schlesinger, the curriculum was written, designed, and printed by the people, for the people. The paper was made in Hamburg by Peace Paper Project artists using leftover pulp from workshops with Middle East refugees who pulped their clothing. The type is from the Rob Roy Kelly American Wood Type Collection. Proceeds from the sale of this portfolio will contribute to further education and activism through letterpress workshops.

Interested in bringing A People’s Curriculum for the United States Letterpress Workshop to your community? Send us a query for details.

Alan Loney : The Books to Come

Of Alan Loney’s long-anticipated collection of essays entitled The Books to Come, Johanna Drucker has written: “Few people have mused with such imagination on the topic of the book as Alan Loney does in this volume. His reflections distill a lifetime of practice and reading, of knowing books and living with and around them. His thoughts about libraries, writing, texts, the codex, printed books, the artist’s book, fine press traditions, and bibliography are at once philosophical and poetical. Though writing in the tradition of Mallarmé, Jabès and Blanchot, Loney’s sensibility is contemporary and original, informed by his practice as a printer and a profound engagement with books as expressive objects and objects of contemplation.” Foreword by Jenni Quilter. Paperback.

Paperback. 136 pages.

ISBN: 9780986004018

Alastair Johnston : Hanging Quotes

Conducted over the course of four decades, Hanging Quotes is a landmark oral history project comprised of nineteen interviews with pioneer book artists, typographers, and poets. Alastair Johnston’s thoughtful questions evoke fascinating new stories and information from luminaries as diverse as Nicolas Barker and Robert Creeley. He discusses the transition from cast metal to digital type with the prime movers in the field: Matthew Carter, Sumner Stone, and Fred Smeijers; and he takes stock of the field of artists’ books in wide-ranging conversations with Sandra Kirshenbaum and Joan and Nathan Lyons, while his groundbreaking interviews with Dave Haselwood, Holbrook Teter, Bob Hawley, Walter Hamady, and Graham Mackintosh shed new light on the history of the book in the 20th century.

Paperback. 274 pages.

ISBN: 978-0982792667

FREE LSD

FREE LSD (2017)

Edition of 30. 11 x 14″

Drew Matott & Kyle Schlesinger

 

Free LSD is a collaboration between Peace Paper Projects and Cuneiform Press. The artists shredded and pulped American military uniforms to make thirty unique sheets of handmade paper. The wood type, from the renown Rob Roy Kelly Collection, was set by hand and printed in silver.

Johanna Drucker : What Is?: Nine Epistemological Essays

“For decades, Johanna Drucker’s work—as a theorist, printer, art historian, poet, literary critic, and designer—has been set apart by her mastery in each of those fields. With the broadened perspective of recent research into digital media and complexity theory, and with a full awareness of the historical dimensions of our current understanding of ‘materiality,’ the series of nine conceptually linked essays in What Is? again leverages Drucker’s positions across disciplines to show us how little we know about the most familiar concepts: from letters and words to documents and books and their digital futures—and why knowing more really matters.’

— Craig Dworkin

“In these meticulous interrogations, Johanna Drucker takes us on journeys of relentless, informed, and thorough thought regarding the nature of the mind made visible—what us graphic designers would identify with as typography or graphesis. Reading these essays through the eyes of graphic design, each one resonates with expanded understandings—for one, of typography as transformative ‘imaginative energy’ and not just thought’s mirror. I hope every MFA graphic design student will read these essays and be inspired to understand the significance of their discipline, but more importantly be inspired towards the imaginative possibilities in their work to which Drucker pays such devoted tribute.”

— Louise Sandhaus

“In What Is?, Drucker traces the invisible thread that links letters to writing to books to the digital age. In so doing, she makes sense of emerging technology and the way it has insinuated itself into the culture of book making, writing, and reading. Drucker’s grand arguments are based on modest means. In this case she is starting with the humble letter. But, by probing the philosophy of language as well as the rhetoric of art, she builds toward a broader picture. In the end, her investigation concludes with nothing less than a new understanding of digital materialism.”

— Elizabeth Guffey

Hardcover. 140 pages. Two-color printing throughout.

ISBN-13: 978-0986004025

Tate Shaw : Blurred Library : Essays on Artists’ Books

Despite the fact that the field of artists’ books has grown steadily since the mid-sixties, the discourse has been largely under-theorized. Blurred Library: Essays on Artists’ Books, is a stunning collection of the most revered essays by Tate Shaw, the Director of Visual Studies Workshop. For years, Shaw’s contributions to the field of artists’ books as a theorist, artist, writer, historian, and teacher have been celebrated internationally, but have largely gone undocumented, until now. Shaw’s versatility as a scholar and artist allow him to take a holistic approach to his subject that is historical, conceptual, anecdotal, contemplative, and engaging. Blurred Library is an indispensible contribution to the field of artists’ books, essential reading for emerging and seasoned artists and scholars alike. Lavishly illustrated throughout by photographer Doug Manchee.

Tate Shaw is the Director of Visual Studies Workshop (VSW), Rochester, NY, a nonprofit organization supporting artists’ books, photography, and the media arts. He is also an Assistant Professor at The College at Brockport, SUNY where he directs the Master of Fine Arts program in Visual Studies at VSW. Shaw makes artists’ books, writes essays, organizes symposia on books, and is co-publisher of the small imprint Preacher’s Biscuit Books.

Paperback. 208 pages.
ISBN: 978-0-9860040-6-3

The Art of Collaboration: Poets, Artists, Books

Always a space for experimentation, the book has been a platform for innovative collaboration since its invention, and never more than in the modern era—when painters, poets, editors, typographers, and binders have each contributed to the production of works whose whole becomes something far more than its parts. The essays in this volume address some of the main threads of collaboration in American and French poetry and printing, where the livre d’artiste flirts with the artist’s book in imagining the page, the text, the codex as a vital scene of exchange. Each of these authors has been involved in this field in a professional and/or creative manner, and each speaks from experience with substantive authority.

— Johanna Drucker,
Breslauer Professor of Bibliographical Studies, UCLA

 

The Art of Collaboration brings together the perspective and insight of a distinguished international community of poets, artists, publishers, scholars and curators, drawing from their rich diversity of experience to identify a useful framework for documenting and understanding the recent history and practice of the age-old tradition of collaborating with text and image. This collection is an invaluable tool whose very presence is a brilliant example of its subject.

— Steve Clay
Granary Books

The essays collected in this volume originate from a symposium that took place at the University of Caen, France, in March and April 2011, entitled ‘Collaboration and the Artist’s Book: a Transatlantic Perspective,’ one of the first in Europe to be organized for literary and cultural studies. The participants included American poets and artists who have produced significant work in the field (some since the sixties), together with American and French scholars, independent publishers of artists’ books, and library and museum curators.

Contributors include: Anca Cristofovici, Barbara Montefalcone, Antoine Cazé, Olivier Brossard, Michael Siebenbrodt, Vincent Katz, Bill Berkson, Susan Bee, Raphael Rubinstein, Gervais Jassaud, Pascal Poyet & Françoise Goria, Kyle Schlesinger, Antoine Coron, Constance Lewallen, Charles Bernstein & Richard Tuttle.

 

Edited by Anca Cristofovici & Barbara Montefalcone.

Hardcover. 198 pages. Full color throughout.

ISBN: 978-0-9860040-5-6

Threads Talks Series

Threads, a series of talks devoted to the art of the book, includes poets, artists, and publishers. It explores and enriches relationships between various strands of book culture that are often approached in isolation: poetry and writing; visual and performing arts; collaboration; design; printing; independent publishing; literary history; critical theory; and material culture.

The premise for the series was very similar to the kind of interdisciplinary approach to the book that has interested us all along. A book is never more successful than the relationship between its parts; the philosophical and material connections between writing, art, design, typography, translation, and distribution is more significant than excellence in any isolated area.

The talks were originally recorded before a small studio audience, then made available to the public on PennSound, and are now collected here in written form for the first time.

Threads began in March 2009 and concluded in October 2012. There were twelve speakers: Alan Loney; Charles Alexander; Simon Cutts; Buzz Spector; Jerome Rothenberg; Cecilia Vicuna; Jen Bervin; Kathleen Walkup; Johanna Drucker; Keith Smith; Richard Minsky; and Emily McVarish.

Edited by Steve Clay and Kyle Schlesinger. A co-production with Granary Books.

Paperback. 194 pages. Full color throughout.

ISBN: 978-1-887123-84-6