Making Artist’s Books
Robin Wallace-Crabbe
To draw a distinction between the idea, the journal and preconceptions and possible realities attaching to artist’s books, it is simplest to describe a work by British artist Glen Baxter. We have an imperialist wanderer in sola topee [pith helmet], Bombay bloomers [long shorts], shirt with pockets for keeping about you the sorts of things you might need in foreign parts. This man is sitting in a director’s chair while all about him spreads a flat African grassland. Approaching from the horizon is a highly excited African man waving a large book in the air. Our European explorer—think journal keeper—is writing: ‘ I shall never forget the day that Ombolo discovered the Post-Impressionists.’
By contrast, artist’s books tend to be made by people who have ventured too far into the precious. Think of a slim volume printed on very expensive handmade paper. Think of the volume as a collection of poetry made up of one poem. Think of the poem reading: I DROP THE POOL INTO THE ROCK. The paper will cost $12 a sheet, have a handmade-look ragged edge, be better than acid free, be imported, be heavyweight—the book’s maker will be able to tell you the precise gram weight of the paper. The paper is called things like Hahnemuhle or more exotic, from the Indian sub-continent, Khadi. Ink will hold the smell of lavender oil and be made to an ancient recipe. Page one will be blank. So will pages two, three, four and five. Next, page six with, embossed and inkless, the letter ‘I’. A couple of pages on, the word ‘drop’, should you be so lucky.
And so it goes till you reach the colophon page where, to be read sharp and clear, are the names of the book’s maker, the poet, illustrator, typographer, etc.
Within the general area of artist’s books, inside this precious extreme, there is room for many objects. A matchbox containing wee sheets of paper—cigarette paper, let us imagine and, on each sheet a beautiful miniature.
Or, well, to digress; when I was a child my father demonstrated an interest in artist’s books, and also in arty, limited edition, short print run books with titles like Casanova’s Memoirs or the something Sutra. Later, he was to buy a printing press and many drawers of metal type and, to get his hands on wooden type as well, also uncut pear-wood engraving blocks from far away, on which he engraved images of naked or semi-naked women cavorting with pirates or serving drinks to chaps like the journal-keeping explorer in the Glen Baxter picture.
His interest in artist’s books connected with what was a gentleman’s occupation through the nineteenth and into the first part of the twentieth century—the collecting of prints and small edition books, many of which were fit only for the eyes of fellow gentlemen. Thus they were kept in drawers till passed from hand to hand for amused examination by semi-plastered gentlemen who had retreated from the dinner table to smoke while the women engaged in women’s talk in some alcove.
The definition of images kept in these print drawers tended to clump around notions of the scientific, the anthropological and/or the pornographic. Depictions of imaginative positions for sexual congress, relief or intaglio, were popular. These print drawers might be thought of as large artist-as-collector’s books, and/or as containing elements extracted from, or from which might be constructed, artist’s books. Whatever, they were evidence that individuals will keep themselves properly or improperly occupied collecting and printing images that (were then at least) prohibited from being reproduced or traded in the wider world.
I suppose that these days, with new accountancy methods and the systems of mass marketing trashing the appearance of books, it is not surprising that we poor human beings are still playing with the idea ‘book’. Books are drummed into us as children. We collect them before we are able to read. So, children still, with artist’s books we seek out imaginative paths around the limiting structures we have, with good or bad intention placed in our own way.
Right now the artist’s book might be thought to be having a bit of a resurgence. One outstanding form that this resurgence takes is the zine. Zines came as we might say from left field, out of the ranks of those who wouldn’t know a sheet of Hahnemuhle from laser paper and, what’s worse, wouldn’t care. Zines came from people ignorant of the great traditions of the artist’s and the explorer’s journal, people who may be thought to have scoped a less than objective eye across the world around them. Zines tend to be photocopied, crudely stapled, and to contain the random wanderings of their maker’s mind in a way that is reminiscent of the writing and publications of people associated with the beat generation. Those I have seen, and in particular one I have by final year high school student Janet Walker, play with image making and with text, even poetry. Her zine is the antithesis of the ‘I DROP A POOL INTO A STONE’ book I invented some minutes back.
And then there are e-zines. These are one of the few optimistic cultural by-products of the Internet. They are zines on the net, paperless, free, endlessly make-able and remake-able and remarkable. Anyone can do it, you don’t need fonts of type, a Luddite consciousness, a printing press that only a forklift can move and which threatens to take a dive through the floorboards.
For myself—I guess it is in my genetic makeup, my father having during my teenage years vanished into his shed to work on his typesetting, his woodcuts, his artist’s book- making—for myself I go for the artist’s book of the kind made by Ingeborg Hansen and Phil Day, the founders of Finlay Press in Goulburn and now Braidwood. I have worked with them on a couple of their publications, writing one, producing linocuts for another. Theirs is an artist’s book activity that seems to me to find a middle path between the overtly precious production and the formless, the grotty, the anti-print tradition. These, made in very small editions, usually around 12 to 20 copies, include a music score, a play, a book of poetry. Oh dear I do hate making lists. They are concerned with the qualities of paper but avoid fetishising those qualities. They are very concerned with typography, Ingeborg, who is also a writer, tending from time to time towards a playful use of type, hinting at an interest in some of the typographic explorations of the Bauhaus. Phil, being a visual artist, pushes the image side of their production, often using his own delicate, obliquely erotic images, but also avoiding hogging the field, inviting other artists to collaborate. I believe copies of a number of their books are held in the National Library; they are well worth taking a look at.
In relation to Donald Friend, I have the impression that he was generally uninterested in printmaking; more the rapid image-maker, not a man to fuss over editioning. I printed a couple of his images, well, rather, I was the ‘clean hands’ assistant of Janet Dawson when she printed swimming figures of his for Gallery A, Melbourne in the early 1960s. The painstaking work involved with an artist’s book was not for him. Thinking back, I find the swimming figure interesting. It was a girl. And it often strikes me that it, a girl image, might have been produced to sell to those of the art conscious affluent middle classes disinclined to hang on their wall one of his hundreds of market-successful images of boys with surprising gifts in the genitalia department. It is strange isn’t it, looking back, to see how unconcerned often rather square, conservative families were with the open eroticism of many Donald Friend drawings? They hung them on their walls, as the British had Russell Flint watercolours, not as porn, soft or hard, but as art.
