Books to Hold or Let Go was a group exhibition of bookbinding responses to a single book: Poems to Hold or Let Go by Rosemary Dobson, a fine press volume designed and published by myself, Ampersand Duck, in 2008.
The exhibition opened on May 14, 2009 at Canberra’s Craft ACT gallery and continued through to June 20, 2009.There were 24 bindings by 23 people, including the original edition binding of the book. I set aside 30 copies* of the freshly-printed pages — called sheets — as a deluxe binding edition (numbered I-XXX), and they were offered for sale to binders with the added incentive of an exhibition of what they did with the pages. This show is the result.
All works are unique (apart from the edition binding, of which there are 200), and most are for sale. For information about prices, you must contact the binders personally: drop me a line and I will forward you their details. Many of the binders belong to the Canberra Craft Bookbinders’ Guild, and some belong to the NSW Guild of Craft Bookbinders.
There is an online room brochure for the show, available from the Craft ACT website, and basic details of the bindings. I am using this post to feature the binders and their work in more detail, and also in their own words if they provided an artist’s statement. There is also a post about some of the bindings in progress.
Participants
I will list the binders in alphabetical order, and then include their details. You can click on each name to jump to their information. All images are © Ampersand Duck and the artists. Please do not reproduce anything without acknowledgement.
Elke Ahokas (Vic)
Sue Anderson (NSW)
Lee Bratt (ACT)
Suzy Braun (NSW)
Lorraine Brown (Qld)
Sarah Bunn (NSW)
Dario Castello (ACT)
Molly Coy (WA)
Teresa Duhigg (ACT)
Caren Florance (ACT)
Mark Gilbert (SA)
David Hodges (ACT)
Rosemarie Jeffers-Palmer (NSW)
Mia Leijonstedt (United Arab Emirates)
Linda Newbown (ACT)
Barbara Schmelzer (NSW)
Wayne Stock (NSW)
Genevieve Swifte (ACT)
Robin Tait (NSW)
Wendy Taylor (ACT)
Joy Tonkin (ACT)
Vicki Woolley (ACT)
Anthony Zammit (SA)
PARTICIPANTS IN DETAIL
Elke Ahokas (VIC)
Personal: Elke Ahokas is a professional bookbinder from Victoria. You can see more of her work at her website.
Work: Carolingian binding: oiled Victorian Coobah (Acacia salicina) slabs. Text sewn onto hemp cords using waxed linen thread. Translucent paper endpapers.
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Sue Anderson (NSW)
Personal: Sue Anderson is an amateur binder from NSW. She has exhibited widely in both bookbinding and artists’ book exhibitions and prefers to collaborate with writers and printmakers.
Work: Simplified binding of embossed black leather boards, design in acrylic by binder. Black goatskin and white sheepskin spine. Grey goatskin details. Japanese Kozo endpapers.
Statement: Rosemary Dobson’s recurring images of dark and light, and references to the moon and moonlight, together with the wood engravings affected my choice of binding materials and design.
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Lee Bratt (ACT)
Personal: Lee Bratt is currently studying at the Printmedia & Drawing Workshop of the ANU School of Art and has a strong interest in artist’s books.
Work: Artist’s book binding: concertina files, Stonehenge paper, Gampi tissue, leather, Polaroid transfer print, gold and silver leaf.
Statement: my choice of book design was influenced by information taken from the project, the poet, the artist and my thoughts on the title.
The title, “Hold or Let Go” conjured up thoughts of a child’s’ squeeze box, a music instrument that requires the player to hold and/or let go to make the music. The pages of the book are filed in the concertina sections, a small bow extends out of the file inviting you to hold or let go of the pages. The back cover has part of the keyboard from a squeezebox and the handles have been attached in opposite directions, so you may hold the book but let go of the pages.
The poets’ age influenced the choice of materials: Stonehenge paper for its strength and colour, tissue paper for its fragility and leather for its permanency.
The wood engravings inspired my Polaroid transfer mounted on the front cover, which is an image of a tree taken through the words from a poem. The tree stretches out as if letting go or taking hold of the words.
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Suzy Braun (NSW)
Personal: Suzy Braun was a refugee from the 1956 Hungarian Uprising. Her bookbinding is informed by her professional life in fashion and textiles.
Work: Gold-blocked leather cased-in binding with marbled endpapers.
Statement: I was born in Budapest, hungary. My Central European background in the Second World War interrupted my formal schooling, and I have come quite late in life to bookbinding. Initially I was trained as a seamstress, and later as a patternmaker/designer. At the time of the Hungarian Uprising in 1956, I managed to escape the country through a dangerous, swampy border into Austria with countless others of my compatriots. After lengthy official processes, I was accepted to migrate to Australia and have been resident in Sydney since 1957 and continued my profession as a designer of ladies fashion. I have always been a keen reader and I have an interest in art, classical music and all kinds of handcraft.
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Lorraine Brown (Qld)
Personal: Lorraine Brown has been binding books for 9 years under the name Bound by Brown. Prior to this, her working life was in the IT industry in varying capacities – mainly programmer and project manager. She lives at Mt Tamborine in Queensland.
Work: Text block: Sawn in block sewn on 5 cords – each cord being 3 ply unbleached linen yarn, wound 3 times to create a 9 ply cord. Sewn using beeswaxed linen thread 16/3. The endbands are green goatskin suede with a linen thread core. The endpapers are made using Canson Ingres Vidalon 100 gsm – cream – and a decorative paper showing antique manuscript design for pastedowns.
Spine: Green oasis goatskin, acrylic paint washed pigskin with clear top coat for random spine wraps.
Cover: Inner cover: 1200um greyboard lined with 70 gsm brown display paper. Greyboard edges coloured using Burnt Umber acrylic paint. Outer Cover: Queensland Walnut Veneer with clear shellac finish.
Title: Green oasis goatskin, 18pt Times New Roman typeface, red gloss pigment foil, and
‘find the title’ in the jumbled letters.
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Sarah Bunn (NSW)
Personal: Sarah Bunn is Paper Conservator for the Art Gallery of NSW and Library and Archive Conservator for the Australian Museum.
Work: Limp binding: chain stitch with recycled Japanese silk kimono chemise.
Statement: Working as a conservator of rare books in libraries in the UK, Italy and Sydney, my perception of books and bindings has been shaped by my exposure to the beauty and ‘honest’ representation of materials as expressed in early printed book structures and by the inherent flaws and degradation of their later 19th Century counterparts. I choose to create simple, tactile structures — books I would want to open, and read, in privacy.
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Dario Castello (ACT)
Personal: Dario Castello is a Canberra bookbinder and President of the Canberra Craft Bookbinding Guild.
Work: Simplified binding in leather and canvas. Hand marbled paper by Joan Ajala. Matching slipcase.
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Molly Coy (WA)
Personal: Molly Coy is a fine binder/restorer, book artist & tutor working in Western Australia.
Work: Book block additions: Embossed pages 150gsm Parilux Matt Cream with gold blocking foil and hand-coloured images. Additional blank pages in the back of book for owners poems / thoughts. Hand-made rice paper inserts. Handsewn, round-backed block with embossed, coloured/gilt edges
Binding: Case in printed, hand coloured hide, with onlay and hanging title.
Doublure in rust suede with inlay and gold foil and blind embossing.
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Teresa Duhigg (ACT)
Personal: Theresa Duhigg is a Canberra bookbinder and a member of the Canberra Craft Bookbinding Guild.
Work: Cased-in leather binding with colour applique.
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Caren Florance (ACT)
Personal: This is my website. For more information on me, see here.
Work: Exhibition binding: Long-stitched limp binding or rag momigami paper (made by the artist) and vintage Victorian cotton thread. Title embossed using lead type.
Statement: I am slowly binding the edition binding of 200 copies (in batches to avoid falling over with boredom), so it was wonderful to have a play with this binding. Recently I stumbled upon a cache of gorgeous rag momigami paper I’d made when a student, and thought this was an opportunity too good to miss. I bought the thread (on it’s original Victorian-era factory spool) from one of my favorite kooky shops: Peppergreens, in Berrima, NSW. One of the features of momigami paper is that it grows softer the more it is handled, yet remaining strong. The spine of this binding is much softer than the sides, with the hope that the cover sides will become more pliant with frequent reading of Dobson’s excellent poetry.
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Mark Gilbert (SA)
Personal: Mark Gilbert is a South Australian bookbinder.
Work: Full Morocco leather binding, blind-stamped, with red cloth doublures.
Statement: I wanted the book to have a simple, almost plain look and feel — and where possible — to evoke the rural Australia of my childhood. A lot of the poems seemed to have that flavour; my favorite was ‘Breakaway’, and this influenced my selection of the materials.
I sewed the sections with the closest thing to raw string that I could find. This had problems as it kept fraying and broke a few times as I tensioned it. Similarly, the coloured end papers appealed to me as they had a sort of natural unfinished look .
I was lucky enough to have a piece of golden morocco goatskin just big enough lying around and I felt that was in keeping although it might give the book a more refined finish. The colour was so beautiful that I decided to risk it. To counter this I determined that the decoration should be as simple as I could make it. I therefore reduced the title to its essence Poems but introduced the bar motif to stimulate thoughts of captivity and/or being “set free”.
The red cloth doublures were selected because the colour combination was so exciting — and the repeated red glimpses were introduced for a bit of interest and to continue the bars into the book . The decision to bond the coloured endpaper to the plain one was an afterthought and had to be done “in situ”. This was the most nerve-wracking moment.
I am an amateur bookbinder and, although this is my own work, I could not have achieved this standard without the assistance and advice at every step from my teacher Anthony Zammitt.
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David Hodges (ACT)
Personal: David Hodges is a Canberra artist and bookbinder. He prints and binds unique editions, conducts workshops and undertakes bookbinding commissions and book repair. David has a workshop at the Strathnairn Arts Association.
Work: The text block is hand-stitched and case-bound using a variation on a dos-a-dos binding. The case is a full binding covered in a cotton and blind embossed.
The endpapers are a Eucalyptus and watercolour transfer on hot-pressed 160gsm Canson.
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Rosemarie Jeffers-Palmer (NSW)
Personal: Rosemary Jeffers-Palmer is a profession binder and book arts teacher from Sydney. She also owns Artwise Amazing Paper in Enmore.
Work: Bound in local calf leather with leather onlays and silver foil tooling. Stitched onto tapes and laced into boards. Laminated endpapers, edge colouring and hand-sewn headbands.
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Mia Leijonstedt (United Arab Emirates)
Personal: Mia Leijonstedt is a professional binder from Finland who currently works from Dubai. You can see more of her work at her website.
Work: A long-stitch binding with soft goat skin cover. Decorative techniques include dyed parchment onlays and freehand blind-tooling. Binding is housed in a dyed paper wrapper. The concept of the binding is about poetry lines in visual form. On the front cover the elements are all in balanced order, holding it together, but on the back cover they are in the process of disintegrating and letting go.
Statement: Artful bindings for me are about celebrating and treasuring books and what they mean to us. I often make my bindings like they were props or characters in the story they’re housing. Each detail is important and the combination of all visual elements should invite the viewer closer, hopefully to experience a wordless moment of the rich history preserved in books throughout time.
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Linda Newbown (ACT)
Personal: Linda Newbown is a Canberra book artist and binder who works under the name Boundary Press. She is a Life Member of the Canberra Craft Bookbinding Guild.
Work: Laced-in binding. Vellum spine, paper boards, kid leather (from found glove).
Statement: Binders hold the printed pages momentarily. We bind the pages so that you may more easily hold them. The bindings will show signs and marks from the binders’ hand. We have held these pages and now let them go.
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Barbara Schmelzer (NSW)
Personal: Barbara Schmelzer is a professional bookbinder who comes from Germany and works from Sydney. You can more of her work at her website.
Work: Airbrushed German vellum binding.
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Wayne Stock (NSW)
Personal: Wayne Stock is a professional bookbinder and a member of the NSW Bookbinding Guild.
Work: Full hand-dyed mandarin kangaroo binding with case and chemise. The image is blind-tooled and blue.
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Genevieve Swifte (ACT)
Personal: Genevieve Swifte is a professional artist who works closely with the book form within her drawing and printmaking practice. She has a studio at ANCA in Dickson.
Work: Artist’s book binding: open-sewn Magnani Vergata book block accompanied by an Asian-stab binding of hand-printed Gampi silk paper and horse hair, housed in a simple conservation folder.
Statement: In her poem ‘Over the Frontier’, Rosemary Dobson evokes for us the poem that does not exist as, Trembling, it crosses the frontier at dawn from non-being to being. In the making of this book I have attempted to create a volume of Dobson’s poetry that hovers between these two states. Difficult to read, the poems instead can be glimpsed as a whole, a shape, or as a shadow.
The presence of the hand within the structure of the book is normally hidden from us, but through the translucency of the paper I have used, these poems can be held in the palm of the hand. They become an integral part of the book itself and a metaphor for the relationship between the poet, the artist and the reader. To print this book I used gentle pressure from my fingertips, echoing the Tall, tapering fingers of ‘Spires’ and the ephemeral treatment has removed the poems from the clarity of the page, returning them to the poetic imagination, where they can be held by the inner eye.
The format of the book is at first unfamiliar yet recognisable as a copy of the original. It refers to Asian binding and structures, to scrolls and to the poetic traditions of Asia. The sensuous quality of the Japanese Gampi means that the paper behaves like sheets, like pale cloth washed in the white stone shallows. Though, in this edition, illustrations are absent, they have found their way into the book through the binding of horsehair that could have been pulled from the wire of Rosalind Atkins’ gate, resembling the web spun between hinge and latch or as a token from the hand of ‘The Bystander’.
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Robin Tait (NSW)
Personal: Robin Tait runs the Tait Bindery in Queanbeyan and is a member of the Canberra Craft Bookbinding Guild. At present she is working from Adelaide as a paper conservator.
Work: Crossed Structure Binding Solo structure developed by Carmencho Arregui, using remnant paper stock from the Brindabella Press.
Statement: The covering paper was used for the Brindabella Press Barbara Hanrahan book Iris in Her Garden and the holes punched through are to try to echo the ‘divining colander’ mentioned in the last poem of Poems to Hold or Let Go.
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Wendy Taylor (ACT)
Personal: Wendy Taylor is a Canberra bookbinder and a member of the Canberra Craft Bookbinding Guild.
Work: Cased-in binding. The cover material is a Canson Mi-Teintes paper, painted with acrylics and fine sanded to a silky finish to provide a tactile surface to hold.
Statement: I read Rosemary’s poems during the week of the Victorian fires. Her poem, ‘News and Weather’, had a resonance with what was then happening in Victoria – in particular the line, Terrible times in the world that will not be changed. The book’s cover is a response to her poem and the fires.
My introduction to bookbinding was at high school where arts and crafts were highly valued. I have continued the craft on and off over the years. My knowledge of technique has been reinforced with courses at the Canberra Institute of Technology and additional workshops.
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Joy Tonkin (ACT)
Personal: Joy Tonkin is a professional bookbinder under the name Bookarts Canberra. She is a member of the Canberra Craft Bookbinding Guild.
Work: An exposed sewing technique in the style of Jean de Gonet’s binding. The book is sewn onto snake skin tapes. The hollow-back spine is covered in oasis leather. The boards are a wood veneer with polycarbonate and leather onlay decorations. The endpapers are hand-made papers from Nepal. The book is housed in a box made from hand-made papers, lined in suede, and titled in kangaroo leather on the spine.
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Vicki Woolley (ACT)
Personal: Vicki Woolley is a Canberra bookbinder and a member of the Canberra Craft Bookbinding Guild.
Work: Quarter-bound in leather with rounded spine. Front cover marbled paper by Marianne Peter, Bethune, France. Endpapers are Canson 160gsm.
Statement: I was introduced to papermaking in February 2003 which was the catalyst for learning bookbinding. I joined the Canberra Craft Bookbinders Guild in the same year. I plan to devote more time to these interests in the future.
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Anthony Zammit (SA)
Personal: Anthony Zammit is a South Australian bookbinder.
Work: Full bound in red Morocco leather with Doublure and fly leaves lined from Japanese ornamental papers. The slip case has vellum supported edges with a dark red diamond patterned Japanese ornamental paper sidings. Internal and external gold lines are hand finished.
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* yes, there are a few copies left if you are interested in using them for binding. Contact me for details.