Learning Absence, 2010. Artist’s book of letterpress and monoprints on Kozo washi. Text is the poem Learning Absence, 1986 by Rosemary Dobson. Handprinted and bound in a hardcover Asian stab binding with either handmade denim rag endpapers (made by Katharine Nix) or blue commercial momigami endpapers. Edition of 15, made for the Book Art Object project. The poem is reproduced with permission from the poet and is taken from her Collected Poems (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1991).

Dobson’s poem has a special meaning to me, as I have known her for a long time now. I wanted to make a book that could draw from my experience with her, but also be more generally appealing, in the same way that Dobson’s poem itself is personal yet taps into broader emotions.

I decided to use monoprinting to make images for my book. I think that loneliness and grief – the two dominant emotions I get from the poem – are universal human experiences, but that no two experiences can be the same, so monoprinting suits as an visual metaphor. I added text using handset and printed letterpress, and kept the entire book in one colour range: a deep blue-black mix that varied as I printed, in an attempt to create a melancholy early-evening lonely feeling to match the sensation of arriving home to an empty house. I tried to make the visual movement of the imagery move from external to internal and then out to universal.

The binding had to be formal (a hardcover stab stitch) with a personal touch (a hand-stitching in vintage thread across the front). I printed enough copies to be able to give one to Dobson’s family, and they responded well to the way I’d presented the poem, understanding the connection I’d made to the poet herself, which is very gratifying.

Book Art Object is a loose grouping of book artists that shifts with each project. The central concept is that of a book club for book artists, so we pick a text that we all like and then respond to it and discuss the results. I am treating my BAO participation as a way of experimenting with processes and forms that I would like to try, so I don’t think of each piece as something to be eventually exhibited (even though it probably will be!).

Working with other artists on this project has been wonderful for both the feeling of support and also the chance to discuss approaches to the text, which is so enriching to the development of our ideas and working methods. We communicate through our Book Art Object blog, sharing ideas and progress, and it’s wonderful to witness at the end how differently we all respond to the same text.

Feel the Fell. Unique artist’s book of letterpress and offset letterpress ink on Chinese roll paper with handsewn whirlwind binding. Text by Gerard Manley Hopkins. Design and production by Ampersand Duck.
Held in the Artspace Mackay Collection, Queensland, Australia.

Feel the Fell was made for my solo show, Pressings, at Megalo in 2009. I often run pieces of paper through my press rollers at the end of the day to remove the excess ink before cleaning, and I keep every piece of paper, because I love the random and beautiful results. They speak to me of the process of printing (especially when I have used packing sheets, and there is overprinted embossed text that is picked up by the ink) and the process is a primary part of the experience of using letterpress, because the final printed product is often so similar to something that can be produced more easily by other printing methods.

Anyway, this piece came together when I was browsing through my high school copy of Norton’s Anthology and my eyes were caught by some lines I’d read years ago and had underlined, and then forgotten:

I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day.
What hours, O what black hours we have spent
This night! what sights you, heart, saw; ways you went!
And more must, in yet longer light’s delay.
With witness I speak this. But where I say
Hours I mean years, mean life. And my lament
Is cries countless, cries like dead letters sent
To dearest him that lives alas! away.

I am gall, I am heartburn. God’s most deep decree
Bitter would have me taste: my taste was me;
Bones built in me, flesh filled, blood brimmed the curse.
Selfyeast of spirit a dull dough sours. I see
The lost are like this, and their scourge to be
As I am mine, their sweating selves; but worse.

Gerard Manley Hopkins

And the first lines seemed all I needed to unlock an emotional darkness that the ink seemed perfectly eloquent enough to convey. It’s a very specific poem, but the despair is universal, and so I let the marks do their work.

It’s a lovely piece to look through, and until Artspace Mackay bought it, I encouraged people to use their hands without white gloves to flick through it (and now it is doomed to white-glove-dom forever!). You can see white gloves peeping through some of the images here… After a day or two of having them there, I decided they weren’t necessary, because most of the beauty is in the way the soft paper feels in your hands.

I made a box for it to live in, in which it rolls up like a scroll. The box is covered with a black slubbed bookcloth called Cannapetta, and has hand-stitched detail and ties in black waxed linen thread.

It was also exhibited at the 2010 Libris Awards in Mackay.

I also made a smaller version of this book for a friend who loved it but couldn’t buy the original. That one is also unique, and lives in Melbourne, hopefully being loved and handled. It’s box is recycled from an old bible.

My brief was to print a folio of broadsides, or posters, using a poem each from four Australian and three New Zealand poets, in an edition of 100. (The ’4′ was an accident, and the running joke is that it takes four Australian poets to make three NZ poets.) I had the run of the Otakou Press typefaces, including a wonderful collection of wood types, and the choice of their three presses: a Vandercook cylinder proofing press, a small Albion press, and a large Columbian iron press, all of which were only set up for hand printing.

This is the result. The pages are printed on Fabriano Rosapina 220gsm, and the folio cover was designed by myself in collaboration with the University of Otago Bindery, and constructed by the bindery.

The folio cover.

The title page

‘The Sibyl’s Avenue’, by Australian poet Robert Adamson.

‘Sight-Reading’, by Australian poet Stephen Edgar.

‘The Piano’s Birthday’, by NZ poet Michael Harlow.

‘Night Sonnet’, by Australian poet Sarah Holland-Batt.

‘At the Opera’, by Australian poet Les Murray.

‘…If you like’ (untitled), by NZ poet Vincent O’Sullivan. This is a very difficult image to scan, as it is printed very transparently, so this is a photo taken from an angle, unlike the other images in this post.

‘No String Banjo’, by NZ poet Sue Wootton.

If you would like to purchase a copy (although they are nearly sold out), please contact Donald Kerr, Special Collections Librarian at the University of Otago Library: donald[dot]kerr[at]otago[dot]ac[dot]nz.

I have written about the printing process further here, plus there is more writing on my personal blog for the months of August and September, 2010. There is also an interview with me on Dunedin community television here, and for a short time there is a Radio NZ interview on The Arts on Sunday for the 17th of October here.

The residency fell into my lap, through the generosity of master printer Alan Loney, who took it upon himself to introduce me to Donald Kerr, the Otago University Special Collections Librarian, when we were all at a conference in Brisbane called The Limits of the Book. Donald has custodianship of a wonderful collection of printing equipment, originally established as a bibliography teaching aid, and while continuing to be used as such, has also become a press in its own right: the Otakou Press. Established in 2003, it hosts an annual short-term printer in residence who produces a work that is sold – and usually sold out before the project is finished – and funds the next PIR the next year. The residency is now totally self-funded, and includes travel, accommodation (which includes food) and a stipend.

Donald and I had wonderful talks in Brisbane, about letterpress, the history of the equipment, and his liking of posters. Up to now all the printers had been New Zealanders, men, and had made books. Time for a change! We decided that I would be the 2010 PIR, and we would make posters, preferably using some of the wood type in the collection, which had scarcely been utilised.

We decided to have six poets, three from NZ and three from Australia. Donald picked out some names and emailed them all to see if they were amenable. Peter Porter and Les Murray were on his list, but PP died soon after, and we didn’t hear from Les, so we ended up with Vincent O’Sullivan, Michael Harlow and Sue Wootton batting on the NZ side, and Robert Adamson, Sarah Holland-Batt and Stephen Edgar for the Aussie side.

And then Donald got a letter in the post from Les, who doesn’t do computers. He’d LOVE to be in it. And, we both agreed, you can’t say no to Les. So. We had SEVEN poets, and I just didn’t have the time in the residency to add an extra NZer – seven was going to be pushing it. Did I mention that my edition is to be 100 of each, plus title page and colophon? That’s 900 pages, over a period of six weeks.

There was only so much planning I could do beforehand, since I hadn’t seen the type selection: read the poems (each poet sent a small selection of small, in most cases unpublished, poems to choose from) and select one for each, and make notes about what each inspired visually when I read them. We’d decided upon paper stock, and ordered it: Fabriano Rosapina, a lovely thick white Italian paper, that would need to be hand-torn into quarter-sheets.

The poems I picked didn’t seem to have any connecting theme, apart from my liking them, so I decided to go with the idea that their number inspired and call the folio PRIME, playing with the idea of seven as a prime number and also that these are poets in their prime. Since then I have realised that the connection is one of process (in the use of wood type) and that the title could have reflected that, but I’m happy with Prime.

Then

Arriving at the University of Otago, settling in to my digs at the very comfy St Margaret’s College, and getting to know my way around were all the easy things to do at the start of my residency. Dunedin is beautiful, even in the depth of winter, and surprisingly warmer than Canberra, owing to what everyone says is a mild winter. The big learning curve was tackling the presses in the print room…

I am used to printing with a cylinder flatbed letterpress, which has built-in rollers that ink the type and can be adjusted to stay at a level that rolls the type the same way every time. Here in Dunedin, they have iron hand-presses only, which means that the printer has to hand-roll the ink onto the type every time they pull a print.

The up side of that is that you can print multiple colours at once. The down side is that you have to develop a good technique of rolling sensitively to the type’s needs, and evenly, and neatly. Every time. And I had to learn how to do it FAST, because there were those 900 pages to print, and time was ticking.

I’m talking in the past tense here, but as I write I’m still in the thick of it. I’m nearly halfway through my third week of the residency, and I’m only 300 pages in…

This is the Columbian press, the grand madam of the room. She’s my press of choice from the three available to me, with her bobbing eagle counterweight and decorative dragons. I had a crash course in using her, including how to make my own brown-paper tympans and friskets.

The fact that I have to hand-roll the type, lower the frisket then the tympan, roll the bed under the platen and then pull the press handle for every. single. print. means that I am physically limited as to how intricate and/or layered these prints can be. I need to design them to be striking without being overly hard to produce.

I am also limited by the colours available to me. I can mix colours, but that means I also have to judge how much mixed ink I need for a print run, and the amount of ink varies according to how much surface area there is on the type; wood type is generally broad-surfaced and thirsty, whereas metal type is smaller and finer, needing finer layers of ink rolled with a lighter touch. When I first arrived, I only had blue, red, yellow, black and a transparent mixing white, but an ex-commercial printer who now works at the Uni of Otago library brought in a gift of some pristine tins of Pantone colours: a variety of reds (rhodamine, rubine, warm red, all fabulous and important distinctions when mixing colours), a green, orange and a good dense rich black that does not shade into grey like most offset blacks. A most welcome gift, and one I’m using gratefully.

The other limitation, or maybe I should say, addition to the palette of choices, is the type itself. The Otakou press has a house font, Garamond, which is one I use extensively in my studio as well. So there is a healthy amount of that, plus a number of drawers of assorted fonts like Gill, Imprint Shadow, Plantin, Gothic Condensed, but not in any great quantity or variety of sizes. There is also a lot of very beautiful wood type, in many sizes (wood type is measured in ‘lines’ but I don’t know what ‘lines’ actually means).

So, to print a poem as a poster, no matter what my idea is, I have to find a font that not only suits the feel of the poem, but also has enough characters in the drawer to set the whole poem and whatever I want to use around the page. I had to count every character in every poem and make a chart of the alphabet needs so that for each layout I can make sure that I can make the poem before I get halfway through and discover that there aren’t enough Hs or something. And you know poets… they tend to use strings of words with the same letters, even if they aren’t conscious that they’re doing it (I don’t even mean alliteration or rhyme… I mean just repetitions of letters generally).

My first attempt was a shape poem by NZ poet Sue Wootton, called No Strings Banjo. Donald thought that this would be one of the hardest poems to tackle, but actually, making a shape in letterpress is fairly easy if you stick to the basic principles of keeping all the lines the same length and making a shape within a block, like building pixels.

This turned into this:

Please excuse the torn base and the handwriting; this was my bon-a-tirer (good to print) reference copy for editioning purposes.

I didn’t know that Sue was from Dunedin until she walked into the studio for a peek, and to my delight she was delighted with the layout, and adored the Fancy Western wood type as much as I do.

I wasted a lot of paper on that first edition, until I worked out my rolling technique. Donald forgave me, as he knew I’d been chucked in at the deep end. I thought the edition printed ok finally, but I know that by the time I get to the end of the residency, I’ll look back at the quality of this first run and shudder.

The next batch, because I had such a clear picture in my head of the print, was Les Murray’s At the Opera. Donald wanted COLOUR, and so I decided to give him some red, a good patchy red velvet curtain of a large wooden M.

Like this one, all rolled up and ready to print as this:

Another thing that Otakou Press has in abundance are wonderful vintage image blocks, ranging from whimsical Victoriana through to cheesy ads from the 70s and 80s, before everything moved to polymer plate. Donald wondered if I might not use a couple, like this one:

He thought it might be a good way to illustrate the word lorgnette, which is the central premise of the poem, but I decided to keep everything typographical, to stay away from the ready-made images, and make people do what I suspect Les Murray wanted people to do: go and look up the word.

Now

So I’m beavering away, even on the weekends, because doing something every day is the only way I’ll get everything done. I’ve had lots of visitors, including a bunch of wonderful librarians who have been helping me tear down the paper. Part of my brief was to promote the program locally, so I’ve had interviews with the local paper, the university paper and there’s one coming up with the local tv station. I’ve talked to English students about working visually with poetry from a textual viewpoint, and to printmaking students about working with text as image and markmaking with moveable type.

I’m discovering how fast I can work if I only have one roller, and one colour, but that working fast gives me blisters. I printed 130 pages (I allow for bad printing!) in two and a half hours on Sunday to produce an under-layer for my Vincent O’Sullivan poem layout:

It’s a poem about rocks in a river forming trains like bridal veils, so I’ve printed large pine type that has a distinct wood grain in a green-grey, and will make the three stanzas of the poem into charcoal-silver clumps that will have cool watery type trails.

While that layer dries, I’m working on the Stephen Edgar poem, a fabulous piece about imagining words in the air around oneself. While my inner vision is an airy one in dull colours, what has emerged from the type and colour resources (and Donald’s yearning for colour) is quite different. It’s early days yet, but I’ve pulled from the poem the notion of sunset revealing disintegrating words, so I’m using sunset colours of pinky-red and orange and black…

This is hot off the press this afternoon, my first tentative pull in one colour to see if the composition works. I’ll be running this one through the press twice, like the O’Sullivan, which will cut into my time a bit. I can see the next two weeks being completely manic as I try to get everything printed in time for the folios to be collated by the last week. I’ve just finished talking to the most excellent university binder here about the folio design of black & white with a strip of overprinted proof inset into the front. Yum!

I have been blogging my Dunedin experiences, both printing and otherwise, at my personal blog, and there are more photos on my flickr page.

(BTW, If you’re interested in purchasing Prime, you can contact Donald by emailing donald[dot]kerr[at]otago[dot]ac[dot]nz. Because the press is not-for-profit, they retail the PIR produce at very affordable prices, and pump all the money back into the residency. This folio of seven posters will be only NZ$250 plus postage and packing (for the whole folio, not individual posters). We’ve already sold a third of the edition, so don’t delay if you want one.)

Cross-posted at Slow Making.

Those Who Travel is a very special collaboration by four artists: Sarah Rice, Patsy Payne, Ampersand Duck and Shellaine Godbold.

this is a gap

this is a gap

A stunning artists’ book of original, unpublished poems by Sarah Rice, accompanied by a suite of exquisite images by Patsy Payne, produced using lithography and pounced graphite drawings. The layout has been designed to create a spacious, airy feel, and the binding has been kept light and fluid to reflect the dream-like quality of the pages.

this is a gap

this is a gap

Printed on Arches BFK 250gsm paper, the book is hand sewn with no adhesives, and has a pale grey Magnani Pescia loose wrap cover, embossed with the title.

this is a gap

this is a gap

The text is hand-set in metal type, using English Garamond, and printed on a Vandercook SP 20 press in a silver ink.

this is a gap

this is a gap

What you have seen here is only a selection of the 40 pages. Painstakingly produced, this book is available in a limited edition of 16 copies. The dimensions of the book are 250 x 150 x 5mm.

this is a gap

COLLABORATORS

Dr Sarah Rice is a ceramicist and art theorist whose philosophical bent has influenced many art students at the ANU School of Art.

Patsy Payne is a renowned printmaker, and is currently Head of Printmedia & Drawing at the ANU School of Art. She designed the book, produced the lithography stones, and pounced the drawings.

Ampersand Duck set and printed the text, and bound the books.

Shellaine Godbold is a fabulous artist and she did the lithography editioning (with flair).

this is a gap

this is a gap

Available now for Aus$450 plus p&h. Contact me for more details or to purchase. I will send you an invoice that can be paid by Paypal, EFT or cheque.

All money from the book is being donated to Sarah Rice.

Shared Rooms: Poems by Anna Akhmatova with Translations by Natalie Staples and Imitations by Rosemary Dobson and David Campbell

Letterpress and monoprints on Zerkal Wove paper, housed in screenprinted acetate envelopes, contained in a bookcloth-covered box with a perspex drawer (boxed) or a printed card slipcase (softbound ). English text handset in Perpetua and Times; Russian text set in Latinski and printed by letterpress using photopolymer plates.

2 edns: 5 boxed, 6 softbound. Canberra: PM&D and EABS, National Institute of the Arts, 2002.

This was my Honours project for the completion of my Visual Arts degree.

Around the year 2000, I came across a pile of drafts of these poems in the bottom drawer of a cupboard at Rosemary Dobson’s house. Immediately I saw their potential for an artist’s book.

Rosemary Dobson (1920- ) and David Campbell (1915-79), both celebrated Australian poets, would for many years meet with Natalie Staples (1933- ), a scholar of Russian literature then working at the Australian National University. Natalie, knowing their tastes in poetry, provided excellent literal translations of poems by Anna Akhmatova (1889-1966) and her colleague Osip Mandelstam (1891-1938), as well as by other lesser-known Russian poets. Rosemary and David would discuss them, then take them away and write their own versions, coming back for the next session to discuss what they had produced and start the process again with another poem.

These shared poems were twice given an opportunity to emerge publicly: Moscow Trefoil (Canberra: ANU Press, 1975), and Seven Russian Poets (St Lucia: UQP, 1979), now both out of print. In the former, Natalie’s versions were joined by both or either versions by Rosemary and David; in the latter, only one version was printed, without the literal translations. There has never been a book with all four states: the original Russian, the literal translation, and both ‘imitations’. Using letterpress, I was only able to reproduce four poems in the time available; in the National Library of Australia, where the papers are now housed, I have found over 150 poems shared by this group of writers.

Anna Akhmatova is regarded as Russia’s greatest female poet. She was extremely popular before the Russian Revolution, and suffered great tribulations as a consequence of her fame after the Revolution. She and Mandelstam were persecuted by Stalin, banned from writing and treated as enemies of the State. Mandelstam was exiled to a labour camp, where he died; Akmativa was followed, spied upon, and her family jailed and harassed. Her life was lived in shared rooms, and her poetry written in secret expect for two periods: 1923-40 and 1946-56, when for various reasons she found herself in tenuous favour. Like Mandelstam, whose poetry survives because his wife stashed it and his friends memorised it, Akhmatova’s poetry is famous because it has been shared by people who appreciate it, and by translation. Each poem is a room in which many minds have sat and discussed the world and its nuances; just like the rooms in which David, Rosemary and Natalie shared their interpretations.

I wanted a layout that allowed the poems to be read in any order, mixed and matched, allowed to flow between or away from interpretations. They are presented like letters in a drawer, collated in envelopes (themselves overprinted with original manuscript reproductions) and able to be arranged within the drawer spaces to be read and reread in myriad combinations.

A note on my choice of poems: three of the four poems are most of a series called ‘Northern Elegies’ (also sometimes called the Leningrad Elegies). ‘Three Autumns’, the poem I have placed first, is not part of this series. I decided to include it as an introduction because the first of the Northern Elegies is less universal in theme than the other three: it is heavily rooted in Russian culture and geography and requires more knowledge of Akhmatova’s context. ‘Three Autumns’ was written around the same time as Northern Elegies II, segues nicely into NE II’s first line, and shares similar themes to the other poems, so I have substituted it as the first of the four poems.

Contact me for more details or to purchase. I will send you an invoice that can be paid by Paypal, EFT or cheque.

Artist’s book.

Viewed from the side in one of the many possible configurations

Unique letterpress concertina-bound book with removable hard cover and slipcase. c.100 x 100 x 50mm. Canberra: Ampersand Duck, 2005. Private Collection.

I often make small books from the remnants of larger projects, and this is the first of them. Playing with Anna’s Ghosts is a playful book with a concertina binding, removable hard covers and a half-slip wrapper. The title is a pun on the use of typesetting proofs and the contents of the text, which are poetry scraps from the printing of Shared Rooms. The book can be configured in as many ways as the scraps of text can be read.

view from above when arranged in a circle

The ultimate in automatic writing, these pages are pristine examples of computer spam culled from my virtual in-tray, typeset and then printed as a traditional style of fine press poetry chapbook.

Handset, letter by letter, in wood and metal type, and printed in two colours on tyvek (a plastic stock) and card. 8pp, with a hand-rolled and hand-stitched cover.

Ampersand Duck chapzines promise to give you something different in a very familiar way.

Edition of 100.  AVAILABLE

Aus$25 ea

Contact me for more details or to purchase. I will send you an invoice that can be paid by Paypal, EFT or cheque. Thanks to the non-weighty goodness of paper, up to 3 copies can be sent with only one postage charge.

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.
[back to index of participants]

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.
[back to index of participants]

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.
[back to index of participants]

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.
[back to index of participants]

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.
[back to index of participants]

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.
[back to index of participants]

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.
[back to index of participants]

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.

Author: Rosemary Dobson
Artist: Rosalind Atkins
Design & Production: Ampersand Duck

Printed 2008, released 2009
&Duck Selected 2

Colophon

Poems to Hold or Let Go is the second volume in the Ampersand Duck fine press series, ‘Selected’.
Printed with photopolymer plate using letterpress processes in Garamond, accompanied by two exquisite boxwood wood engravings on cream 125gsm rag mould-made Magnani Vergata laid paper, in a cased binding of teal Buckram and letterpress-printed navy Wibalin with a dustjacket of wood and metal handset & printed Wibalin. 56pp. 240 x 163mm. Edition of 200.

A view of one of the printed sheets in production, featuring one of the two Ros Atkins wood engravings

About the book

Poems to Hold or Let Go is a selection of 41 poems by beloved Australian poet Rosemary Dobson that spans over 60 years of outstanding writing. It is a conceptual rather than chronological selection, leading the reader on a journey through the poet’s themes and preoccupations, then forking off into an autobiographical direction. The volume includes three later poems that have never been published in book form. The two original wood engravings act as portals to and from the journey, with two seminal Dobson poems acting as prologue and epilogue. The title is chosen by the poet, and suits the philosophical meanderings the reader will undergo.

This whole volume was designed with great care in consultation with Dobson, and the printer’s late-process surprise gesture to her was the use of metal Garamond type in the dustjacket design that had once belonged to her late husband, Alec Bolton, proprietor of the Canberra private press, Brindabella Press.

About the contributors

Rosemary Dobson

Born in 1920, Rosemary’s career as a writer of poetry began at school (Frensham, in the Southern Highlands of NSW). Rosemary’s career continued with early acceptance of publication in literary journals. She has published altogether since then 14 volumes of poetry, two books of prose and (in collaboration), two volumes of translations from Russian poetry. She has edited several anthologies. Her most recent volume, Untold Lives and Later Poems, won the 2001 Age Book of the Year award.

Rosemary has received a number of literary awards including the Patrick White Award for Literature (1984), the Australia Council’s Writers’ Emeritus Award (1996), a DLitt from Sydney University (1996) and the Order of Australia for services to Australian Literature (1987). In June 2006 she won the NSW Premier’s Special Award.

She was for some years on the Editorial Staff of Angus & Robertson, publishers. In 1951 she married Alec Bolton, printer and publisher and Founding Director of Publications at the National Library of Australia. Subsequently taking early retirement he founded his own printing press, the Brindabella Press, much praised for the standards he set in all aspects of book publication. He published 23 books, nearly all of poetry, before his untimely death in 1996.

Rosalind Atkins

Rosalind Atkins is a highly regarded printmaker whose prints have been published in conjunction with the works of some of Australia’s best-known poets, including Les Murray and Judith Wright. She graduated from RMIT with a Bachelor of Fine Art and followed that with a Graduate Diploma of Fine Art. She is a member of the English Society of Wood Engravers. Rosalind has exhibited extensively, and is collected widely by national and international institutions as well as private collections.

Prospectus

Every ‘Selected’ volume has a letterpress-printed prospectus that is sent to press supporters and other interested parties. If you would like to be on the mailing list for these, please contact me.

Purchasing

Aus$350.00 ea +p&h
Also available in binding sheets: Aus$150.00ea + p&h

STATUS: Available

Contact me for more details or to purchase. I will send you an invoice that can be paid by Paypal, EFT or cheque.

All volumes are signed by the artist and printer; a limited number early in the edition are signed by the poet. Early sales will therefore obtain fully signed volumes.

Also

Associated with this book release is an exhibition of various fine bookbindings of the sheets of Poems to Hold or Let Go. Thirty sets of book sheets were set aside for this purpose and numbered in roman numerals as a separate deluxe edition. The exhibition was called Books to Hold or Let Go.