Pickled books?

Seen at "Maggs beneath the Covers" at Maggs Antiquarian Booksellers, 50 Berkeley Square - in which 12 artists have work scattered throughout the building, which incidentally is about as "original features" as Georgian houses can be, quite apart from being filled with amazing old books - the business was established in 1853, and moved to the current location in the 1930s.

The exhibition runs till 21 December. The artists taking part are Robert Cooper, Amy Douglas, Gavin Fry, Penny Green, Stella Harding, James Hunting, Lyndall Phellps, Freya Pocklington, Nigel Slight, Matt Smith, Clare Thornton, and Russell Webb.

Poetry Thursday - Sylvia Plath

"Black Rook in Rainy Weather" by Sylvia Plath (1932-1963) - hear her read it here.

On the stiff twig up there
Hunches a wet black rook
Arranging and rearranging its feathers in the rain.
I do not expect a miracle
Or an accident

To set the sight on fire
In my eye, nor seek
Any more in the desultory weather some design,
But let spotted leaves fall as they fall,
Without ceremony, or portent.

Although, I admit, I desire,
Occasionally, some backtalk
From the mute sky, I can't honestly complain:
A certain minor light may still
Leap incandescent

Out of kitchen table or chair
As if a celestial burning took
Possession of the most obtuse objects now and then --
Thus hallowing an interval
Otherwise inconsequent

By bestowing largesse, honor,
One might say love. At any rate, I now walk
Wary (for it could happen
Even in this dull, ruinous landscape); skeptical,
Yet politic; ignorant

Of whatever angel may choose to flare
Suddenly at my elbow. I only know that a rook
Ordering its black feathers can so shine
As to seize my senses, haul
My eyelids up, and grant

A brief respite from fear
Of total neutrality. With luck,
Trekking stubborn through this season
Of fatigue, I shall
Patch together a content

Of sorts. Miracles occur,
If you care to call those spasmodic
Tricks of radiance miracles. The wait's begun again,
The long wait for the angel,
For that rare, random descent.

Help from a needle

Stitching on a new "journey to the studio" piece - working title "Black and White and Red All Over" - I was noticing my inefficient sewing method - poke the needle in, dither about a while to get the stitch length right, bring needle up, less dither to stitch in, back to dithering about where to poke it UP again... so I practised not-dithering about exact stitch length for a while.OK the stitches are getting a bit longer than in the previous versions of this work.

Even though I was being more resolute about jabbing the piece with the needle, there was still a great deal of back-and-forth and quivering-of-hand when it came to pulling the needle, with its two stitches (four jabs) out of the fabric. Little tug, another little tug, slightly greater tug - finally it was through. I was using the long thin needle at the top of the photo, threaded with the fine perle that you see at the bottom - perhaps that thread was too thick for the needle - or rather, the eye of the needle not large enough to allow the thread to pass smoothly through the fabric. The only other needle immediately to hand looked too large - would it make giant holes in the fabric (better not risk it) - though the holes weren't as big as expected, I went hunting for something medium-sized, and started paying attention to my movements in pulling the needle through.

The idea is to sew more efficiently - and to do that without particularly thinking about it. What you use affects what you do. I well remember Julia Caprara saying "Don't fight with your materials" - in other words, if it's a struggle, find something different to use.

That fine needle is ok for the red, very thin, perle, and for two strands of stranded cotton. In fact the stranded cotton is probably easier to stitch with than the perle. But the off-white and pale grey perle (acquired via Winifred Cottage, over the years) are so soft and have such subtle variations of colour ... worth a bit of struggle with the materials, for the joy of using them.

Canadian Red Cross quilts

I won't be able to do justice to Maxine March's talk about the Canadian Red Cross quilts, given at London Quilters meeting this week. As part of the Canadian Red Cross Quilt Research Group (whose members met at Beckenham Quilters), Maxine has been researching the history of these quilts, and her talk was a fascinating glimpse into life during the second world war, both of the way these quilts were made and the stories of some of the people who received them. 

As part of "Women's War Work", the Canadian Red Cross coordinated the collection of quilts to be sent to the UK to provide bedding (and comforting) to people who had lost so much through the bombing, and also to "displaced" people like the women in the Land Army. Hundreds of thousands of these quilts were made by a plethora of women's groups in towns large and small, and the exact numbers are impossible to know. In one six-week period in 1944, some 25,000 reached Britain. Yet of those many, so few survive.

Where did all the fabric come from? Close examination reveals that some were dressmaker's scraps, some were floursack prints, many were pyjama fabric. The backing was often cosily-striped flannelette (winceyette). Sometimes the fabrics were strange to modern British eyes -

I remember seeing this type of fabric, a doubleweave brushed cotton  (the flap shows the reverse side, less worn) in inexpensive bathrobes, well after the 1940s. 

The brightly coloured decorative stitch in the photo above is an example of the care that went into making these quilts, the attention to making a pleasing object. Machine pieced, usually in blocks by individuals (at home), they were hand quilted, probably as a group social activity. 

Maxine gave permission to use photos of the quilts in this "educational" blog post, and agreed to be photographed in front of a quilt that was obviously made by a variety of people from a variety of scraps -

The quilts were exhibited at the Quilt Museum in York in 2010, accompanied by a catalogue, which is a bestseller at the Quilt Museum shop. You can hear Maxine talk about the quilts at vimeo.com/13412323

Reproducing the special  label, containing the Red Cross emblem, is tricky - Maxine corresponded with the organisation for eight months to get permission and clarity on how it could be used.

If you have, or suspect you have, a Canadian Red Cross quilt lurking in a cupboard - or a story about a wartime quilt - the research group would love to know about it. In the absence of the group's website, I can pass your contact details on; if you have trouble leaving a comment here, please use the contact form on my website.

That time already?

Xmas lights on Regent Street. How many shopping days??

Under the spine

Bindings in past centuries thriftily reused paper for the concealed parts -

This book was published in 1864 -

Fry's/Cadbury's cocoa is still available, but Coleridge is probably read less these days - do they still teach "The Ancient Mariner" in school?

As for the cocoa - Fry's has been made since the 18th century; it's "Dutch processed", which reduces its antioxidant properties (and why would you eat any sort of chocolate if not for the antioxidant properties -?). Chocolate bars didn't happen till 1847 - and their chocolate easter eggs date back to 1873.

Quote for the day

"The mind that is not baffled is not employed." - Wendell Berry

...baffled about what it is or might be...

Berry also said: 'Don't own so much clutter that you will be relieved to see your house catch fire.'

Book du jour - three generations

Still auditioning "book cloth" for the spine...

Taking a photo is good because it gives a more objective look to the items being considered ... or is it that the colour values are changed slightly by the camera? In any case, the three in the middle have been eliminated from the range of possibilities.

The black-and-silver fabric at bottom left is from a broken umbrella - not sure whether nylon is really suitable for the spine treatment of a book....

The beige on the right was used in "The Seeing I" - made into bookcloth by adhering it to tissue with some fusible web. It turned out to be quite thick, and because it's a rough silk, it's not very functional, eg hardly suitable for a textbook; but then, I wasn't using it for a textbook - and the wear&tear from handling is part of the life of a book.

Now that a book using the subject matter of this project has been made, I'll put it aside for a while - the Al-Mutanabbi Street books need to be finished. Or rather, started - it's been all experiments so far.

Keeping time

Can you spot five clocks?

What is amazing is that this sequence of clocks along Fleet Street are all telling the right time! All too often when you see a public clock, it has stopped working - yet another case of neglect and degradation of public services.

Before the days of the Greenwich Time Signal - the beeps that signal the "top of the hour", aka "the pips" - someone went to Greenwich Observatory every day, reset a pocket chronometer to the exact time, and take this time round to merchants and others who had subscribed to this service. From 1836 to 1856 this person was John Henry Belville, after which his widow Maria took on the job, passing it in 1892 to her daughter Ruth, the most famous "Greenwich time lady", who continued in the job until the 1930s, retiring in her 80s like her mother. The Greenwich time signal was started in 1924; before that, another way of getting the accurate time was to subscribe to a telegraphic time signal.

Book du jour - The Seeing I

The "I" in the title is the first person pronoun; this isn't going to have a sequel called "The Seeing II" -

The eyes are from photos of me through the years - they are the young-me's that are part of memory and are kept alive (or are they) via these photos. I look into "her" eyes and wonder, Who was I then? What was she thinking? Why did she spend so much time worrying? I prefer the photos where the eyes don't look into the camera - it seems "she" was about to go and do something more interesting - or the sideways look could indicate she was thinking about something entirely removed from the current situation; don't we often do that to keep from meeting other people's eyes, to indicate we are "elsewhere" for the moment? If children hide their eyes to become invisible, adults slide their eyes to do the same thing...

The title leapt out of the quote from Penelope Lively I noted in an earlier post about the "three generations" project - the relevant words are "you are not the seeing eye". Having the title, I immediately knew which photos to select, and putting them onto my template and printing took all of 10 minutes. All the binding materials were to hand, and for the big decision of which fabric to use for the spine, I simply followed the precept of "take the nearest". The binding (drum leaf binding) took two and a half hours. 

This project has made me curious about how other artists use autobiographical photos in their work. 

Found in books

In a book in the second-hand bookstore, the William Blake poem about seeing the world in a grain of sand -

 In a book from another age, with lovely endpapers -

 and a William-Morris-style title page -

William Henry Hudson (1841-1922) was an author, naturalist, and ornithologist. His best-known novel is Green Mansions - wonder if anyone reads it nowadays?

Book du jour - three generations

Off and on, the "eyes" book is developing. It's threatening to veer off course, with the idea of children thinking their "self" is invisible when they aren't meeting someone's gaze, so I collected photos of my very young self either looking at the camera or not ... but that this something for another time.

Also I found more photos of my grandmother, my mother, and my younger self. Here we all are as brides - 

They are looking out at us - I wonder what they were thinking... I am looking away; can I remember what I was thinking? How have subsequent events changed my memory of what was going on in my head then? Did my mother and grandmother look at their own photos, in later years, and were they able to remember who they were then? Why didn't I ask them that, when I had a chance?

For me, looking at these photos, into their mute eyes, brings so many memories - so many rehearsals of old memories. And some surprises, due to my own imperfect memory. I went to check on the date of Oma's wedding - and found that what I thought was a wedding photo - wasn't. This is the wedding photo, 1910 -

so this photo

must have been taken some time later, probably after 1919. (Note the change in mustache styles!) Unfortunately the real wedding photo - of which I have only a web version of a photo of the original photo - contains too few pixels for the eyes only to be used in a print version. Which is sort of appropriate - mists of time and all that - but not all that good to look at really.

For completeness' sake, here are the other wedding photos, one post-war and one post-hippy -

1947

1971

Small Publishers Fair

Again, the annual pilgrimage to Conway Hall for the Small Publishers Fair. The highlight for me was the exhibition on Hans Waanders, put together by Peter Foolen, who was also showing some of his other books about the work of other artists - Dick Cassée among them.

Hans Waanders' motif is the kingfisher, and one of his books is Perches; another is In Search of Blue. I loved this view of his studio -

 And this story is extraordinary - "it is not insignificant that Waanders has undergone numerous heart operations including triple bypass surgery. Bodily evidence of these experiences appears in such works as Kingfisherpond (1989) and Bloody Tracks:Traces Sanglantes (1984-87). In these pieces, he literally used the surgically enlarged and engorged veins of his left forearm as a bush to paint. Kingfisherpond is a series of lines made by pressing of this arm on paper. When viewed through the successive semi-transparent layers of paper, the lines form a triangle in blue pigment."

The writing, from an exhibition catalogue, goes on: "On one level, Kingfisherpond might recall the symbolic significance of the number three - potential references to the Holy Trinity, transubstantiation  the Eucharist, and other esoteric and theological references to the philosophical  psychological, and teleological constructs association with numerology. Or it might signify the purely mathematical and geometric form of the triangle as it evolves through numerical progression and physical transparency."

Among the Waanders and kingfisher memorabilia, here is sound made visible -

Elsewhere at the fair, a tempting display from Redfoxpress -

More temptation for me in Things I Wanted To Tell You by Kirsten Merola -

What I took home was this book of poems with illustrations by Mary Kuper, from a recent exhibition at the Poetry Library -

Book du jour - three generations

Having made one version of the "three generations" book (results here), I'm going to do it "properly" this time. Gather the materials beforehand. Make all those choices before doing the binding (drum leaf binding).

Printing will be on cream paper, endpapers will be light grey, the boards will be covered with the paper with the tiny print, and I'll make the bookcloth for the spine, using fusible web to join cloth onto tissue paper. (Also needed: the boards, some tyvek or cambric, and some bristol board - just small amounts.)

But which of the fabrics to use for the bookcloth ... ? I want to make a book with each of them! Or, maybe none of these. I've left them lying on the workbench, ready for a rethink once I get back from looking round the Small Publishers Fair.

Paper making, of a sort

Raw materials - cotton linters. To which I wanted to add mica flakes and black dye.

Painting the dye onto wet paper -

Not a good result! When ironed dry (I was in a hurry to see what would happen), the procion dye went into the j-cloth, and also into the newspaper on which I was ironing ... and not all that much stayed in the paper -

Same thing with the one that was left to dry naturally (3rd from left). The others are the result of adding dye to the water - which made it impossible to see the pulp in the water, and diluted the dye too much. And my rubber gloves leaked. The grey shades are definitely suitable for November -

Sprinkling the mica flakes onto the paper before compressing it sort of worked - quite a few have fallen off, but most are still there.

Perhaps the way forward for making black paper is to dye the already-made paper. Or to dye the cotton linters, and treat them with synthrapol before pulping them.

Found art Friday

A present from the kitchen sink!

Book du jour - reading rooms

Inside the rooms - rubbings of the edges of pages - they have quite a Cubist/Futurist feel... -

 The "rooms" will just about stay quietly as square shapes -

 When they do stay square, they can go at right angles -

 But they are difficult to keep in position. Whereas in making this arch -

the book flops open and the "rooms" keep their shape via the tension on the structure.

Some parts of the paper have puncturing, and there's even a bit of stitching here and there. I'm thinking about the "meaning" (if any!) of those sorts of marks.

To avoid the drip of dye into the "inside", using clean newspaper for each sheet won't be enough; preparing a large sheet of paper and cutting it into strips, or cutting off the edges of strips, is also part of the plan. Or a thicker, denser paper might not let ink seep through. I'd like a paper that's smooth on the inside and rough on the outside - is there such a thing?

Poetry Thursday - November

No sun—no moon—no morn—no noon,
No dawn—no dusk—no proper time of day,
No warmth—no cheerfulness—no healthful ease,
No road, no street, no t’ other side the way,
No comfortable feel in any member—
No shade, no shine, no butterflies, no bees,
No fruits, no flowers, no leaves, no birds,
                November!

That's by Thomas Hood (1799-1845), in whose day fog and smog were frequent if not constant. And don't we all feel that way on the gloomy days of this darkening month.

But on a misty day, with the damp ground strewn with golden leaves, and a flock of starlings chattering, whistling, warbling (invisibly) in a tree, and the everyday noises muffled ... it's not so bad!

How's that again?

Book du jour - reading rooms

One idea for my books for the al-Mutanabbi Street Project was to use double-fold accordion to make "a street of rooms" - and finally I sewed together the papers I'd assembled for a try-out of the concept.

The sewing was very awkward! The origami papers were joined with tape, which made things worse - so I cut them apart and tipped them in once the fold had been sewn. The yellow paper looks smaller because it is - I wanted to see what happens with smaller and smaller "rooms" - how does this affect what you might be able to put on the inside of the outer paper, or even on the other side of the wall of the room?

On checking the instructions for the book with just one layer of paper, I saw that you're meant to fold the two strips of (white, in this case) paper together for sewing at each fold - then reverse the fold on one of the strips of paper to make  the structure. Well, I'll try that next time - it definitely sounds more straightforward, more do-able, than my current attempt.

Dyeing and inking of paper continues - I've rigged up a line with clips to hold the paper while drying -

These are for a single-layer double accordion fold book - the inside of the pages has a bit of collage and a bit of frottage. I thought the collage would make the paper (re-used photocopies) more substantial, but it doesn't really. And the ink seeps through the thin paper. One discovery is that the black areas of the photocopy resist the dye and ink - the areas with graphite frottage make quite a rich surface.

Inside these "rooms" will be patterns made from rubbings of the edges of pages -

Without the cover at either end, this is one maquette for "street of reading rooms" (a longer one awaits sewing) -

It can also become a star shape; what is an optimum number of cells? -

The collage is unnecessary - one coloured "wall" will tint the others, as with the red at bottom left.

Another observation: The ink seeps through the paper; the dye doesn't penetrate, but will run underneath and stain the reverse if you're not careful.

Still experimenting ... still slushing it all around in my subconscious ....