Artists' Books in Macalester College Library's Special Collections

Marvel Gregoire's "TIR." 2018.

Minneapolis-based book artist Marvel Grégoire dedicated this book to the children of Parkland Florida.

The paper is handmade, featuring seventeen pages with a single 16 mm embossed circle painted with watercolor, using a different color on each page, one for each victim of Parkland. The soft paper and pastel-colored circles contrast starkly with the book's grim message.

"When nothing is done, there is a disturbing association created between random violence and the devaluation of children in our culture," wrote Gregoire in her artist's statement, "We might say that this is unacceptable. But when nothing is done, we are all complicit." 

"Listen, Listen : Adadam Agofomma. Honoring the Legacy of Koo Nimo" from Take Time Press, 2011.

In this inaugural publication of Take Time Press, book artists Mary Hark, Atta Kwami, Pamela Clarkson, and associates honor the legacy of the palm wine musician Koo Nimo and his musical group Adadam Agofomma, whose musical career has preserved and spread the traditional stories and instruments of this West African musical genre to the world. 

Take Time Press's mission is described in the colophon of this book: "to seek to nurture international collaboration and to celebrate cultural activity in the Greater Ashante Region of Ghana." In that spirit, as well as in the spirit of Koo Nimo's music, the majority of the paper used in this project was handmade by Mary Hark from "botanicals harvested near Koo Nimo's home in Kusami, Ghana, during July and August 2010... [including] pulp-mulberry, cashew, papyrus, and other fibers which grow in the Greater Ashante Region." This choice of material instills Koo Nimo's celebration of place and culture throughout the entire book. 

Islam Aly's "Unleash." 2017.

This book utilizes an ancient book-making technique called Coptic binding. Dating back to Egypt in the 2nd century AD, this binding is often encased in leather, but when the binding is left exposed, books with Coptic binding can open 360°. 

In Unleash, the figure of an angel travels across flip-book-like pages, disrupting text about confinement and restraint, escaping the book, and leaving behind the loose letters in the outline of a human face. The binding of the book itself helps create the story of this journey. The tight and visual binding---as well as the leather straps and clasps that wrap around the closed book---echo the themes of containment. However, when the straps are opened, the book's pages ripple completely open, reflecting the angel being unleashed. 

Julie Chen's "Bitter Chocolate." 2016.

Bitter Chocolate is bound in a Jacob's Ladder format with 26 panels hinged together. The first side, "Unsweetened," tells the early history of chocolate, the artists' personal history with chocolate, and the first half of the story of Cacao Woman, a figure inspired by both the role cacao played in Mayan history and myth and the ways that history has been fictionalized and mythologized by modern chocolate sellers and consumers alike. The second side, "Untempered," tells the more recent history of chocolate and the chocolate industry, and the second half of the Cacao Woman story. 

The distinct binding style of the book creates a distinct experience for the person reading it, as well. As Chen explains on her website, "The full meaning and impact of the story is only revealed when all four parts of the content are discovered and read." Between taking the book out of its custom enclosure and folding and unfolding it to read it, the reader is reminded of unwrapping a bar of chocolate. 

Alicia Bailey's "Extinct Extant." 2011.

In 2011, artist Alicia Bailey photographed seven different extinct bird skins at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. The book Extinct, Extant complies these photographs with information from different accounts of these species to give the birds a new form of life: story.

The eight leaves of the book are formed from repurposed commercial negative envelopes attached to an accordion spine. Information and images about each extinct species are inside the envelopes, and cropped images of each bird skin are collaged to the backs.  

To read this book, you must flip through the envelopes and take out their contents, creating a feeling like that of going through the cabinets of a museum. The repurposed material helps create the feelings of history, preservation, and rediscovery that give these birds their new life through remembrance. 

"Paradox: A Study in Musique Concrète" by Mike Hansen. 2019.

The mid-20th century saw the rise of the French compositional experiment of musique concrète, which focused on collaging together natural sounds into a new auditory and artistic experience. Mike Hansen's Paradox builds both literally and figuratively upon this movement. This EP features four compositions of solo instrument recordings, restructured with computer software to create the acousmatic sound of the musique concrète style, cast onto records made of a fine high-tensile cement to create playable concrete records. 

As he writes on his page for the music distribution platform Bandcamp, "Paradox’s concrete discs continue my art practice’s research into perceptions of perceived notions of what/how a sound object should appear or perform, through objects, sculptures and installations. My love for abstraction and an improvisational composition is reflected in each of the recordings." 

"Queer Masses. Issue Two: Comfort" by RUMTUM. 2021.

In 2021, book artist Sarah Evenson and illustrator Jade Juno published a five-part zine called "Queer Masses" under the collective name of RUMTUM Press. As they write in an artists' statement for the Minnesota Center for Book Arts, they wanted the project to "unabashedly position queerness as an essential site of transformative social resistance and joy," as well as "combine the well-crafted physicality of artist books with the affordability and accessibility of zines."

To achieve that goal, they made the zine's distribution an intentional part of the project, using USPS to ship the zine quarterly to readers across the country without adding cost to the product or its readers. The zine was delivered in a standard USPS envelope that RUMTUM addressed and decorated by hand. This distribution decision, from its strategicness to its loving detail, embodies the zine's message of bringing "a queer and gentle (but necessary!) end to the current oppressive reality in favor of an alternate more loving world."

"Lexicon" Pamphlet Series by the Institute for Anarchist Studies. 2012.

Made in collaboration with artist Josh MacPhee of the Justseed Artists' Collective, the Institute for Anarchist Studies published the Lexicon series of 2,000-or-so-word pamphlets, to "convert words into politically useful tools—for those already engaged in a politics from below as well as the newly approaching—by offering definitional understandings of commonly used keywords." 

The entire pamphlet series is available at no cost on the IAS website. The Institute for Anarchist Studies offers free print copies of all five pamphlets in the series--White Supremacy, Power, Colonialism, Gender, and Anarchism(not pictured)--as well as PDF copies to download for printing and sharing. In this way, Lexicon is distributed directly to the people, carrying out the overarching goal of the project to make political language broadly accessible.