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Artists' Books in Macalester College Library's Special Collections

This guide features a sampling of the artists' books available in the Macalester College Library Special Collections.

Unlike the segmented production of a typical book---written, edited, printed, published, and distributed, all by separate parties---every detail of the book-making process contributes to the creator's vision when making an artist's book. Below are some examples from our collection of how specific book-making techniques shape the work's final form. 

 

Paper

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." 

Binding

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. 

Repurposed Materials

Extinct Extant with box, opened and with two folios pulled out.

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. 

Distribution

Queer Masses Issue Two with packaging

"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."