Book Studio

For an overview of some pretty amazing bookbinding work, check out this post at Bibliodyssey.

The Book Complimentary class have been playing with pop-up books over this last semester; here are some paper links for future reference. If you know of others, please share them with us!

• Robert Sabuda’s pop-up cards with instructions and templates
• John Patience’s pop-up book resource page
• Peter Callesen’s paper engineering
• Paperform paper design & engineering
• Chinese paper folds & cuts
• Tarquin books on paper engineering and pop-ups
• A reference page on Chinese papercuts of all kinds

A group of Honours students in the painting workshop have produced their own zine, titled (at last notice) dot dot dot. Consisting purely of drawings photocopied in both colour and black & white, they saved their text for the cover, which was set in metal type and printed using letterpress in the Book Studio.

Erik Krebs-Schade and Tiffany Cole of the Painting Workshop proudly holding a copy of the zine cover, fresh off the press and still wet. Erik set most of the type.

A view of the type form, clamped up (flipped in Photoshop to allow normal reading, as it usually reads back-to-front and upside-down). We printed 2-up onto A3 paper to fold down to A5 size.

The covers, drying en masse in the racks.

The zine artists were: Tim Price, Erik Krebs-Schade, Tiffany Cole, Kalina Pilat, and Della Jackson. The project was co-ordinated by Raquel Ormella of the Painting Workshop with printing help from Caren Florance of the Book Studio.

The zine was produced in an edition of about 270, and was launched at the Zine Fair of the 2006 This Is Not Art festival in Newcastle.

The Book Studio has just inherited a mystery tool and would love to have the mystery solved.

Here it is, sitting on an A4 sheet of paper, to give an idea of its proportions:

Heavy (solid iron handle), with two unpainted metal panels on the sides bolted on and holding the ‘axle’, the head is shaped for a specific purpose, including levelled-off ‘feet’ to allow the tool to be sat on a flat surface a certain way up when not used.

Each of those toothed circles, and the plain circles between them move independently in either direction without resistance (the centre is actually two roundels, I just forgot to stagger them when taking the shot). The teeth in each circle aren’t the same size as you turn them around. On one circle the teeth have miniscule differences; on another they graduate from very thin through to a medium size.

The brand is Huntingdon woops, HUNTINGTON, and on the next side of the handle (which is diamond-shaped, not square) is a large ‘B1′.

The tool used to belong to the Graphic Investigation Workshop, one of the precursors to the Book Studio. GIW was a Canberra Art School department, for 20 years under the leadership of Petr Herel, a Czech artist who brought his European artist’s book sensibility to Australia long before Australians had any concept of a book being more than just something to read. GIW focussed on drawing as a philosophy, the book as a wide-ranging concept, and poetry as mandatory to creative life.

If the tool came from GIW, it could be to do with printing presses, papermaking equipment, letterpress, or just picked up by someone and kept as an interesting object. Could it have been used for calibration or measurement? Does anyone know?

POSTSCRIPT: Thanks to Norm and Foo who identified the tool as a grinder dressing tool, to keep grinding wheels buffed and rough.  We may still have the wheel it fits, if we’re lucky!