Book Studio

More pages for the Book Studio’s contribution to Bookmagazinebook’s miseducation volume:

A page by Labratt. It’s hard to reproduce; there are layers of print incorporating metallic paper.

A page by Kristin, an exchange design student from Canada.

Margaret, a 3rd year printmaking student, made a book within a book:

Stay tuned for more pages, coming soon…

And to see other Bookmagazinebook contributions, there’s now a flickr group to explore (and join, if you’re playing too).

On the night of the 28th of February the art school was hit by a freak supercell thunderstorm. Four feet of hail clogged the school’s downpipes and consequently torrential rain had nowhere to go but through the inside of the two-storey school. Three weeks later we are still mopping up, and the damage will take months to repair.

The Book Studio was flooded, but damage was confined to a few works on paper and some of the MDF furniture. Both presses seem ok, although we do have to watch for future rust, and miraculously, all the computers and our brand-new inkjet printer escaped harm.

This view is after the pool of water was sucked out; there are typecases drying out and damaged works being investigated. The top of the metal letterpress cabinet (centre-ish) is totally orange with rust.

We are hosting a workshop for the ANG print symposium (details to follow), and hopefully all will be back to relative normality by that time.

Students in the Book Design complimentary unit have taken on the Book Magazine Book challenge of playing with a page of a travelling book and then passing it on. Over the next few weeks we’ll blog the progress of Miseducation as it passes through the class, and when we’re finished we’ll pass it on to someone else for another stage of its journey.

The book started here, and now today’s contribution is by Brad Santos, a 3rd-year Printmedia student:

It’s a combination of drawing, layers of collage and papercuts.

If you want to get involved with the Book Magazine Book project (you don’t need to be an artist), read the guidelines and email johnbonbailey at hotmail dot com.

For your one-stop shop of traditional bookbinding and book repair instructions, go to the Indiana University Libraries website, Repair and Enclosure Treatments Manual. It has a wide variety of techniques, clearly illustrated and explained.

Being an academic sort of blog, the Book Studio blog has had a haitus between the end of the 2006 academic year and now… but the new year starts on February 19, and good things will flow from that point.

In the meantime, if you would like to see a small informal artist’s book that reflects the streets of Brisbane sticker culture, go to this post by Byrd, a Canberra graffiti artist who has documented 12 months up north in his own special way. He’ll be back by May, and Canberra will start to look colourful again…

By the way… this blog has been inundated with spam, and in an attempt to avoid it, comments have been turned off. If you would like to say something in relation to the site, please use the blog email address and contact the studio directly. All feedback is very welcome.

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!

Ron McBurnie, Townsville printmaker and book artist, has an exhibition opening soon at the Impressions on Paper Gallery in Braddon. Ron is a regular Printmedia visiting artist. The exhibition, called Chasing Palmer: etchings influenced by Samual Palmer, runs from 28 Sept to 22 Oct 2006, with the opening at 5.30 on Friday 29 September.

If you’re interested in more of Ron’s work, he has a website and an infrequent but interesting blog.