Proverbs
1
They who would make the desert bloom
must first make a desert
2
When the lion lies down with the lamb
only one of them wakes up
3
In a land of milk and honey
the cow is queen and the drone is king
ABCD April 2024
Seven members of Artists’ Book Club Dove met in the print studio on a beautiful sunny day when the cowslips were in flower. Yes, those are orchid leaves in the foreground (below) – but which orchid? Common spotted is my guess.
Bron showed us a beautiful book by Alec Finlay, Mesostic Remedy, mesostic poems on the names and functions of the Bach flower remedies. I met Alec Finlay at the Pier Arts Centre in Stromness, Orkney in June 2008. At that time he was writing three-line poems on the blades of wind turbines, a form of circle-poem that works well with the kinetics of turbines. I remember that he talked about mesostics too (a variation on the acrostic poem) and that I wrote a mesostic on the bus back to Kirkwall, where I was staying at the Youth Hostel. Alec’s book is beautifully paced. It has plenty of white space around the drawings and poems. You read it slowly and carefully. It is a reminder that a page does not have to be filled!
Diana had brought a “Spider” binding, a structure she is willing to teach us at a future meeting. Very useful for holding rather bulky insertions. See page 137 of Art of the Fold by Hedi Kyle and her daughter Ulla Warchol.
Jane has been sorting through great quantities of indigo-dyed papers and producing some striking collages. Perhaps they will turn into a book, perhaps not!
Clare brought a book she made some years ago, about a Welsh slate fence. It uses collage, the topic of our work this afternoon. It has only one page, but what a page! It is a line of upright slates. On the back of each slate, one tercet of a poem. A window cut in the front cover gives a view of the slate fence and the Welsh mountains behind it. Simply stunning. (Clare’s photos)
Pauline brought photos of the gallery space in Appledore where we’ll be exhibiting our work later this year. I’ll post photos of the finished work after this show and the one in Somerton.
Judy has been solving a problem posed by her massive map-book.
I (Ama) have made a book with many pockets to hold the bucket-list suggestions from the guests at (daughter) Mary and (son-in-law) Jan’s wedding. It’s an unruly book, unlikely to behave nicely on a bookshelf between other, more sober, volumes. The bookcloth was left over from binding Fraser’s Sermons, and the images on the cover were left over from making the wedding invitations. The sewing is a single-sheet Coptic, the pages being folded at the fore-edge. I no longer have the book, but here are some photos.
After a sumptuous shared lunch and a visit to the tree plantation and the cowslips, we spent a playful afternoon collaging random pages, to be collated and bound later. Here are my papers, including indigo-dyed, paste-patterned and handmade, and bits of old hydrographic charts. And a couple of pages in progress. One of them includes a piece of indigo-dyed jute ribbon.
Next meeting 25th May.
Here are the edited highlights from my notebook:
April Dove-droppings
fly in and fly out
shoulder to shoulder
joined in the middle
a ropey old bit of card
does have a life of its own
it’s all about stuff
look through the front cover
the more you look the more you find
the range of colour you can get
those four mermaids
trapped for hundreds of years
at the top of the tower
take them on bicycles
following connections
out to sea
women came to dance
in the back of my mind
to wind you up
a drone would be essential
find a jump-off point
another way in
a way to make a book
make and discard
like a sculpture
a pond
seeds of love
but not yet
because it can change
live with the pages
shunt them around
make holes
start with the paper
suminagashi in puddles
the postman painted every day
walking in the pine woods
fifteen miles a day
I’ve kept everything
this rather revolting book
I found in a puddle
something about the smell
something slightly damp
slightly slimy or slithery
Poetry in Bath Saturday 13 April
This is at BRLSI – the Bath Royal Literary and Scientific Institute, 16-18 Queen Square, Bath BA1 2HN.
Get tickets online or on the door. More details on the website.
Repairing an heirloom: part 2
Well, that was a nerve-wracking task, but it’s done!
I left the Sellotape in place where I couldn’t remove it without damage.
Here’s the simple jig with a folio in place, ready for Filmoplast. Repairing the 60 folios took a couple of hours. First I practiced on a well-worn copy of “The Tale of Two Bad Mice” from my childhood.
The sewing would have been quicker, easier and neater if I’d had a sewing frame. I remembered that I needed to paste a piece of mull (stiffened openweave muslin) over the spine.
I made book-cloth from a piece of dark green poplin. The existing boards were dog-eared so I cut new ones and covered them. I found a nice bit of marbled paper for the endpapers, and pasted the mull and trimmed tapes between the endpapers and the boards. This was the most stressful operation! I temporarily inserted pieces of card to make the fore-edge the same thickness as the spine edge (which was swelled with Filmoplast) before pressing the book overnight.
Next day I gingerly unwrapped it. It looked ok. I pasted an envelope, for the press-cutting, inside the back cover. What remained of the original spine with gold title, I pasted inside the front cover. I added a small label on the front. It’s far from a professional repair job, but much better than before!
The press-cutting includes some information about the author and his grandfather, father and sons:
The Rev Donald Fraser was admitted minister of Killearnan in 1744, was translated to Urquhart (or Ferintosh) in 1757, and died in 1773, in the 67th year of his age and 30th of his ministry. His son, Alexander Fraser, was inducted to Kirkhill, in the Presbytery of Inverness, in 1773, and died in 1802, in the 53rd year of his age and 29th of his ministry. He was succeeded by his son, Donald Fraser, who was ordained in the same year (1802) and died in 1836 (in consequence of being thrown out of his conveyance) in the 54th year of his life and 34th of his ministry. He had three sons in the ministry, one of whom, Alexander, succeeded him, and continued minister of the parish until 1843, when he joined the Free Church, but being followed by nearly all his people, he continued to minister to them until his death in 1884, in the 82nd year of his age and 57th of his ministry. The Frasers were thus ministers for 140 years, and ministers at Kirkhill for 111.
ABCD March 2024
On 23 March, seven members of Artists’ Book Club Dove welcomed a new member, Diana Illingworth-Cook, a very skilled and creative bookbinder. Not only that, but she keeps hens and ducks!
She brought a selection of her books to show. One that especially appealed to me was this longstitch journal with tackets, with its heavyweight grey card wraparound cover folded and pasted back to show the white deckle edge. Elegant and beautiful.
Jane, Judith and Bron had been to the Book Band exhibition in Stroud, and came away with many topics for discussion.
Bron has made a large clamshell box to hold some prints.
Judith will be teaching us one of Claire Van Vliet’s woven and interlocking book structures in May. I have the book of the same name, bought for me many years ago by my son when he was in USA. It is now available as a PDF.
Judith recommended a podcast, The Unfinished Print, in particular the episode on Lucy May Schofield. I very much enjoyed the episode featuring Wuon-Gean Ho, whom I met many years ago in London.
Judith has made “a crazy book” (photo below) with indigo-dyed cover and cyanotype pages.
I (Ama) have been collaborating with San Francisco poet Beau Beausoleil on a project called Lives of the Poets. Some poems are by him and some by me. Three were written jointly in email exchanges. The images on some of the pages are of my papers dyed with botanical dyes, mostly from the compost-bin – walnut hulls, onion skins, red cabbage leaves and so on. The collection was recently long-listed in a chapbook competition. I brought along an A5 woven-spine version that I’m making in an edition of two, initially. And a tiny book of Poems for Leonard, my grandson. My third woven-spine book, Overheard on the Bus, is made from a large sheet of marks and writing in botanical inks, made during a weekend workshop with Kathryn John. I cut the sheet up and wrote in walnut ink a surreal fragment overheard on the bus from Street to Butleigh on the first day of the workshop: “I left my spoon in Street. I’m surprised we have any cutlery left at all. I keep fishing knives out of the carpet.” I bought the yarn in a charity shop. It looks similar to the one Jane used on her woven spine, but I think Jane’s was home-dyed. Photos below. Click on a photo to see it full size.
Jane is our Indigo guru. Here is her woven-spine book of indigo-dyed pages. I love the organic way the dye leaks under the resist when the paper is wetted before going into the vat.
After lunch, Clare taught us the woven-spine structure. Here is her lovely little book made from cut-up pages from a Gudrun Sjoden catalogue. Every double-page spread has unexpected juxtapositions of colour and image.
Pauline, now living in North Devon, will be the featured artist at the Appledore Gallery during May. Open Wed-Sat 11-4.
Our next meeting will be on April 20th. Till then, here are the edited highlights from my notes on the March meeting.
March Dove-droppings
three horses in Ilchester
to carry parsley
like a piano hinge
the Secret Belgian
used a moustache-comb
for a photocopy job
a clamshell
is a bit like a bicycle
that went down with the Titanic
where it flops
how it flips
an arthritic dragon
the Queen of Magnets
dissected an Icelandic book
on the wrong side of the ruler
she’s got sharp fingernails
eat them and you will die
a closed book
Good Friday
Good Friday Prayer
for all flesh and blood nailed up
to hang and blacken in the wind
as a warning to others
for crow and fox and human
pest or enemy or convict
for bereaved mothers
for tortured and torturer
oppressed and oppressor
my sisters and brothers
Ama Bolton, March 2012-March 2024
Repairing an Heirloom
There was a knock at the door yesterday. “I’m looking for a bookbinder.” She handed me a small, precious book, 190 years old and worn out with much reading. I said I would do what I could, but it would not be as good as new. Later I photographed it and removed the brittle brown-paper wrapping. Inside were boards covered in green moire linen. The sticky tape came easily off the gold-tooled spine, but much remains on the pages. The ten signatures consist of 8 and 4 folios alternately. Only fragments of the unbleached thread remain. Most of the folios have split at the fold. A press cutting, dated 1 November 1886, is fixed to the back endpaper with a rusted pin. The front endpaper is missing. “Grandfather” is written in pencil under the author’s name. The present owner is the author’s great-grand-daughter.
I plan to repair all the folios with Filmoplast P90, an archival repair tape. Then I’ll reassemble the folios into signatures and stitch them onto tapes. Then make new endpapers and a pocket to hold the press cutting. I hope to re-use the boards but am not sure how best to treat the spine, which will need reinforcing. I’ll probably paste it to a strip of book-cloth. Everything I do will be reversible, in the event of a future repair.
Civilian
civilian
she listens at night
for the purr of an engine
for the whistle of a rocket
for the bark of a gun
for a bang on the door
she hides her daughter
she does not ask her sons
where they go each night
she scavenges under a curfew
she lives under a false name
she mourns the dead
she knows the mourning
will never be done
she hopes for a clean death
Ama Bolton 4 March 2024. Image: Unwritten Page 15, botanical dyes on rag paper
ABCD February 2024
It was good to be back at the Dove last Saturday with other members of Artists’ Book Club Dove. Hellebores and snowdrops were flowering just outside Bron’s print studio.
Pauline has been drawing the ever-changing sand-bars in the estuary where she lives, and finding pigments in the beach. Investigating this subject online later, I came across this interesting blog. Pauline also had exciting news about a potential exhibition opportunity for us in September.
Judith has been in India, and as usual she brought interesting finds back with her! She’s been papermaking, ruining bits of kitchen equipment by processing hemp fibres. The photo below shows a piece made from hemp fibres drawn wet from the vat and stitched onto a scrim backing. I turned the photo sideways and it looks like the edge of a pond.
And here are just a few of her experiments with cyanotype, salt, bleach, and botanical inks.
Judy came with her teenage granddaughter Hattie, already an accomplished book-artist (her dream-book was in our exhibition at ACEarts last year.) Here is part of a big project Judy is engaged in:
Jane has been busy celebrating a very important birthday. I forgot to photograph the delicious vegan avocado chocolate cake Bron made for the occasion.
Clare showed us her current sketchbook, handmade and full of observations and lovely watercolour sketches including landscapes and birds.
I (Ama) brought along a tiny meander book I’d made in an edition of two. I gave the first one to my seven-year-old granddaughter Hazel. One side of the paper has a photo of hazel catkins blowing in the wind. The other side has a poem dedicated to hazel the tree and Hazel the girl, with an Irish folk-tale running along the bottom of each page. It has a slip-case decorated with pictures of Hazel fairies, from Cicely Mary Barker‘s Flower Fairy series of children’s books with botanically-accurate illustrations. The second photo shows a book I made by cutting up unfinished watercolour life sketches and dipping the pages in botanical dyes. I love the randomness and unpredictability of this process.
Other news: The Bookband are are having their first group exhibition – “Fully Booked – The Book as Art” at the Lansdown Gallery in Stroud from 12 – 23 March 2024. An exhibition, on until 21 March at the Atkinson Gallery in Street is of Sustainable Art and looks interesting; lace-edged Magnolia leaves, all kinds of foraged materials, drawings in snow …
Our next meeting will be on 23 March. My father’s 103rd birthday! Meanwhile, here are the sweepings from the studio floor.
February Dove-droppings
don’t answer the door
it was vile
down in the cellar
blue and ripply
uncontrollable marbling
strange bits of silvery fungus
it’s dangerous
it’s going to change
it might fall apart
how is it done?
with open folios
like the tower of babel
the bottoms could be dipped
into a dream book
depending where the moon is
low tide and full moon
white waves where they meet the sea
colours in the beach at low tide
nine maps west to east
barrowloads of dove droppings
two sets of black shiny chopsticks
half a vole in the bottom of my boot
a lying head at each end
sprayed neon pink over four bicycles
Snowdrops for Alexei Navalny
“There is no shame in doing little. There is shame in doing nothing”.
— Alexei Navalny
barleybooks 