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| © Sohei Nishino, taken from NY Times. |
I just came across these interesting “diorama maps” by Sohei Nishino on his website. They are constructed from the “enormous mound” of film photographs he takes when visiting various cities.
They were also mentioned in a January New York Times travel piece about maps and such in London.
Pop-ups! They’re Not JUST for Kids from Bowdoin College on Vimeo.
With thanks to Elissa Campbell of Blue Roof Designs, who shared this on Facebook(and who says she in turn discovered it through someone at the Book Arts Guild of Vermont).
I thought this map of US surnames was interesting. It shows the most common names in different parts of the country.
Mine is not a common name. In fact, there is only one other Ellen Golla who turns up prominently in searches. My Googleganger seems to be close in age, have the same middle initial, and also live in California (she at the opposite end of the state).
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| All Trains Go to King’s Cross St Pancras ©2001 |
I’ve been pondering ways of conveying the progression of time and movement in books. I was recently re-skimming parts of Keith Smith’s Structure of the Visual Book. He talks about how the structures of artists’ books relate to those in “music, poetry, story-telling and cinema.” He then cautions:
Carryover of past concepts is often inappropriate… Revolutionary ideas must be realized when starting to work in a new medium. The basic problem in making books is approaching it as if it were many single pictures, and it is not . . . This error comes from working in one medium, and carrying over principles to a new process, rather than discovering what is unique about the new medium.
As someone who used to work largely in single pictures, this is something that I’ve found to be both exhilarating and vexing about making artist’s books.
I was listening to a talk that Bea Nettles gave at Duke University (thanks to a link posted on the Book Arts List). She mentioned how in one of her books she partly conveyed the slow, subtle process of aging by gradually transforming the background color of the book’s pages. As the book progresses and the subject grows older, each page becomes ever so subtly more purple. By the end, the viewer realizes that the pages have become deep purple, hinting at how a person almost imperceptibly ages from day to day, slowly evolving into an older person. Now that’s the sort of thing that makes a book unlike a painting.
Someone mentioned here recently that she’d tried to back silk with paper, but had problems. By coincidence, I just came across this video and thought perhaps it could be useful.
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| From bbc.co.uk/news/magazine |
The BBC News Magazine has an article on the importance of typefaces.
“To most people, typefaces are pretty insignificant. Yet to their devotees, they are the most important feature of text, giving subliminal messages that can either entice or revolt readers, says Tom de Castella.
When Avatar, the biggest grossing movie of all time was released, one section of the audience was immediately outraged . . .”
Volvelles are paper wheel charts with rotating parts. The modern ones, such as those reproduced in Jessica Helfand’s Reinventing the Wheel, are enjoyable. But there’s something so captivating about the ones from previous centuries that were incorporated into books. These were used for serious stuff like astronomy, medicine and fortune-telling. They were computing devices in their day. To think that the modern movable book has such exalted ancestry.
When I posted a picture recently of a volvelle from Petrus Apianus’s 1529 Cosmographia, it whetted my appetite for more. Here are a couple of other examples from the Cosmographia.
Here are a few links to historical volvelles:
The following page from the Astronomicum Caesareum by Petrus Apianus (1540) is thanks to the Wikipedia page on Volvelles:
