caseroom wares

 

The Caseroom were pleased to be in attendance a couple of weeks ago at the annual Small Publishers Fair at Conway Hall, London. It was an opportunity for Barrie’s Dante books to be showcased – even though they are a work in progress – they received positive feedback with several collectors keen to purchase.

Philippa, with collaborator Tamar Maclellan launched two new editions – Kept and Feast, both part of a trilogy that explores found objects within domestic gardens. This project has been a year in the making, and will shortly be showcased in Bristol at The University of West England.

Conway Hall also has Barrie’s favourite piece of advice for living.

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abe books

The Caseroom Press makes Artists’ Books. Not money. Not that this is a problem, we do what we do for love, not lucre.

But occasionally, or books turn up on Abe – and someone is making money (well, potentially).

At the moment of posting, Alan Mason’s The Magazine: January is selling for a whole £4.70. Quite the bargain, even with postage. Alan was after a tenner on Big Cartel.

Issue 11 of The Case Magazine (Vivid), a personal favourite of all the issues we published over the years (it started its life way back at teh Edniburgh College of Art in 1995 and was the seed which grew into The Caseroom Press. It is now on sale for £22. A must have for the avid reader. With postage, it comes in at 5 times the original price, but still worth it.

Disappointingly there are three copies of Utopian Tales for sale (around £30 or thereabouts). Disappointing because there were only ever sixty-four copies made, one for each of the illustrators, one for Jack Zipes, one for the editor, Ken Cockburn, and one as a file copy for The Caseroom Press. This means that three of the illustrators didn’t like it so much they gave it away. You can read all about the project in a previous blog post if you’re interested.

Ken Cockburn will be no doubt pleased to know that the original book in the Overheard/Overlooked series is a snip at £40 (including postage). Ken sold them for about a fiver originally. As a freelance poet, he’s never going to make it into the Times’ Rich List, so if you’d like to donate £40 straight to him, we’ll send you a book free of charge.

Lastly, and by far the most impressive is Angus Reid’s The Book of Days – £250, plus postage… technically we’ve sold out, but I’m sure I can find a file copy for £250 – with free postage. Or, if you pay the train fare, Angus might even hand deliver it and give a reading from the book.

Typewriter Art: A Modern Anthology is up there too – anything from £9–£70 if you’re interested. Barrie is so never going to get a royalties cheque.

recovered/recorded

Philippa’s most recent collaboration with Tamar MacLellan is a small pair of concertina books that explore fragments of china that were unearthed whilst digging in the garden of a newly acquired house. Whilst much has been written on the subject of found pottery, there has been no substantiated conclusions as to why our gardens are littered with these (mainly) blue and white fragments. Having recovered in the region of 150 pieces from the garden, this book focuses on a small selection of a growing collection. The books are presented in an archive bag complete with record card and a fragment of china.

 

 

LENvention 6

In August Philippa attended the annual LENvention workshop organised by Angie Butler (ABPress). The two day event is an opportunity for a group of letterpress practitioners get together to develop a body of work within a 48 hour period. The event was hosted by Lucy Guenot at Gloucestershire Print Cooperative, a lovely print facility in Stroud.
http://www.gpchq.co.uk

This year the group were joined by Jeff Rathermel – executive director at Minnesota Center for Book Arts, as they developed a series of artists’ books that responded to the theme of bookness (or bookishness).

revisiting windham reworked

This week Philippa and Tamar were able to visit Bucks County Museum to see their recent collaborative project – Windham (re)Worked within the context of the Ex Libris exhibition. Many of the works on show appeared to reflect the known genre of altered books and used a strong sense decoration to communicate an aspect of the book, whereas the pieces that held the most interest were those with an underlying concept, which was the approach taken within Windham editions.

below: work by other artists

 

summertime

Summer holidays are always an opportunity to get up to speed on some reading. But what if the book you want to read is out of print and you just can’t face reading it on screen?

Make your own copy of it of course. Which is exactly what Barrie did when he put together a new edition of C. H. Hinton’s An Episode of Flatland; a 1907 addition to the Flatland Universe.

He’ll have to make a companion edition of Edwin A Abbott’s original Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions now of course. The cover design is ready to go.

He’s also, finally, managed to make a cover for Word Disco (Overheard/Overlooked 3) that he’s happy with.

Next stop? A new academic year and a fair few new projects already lined up…

local heroes

The Caseroom Press are very pleased to be making not one, but two more appearances on the Eye Magazine blog this week.

As part of their regular Books Received section, Barrie’s Word Disco gets a mention, as does Steven Heller & Gail Anderson’s latest tome, Type Tells Tales – which both Philippa and Barrie appear in – Eye describe it as a ‘stimulating compendium of type experiments and explorations, both contemporary and historical. These range from familiar classics (Marinetti, Cage, Massin, Drucker, Corita Kent) to local heroes such as Alida Sayer, Angie Butler & Philippa Wood and Sam Winston.’

word disco

Our third book of found texts – Word Disco – is a sequel to Ken Cockburn’s Overheard/Overlooked (2011) and Overlooked/Overheard (2015).

As with the last book, Second Year Graphic Design students at the School of Art & Design were asked to keep their ears open last summer. When they returned to University, the texts were collated and selected by Ken Cockburn then typeset by Barrie Tullett.

Visually it’s quite a departure from the previous books in the series, and from Barrie’s typographic work in general – the texts being typeset, distorted on photocopiers then edited, coloured and composed in Photoshop.

The book has contributions from Lee Flatman, Ryan Forrest, Megan Favell, Ashley Godber, Holly Humphries, Joshua Jepson and Ashley Gillott.

dante in dublin – ready and waiting

Carla and her team at the National Print Museum have done a wonderful job with the hanging of the show.

The Typographic Dante has never looked so good.

The show opens to the public on Friday the 10th of February and is open until Sunday the 2nd of April.

A huge thank you to the Museum for all their hard work in organising the exhibition – and to Brenda Dermody for designing the beautiful publicity materials for the show.

dante in dublin

The Typographic Dante is about to go on show at the National Print Museum in Dublin. Barrie has been working on the project ever since he was a student at the Chelsea School of Art.

Eventually each of the 100 cantos of Dante’s Divine Comedy will be illustrated using a different ‘obsolete’ technology for each of the three books. The 34 cantos of The Inferno are realised through letterpress printing, the 33 cantos of Purgatory are created on the typewriter, and the 33 cantos of Paradise will be illustrated with Letraset.

The illustrations for Inferno are now complete – all 34 cantos, and this is the first time they’ll have been exhibited together, along with 20 pieces from the on-going work for Purgatory.

The National Print Museum is an absolute gem of a place; it collects, documents, preserves, exhibits, interprets and makes accessible the material evidence of the printing craft, and fosters associated skills of the craft in Ireland. It’s an absolute honour and delight to be a part of it.