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P.S.

10/1/2013

We received a lovely response from one of the visitors to the book fair held last November..

I was pleasantly surprised, indeed delighted when I visited The Book Arts Fair at Hadleigh Old Fire Station. (Ironic that in the novel Fahrenheit 451, it was the firemen whose responsibility it was to burn books).
        The event’s organisers should be congratulated on bringing a refreshing exhibition to this part of Essex. In most exhibitions, visitors arrive with different background experience. What made this show distinctive was that visitors were united on mutual ground. Every since childhood, at some stage in their life - even though their experience and knowledge would be varied - each person would have interacted with books. All could bring this understanding into play when considering the exhibits. This rarely happens with other shows.
        One reason the exhibition was successful was that the visitors’ mutual experience - with its inevitable limitations - was then shaken up, so that the visitor could reassess their notion of what a book meant, through a new divergent language.
        As a retired art teacher, I have visited innumerable exhibitions that nowadays I can speed read and leave after a few minutes. I had anticipated that the book fair would be the same. I was wrong.
        I stayed a long time and was one of the last to leave as I found the work and artists thought provoking. Rarely have I enjoyed a show as much. There was considerable diversity in interpretation of what a book could mean and how it may be used as a vehicle for self-expression. Added to this was a particular resonance, poignancy, in the work that shared so little with today’s increasingly technological lifestyle that is devoid of a fuller sensory encounter.
        Art movements are organic and react to the established cultural status quo. Therefore, the lack of sensory experience to be found in the Ethernet and the electronic book will naturally create a counter movement that is concerned with unique, individual work characterised by tactile, visual and poetic concepts. The book exhibition offered a fuller refreshing sensory/conceptual experience.
        I was reminded of exhibitions I visited in the 1960s, most notably at the Royal Festival Hall, concerned with Concrete Poetry in which the physical structure of the word was used in connection with the word’s meaning. (The most obvious example is to write the word ‘tall’ in two-meter high letters). The hand-made object connects with the Arts and Craft movement of the late 19th and early 20th century, but extends into more conceptual and abstract directions.
        The idea of taking the book - a heavily potent symbol - and to ’play’ with it employing lateral thinking to create rich poetical ideas was an engaging, rewarding, activity that increased my artistic perception. What added considerably to my visit were the exhibitors, who willingly participated in a dialogue about their products. As an old hand in the arts business, I was introduced to some new ideas, quite a rare for me.
        It is always sad to finish a good book, so another chapter please. I am looking forward to other, similar exhibitions in which the book as a physical and conceptual item is used as a means to express revitalising thoughts.

Geoff Licence November 2012

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'Smell the Coffee'
Gwen Simpson

On the 5th March 2007 30 people died and over a 100 injured

In June 2012, I read of the Al-Mutanabbi Street Project calling for book artists, to make three books in response to the bombing of al-Mutanabbi street in March 2007. In the heart of the historic centre of the book sellers of Baghdad, 30 people were killed and over a 100 people injured.

I felt compelled to take part, however my first response to this artist's book project was how do I understand something that happened in a place so far away, with a culture that at first felt so different from mine.

To begin with I felt completely overwhelmed by the impossibility of it all. The enormity of it was also compounded by my then limited experience in making artists books.

Al-Mutanabbi Street was the heart and soul of the literary and intellectual community where people would come to look at and buy books that were displayed out on the streets in front of the shops, where cafes, stationers and printers could also be found in this district.

When I thought about my own local community of coffee shops, book sellers and print shops, I felt I had a way in, and began collecting tea-bags and coffee filters as well as asking other people to bring me relevant products from coffee shops they had visited such as napkins and plastic stirrers.

I began assembling these items, using A5 white envelopes as my background and page size. Wrapping up the tea bags and coffee filters that bore a resemblance to bodies wrapped in shrouds carried aloft through the streets, that one often sees on television news footage. I planned to make 30 'tea-bag bodies' which could represent the 30 who had died.

My first intention was to make 130 collages, but times three, to be completed by December 2012 began to feel an impossibility. One solution was to photograph them and produce a 'blur' book, but I dismissed this idea, plus I reread the original brief which asked that people did not use items that would hold up the books going through customs.

Part of my experimentation had involved the re-using of tea-bags and coffee filters. Glued down and varnished with some burnt umber paint rubbed in. I liked the leather like quality this produced and so these used tea-bags and coffee filters became the covers for the coffee filter books. With coffee filters torn into four sections becoming the pages of the book.

I liked this simpler version of the book, the dark stains of the coffee filters looking not unlike burnt edges.

SMELL THE COFFE

My morning ritual.

   One cup of coffee.

   Fine ground and filtered.

   Not to be hurried.

   But savoured,

   In quiet contemplation.

   Thinking and reading.

   Each coffee filter dried slowly.

   The marks and stains unique,

Like people, every where.

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Al Mutanabbi Street Project

7/1/2013

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‘A nation will fall into ruin if its people do not read books.’ Hassan Ali
Karen Apps

The books were made in response to the tragic events of Spring 2007 in al-Mutanabbi Street.

The Breakthrough to Literacy folder references the present shortage of books and texts available to libraries, schools and universities in Iraq.

A book can carry ideas accessed through learning to read. First words then sentences that can be rearranged to make new meanings. We experience the freedom of turning thought into text. We can share ideas with others. We learn. So how do we arrive at a place where words are so threatening as to provoke such atrocities?

Each book contains the same words to create one of three quotations relating to the act of reading. The words are not fixed and there is the potential to make new meanings.

The brown paper slipcovers suggest the wrappings of a purchase but also the supply of forbidden goods sold from ‘under the counter’.

‘You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get the people to stop reading them.’
Ray Bradbury

‘Once you learn to read, you will be forever free.’
Frederick Douglass

‘A nation will fall into ruin if its people do not read books.’
Hassan Ali
Bookseller, al-Mutanabbi Street

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P.S.

Al-Mutanabbi Street Project

'Smell the Coffee'Gwen Simpson

Al Mutanabbi Street Project

‘A nation will fall into ruin if its people do not read books.’ Hassan AliKaren Apps

ABA

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'Smell the Coffee'
Gwen Simpson

‘A nation will fall into ruin if its people do not read books.’ Hassan Ali
Karen Apps