Artist's Book Yearbook 2003-2005 - Book Arts - University of the ...

A Fishy Wish
Hannah Grice
Hannah Grice’s A Fishy Wish sets a series of
colourful prints alongside letterpress verses
about catching a fish. Tissue paper overlays the
images, in many cases depicting the outlines of
the images underneath, perhaps suggesting the
world of difference between the reflected
surface of the water and the fluid world below.
A Fishy Wish uses a variety of papers, and
utilises a Japanese-style stab binding. Hopefully
the artist’s success with this small book will
encourage her to develop a more in-depth
project and, er, catch some bigger fish.
Digital Book Design
Douglas Holleley (ISBN 0 9707138 0 0)
Joan Lyons, in her preface to Douglas
Holleley’s Digital Book Design and Publishing tells
us that the book which follows places digitally
produced books in an historical continuum.
Certainly digital forms of working are at the
forefront of technical development in our time,
and the prospect of placing some of digital
artworks’ protean identity in historical
perspective is welcome.
More immediate, though, at least for me, was
the way Holleley has locked on to technical
issues that place digital book design in a
technical continuum. Much of the life of
debate around artists’ books arises from
matters of technique and production. For many
artists, artists books’ appeal lies in the way they
remain undefined in any one easy description
and can take on the mantle, and the cultural
frisson of many different guises. So perhaps
questions of technique, and how technique is
presented in (or as) the finished artwork, are
the contentious issues that give shape to the
historical continuum of book-making. The
scope of Holleley’s book positions digital book
design squarely as a legitimate part of artists
books’ practice, describing digital techniques
163
alongside traditional ones in a manner
calculated for ease of use and meaningful
transference of skill and inspiration across
media. It includes core digital skills like
scanning and DTP alonside canonical craft
skills in printing and binding in a way I’ve only
previously been able to see in my head or in my
own experiences as an artist who combines
many of the skills shown.
My first few days with the book were spent
exploring the familiar technical territories I’d
previously surveyed for myself through a
combination of instruction and trial-and-error.
What held my fascination was the way in which
I could consult a chapter on constructing hard
covers, and flip a few pages over to find out
about the various tools of Quark Xpress .
In fact, when I read in the acknowledgements
of the author’s admiration for the works of
Edward Tufte, I felt as if someone had sneaked
a look at my bookshelf and assembled some
sort of hybrid book from the evidence of my
own interests. (Tufte’s Envisaging Information is
the best book on organising information I’ve
yet seen, and is a wonderful design experience
as a book to boot.) The point is that works on
both the construction of books, and the
technical how-to of Quark and Photoshop ,
share space on the same shelf in my house:
seeing them together here was sort of
life-affirming for me.
Detail from page 57 of
Digital Book Design and
Publishing showing
examples of “found
typography”, these
images, made in
Mexico are taken
from Holleley’s artist’s
book Past and Future
Tense, 1998
The fact that Holleley has chosen to include
quite detailed technical information that deals
with such digital matters as scanning, page
layout and so on, alongside chapters on paper
and binding makes a bold statement - one I’ve
already touched on above; digital book design
is part of this group of techniques. If the artist
takes a little care, their artwork can be part of
the permanent legacy that traditional
techniques are at the heart of.