From Book Lair to Book Cathedral

This was a week full of wandering and full of wandering book artists' style adventures. It started with a visit to the lair of book beasts, the workshop of Daniel Essig, one of the rock stars of the book arts world. His art is rich and complex, with earth-made vitality imbued by his signature use of mica and metal. His works are held together with bone, leather and linen, and are full of myth and fairy tale metaphor. You probably have seen his work and maybe even tried to copy it too. It just is so appealing. Look for a class with him at Penland or really anywhere around the country. He wanders almost as often as we do!

Peter and Daniel share stories in the studio...

Some super nice old presses in the Essig studio.

Anyone know anything about the small one on the right?

Library visits, book arts students, hauling the rolling suitcases full of books: these are a few of my favorite things this week. We visited librarians at University of North Carolina Chapel Hill and Greensboro, Longwood University in Farmville, Virginia, Goucher College, Johns Hopkins University and Maryland Institute of the Arts in Baltimore. We are getting better at the bookish smart talk about our art... It's fun to find new ways of talking about the uniqueness of each book and to find the obvious reasons that it would fit perfectly in a library's special collection.

In this photo faculty and students join us for lunch in the gazebo next to our sweet camping spot, where we spent two nights in the very center of Goucher College in Baltimore. If our door was open passing students would stop to look and talk. We appreciate our renaissance book as art scholar host April Oettinger, who arranged for us to give a lecture as part of our 40 year celebration, a stuffed to the gills bookbinding workshop in the library, and lunch, dinner, and an appointment with the librarian as well!

The Cathedral of Books! This was Baltimore's first public library, built by George Peabody in the mid-1800s. It is now part of Johns Hopkins University. The fantastic architecture creates an impressive cathedral-like ambience. We were thrilled to have our books spread out over a table in one of the alcoves on the first floor, surrounded by Mr. Peabody's well-used books, many with broken bindings only held together by wrappings of linen tape, as the special collections librarian studied them.

In the "Cathedral of Books," we saw this great engraving in a book on display titled, "Death by Library." I start to feel like this after too many hours inside of too many libraries, so I try to get outside when I can, and so as often as possible we spend the weekends camping in a state park so we canwalk through the trees and by the bays found on the eastern coast of our USA.

We are impressed by the level of engagement and commitment we have found in the book arts students we have talked to. They understand the complexity of the art form, and don't doubt Peter when he says that artists' books will be the dominate art form by the end of the 21st century! Now we just have to work at getting more collectors on board!