You know, I spent the whole time I was at Codex just trying to process everything around me. I thought the few weeks since that I’ve been telling stories and rehashing memories would make it easier to sort it out in my mind, but I still just can’t seem to articulate the impressions bouncing around the inside of my skull.
It was just too big … too rich … too much.
Which probably explains why I never managed to get any decent photos. I was too busy standing there goggling at the enormity of it all to document the experience properly. So I’ll let the Codex folks paint you a picture while I struggle with the words; please excuse my camnesia, then.
Photo courtesy of the Codex Foundation.
Let me backtrack a bit, and explain what all of this was about. For every discipline, subculture or interest group out there, there’s some sort of club, or society, or conference, or symposium, or bee, or knitting night, or comicon, or hot-dog-eating contest, or what-have-you—some organized group or event for like-minded people to get together and share what they do. If you can think of it, there’s probably a group of people meeting about it somewhere.
The trouble with the book arts is that our world is small and spread out. There aren’t too many of us who do this sort of thing in the first place, at least when compared to photographers, or children’s book writers, or web developers. And then within our little group, everybody follows such a different path that getting us together is like herding cats. We’re hard to pin down because there’s a whole universe in our little speck of dust. Printing, bookbinding, papermaking and typesetting are just the tip of the iceberg. Within each of those disciplines is an incredibly broad spectrum of different and often contradictory artists and art forms. And yet each of those fits comfortably, easily, infinitely under the same, paradoxically small umbrella of the book arts. (Now you know why I don’t have an elevator speech.) If you tried to graph it out, you’d end up with either the world’s best or worst Venn Diagram—I can’t decide.
So because we run such a crazy gamut, we can’t be shoehorned in neatly with some other event, even though the “average” book artist can and probably does moonlight quite easily as a dozen other things. There’s no “book arts corner” at SXSW, or BlogHer, or the Venice Biennale. Exhibitions and summits dedicated entirely to the book arts are few and far between—large international events are rare, indeed. So for our lot, Codex is a big deal.
The event consisted of two main parts: a private symposium in the mornings (where various artists and scholars gave lectures), and a public bookfair in the afternoons. This year there were over 140 exhibitors at the bookfair, representing artists in every conceivable discipline and style, and every corner of the globe. The exhibitors hailed from 20 states and over a dozen countries outside the U.S., including Russia, Germany, France, Israel, Colombia, Japan, Mexico and Canada.
And it isn’t just for artists: students, educators, private collectors, librarians, museum curators, conservators and archivists, hobbyists, publishers, supply vendors, gallery reps and dealers, bookstore owners, clubs and organizations, and every stripe of enthusiast were in attendance.
Photo courtesy of the Codex Foundation.
So yeah. Codex is huge.
It was both intimidating and inspiring. I was immediately and constantly confronted with my own insignificance (I kept imagining that at any moment, some cartoon alarm would go off—woop! woop! woop!—alerting everyone to the fact that I didn’t belong there)—yet at the same time, everyone I met was warm and welcoming. I had the chance to catch up with old friends (MCBA, represent!), meet many of my long-admired art-heroes, and be introduced to a whole host of new faces.
But most of all, Codex was completely, utterly overwhelming. I had my brain cranked up into overdrive for four solid days. After meeting literally hundreds of people, answering thousands of questions, asking another thousand myself, handling many dozens of handmade books and artworks, absorbing new information and taking copious notes, and just being exposed to the ultimate sensory overload of it all—well, by the end, I was a deer in the headlights.
And I feel like I barely scratched the surface of what was there. Imagine that you’re visiting the Louvre, or the Smithsonian, or some other enormous museum. Only instead of picking and choosing which galleries and pieces to see, and making your way through room by room, you discover that every painting, every sculpture, every piece of art in the whole place is crammed into one huge hall—each with the artist who made it standing to the side, waiting to meet you and hear what you think. I’d go mad—I think I did go mad!
Everything I saw was phenomenal—it was hard not to just stand there, slack-jawed, struck dumb by the realization that there I was, in close proximity to some of the best work being done by anyone, anywhere. But there were a few things that stuck in my craw, as it were.
Beautiful craftsmanship was everywhere, but sometimes it just buzzed right into my bonnet—like everything at the Sherwin Beach Press table did. The Essence of Beeing, by Michael Lenehan, is a honey of a book, just dripping with texture, detail and perfect printing.
For a type nerd like me, experimental design is a total turn-on. It was a treat to finally meet smart, sweet Inge Bruggeman, the brains behind all the brilliant work I’ve seen over the years. It was impossible to simply breeze by her table; all of her work has such presence and depth that I found myself completely drawn in.
Amongst all the wood type and leather tomes were unorthodox pieces that confront our comfort zone in all kinds of unexpected ways. This sculptural work by Diane Jacobs may not look like a book, but take a closer peek. It’s part of a series of garments constructed from woven paper and letterpress printed with derogatory slang terms for women’s anatomy. So if it doesn’t have pages, does it count? Well, in this case, a book-burning and a bra-burning would be the same thing.
I think my very favorite thing about Codex was the fact that illustration was as much at home there as abstract painting would have been at a modern art museum. And Tom Killion is the king of pretty pictures. His huge, exquisitely printed woodcuts evoke both the old Japanese masters and a fresh, modern, slightly psychedelic world of California.
There was a large contingent of traditional fine-press work (i.e. books printed using hand-set type and containing wood engravings or other illustrations, then hand-bound using traditional materials and techniques) there, as well. And Vancouver’s Barbarian Press is the best of the best. This is their most recent book, an adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Play of Pericles, featuring wood engravings by Simon Brett. I managed to catch their table during a lull, so I had the pleasure of being able to page through the entire book. You can see a video tour of it here—it’s truly a masterpiece.
Then there’s the work that looks traditional, but that in reality pushes every boundary of design and concept. This is French artist Didier Mutel’s interpretation of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (website is in French). In Mutel’s version, the two characters are represented by clashing typefaces. Whenever Mr. Hyde is introduced, his huge, hollow type intrudes on the orderly text of Jekyll’s narration. As the story progresses and Hyde dominates, the large type becomes increasingly more prominent—until the end, when the madness takes over completely and the text is illegible. Simple, elegant, brilliant.
Julie Chen is a perennial favorite of mine; her pieces challenge the very idea of what a book is. Every one of her books is an engineering marvel, and just begs to be played with. And the best part is that she lets you! Her table hosted a constant crowd of people who were grinning like visitors to a children’s museum for grown-ups. What a trip.
And then there’s the sort of thing that is both effortlessly brilliant and just plain old fun. This is a still (i.e. a crummy photo I snapped of my computer screen) from the animated short “Old-Time Film” by Barb Tetenbaum and Marilyn Zornado. It’s a three-minute, stop-motion film made in “Vander-mation” (ha!), where every frame is an individual letterpress print made from hand-set type and image cuts.
Jessica and I literally yelled, in concert, when we saw it (the sheep part was the exact moment when the yelling commenced). Which was a little embarrassing, considering the formality of the event, but we just couldn’t help it. And we weren’t the only ones; all week long we heard shouting coming from the far end of the exhibition hall. Letterpress doesn’t usually elicit that kind of response—but then again, letterpress doesn’t usually include animated airplanes or toe-tappin’ bluegrass music.
I wish to goodness that I could just link to it and send you on your way, but there’s absolutely no mention of the thing online—so you’ll just have to take my word for it. Or better yet, contact Barb* and order a copy of the DVD. It’s good, clean, cheap, and seriously great fun.
* (shoot me an email if you’re interested, and I’ll send you the details)
I could go on and on. And I’m sure there were a thousand other great things I never had a chance to see, because I also had a table to man. Jessica and I made the trip together, and had adjacent tables (that’s us hiding back behind the merch); we met in the middle with our Dead Feminists stuff.
Jessica’s done Codex once before, so she was prepared for the overwhelming onslaught of people. She suggested that we put together a take-away catalog of our work so that after the fair, when everyone was just as dazed as I was, they’d have something to remember us by.
Since it was also an opportunity to clear up a little of the confusion over who does what around here, we had fun playing with the design possibilities. We came up with a flip-flop format and a letterpress cover; the cover designs came together at the spine.
Held one way, you’d read her half of the catalog; flip it over and read from the back, and it becomes my half. We converged in the middle with a Dead Feminist “centerfold” (again, ha!).
It ended up being our best business idea yet—not only have all kinds of people followed up with us since then, but we didn’t see anything else like it at the fair. It was definitely a hit.
Still, a color catalog is no substitute for the real thing. At Jessica’s table, people were raving about her newest book, The Girl in the Moon.
On my end, it was an amazing experience to watch a steady crowd playing with Local Conditions. The response people had to the book was both intensely gratifying and humbling—and it was wonderful to see that students, fellow artists, dealers and buyers were equally excited about it. But my favorite part was being a bystander to all the different scenes people designed with the image flats.
The cow completely stole the show there. It was hilarious to see how many times it turned up in a scene, either a fitting addition I hadn’t thought of—or as an absurdly out-of-place monster.
(My favorite, though, is the cow that stood on the airplane wing and pretended to be a gremlin.)
It’s hard to remember that we were in a city as fabulous as Berkeley—the folks at Codex had created a complete world just in that one room. (Though we did get out enough to discover that when the overstimulation had us in a daze, a hot-cookie ice cream sandwich down the street was just the ticket. Thank you, Berkeley!) The next fair is two years away, but I came home with what seemed like a decade’s worth of inspiration. And I find I’m already looking forward to Codex 2013—sensory overload and all. Bring it on; I’ll be there.
