Ampersand Duck too

Ampersand Duck & Byrd: Altered Library, 2013 It's been years now since I had a sessional job teaching artist books and letterpress printing at an art school – a relationship that COVID-19 killed, really – and while part of me misses it, I am enjoying a much less structured life. It's not quite retirement, it's more like 'dedicated freelancing'.  I inherited that artist book submajor course around 2007, when my art school was starting to restructure itself in various ways. I'd been a student in the original unit, and it was taught along the lines of the original workshop, the Graphic Investigation Workshop (GIW), even though GIW had been closed to become the Printmedia & Drawing Workshop (PMD). The original semester unit would produce one publication only: an editioned collaborative book/folio/boxed work, where each student would produce a page (often a double spread) using various print techniques and letterpress, all responding to a common theme or tex...

A few years ago I went to the launch of Michael Richards’ ‘biblio-biography’ of Alec Bolton at the National Library of Australia (NLA). I love the idea of a ‘biblio-biography’, which is just what it sounds like: a history of someone via the books they made. It could also apply to the books someone owned, if they were just a collector, but Alec was a book maker. He was a professional book designer and a letterpress printer. He was the first Publications Manager of the NLA and before that he worked for publishers Angus & Robertson and Ure Smith. He established a private press, the Brindabella Press, and last but absolutely not least, he was the husband of poet Rosemary Dobson, whom he met at Angus & Robertson and married in 1951. I mentioned in the last post that I worked for Rosemary Dobson Bolton. Here’s where it intersects: I met Alec when I worked as the Publications Officer for the Australian Academy of the Humanities, which launched a major bibliographic project called the ...

Moving into my 'forever home' has involved a lot of unpacking of boxes, many of which have been packed for a very long time. I'm nowhere near finished, nor have I organised everything that I've unpacked, which has resulted in a modicum of chaos (if there can be such a thing). Over the last year I've worked on a  project to make a material, handwritten archive of my (meaningful) Facebook posts, something I call my 'Facebook Yearbook', and that crazy task is almost finished. Today I came across a post I wrote in February 2025 and realised that it should be part of the 'small collects' post series that I started here during the first Covid lockdown and will now continue as I wrangle the hoard of treasures collected, bequeathed and discovered through what I now think of as my amazing bibliographic life, now that I'm entering the third trimester of it (cross fingers I am lucky enough to get a good run of it). So what follows is an extended version of ...