Artist books: the altered book

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 text. This is very much GIW practice, and sometime I'll write more about that. 

But because the art school had been swallowed up by its neighbouring university (like nearly every other art school in Australia), it was expected to teach outcomes that were simultaneously broader and more structured. And so I restructured the Book as Art unit into a weekly exploration of an aspect of creative bookness, with a few weeks left at the end for the intensive making of a personal project before assessment. 

The first week was an introduction to book basics (traditional structure, page imposition, the importance of a colophon*) and the creation of a simple stitched sketchbook to use in the unit. Then in week two I reversed that focus on structure... by teaching altered books. It's a great way to learn, pulling something apart and thinking about what you could do with the book at each step of the process, or just interfering with the whole or part of a book in some way, small or large. 

The main reason why altered books was worth teaching back then is because this was a time when the internet was newly rampant and there was a constant media catch-cry of 'the book is dead'. While this was never a concrete reality, it certainly piqued the interest of artists for years: if the book was dead, then we were going to throw it a wake... we would explore its materiality as a form of 'otherness', we'd repurpose it, and we'd document its apparent retreat from the world. The books that actually died were cheap novels and reference books, used whole or pulled apart into components to be integrated with original work, each bookwork articulating a shift in history, value and cultural focus.** 

Of course, teaching this way, one kind of book genre each week, is far less satisfying than really digging deep into a single project, and it did result in less serious, less sophisticated works than that original GIW unit produced, but the idea was that the students had choices, and would have options in the future that might be applied to their major practice, or later in life when they had either more time, or, more likely, fewer options for making grand work, and would have something to do on their kitchen table. 

That week was fun. The altered book genre is an incredibly broad field... there are just so many things you can do, from cutting the book up and altering it radically to make a sculptural work, down to just drawing into the pages and leaving the rest of the book untouched. One of the most famous 'altered' books is A Humament, by the late artist Tom Philips, even though it's been so commercialised as to be the 'McDonalds' of altered books. 

I was recently invited to host a 2-hour 'Create & Sip' session at the nearby regional gallery, SECCA, and I chose to share some altered book play with the participants. I popped into the local library and asked them if they had any books that they were chucking out that I could use. Would you believe it, they'd just thrown a stack into the (very large) hopper (that I certainly wasn't going to jump into). And then the librarian asked me if the books needed to have covers? No indeedy, and she reached into the paper bin and pulled out a stack of book blocks. I didn't look at what the books were, I just carried the stack around to the gallery and left them on a bench ready to work with. It turned out that they were all Australian books about war, to which some participants chose to respond as a subject, and others just used the books as neutral objects to fold, cut, and colour. And that is the beauty of altering books: it's always open to your choice of response. And, happily, the participants had a lot of fun. 

Back in the day I put together a Pinterest page on altered books, and always encouraged my students to do the same. If you flick through it, you'll see what I mean about the broad field, although a lot of it is quite twee. For more serious examples, try these: back in that first flush of reaction to the Death of the Book, we had some fantastic Australian altered book exhibitions, such as the 2009 Artspace Mackay show, Recycled Library: Altered Books, and the 2013 exhibition Unbound at Macquarie University, Sydney (and both of those links are the full PDF of the catalogues). 

In another sense, we had two altered book events per teaching semester: in the early days, the Book class was always held in first semester (which, in Australia, starts in late Feb, early March), and during that semester there would be Edible Book Day (1 April), which I'd try to celebrate on the closest class to it. Hilarious fun, every time, from a bunch of bananas with skins that had been written on with biro, to elaborately baked and iced cakes (sometimes savoury, like the sushi book), and my personal fave, my 'neckoracle', a book-necklace made of strung fortune cookies, which we all ate and then restrung with the paper fortunes. Food, altered into books. Learning should always be fun. 

I made an altered library once, for an exhibition that celebrated the Centenary of Canberra. I collaborated with my buddy, street artist Byrd Meltdown, to create a recycled boxboard structural montage of Canberra's libraries, and he built a bookshelf within it that I filled with altered ex-library books. That's the image you can see above, and here's Byrd's fabulous couch, which encouraged people to sit and look through the books. 

Byrd's Library couch 2013

The books themselves were fun. They were all discarded library books; I was starting the PhD experience, and wanted to play with critical and conceptual terminology in visually punning ways. Here's a couple of examples: 

Ampersand Duck, Slippage, 2013 (book dunked in water, as if I slipped while reading in the bath)

Ampersand Duck, Iterative, 2013

These days, I don't think the book is dead, but the quality of the new book is pretty dead in the water. Most books these days are badly bound, or burst-bound with plastic adhesives. The paper grain is ignored, so that after one read they distort and flare. The text is enormous, as if we all hate wearing glasses. And as for old books, there are so many discarded books from our older generations that even secondhand book fairs are rejecting donations. I'm conflicted about the future of the book, but that doesn't stop me from housing as many books as I can, even if some of them will only be good for altering as artwork. And altering allows so much thinking about the book: its past and its future. You should try it sometime. 

Ampersand Duck, Men Never Know, 2011

* A colophon is like the imprint page at the front of a published book, but in an artist book they're usually at the end, and they SHOULD include: the name of the artist (not just the signature!), the writer (if a separate person), the date, edition number and total edition, the place of production, and the processes and materials used. So many artist books have just a signature and date and maybe the edition number. Ugh. 

** a large part of this particular paragraph was written for a conference paper for a 2021 ARLIS conference that was then published in The Blue Notebook 15.2.