“Its not just this linear experience of open the book and get to the end of the book. Its also a trans-generational experience…you can open a book that was printed in 1780 and somebody sprinkled it with camphor and you can smell the camphor. Its not just the words that relate you to the book. Its the physical action somebody took on that object that is also important.” — Rob Buchert, Tryst Press
Rare Books holds all Tryst Press productions. We chose these three as favorite examples of Tryst Press’s work of the book.
“Their eyes followed us every moment. I do not forget their eyes…”
Interlinear for Cabeza de Vaca
Haniel Long (1888-1956)
Provo, UT: Tryst Press, 1996
E125 N9 L62 1996 oversize
Illustrated by Tal Walton. Printed by Rob and Georgia Buchert on handmade paper from India with Caslon Oldstyle type. Edition of one hundred and fifty copies.
“Behold, for this last time have we nourished my vineyard. And thou beholdest that I have done according to my will and I have preserved the natural fruit, that it is good, even like as it was in the beginning. And blessed art thou, for because that ye have been diligent in laboring with me in my vineyard and have kept my commandments — and it hath brought unto me again the natural fruit, that my vineyard is no more corrupted and the bad is cast away — behold, ye shall have joy with me because of the fruit of my vineyard.”
The Allegory of the Olive Tree
Provo, UT: Tryst Press, 2006
BX8643 O44 A42 2006
Printed letterpress with handset Nicolas Cochin and Garamond types on paper hand made for this edition. Edition of fifty copies. Rare Books copy is no. 6, one of eight bound with olive wood boards.
“Oldest printed view of Jerusalem. Woodcut by the shop of Michael Wolgemut. From Liber cronicarum (Nuremberg Chronicle) by Hartmann Schedel, 1493. Printed at Tryst Press as a keepsake for attendees of A. Dean Larsen Book Collecting Conference, Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University, March 30, 2007.”
Here are some of the pieces chosen by the Rare Books staff for this episode:
ARKA
Timothy C. Ely
Portland, OR: T. Ely, 1995
N7433.4 E35 A7 1995
The book is drawn on BFK gray paper that was brush-sized with gelatin and CMC, then under painted with CMC and acrylic paint. Other materials include ink, Graphite, and watercolor. Each folio is sewn onto four raised cords that, on completion of the sewing, were laced into birch plywood boards. The end bands are silk worked over cores of leather. The spine of the book is goatskin. The board pastedowns are painted paper. The boards have a small amount of gold tooling suggestive of one part of the history and technology of the art of binding. Otherwise the cover boards are painted. The book is contained in a wooden box.
Hunting the Burn
Alicia Bailey
Lake City, CO: Ravenpress, 1998
N7433.4 B22 H86 1998
Two-sided leporello with self in-folded covers and removable spines. One side is Carolyn Hull’s poem “Hunting the Burn,” laserprinted on Basingwerk, overcoated with wax and pigment; the other side is a panoramic painting by Alicia Bailey, digitally reworked and printed with color inkjet on Arches 90 lb. cover and overcoated with wax. Four of the twelve panels have hand-cut rectangular openings with mixed media insertions. Covers are black Canson with hand applied enamel. Title piece is laserfoil on black paper. Spine pieces are black embossed paper laminated to black Canson. The box is paper-mache, gesso and pigmented wax. Box top has metal mesh and hemp-wrapped, wax-covered bullet attached. Inside box are stones and feathers. Edition of twenty copies, signed by Alicia Bailey and Carolyn Hull. Rare Books copy is no. 10.
Surplus Value Books: Catalog Number 13
Rick Moody
Santa Monica, CA: Danger! Books, 2002
N7433.4 M644 S6 2002
Deluxe edition presented as a collector’s box, containing two pens, one felt tip marker, one white-out correction pen, one pencil, one wooden nickel, one photograph with loop, seven photographs of “original artwork for placement only,” and other items. Text is composed in the form of galley proofs. Upon removing the galley holding the text, the reader is presented with a removable panel resembling a hospital release checklist. Holes cut into this panel reveal the objects contained below. The collectible objects in the box act as literal illustrations to the story. The narrator of the story is a bookseller, collector, mental patient. The story is told through the description of books for sale in the bookseller’s catalog. Values are assigned to each item in the catalog according to the bookseller’s inherent personal desire for each item. Themes of value, voyeurism, and deceit are presented as a pathology of collecting through the multiple layering of information and the revealing of objects of desire that are contained in the collector’s box. This work was first published in offset. Collector’s box constructed by Daniel Kelm at Wide Awake Garage. Rare Books copy is lettered “H.”
43, According to Robin Price with Annotated…
Robin Price
Middletown, CT: Robin Price, 2007
N7433.4 P753 A15 2007
From the colophon: “Paper maps from locations along the 43rd parallel are bound in an accordion that structurally supports the main text, which is printed on graph paper and also hinged together as an accordion (opening to 20 ft.)…The unusual double-layer accordion, housed in a printed cloth-covered clamshell box, is co-designed and co-produced by Daniel Kelm at Wide Awake Garage…” Edition of eighty-six plus twelve deluxe copies. Rare books copy is no. 23.
The Desert: Further Studies in Natural Appearances
Jen Bervin
New York City: Granary Books, 2008
N7433.4 B47 D47 2008
An altered book is a form of mixed media artwork that takes a book from its original form into a different form, altering its meaning. The artist may take an old or new book and cut, tear, glue, burn, fold, paint, add collage, create pop-ups, rubber-stamp, drill, bolt or be-ribbon the book to create a new work that is the expression of the artist. In this case, it is the text that is altered — by sewing over certain passages and leaving others exposed. The text from which Jen Bervin’s poem emerges is The Desert, written by John Van Dyke (1856-1932), a professor of Art History at Rutgers University. Van Dyke, the author of several books on art theory of the Art-For-Art’s-Sake school, claimed to have spent three years in the American Southwest desert with only his fox terrier for company and a pony for transportation. According to Van Dyke, he carried with him a rifle, a pistol, a hatchet, a shovel, blankets, tin pans and cups, dried food and a gallon of water. His romantic rhapsody of this trip, published in 1901, was a big hit, extremely influential and remains in print. In fact, Van Dyke saw most of the great desert over which he swooned looking out the windows of trains on his way from one first-class hotel to another. The Desert, version 1901, is the fact-faulted, fantastic hoax of a well-bred, well-educated Easterner, in much the same way that Harvard-educated New Englander Owen Wister’s novel The Virginian (1902) is a glorification of an American West culture that didn’t exist. Prose poem adaptation with overlay of zig zag stitches in pale blue thread. Composed and sewn at James Turrell’s Roden Crater on the Wave Books Poetry Bus Tour in October, 2006. Housed in a hinged archival case. Issued in a wrapper of white muslim cloth and white felt stitched together with blue thread.
Justice: What is Justice?
Thomas Ingmire
T. Ingmire, 2009
N7433.4 I48 J87 2008
Handmade paper mounted over board, Chinese Sumi ink, wide-edged pen (Automatic pen), Japanese brush.
The Latest Things in Kites
Christopher Fritton
Ferrum Wheel Press, 2014
PS3606 R58 L37 2014
Artist’s statement: “A chapbook produced for Carrier Pigeon magazine as as tip-in, The Latest Things in Kites borrows language and its title from a chapter in the book, Fun for Boys. The chapbook is a single-sheet, four-page fold-over with rounded corners and a small embroidery thread tail. Handset in 14pt Goudy Bold and 10pt Goudy with antique copper cuts on Mohawk Via vellum. Hand letterpressed.” Edition of 1200 copies.
Whitman Crosshatch
Walt Whitman (1819-1892)
East Hampton, NY: 2015
PS3222 A7 2015
A Casual Commentary: front seat, u.s.a.
Marnie Powers-Torrey
Salt Lake City: UT: M. Powers-Torrey, 1999
N7433.4 P69 C37 1999
Typeface is Twentieth Century Medium Italic. Handset and printed on an Asbern letterpress. Photographs are gum bichromate prints, photolithographs, and intaglio prints from photopolymer plates. Edition of 15 copies, signed and numbered. University of Utah copy is no. 4.
God Created the Sea and Painted it Blue So We’d…
Michelle Ray
Tallahassee, FL: The Small Craft Advisory Press, Florida State University, 2013
N7433.4 R395 G63 2013
Title is derived from a quote by Bernard Moitessier, a French yachtsman. Eleven unpaged booklets issued in a basswood box attached to linen hardcover with embossed title and printed endsheet. Inside the box are two compartments. One contains a tunnel of cut-out illustrations. The second compartment holds a cardboard box with title printed above tab enclosure and which contains the booklets. Images and text created with photopolymer plates, using Trajan and Optima typefaces on handmade cotton/abaca, French Construction, and Neenah Environment papers.
From the publisher’s website: [Mrs. Delany] is an “imagined collaboration between Mrs. Mary Delany (1700-1788), an English widow, woman of accomplishment, and creator of imaginative botanical ‘paper mosaics’ and Herr Ernst Haeckel (1852-1911), a distinguished and controversial German biologist and artist who devoted much of his time to the study and rendering of single-celled creatures.”
Cut paper image of a microscopic organism affixed to frontispiece with another cut-paper image affixed to the recto of the same sheet; eleven cut-paper interpretations of microscopic organisms tipped on to captioned plates; tipped-in cut-paper initials, numerous smaller cut-paper decorations. The paper cuttings are adapted from Ernst Haeckel’s Die Radiolarien (1862) and Kunstformen der Natur (1899-1904). They are cut from a variety of papers, including Yatsuo, Kozuke, mulberry, Gifu, Kitikata, and Kiraku kozo from Japan; Ingres and unidentified wove from Europe; and Reg Lissel handmade papers from Canada. Some were cut from papers previously marbled in the Turkish or Suminigashi styles. Some were dyed by the papermaker; some were dyed or otherwise hand-colored for this book. The cuttings are mounted on one of Arches text wove (white), Arches MBM Ingres (black) or Hahnemuhle Ingres (black).
Bound in full polished morocco, ruled and stamped decoratively in red and gilt with a gilt-lettered spine by Claudia Cohen. Marbled endpapers. Issued in orange clamshell case with a gilt-lettered spine label.
Edition of twenty-five copies plus six hors de commerce, each signed by the author, printer, and binder. Rare Books copy is XXII.
Jabberwocky
Barry McCallion
East Hampton, NY: 2015
PR4611 J32 2015 oversize
India ink washes, various collage and drawing elements incorporating metallic gold paper and aluminum foil with text from newspaper type, copied on various papers, each letter cut out and collaged in a myriad of shapes and sized as well as colors. Richard de Bas cream wove paper. Bound by Joelle Webber: hand-sewn yellow colored silk over boards with title on front panel, a reduced reproduction of the title-page. Blue and silver endpapers by St. Armand, terracotta colored guards. Housed in tan linen over boards, clamshell box, title in red reproduced from the title-page with yellow and red reproduction of first page inset on front panel. Signed and dated by the artist.
The Arctic Plants of New York City
James Walsh (b. 1961)
New York City: Granary Books, 2015
N7433.4 W355 A73 2016
From the publisher’s website: “The Arctic Plants of New York City combines personal letters, poetry, prose essays, scholarly research, botanical exploration and artistic investigation, and ranges from the Doctrine of Signatures to the sleep of plants, and from Jean-Jacques Rousseau and John Muir on mental travel to Giacomo Leopardi and Charles Baudelaire on the necessity of illusion for art and life. Interspersed throughout the book are a number of two-page spreads that focus on a single plant, such as Common Mugwort, with a mounted botanical specimen of that plant surrounded by texts drawn from earlier writers on botany and set in verse, creating a field of word-objects interacting with plant-objects. The letters that open the book lead into a prose essay that touches on the souls of plants, their use in medicine and as spurs to mental travel, their transience, their migrations, their meaning. A bibliography lists the most essential works from the author’s research and the book concludes with a reproduction of the index from Nicholas Polunin’s Circumpolar Arctic Flora (1959), in which the author has marked in red pen the eighty-eight Arctic plants that occur in New York City. Written, designed, and printed letterpress by James Walsh, with eighteen botanical specimens pressed and mounted by the author. Bound by Daniel Kelm at Wide Awake Garage.” From the colophon: “All the plants were gathered in Brooklyn.” Printed by the author using two Vandercook proof presses at the Center for the Book Arts. Text paper is Somerset Book White, endsheets are Hahnemuhle Ingres Blue Green. Cloth bound in Dover Oxford Black. Edition of forty copies, 34 of which are for sale.
This past spring, students taking Digital Storytelling, a course taught by Natalie Stillman-Webb, Department of Writing and Rhetoric Studies, worked with Alison Elbrader, Special Collections Reference Librarian. One student, Mickenzie Burns, produced this video, inspired by her visit.
Inspired by PBS’s The Great American Read, beginning May 22, season six of KUED’s VERVE was produced by Ashley Swansong, Digital Media Producer. While working toward her Bachelor’s of Fine Arts in Film, Cinema, and Video Studies from the University of Utah, Ashley worked in Special Collections.
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