#daniel kelm

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It's Fine Press Friday!

This week’s Fine Press Friday highlights another book from the estate of our late friend Dennis Bayuzick. Gabriel’s Family was created by Philadelphia artist and poet Claire Owen in 1992 at her Turtle Island Press in an edition of 52 copies signed by Owen and her collaborator Daniel Tucker. It tells the story of a stone cutter who creates beautiful, but grotesque creatures and eventually believes them to be a part of his family and a completion of himself. His solitude, however, is threatened by being evicted by the bishop, and events unfold from this predicament.

The images are relief etchings prints created by Owen herself. The presswork is by Art Larson of Horton Tank Graphics, in Hadley, Massachusetts. The text is set in Baskerville and the titling is done in Centaur. The book was bound in red Nigerian goatskin, with a brown spine, stamped in gold and white foil, by Daniel Kelm at Wide Awake Garage in Easthampton, Massachusetts. The story was originally published in The Painted Bride Quarterly of Philadelphia in fall of 1991.

View other books from the collection of Dennis Bayuzick.

View more Fine Press Friday Posts.

– Sarah S., Special Collections Graduate Intern

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Daniel Kelm

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Book/Not Book

This week we present Daniel Kelm's 2005 artist's book Neo Emblemata Nova produced in an edition of 21 copies at The Wide Awake Garage in Easthampton, Massachusetts, with assistance of Garage mechanics Erin Clay Nelson, Meg Sanders, Sammy Lee, Anthony J. Flandaca, Amy Borezo, and Kylin Lee. Using a variation of Kelm's famous wire-edge binding structure, the work is designed as a Möbius strip--a two-sided surface with a half-twist and connected at the ends, essentially creating a continuous one-sided surface where one may view both sides in one continuous line without having to turn the surface over.

Sound mysterious? Well, it's a remarkably simple design, but the mysterious anomaly of a two-sided object with a single continuous surface is matched by the cryptic nature of the work's contents. On each page, Kelm reproduces images from the 1618 second edition of alchemist Michael Maier's treatise Atalanta fugiens or Emblemata nova. The images are offset-printed and hand-spattered with inks. Here, Maier offers detailed descriptions of transmuting base metals into gold. Unfortunately, these descriptions are presented entirely in allegorical, emblematic imagery that is as mysterious as the structure itself -- to the uninitiated. 

An additional dilemma is that once unfurled from its tight little package, it is nearly impossible to figure out how to transmute the Möbius strip back into its original folded, square form. Not to worry, Kelm has included a tiny instruction manual for just this situation. But, alas, the instructions are nearly as cryptic as the work's surreal geometrical form and its fabulous alchemical contents.

But the real question: is this really a book, or is it a toy, educational tool, alchemical cypher, or just a frivolous geometric curiosity?

So, Book/Not Book? You know what you know, so reblog and let us know.

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It's Fine Press Friday!

For the occasion of binder Daniel Kelm's residency in our 2014 Ettinger Book Artist Series this fall, painter, letterpress printer, and retired UW-Parkside Art professor Dennis Bayuzick (Purple Parable Press) generously donated his copy of Granary Books' Synesthesia to UWM's Special Collections.  In Synesthesia, Steve Clay's Granary Books brings together the words of New Age philosopher Terence McKenna with the impeccable letterpress work of Philip Gallo's Hermetic Press, the mysterious hand-made glyphs and illuminations of Timothy Ely, the wire-edge binding of Daniel Kelm and his Wide Awake Garage, and a cloth-covered clam-shell box by Jill Jevne. The text is printed in Eurostile Normal and Extended, with Legend, Trump Semi Bold, and Cooper Black on Rives BFK paper. Produced in 1992 in an edition of 75 copies (our copy is signed by McKenna, Ely, and Kelm), Synesthesia remains a consummate tour de force of contemporary fine-press production.

Find it in the catalog here.

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Tauba Auerbach, RGB Colorspace Atlas, 2011

Digital offset print on paper, case bound book, airbrushed cloth cover and page edges. Binding co-designed by Daniel E. Kelm and Tauba Auerbach. The books were bound by Daniel E. Kelm assisted by Leah Hughes at the Wide Awake Garage.