Preservation Week is Coming!

Preservation Week, April 21- 27, is an annual event sponsored by the American Library Association to raise awareness of preservation issues and solutions.  We will mark the occasion at Dartmouth College Library with guided tours of Preservation Services on Thursday, April 25 at 11 am, noon, and 1pm.  We will also feature a daily preservation tip on our blog.

For more information about Preservation Week including disaster recovery information, preservation tips for military families, and answers to your preservation questions follow this link:  "Preservation @ your library"

Amos Kennedy Came to Town and Left an Impression

Amos Kennedy was on campus from January 28th to February 1st, dovetailing with the Martin Luther King, Jr. activities. His visit was sponsored by the Office of Institutional Diversity and Equity, Friends of the Dartmouth College Library, Preservation Services, and the Dartmouth College Library Book Arts Workshop.



Amos intersected with campus events in many areas. He visited Michael Chaney's class on Dave the Potter, where he viewed student work and discussed his own work and ideas (photo above). On Tuesday night he had dinner with ten students arranged by the Office of Institutional Diversity and Equity, and Wednesday night he was at a viewing of Proceed and Be Bold, a documentary about Amos by Laura Zinger (also available in the Jones Media Center). He was also interviewed on "Word of Mouth with Virginia Prescot on New Hampshire Public Radio (listen here).

The workshops were a drop-in style, and over the course of the workshops we estimated 200 visitors. Five posters were produced based on quotes that were submitted by members of the Dartmouth community.
Written by Deborah Howe.

The Last Lot

As scanning of the Serial Set winds down at Newsbank it seems that there are many things to count, and to count down. There are, of course, the usual tasks of keeping track of Serial Set volumes passing through Preservation Services, charging them to the appropriate library accounts to track their whereabouts and pushing them around on book trucks. In addition, an accurate count of volumes which are repaired is included in monthly departmental statistics. As for counting down, it’s hard to say how many more volumes will need to be repaired. This won’t be known until all the volumes have been returned and looked over by a technician. However, the last outgoing Lot of books have been packed and shipped. This Lot, Number 25, included forty-two volumes of House and Senate Journals ranging 1981 to 1994. Will this be the last time I wrap a book truck in lavender shrink wrap? Probably not, but it’s a significant benchmark anyway.

House and Senate journals getting ready to go

Written by Elizabeth Rideout.

Amos Kennedy Visit to Dartmouth

Sponsored by the Office of Institutional Diversity and Equality, Dartmouth College Library and the Friends of the Library.

Amos Kennedy is a letterpress printer using a distinctive voice to create posters, artists’ books, and publications. Through his strong graphics and bold typography, Kennedy pushes issues of race, freedom, and equality, often incorporating proverbs and tales of the Kuba and Yoruba people of Africa, as well as the work of African-American poets such as Paul Laurence Dunbar. Amos quit his corporate job at the age of forty to become, as he calls himself, “a humble negro printer”. He received his MFA from the University of Wisconsin, has taught workshops in over seven countries and is currently spearheading the Detroit Printing Plant.

The Rare Book & Manuscript Library at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign holds a large collection of Amos’s work containing artists' books, postcards, and posters. His work can also be found in many other collections such as Northwestern University and the libraries of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, but Amos will sell you an original letterpress print for just fifteen dollars. “My posters are for everybody,” says Kennedy. He is also the subject of a documentary by Laura Zinger called "Proceed and be Bold.”

Exhibit: Baker Berry Library
Letterpress broadsides by Amos Kennedy reflecting on life, race and injustices. During the month of Janurary there will be an exhibit of Amos Kennedy's posters on display in Berry Main Street.

Event Schedule:
Events will take place in the Book Arts Workshop located in Baker Library, rooms 21-23 (West entrance, lower level, around the corner from the Orozco murals). All events are free and open to the public.

Monday, January 28th
11:00 AM - 1:00 PM Printing demonstration in the Book Arts Workshop hall with the Washington iron hand press.
1:30 PM - 5:00 PM Amos Kennedy will be printing his colorful and unique posters using the Vandercook press. Come by to print your own poster and see what can be done with type. This is a drop in workshop, participants are encouraged to come for an extended time period.

Tuesday, January 29th
1:00 PM - 4:00 PM Amos Kennedy will be printing his colorful and unique posters using the Vandercook press. Come by to print your own poster and see what can be done with type. This is a drop in workshop, participants are encouraged to come for an extended time period.

Wednesday, January 30th
11:00 AM - 2:00 PM Amos Kennedy will be printing his colorful and unique posters using the Vandercook press. Come by to print your own poster and see what can be done with type. This is a drop in workshop, participants are encouraged to come for an extended time period.
7:30 PM Proceed and be Bold: A Film by Laura Zinger. A few years ago independent film maker Laura Zinger made a documentary about Amos. The film covers Amos Kennedy’s background but more than that it addresses issues of race, finding your voice in the modern world, and discovering your passion. Come and see the film and hear a lecture by the man himself. This event is sponsored by the Friends of the Library. Location: Hood Auditorium.

To Great Teamwork

Almost ten years ago John Cocklin, Economics and Social Science Data Librarian, was contacted by Readex (a division of NewsBank Corporation) to borrow a small number of volumes from the U. S. Congressional Serial Set. They were digitizing their microfilm edition of the Serial Set and wanted to scan color images from our printed copies in order to enhance the product they were developing. On the success of that initial loan, Readex approached John about a collaboration of a much greater scope. A full color digital edition of the American State Papers (1789-1838) and the U. S. Congressional Serial Set from 1817-1980 using Dartmouth’s paper copy.

(See The U.S. Congressional Serial Set Project for a summary)

This would be a major undertaking and involve collecting, conserving, transporting, and re-shelving over 14,000 volumes. The joint venture began in 2005 and was projected to be completed in 4 years. For a variety of reasons, including expanding the project to include other publications and staffing ebb and flow, it has (happily from our view) doubled in duration so that we are in the 8th and final year.

Scholars have benefited from the digitized Serial Set, and the ability to search the full-text of the contents has led to new discoveries. An example is the number of women who served as men in the War of 1812 and the Civil War. The Serial Set contains a larger number of petitions to Congress for pensions from these women, indicating the practice was more prevalent than previous research had indicated.

The success of the joint project is in large part due to teamwork. In the early stages, there were almost daily emails or phone calls between the project managers and key project staff. As the normal rhythm took over, the need for daily communication lessened but is still there. Readex staff might identify a missing scan and Dartmouth staff will track it down in the stacks to verify if it exists. If a Dartmouth patron needs to borrow a volume that is at Readex, we know they will have it back in Hanover within twenty-four hours.

Every year the project team members gather to talk about what is working, what could be improved, and what we see happening in the coming months. We’ve gotten into the habit of each taking turns hosting the event. When the Readex team comes to Dartmouth they are able to check on the physical volumes and double check the item count in order to adjust their benchmarks. When we visit Readex we are able to touch base with the scan operators and provide training updates on book handling. As the Library’s digital program has taken shape, we have learned useful project management tips from our Readex colleagues. Our last project meeting was at Readex in Chester, VT and focused on winding down the project sometime in April 2013.

Teamwork – something to celebrate.

Written by Barbara Sagraves.

Planning and Building a Digital Collections Program, May 10, 2012

I recently had the pleasure of working with a colleague from Amherst College to organize a regional forum on "Planning and Building a Digital Collections Program". Kelcy Shepherd and I organized this event through the NorthEast Regional Computing Program, better known as NERCOMP. Our goal was to bring together speakers on a variety of topics related to creating digital collections in a library or archive setting. The forum included four presenters:

• Dartmouth College Library's own David Seaman, Associate Librarian for Information Management, who spoke about our Digital Library Program Plan and the process we’ve gone through to develop our digital collections infrastructure over the past several years.
• David Mathews, Partner at The Image Collective, who gave a detailed presentation on the important technical considerations for digital imaging.
• Nancy McGovern, Head of Curation and Preservation Services at MIT Libraries, who covered the basic components of digital preservation planning. This talk was a very abbreviated version of the ICPSR's five-day Digital Preservation Management Workshop, which builds on the Digital Preservation Management Tutorial found here.
• Anne Sauer, Director and University Archivist at Tufts University, who talked about the challenges and strategies involved in advocating for digital collections funding within a larger campus environment.

All of the presentations were excellent, and Kelcy and I had a great time organizing the event. The presenters' slides can be found here (some slides are not yet available, but will be soon). Many thanks to all the presenters and participants, and to NERCOMP for hosting the forum!

Written by Helen Bailey.

Quetzalcoatl Premiere

Preservation Week 2012 has come and gone. How did you celebrate? There were a number of great activities all over the country – I hope you were able to participate and deepen your understanding of the need to preserve our cultural heritage today so that it may be passed on to the next generation. If you haven’t had a chance, be sure to review our preservation pointers.

Dartmouth's major Preservation Week event was a public screening of the film Quetzalcoatl. You may recall from earlier posts (here and here) that funding for the film restoration was provided by a grant from the National Film Preservation Foundation. Part of the mission of the NFPF is to promote film exhibition and so projecting the film before an audience was a grant requirement.

Quetzalcoatl was ready for public viewing at about the same time that our colleagues at the Hood Museum of Art were preparing a major exhibit, "Men of Fire: Jose Clemente Orozco and Jackson Pollock". We decided to schedule the premiere during the "Men of Fire" exhibit (April 7 – June 17) and serendipitously Preservation Week fit right in.

April 25 was the premiere and Mary Coffey, Associate Professor of Art History, provided an introduction to an audience of fifty students and community members. She highlighted these aspects of the film:

• The director’s use of pan and scan to emphasize parts of the mural.
• The impact of the musical score by Theodore Newman.
• What parts of the mural the director included and what was excluded.

What a difference it made to experience Quetzalcoatl on the big screen! After the movie, Professor Coffey took questions from the audience and many commented that the film helped them better understand Orozco's work. One person stated that although he had studied the mural, he had never before been able to see at eye level the figures of Quetzalcoatl and the Christ in the way the film maker made possible.

If you would like to view the movie, a DVD copy may be checked out from the Jones Media Center. Ask for Jones Media DVD 13348. Or you may see it on Dartmouth's YouTube channel.

If you are in the Upper Valley, be sure to visit the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College to see the "Men of Fire: Jose Clemente Orozco and Jackson Pollock" exhibit from now until June 17.

Written by Barb Sagraves.

Home Movie Day

Celebrate Home Movie Day in the Upper Valley this Saturday, October 15th! The Howe Library will be holding continuous screenings and film assessment from 10am - 5pm. For more information visit their Facebook page.

Visit to Readex!

A few weeks ago the Serial Set team here at Dartmouth went down to Chester, Vermont for our annual Serial Set Project meeting and got to spend most of the day with our partners at Readex! I was able to go down in November shortly after I started here in Preservation Services, but this was Elizabeth Rideout's first visit. So we got to go on a nice tour.

At any given time, Readex is undergoing several different projects, while working toward putting out into the world an assortment of databases jam-packed with information from a variety of sources. My particular interest with Readex is with the U.S. Congressional Serial Set, as this is the set of books that myself and Ms. Rideout work on. So while Readex has many different aspects of production, I'm going to focus selfishly on what I consider to be my favorite.

Readex Operations, disguised by a humble New England exterior, but what lies behind these walls is nothing short of astounding. Pictured from left to right Elsa Lamphere (my direct contact at Readex), Elizabeth Rideout (my partner in crime), Deborah Howe (the chief, directly oversees any and all repairs by Elizabeth and me), and Vicky Gardner (Vice President, Editorial).

After some warm 'Hellos' we're taken into the depths of the Readex production line. This is where the process starts.

A temperature and humidity controlled holding room for the Serial Set to rest in while they wait to be scanned, packed or double checked. Each truck arrives, is checked in and is assigned a special number that only Readex knows.

Elsa explains to Elizabeth the way that each volume is flagged and tagged throughout the scanning process. (Look at all those Serial Set books in the back ground! Readex sure is working hard!)

Once the Serial Set volumes are flagged and given their unique ID numbers, they are scanned, one page at a time by an incredible piece of technology! A KIRTAS Machine! (Watch this amazing video to see how it actually moves! Video NOT taken at Readex)

The technician places the volume in the machine and lines up the clamps just right, this way the machine can do its thing without a lot of re-adjusting and without damaging the book.

The machine then takes over for the most part. There is a vacuum arm (with yellow around the edge) that reaches over and turns the pages, at the top of the machine is a camera and two mirrors that photographs each page when the book is open. The cradle that the book is resting in is adjustable and the technician does just that as the pages are turned and weight is distributed differently. This prevents any stress on the spine as well as unnecessary strain on the shoulders and boards of the volume. There are several other features that the Kirtas utilizes to keep the process going smoothly including a small air jet called a 'fluffer' that blows to keep the pages from sticking to each other, small clear clamps that hold the book open, and direct download to a computer as the machine photographs.

The following is the sequence as the machine turns a page!

After the volumes are scanned, the images are checked by technicians for quality control. Sometimes there's a hand in the scan, sometimes they missed a page, or sometimes the camera just didn't photograph the right side. Once all the images are okay, they send these to the Index-ers. These folks READ all of the Serial Set books and index the content! Incredible! The product goes through several more steps to insure its accuracy and usability, and then it's released to the customers.

Thank you so much for the tour, Readex! As always, we here at Dartmouth had a wonderful time.

Photos and Writing by Beth Hetland

Conservation Road Show

On April 7th, 2011, I gave a brief presentation on the history of book structure and materials, to Joy Kenseth’s “Book as Art: Renaissance and Baroque Illustrated Books at Dartmouth”. I find these opportunities a great source of enjoyment and a chance to educate the students in something they might never have contemplated. In fact this is how I came to be in the field. As a student at the University of Cincinnati, Gabrielle Fox, the then conservator there, came and gave a talk to our “History of Illumination” class. I was hooked and have never looked back. I’ve come full circle so it seems.

Below are images of the items I brought to the class to demonstrate the various steps and materials used in book construction.

A sewing frame with signatures to illustrate the foundation of the sewing structure.

This is a goat skin of mine which makes a regular appearance to illustrate the direct derivative of the parchment into a book covering material. The dark spots are the blood vessels which remain as a result of how the skin was prepared.

In Preservation Services, we have two cut away models that were executed by Stephanie Wolff. The two photos above show one model that features sewing on cords with the lacing pattern into the boards, along with hand sewn German style headbands.

Below the other model illustrates the case binding, with both linked and simple sewing on tapes.

These models have been extremely helpful in teaching book construction and are consistently being used for tours and talks. I highly recommend that time be taken to create such cutaways, not only will you have illustrated samples of book structure but making them will exercise the skill of the binder.

Gold leaf and finishing tools allow for the exquisite decoration of bindings.

I find it so interesting that the headband has remained a component of the book. In the era of wooden boards and the need for a serious connection between them and the text block, it made perfect sense to have the extra cord attachment. However, as it stands today, it’s purely a fashion accessory, having no structural or intrinsic value whatsoever. I have no theory as to why it has remained, but only in that it adds a decorative element to our literary companions.

And to the state of book construction today, the sample above shows how the book case is fabricated separate from the text block, a quicker and more efficient but less durable construction from the days of past.
I am hoping that this collaboration between the faculty and conservation staff will develop into a more formal dynamic and be part of the classroom experience on a more regular basis.

Written by Deborah Howe

Preservation Week Wrap-Up

Another National Preservation Week has come and gone! I hope you had an opportunity to benefit from our tips or attended the “Protect Your Treasures” event. If you missed it we had a great turnout: questions were answered, examples were shown, and many, many conservation supply catalogs were handed out.


We had experts to answer questions about photographs, digital objects, textiles, and books & paper. This photo shows a few of the items on display at the Books & Paper table. Notice the “Collections Care” catalog published by Gaylord. They very generously sent two-dozen copies along with their supply catalog; thanks also to University Products for their catalogs.

Special thanks goes to Helen Bailey, Stephanie Wolff, Deborah Howe, Beth Hetland, Elizabeth Rideout, and Margaret Spicer for making “Protect Your Treasures” a success.

The next Preservation Week is April 22-29, so mark your calendar!

Written by Barb Sagraves

End of a Long Journey:

The Dismantling of the Guild of Book Workers "Marking Time" Exhibit.

On March 22nd, 2011 a group of volunteers assembled at the Library to dismantle the “Marking Time” exhibit that had been on display in Baker Berry Library since November of 2010.

Amongst the group, was Rutherford Witthus, one of the exhibitors. His book, Matan, Williams, Witten and Nagel, Crumpling a Thin Sheet, 2001, utilized the controlled spontaneity promoted by John Cage to produce crumpled pages. These are included in his book as well as beautiful printed scans of them.

It was a delight to have him here as we took a moment to have show and tell and he was able to illustrate how the pages were manipulated and handled.

For more information on Rutherford’s work visit his website.

After the show and tell and putting all the books back in their boxes, the team went to work with bubble wrap and packing material to get the books ready for shipping. Here students from North Bennet Street School busily match books with the right size shipping container and make sure the correct address is on the right box!

Elizabeth Rideout inspects the packages to make sure they are well sealed and RTG (ready to go).

McKey, loading the boxes onto trucks headed to the mail room for UPS pick up. It felt like an old friend was leaving after a wonderful visit. I hope all the binders were happy to finally get their books back.

Special Thanks to:
Linda Lemke, Rutherford Whittus, Stephan Stefanko, McKey Berkman, Arini Esarey, Erin Fletcher, Celine Lombardi, Anna Shepard. And most of all to the wonderful, thorough, and outstanding head of Shipping & Receiving, Jim Guay, without whom we would be at a complete loss.

Written by Deborah Howe

Transformations

Dartmouth holds a Winter Carnival every February and amid the snow sculptures and athletic contests, the Alumni Office invites class & club officers back to campus for a special event. The alumni program theme for 2011 was “Hidden Treasures” and if you know anything about the Library's Book Arts Program you know it is “hidden” in the southwest corner of Baker Library's basement and is an undisputed “treasure”.

I worked with Anne Peale, '11, to plan the event and we decided to have our visitors print covers for a keepsake pamphlet that they would sew themselves. Anne is a student instructor in the Book Arts studios and she came up with a wintery design printed with silver ink on “Dartmouth green” card stock.

Anne did a fantastic job explaining letterpress-printing technology to the alums and enthusiastically described the influence working in the studio has had on her life. I wouldn't want to embarrass Anne by announcing her career plans in a blog post but simply put, the Books Arts Program had a transformative impact.

It turns out, Anne's wasn't the first life to be transformed through the program. One of the Dartmouth alums who showed up for the tour had been a student employee of Ray Nash, the founder of the Graphic Arts Workshop and in whose honor the Book Arts Program was re-established. I was humbled to meet a "Nash student" and felt privileged as he movingly described his mentor, Ray Nash, and his mentor's influence on him. That day I formed my own "mental keepsake" as I watched a past student of the Graphic Arts Workshop nod his approval of the generation that has found a home in the Book Arts Workshop.

Photos by Sue Wiley Young '77
Written by Barb Sagraves

Preservation Week 2011

Protect Your Treasures: Preserving Personal Collections

Dartmouth College Library presents a personal treasures preservation event as part of the 2nd Annual ALA Preservation Week. This event is part of a national celebration initiated by the American Library Association to raise awareness of cultural heritage preservation within the community.

Special One-Day Event, Wednesday, April 27, 2011 11am-1pm

Baker-Berry Library, DCAL Conference Room

Dartmouth College Library’s Preservation Services department is hosting a two-hour personal treasures preservation event. Faculty, students, staff, and community members are invited to bring questions about personal documents, family photos, and memorabilia for advice on how to best preserve those treasured items.

If you have a sample item from your collection, please feel free to bring it along with your questions. We will provide information about best practices in storage, handling, and general preservation guidelines for a wide range of materials, including:

• Photographs
• Books
• Documents and art on paper
• Film, video, and home movies
• Records, tapes, CDs and other audio materials
• Digital items such as documents, photographs, and other personal files
• Textiles

**Please note: we will not provide any monetary appraisal of items. If you are interested in assessing the value of your treasures, we recommend having them evaluated by a professional appraiser.

Click here for more information!

A Cavalcade of Cartoonists

On Friday, March 4th, Preservation Services had quite a collection of visitors. Candidates from the Master's Program at The Center for Cartoon Studies (CCS) were invited to participate in a Book Arts Workshop created just for them to focus specifically on binding suggestions and techniques that could be applied to their Thesis Packaging that is due in May.

Since I am both a member of the Preservation Services staff and a Cartoonist at CCS, I wanted to bridge the gap between the two and give my classmates (and co-workers) a big treat. As community members we, the Cartoonists, have often attended the Letterpress and Bindery Studio workshops but because there is a limit to how many can participate at a given time, we have to stagger our visits and don't always make the cut, strictly due to space. But here in Preservation Services, we could happily fit all 10 of the participating Cartoonists and give one on one feedback more tailored to combining comics and book binding.

So with the aid of some creative carpooling, and collaborative curriculum planning, I met a group of excited Cartoonists at the Baker Information desk at 10am. After a brief tour and some introductions, there was no time to waste. Deborah Howe began to produce example after example to give just a small taste of the endless possibilities awaiting each Cartoonist's Thesis.

Then we jumped right in to a multi-signature pamphlet stitch.

Jon Chad, Faculty at CCS, uses a jig to puncture his signatures.

Two tables full of Cartoonists sewing their signatures!

Ben Horak (left) and Josh Kramer (right) giggle about starting a 'Book Binding for Men' club.

Betsey Swardlick completes her second kettle stitch, nice and tight!

Stephanie Wolff (right) helps Lawrence Derks line up his signatures.

Lena Chandok (right) starts folding her cover, while Andy Christensen (left) makes sure he's doing it right!

Cartoonists look on as Deborah Howe (far left) scores her cover lightning fast!

Gluing book cloth requires a LOT of concentration!

"I did good!"

Thanks Dartmouth College Library's Preservation Services!

Written by Beth Hetland

Panel Discussion

The Friends of the Dartmouth College Library invite you to attend a special panel discussion in conjunction with the Guild of Book Workers Marking Time exhibition currently showcased in Baker-Berry Library through March 20th, 2011.

Bound for Glory: The Hand-made Book as Aesthetic Object and Conceptual Process

Saturday, March 12th, 2011 from 2:00pm until 4:00pm in the Treasure Room, Baker Library.

Reception and tour of the exhibit and conservation lab will follow the panel discussion.

Panel participants:

Jeff Altepeter, Chair of the New England Guild of Book Workers
Richard Baker, binder in private practice
Alex Halaz, Professor of English, teaching History of the Book
Stephanie Wolff, Conservation Technician at Dartmouth College

This panel will discuss personal insights in creating hand-made books and the role of book arts in the academic world.

This event is free and open to the public, for more information, please call (603) 646-2236

eResources Fair: a recap

Last week I had the privilege of participating in the
Dartmouth College Library eResources Fair. eWhatses Fair, you ask? Let me explain.

As part of its many services to the Dartmouth community, the Library provides access to a HUGE number of electronic resources for Dartmouth students, faculty, and staff. These include scholarly databases, electronic journals, ebooks, streaming music and video, newspapers, and so much more. We have such a wide variety of eResources that it can often be overwhelming to try and navigate them all. Enter the eResources Fair.

This annual event is an opportunity for anyone on campus to come learn more about the eResources available for use through the library. They get the chance to learn about what eResources we have, talk directly with vendors about how a product can help with their research and find out exactly where and how to access these materials.

So what is a Preservation Specialist doing at the eResources Fair? Let me explain further. Part of my job is to coordinate the workflow between Digital Production and Preservation Services. Digital Production is the unit in the library that does in-house digitization of library collections. For most paper-based materials (books, manuscripts, photographs, etc.) the digitization process involves scanning the item, editing the scanned image, adding metadata, and publishing it online. That's a very simplified explanation, and more information on Digital Production can be found here. In any case, some of the Preservation staff spend part of their time in Digital Production doing this digitization work.

But digitization isn't only about scanning and publishing. Often items, such as books or manuscripts, need to be repaired prior to beginning the digitization process to ensure that they aren't damaged during scanning. The Conservation team within Preservation Services is directly responsible for those repairs.

Since I'm involved in coordinating many steps of the digitization process, from planning to repair to scanning, I'm very familiar with the kinds of materials that get digitized, how digitization works, and how the final digital product is made available online. And that's how I ended up at the eReources Fair, telling students and faculty about the wonderful collections that are now available for web access, anytime and anywhere!

To explore these collections yourself, visit the Digital Collections page at http://www.dartmouth.edu/~library/digital/collections/index.html

Written by Helen K. Bailey
Photography by Joseph Mehling '69 used with permission

"Marking Time"

The Guild of Book Workers traveling exhibition "Marking Time" is on display in Baker-Berry Library from November 5th, 2010 - March 20th, 2011. An Opening Reception is scheduled for Friday, November 12th, 2010 from 4-6pm in the Main Hall of Baker-Berry Library.

For the Guild's 2009-2011 traveling exhibition, members were asked to respond to the theme "marking time" and were invited to interpret the theme as narrowly or broadly as they wished.

In this exhibit of fifty works, traditional fine leather bindings stand alongside contemporary bindings that have been dyed, collaged, or incorporated with photographs or handwriting. Texts selected to be bound are as likely to be poetry or classics as they are science fiction or hard science. The show includes work in the codex format, complex folded structures, wooden constructions, hand-held toys, and sculptural objects. Text and imagery is produced by the most ancient and the most modern mark-making methods: calligraphy, painting, woodcut, letterpress, and digital output. In exemplary work, the artist's facility with craft, structure, material and content allows each individual to create a cohesive whole.

Our own Stephanie Wolff and Deborah Howe have bindings on display in this exhibit.

The Book Unbound & The Book Arts at Dartmouth

Baker Main Hall, Baker-Berry Library, September 7 - November 24, 2010

This exhibition highlights the book and the book arts at Dartmouth in anticipation of Marking Time, the new traveling show from the Guild of Book Workers, on display in the Berry Main Street exhibition cases from November 5, 2010 through March 20, 2011.

The Book Unbound & The Book Arts at Dartmouth was curated by Stephanie Wolff and Deborah Howe, with help from Barb Sagraves, Professor Alexandra Halasz, Richard Langdell, Laura Graveline, Joe Wright, Jay Satterfield, Pat Cope, McKey Berkman, Laura Braunstein, Book Arts Program participants and CoCo 11 students. Exhibit design by Dennis Grady.

Deborah Howe at PBI

Deborah Howe was selected to teach a workshop at this year's Paper and Book Intensive. The two week summer camp for book artists and binders is a highly regarded workshop so it speaks well of Deborah's teaching talents that she was recruited. Deborah taught "Readdressing the Built-In Groove Case.

She also took advantage of her time there to attend a week long session on late 18th century French binding structures. Drop by Preservation Services to see the beautiful exemplar Deborah created.