Student exhibition explores ‘Art of the Printed Book’

The location of this exhibition couldn’t be more appropriate: the second floor of the Memorial Library.

But according to Tracy Honn, director of the library’s Silver Buckle Press, which is dedicated to historic printing processes, this exhibition is so much more.

“Books are such intimate objects. I just read a blog about (Fort Atkinson poet) Lorine Niedecker’s personal library books that she’d underlined this phrase from Gerald Manley Hopkins, ‘undo the very buttons of my being.’ That’s what books can do,” says Honn.

And that’s what the class she taught in the fall of 2003 endeavored to show its students, she says. Through Thursday, March 31, “The Art of the Printed Book” will showcase the work of six students, all of whom took the class of the same name when Honn taught it.

“I love the engagement of faculties required to make books, your hand, your eye, your intellectual skills. In making books there is always the elemental appeal of authority,” she says.

Students from the class usually come from printmaking or graphic design, Honn says. “I certainly expect students to have honed their critical skills in this class and assume that they apply them to other areas of study,” she says.

One of her former students definitely has. Kathy O’Connell, a graduate student in art who works at Silver Buckle, says she enjoys making books precisely because it engages so many skills simultaneously.

“Creating an artist’s book requires technical skills to construct the object as well as create the artistic content. Making a book demands a balance between the technical process and the creative process,” she says.

Fellow graduate student Amanda Mathenia agrees. She has three pieces in the exhibition: a book with 16 linoleum cut illustrations about a summer visit to her grandparents’ cabin in rural Missouri, a small pop-up book with watercolors printed out digitally and a collection of tomato soup recipes anchored by a wood type centerfold proclaiming, “Tomato soups are souper!”

“The bookmaking class helped me appreciate modern technology — there were so many things done on a computer that would be impossible to do by hand,” she says. “But I also realized that I don’t necessarily need a computer to lay out an awesome-looking book.”

Honn herself is a maker of books. Not surprisingly, perhaps, given her decade of work at Silver Buckle. Currently, she’s devoting some time to learning more about Johann Gutenberg and his eight-page Tabula Rubricarum.

“It was printed at the same time as the 42-line Bible,” she says. “In the 15th century, when a Bible got purchased it was taken by the buyer to have some finishing touches put in by hand, and this little book was the guide that the illuminator used to know where to put titles and so on. It’s basically an index of the Bible and is, as far as I know, the first printed reference book.”

In keeping with Honn’s interest in Gutenberg, Silver Buckle Press is having a symposium, “Recasting Gutenberg,” on Thursday and Friday, April 7 and 8. Honn says a number of invited scholars will discuss new learning about early printing.

“There are some competing theories about early type casting that people get pretty passionate about, and we’re having some of them presented in the program,” she says.

For more information on either the exhibition or the symposium, both of which are free and open to the public, contact Silver Buckle Press at 263-4929 or sbp@library.wisc.edu.