Books in the Wild

Dictionaries are an ever-changing record of language, constantly being updated, amended and added to. This goes for all dictionaries: Merriam-Webster, Oxford English Dictionary, Collin’s. Updates to the dictionary can be new words entirely, or amendments for new meanings of existing words. As you can imagine, 2020 was a heck of a year with both Merriam-Webster and OED adding over 1,000 words, and Merriam-Webster just added over 500 more at the end of January 2021.

Talk with filmmaker James Kennard and book maker Mark Sarigianis about the documentary film The Book Makers

Today I talk a little about pandemic projects, zines, and artist’s books, and have a wonderful discussion with the Quarantine Public Library. The Quarantine Public Library (QPL) is a collaborative project dreamed up by artists Katie Garth and Tracy Honn in May of 2020. QPL is an online book repository that features downloadable and printable booklets. The single-sheet eight-fold zine (or “instabook” from episode 16) format is ideal because it’s a simple structure that really anyone can create. QPL isn’t a “zine library” so much as it is a collection of creative responses to the simple structure. The statement on the site reads: We wanted to make something to share as many of us are staying at home, disconnected from art, books, and one another. The project is not about COVID-19, but is explicitly of its time. With brisk attention, a lot of talking and correspondence, and the enthusiastic good will of generous artists who say yes, we offer this as a gift to share and circulate in a discombobulated time. The QPL site is entirely free, offering the booklets to download and print. There is an instructional video showing how to assemble each booklet yourself. I think in these strange times, there is something comforting about making things by hand, especially a structure that is so quick and easy. It provides a small but much-needed sense of accomplishment. All donations to QPL go to EveryoneOn.org, a non-profit that connects low-income families to affordable internet service and computers.

In 1917, a new novella was published by Mark Twain. The weird part? Twain died in 1910 and the book was purportedly written by his ghost.

Follow the process of making a book while we cover specialized book terms, and some surprising idioms with bookish origins that we use in daily language.

Interview with Mary Baughman, co-founder of the Austin Book Arts Center about the history of book arts in Austin, and the vision of the ABAC

This episode covers the true story of James Cook, a bookbinder who murdered tool engraver John Paas the town of Leicester, bookbinder James Cmurdered tool engraver John Paas over a dispute about brass finishing tools. The tale is particularly gruesome and well-documented because James Cook was the last person to be gibbeted in Britain. Then I interview contemporary bookbinder and tool maker Brien Beidler for some added perspective.

Willard Library is the oldest library in Evansville, IN, established in 1885. There have been reports of apparitions and poltergeist activity from patrons and employees of the library since 1937 that continue to this day. In this episode we will discuss the history of the library and talk with Library Director Greg Hager about some history, legends, and first hand spooky accounts

We at BookLab II have just returned from a fabulous but exhausting trip to the CODEX Symposium and Book Fair, held every other year in the Bay Area, California. Today I am joined by my fellow BookLab colleagues: Craig Jensen, conservator, master-binder and founder of BookLab, and Marc Hammonds, limited-edition binder and official BookLab apprentice. This episode is a conversation all about CODEX, book arts in general, how we discovered book arts, and maybe even a little book art gossip!

If you've ever watched any television shows or movies ever, you may have seen a familiar looking newspaper read by many fictional characters for decades. This exact same newspaper has been spotted in Scrubs, Modern Family, No Country for Old Men, Everyone Hates Chris, Back to the Future, Desperate Housewives, Charmed, That 70’s Show, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and even classics like Citizen Cane and Cincinnati Kid. Is this a newspaper conspiracy? No, not really. It is a stock item printed by the Earl Hays Press in California, a specialty shop that creates film props such as stock newspapers and recreations of "real" newspapers. fictional brands and products, and even fake IDs and currency. In this episode, we will dive a little deeper into the legendary newspaper, and the dos and don'ts of printing film props.

Today’s episode is all about unreadable books. What does it mean to read? How do we garner read meaning from text written in a language that we do not understand? Today We will talk about the process of reading, and I have some fun historical and contemporary examples of indecipherable books, including the mysterious Voynich Manuscript, Codex Seraphinianus, and contemporary works by book artists Heather Peters and Timothy Ely.

Now that we are in October, we are getting into the Halloween spirit by talking about an infamous book called The Malleus Maleficarum, also known as The Hammer of Witches. A book responsible for fueling the heinous witch trials throughout medieval Europe for centuries. We delve into book history and talk about the author and inquisitor Heinrich Kramer. Then we have a fantastic interview with rare books librarian Karen Wahl about her research on the printing developments of the Malleus Maleficarum, and a talk with writer and translator Valarie Williams about an 20th century supernatural scholar named Montague Summers. For this episode, what I originally thought would be a fun witchy romp through book history, ended up being a little heavy, more than a little misogynistic, and a lot uncomfortable. So, I won't be getting into the gory details about the European witch trials on this podcast, but choosing to mainly focus on the Malleus Maleficarum itself and its author. There are plenty of gory details about the witch trials out there that you can easily find, trust me. Instead, I want to emphasize how powerful a book can be, for better or worse. The Malleus Maleficarum is after all, probably the most widely printed and bestselling book after the bible. It was the go-to witch hunting manual for centuries, and single-handedly altered the lore of witches forever. Disclaimer: Although this a very tame version of the European Witch Trials and this episode is still very much safe for work and not explicit, there is some material that may be uncomfortable for very sensitive ears - I do mention parts of the human anatomy and talk about the inquisition of witches.

What is book art exactly? What is an artist book? Are all art books book art? What do you mean by "codex"? Or livre d'artiste? Are you making these words up? I've been getting questions like these for the past seven episodes or so. So today we are starting at the beginning with Book Art Trivia with artists Ariel Hansen Strong and Faith Hale

Lyall Harris is a book artist, writer and painter who lives and works in Charlottesville, VA, and Florence, Italy. Lyall's artwork has been exhibited in more than one hundred solo and juried group shows and recognized with over twenty awards. She has been the recipient of fellowships at Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, NALL Foundation in Vence, France, and San Francisco's Grabhorn Institute. Lyall is also the co-founder and co-editor of The Sigh Press literary and art journal in Florence, Italy. Meeting Places/Luoghi d’incontro is the collaborative work by Lyall and Florence, Italy-based book artist and printmaker Patricia Silva. After having met in Florence, Lyall Harris and Patricia Silva embarked on a series of twelve collaborative book art projects since 2014.The artists set constraints for the process, both of materials and time, which forced them to work in an immediate, intuitive and exploratory way. The varied work addresses issues and histories from their shared and layered perspectives as artists, mothers, daughters, wives, and expats in a changing and complex environment.

Today we are on the hunt for missing punctuation. Like many letters and even entire words, quite a few good punctuation marks have been lost to modern English. In this episode, we’re going to track down some forgotten and elusive marks, from the mysterious Pilcrow to the playful interrobang. Today I have a very exciting noir-themed audio drama filled with questionable acting and an unforgivable amount of punctuation puns.

For his 90th birthday in February 1913, renowned British naturalist and evolutionary biologist Alfred Russel Wallace received a mysterious package containing a small booklet called Shall We Have Common Sense. This booklet, dated 1849, contained essays on evolution through natural selection and germ theory. If this booklet is authentic, it precedes Darwin and Wallace’s publications on evolution by a decade, and Louis Pasteur’s writings on germ theory by nearly two decades. Is it a genuine remarkable discovery? Is it an elaborate and confusing hoax? Join in on the investigation as we explore some intriguing characters like the eccentric atheist George Washington Sleeper, British naturalists Alfred Russel Wallace and Edward B. Poulton, and a mysterious little booklet that could change the history of evolutionary theory.

A commonplace audiobook

Artist Talk with Book Artist Julie Chen at University of Washington on March 16, 2017 during the reception for "Every Moment in a Book: Three Decades of Work by Julie Chen"

In early 1916 on an excursion through the ruined city of Ypres, Belgium, British soldiers came across a damaged letterpress machine in a bombed out print shop. Over the next two years, Captain Frederick J. Roberts and his men produced twenty-three issues of gallows humor, poetry, and prose. In this episode, we’ll delve into some of the history, the process, and production of The Wipers Times.

Today's episode is all about reading - what it means to read, how we read, and a brief history of reading. I'll talk about literacy rates, the alphabetic principle, phonetics, and nonsense poems by Lewis Carroll.