Beyond text: the book as art

When does a book become art in its own right, beyond the prose on its pages? Can a book be a tool, maybe a pipe wrench?

For the upcoming Ideafest session, Book Arts Interactive, staff of the University of Victoria Libraries’ Special Collections and Archives want to help people, especially children and their parents, look at books in ways beyond the text on their pages.

“We want to draw attention to look directly at a book and not just through a book,” said Heather Dean, associate director of special collections.

Tunnel books will be among the items on display. These are books with pages that billow out in accordion-like fashion to create a visual series of seethrough panels. They are similar to pop-up books and were once popular as souvenirs.

It will also feature medieval manuscripts, handwritten on pages of scraped animal skins about 500 years ago. These will demonstrate how books were not always the result of massproduction printing.

There will be a work by Vancouver artist Robert Chaplin, who fashioned a tool, a toilet plunger, into a bell and included upon it a poem to be read. This, too, can be counted as a form of book.

“This is all a chance to start thinking about the book critically, as a material object, as a work of art or a physical item carrying meaning in itself and not just something for recording information,” Dean said.

The session will include hands-on interactive stations with books supplying fun beyond a good read.

People, especially families, will be taught to assemble, sew and bind pages and covers into their own books. They can take them away as blank notebooks or decorate them with inks and stamps, which will be on hand.

Visitors will also be invited to have some fun with images based on those found in books from Special Collections, such as an illustration from an 1894 edition of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice.

These images will be available at stations where visitors will be invited to colour them in.

There will also be images of plants, animals, architecture, and works by English artist Aubrey Beardsley (1872-1898), all reproduced for colouring sessions.

“We are hoping to give people, especially families with kids, an opportunity to get involved with making and filling in their own books,” said Dean.

“We have so many ways now of getting information,” she said. “But by thinking about books in different ways we can appreciate better how information has been passed along for hundreds of years.”

“The book is still enduring,” said Dean.

Books Arts Interactive in on Saturday, March 10, 10:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. at the McPherson Library.

> Find out more about Ideafest at uvic.ca/ideafest, and at timescolonist.com/more