Past Exhibitions

Organized by Alexander Campos, Executive Director, Jen Larson, Collections Specialist, and the Collections Committee, The Center for Book Arts, New York.

For the past two years, the Center for Book Arts has been involved in a Collections Initiative, which involves the in-depth cataloging and preservation of our extensive collection of artist books, prints, catalogues, and ephemera. This exhibition marks the culmination of the three-year Collections Initiative. The exhibition will offer an overview of the history and development of book arts over the past 40 years, and examine the role of the Center for Book Arts in both nurturing and promoting innovative artists and preserving traditional artistic practices. All works in the exhibition can also be viewed through the Center for Book Arts’ online collections database.

ARTISTS WHOSE WORKS ARE ON VIEW AT THE BOOK CLUB INCLUDE:  Tomie Arai, Dennis Ashbaugh/ Kevin Begos/ William Gibson/ Karl Foulkes/ Peter Pettingill, Lynne Avadenka, Bryan Baker, Delphi Basilicato, Barton Lidice Benes, Doug Beube, Karl Beveridge, Michael and Winifred Bixler, Julie Chen and Clifton Meador, Carole Condé, Ana Cordeiro, Sylvia de Swaan, Nicolás Dumit Estévez, Ann Fessler, Ellie Ga, Chitra Ganesh, Roni Gross, Joshua Harris, Barbara Henry, Candace Hicks, Carole P. Kunstadt, Hedi Kyle, Suzanne Lacy, Warren Lehrer, Catarina Leitão, Hilary Lorenz, Margot Lovejoy, Isabelle Lumpkin, Mikhail Magaril, Russell Maret, Franco Marinai, Barbara Mauriello, Scott McCarney, Richard Minsky, Carlos Motta, Mark Murray/Caliban Press, Shervone Neckles, Jánis Rudolfs Nedéla, Heidi Neilson and Chris Petrone, Sarah Nicholls, Sarah Paul Ocampo/ Rachel LaRue Kessler/ Sierra Nelson, Shani Peters, Catya Plate, James Prez, Robin Price, John Randle, John L. Risseeuw, John Ross, Ed Ruscha, George K. Shortess, Robbin Ami Silverberg, SKART, Karina Skvirsky, Kiki Smith, Ginger Brooks Takahashi, Tattfoo Tan, Barbara Tetenbaum, Danny Tisdale, Juana Valdes, Claire van Vliet, John Frederick Walker, James Walsh, Cory Wheelock, Sam Winston,  Paul Woodbine, Paul Zelevansky.

For more about the Center for Book Arts, please visit: www.centerforbookarts.org

In 1912 in San Francisco a group of book lovers came together to create The Book Club of California.  At that time San Francisco possessed printers of extraordinary quality, a thriving literary and art community, knowledgeable booksellers, and major book collectors. Fifty-eight of these men and women including Dr. Edward Rpbeson Taylor, Adolph Sutro and Phoebe Apperson Hearst, were the charter members of The Book Club of California, created for “the study of letters and the promotion of the arts pertaining to the production of books.”

The programs set during these years have continued to this day. Scholarly lectures on the book were sponsored, the first exhibit on rare bookplates was mounted, annual meetings were held, and club offices were established in downtown San Francisco.  In 1914 the Club published its first book, Bibliography of the History of California and the West, 1510-1906, by Robert E. Cowan. It was printed by the firm Taylor, Nash & Taylor in San Francisco. This book established the publishing program of the Club which continues as its best known activity.

Club books show a special interest in Pacific Coast history, literature, and fine printing.  They are fine press limited editions of exceptional quality. Exquisite paper, printing, and binding are shown in this exhibition.  Other books document important fine press firms such as the Grabhorn Press, which demonstrate the mutually beneficial relationship the BCC has had with regional fine press printers.

Exhibits, lectures, and fellowship continue to be integral to The Club’s life. As the Club begins its second century it has moved into spacious Club Rooms at 312 Sutter Street in San Francisco with space for a gallery, a library, lectures, offices, and relaxation. The Club is open weekdays and welcomes your visit to enjoy its many activities, some of which are shown in this exhibit.

-Mary Manning
Book Club of California Centennial Committee

This exhibition opened at Santa Clara University in January 2012. For the full traveling exhibition schedule, please click here.

Selected Press: San Francisco Chronicle, KQED Arts Blog, Smithonian.com, Felt & Wire

You Know My Methods: A Collector’s Approach to the Sherlockian Canon is an exhibition that both celebrates the iconic Hound of the Baskervilles in the 110th year since its American publication and explores the divagations that one collector has enjoyed in his pursuit of the Hound. Visitors have the rare opportunity to see holograph manuscript pages of the Hound, a manuscript that has largely vanished. Also on display are unusual works including a publisher’s dummy for the American first edition; an original illustration by the artist Sidney Paget, who first defined the face and figure of the Great Detective; lurid movie posters of the 1930s and ’40s, and more. At the same time, the exhibition also shows how elements of the story—the cigarette butts at the gates of Baskerville Hall, for instance–can put a “gently mad” collector on the scent of different material for his shelves and walls.

Glen Miranker has one of the premiere collections of Sherlock Holmes books and artwork in the United States. It is the work of more than 35 years, begun as a counter-balance to graduate studies in computer science and a career in high-tech. Glen speaks widely about his “gentle madness” to such groups as the Grolier Club, the University of Minnesota Library, the Toronto Reference Library, the Roxburghe Club, among others. He most recently spoke at Harvard’s Houghton Library, where he helped organize a sesquicentennial symposium honoring Arthur Conan Doyle’s birth and co-curated its companion exhibition. Glen pursued a successful high-tech career until his retirement in 2004 from Apple, where he had been Chief Technical Officer (for Hardware). At present, Glen is engaged in a variety of Sherlockian pursuits while also building collections in wartime cryptography and the early days of radio.

In 1948, Jack Stauffacher & Adrian Wilson reprinted Eric Gill’s 1936 lecture, And Who Wants Peace?, an exquisite folio with a woodcut by Mary Fabilli, the then-companion of William Everson. This exhibition focuses on the work of these young printers in the years right after WWII: the passion, the poetry, the service and the curiosity as they established their presses, studios and careers.

- John McBride, Curator

The books in this exhibition have been selected from more than 60 artists’ books recently shown at the Grolier Club, New York, from the private collection of Robert J. Ruben. They represent a broad range of conceptual content and physical form, created by artists from across international boundaries: Italian Bruno Munari; Swiss Warja Honnegger-Lavater, whose work in the artists’ book medium predated Ed Ruscha’s in the 1960s; and London-based Susan Johanknecht, to name a few. A number of local California artists will also be included.

Many of the works tackle difficult themes, from AIDS, in Karen Chance’s iconic Parallax, to brain trauma, in Scott McCarney’s Memory Loss. Others, such as Ronald King’s Turn Over Darling, and Antonio Frasconi’s A Literary Bestiary, are more playful in content.

All of the books exhibited display craftsmanship and artistry that heighten alertness, challenge aesthetic and political awareness, and lead us to a deeper understanding of the full range of human experience. The exhibition has been curated specially for The Book Club of California by Kathleen Walkup, Professor of Book Art and Director, Book Art Program, Mills College. The initial Grolier Club exhibition was curated by Robert J. Ruben and Yvonne Korshak.

Every year the Hand Bookbinders of California present an exhibition of members’ recent work. The emphasis of the non-juried show changes from year to year according to current interests in the binding world, but always there is a solid core of design binding. This year’s show presents a range of fine binding styles, from an historical replica in the style of “Queen’s Binder B” to an exquisite full French design binding of Macbeth in miniature. There are several examples of finely-tooled books, as well as a variety of other decorative techniques: leather is crumpled, carved, sanded, onlaid, inlaid, painted, and embedded with agate. Members show a similarly inventive approach to structure: two books are bound back-to-back; one starts from both ends and meets in the middle; a third has pages which open like a set of doors. Some books are conceptual: cut and colored triangles of vellum are sewn together into a cat’s cradle. Others are very personal: a mother/daughter collaboration; a mother’s poem to her son; a box gifted to a boy at his Bar Mitzvah. The Hand Bookbinders are not only binders; they write, illustrate, and even print their work. The variety of the 39th annual exhibition shows that book binding continues to flourish in California.

To learn more about the Hand Bookbinders of California, please visit www.handbookbinders.org.

L. Frank Baum, author of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, published almost sixty books between 1897 and his death in 1919. More than a century later, these books continue to astonish for their variety as well as the elaborateness of their production and design.

Baum was born in upstate New York in 1856. He tried a number of careers (playwright, newspaper publisher and editor, manager of a luxury goods emporium, traveling salesman) before his talent as a creator of stories for children became manifest.

His relocation to Chicago in 1891 exposed him to a vibrant arts community. Following the devastating fire of 1872, Chicago positioned itself as the second most populous city in the United States and supported the arts vigorously. The 1893 opening of the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago showcased the architectural, graphic, and printing arts that were flourishing in the great metropolis of the prairies.

Out of this ferment came Baum’s first book for children, Mother Goose in Prose, in 1897. It was published by Way & Williams, one of two major Chicago publishers promoting the arts and crafts designs first introduced by William Morris at the Kelmscott Press, and contained original illustrations commissioned from poster artist Maxfield Parrish. The publication of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz in Chicago three years later showcased the printing arts of Chicago in a way that transformed America’s juvenile literature.

L. Frank Baum rather reluctantly acknowledged that Oz was his greatest success with children, eventually establishing a series of Oz books. But he continually explored new realms of fantasy, including adventure tales for boys and girls as well as romance novels for adults, almost always adopting pseudonyms for these works.

This exhibition, drawn from the personal collection of Peter E. Hanff, shows the rich variety of Baum’s output from 1897 to 1910, the heyday of innovative design for Baum and his publishers.

Kenneth Patchen, one of the 20th century’s leading experimental writers, produced over two dozen volumes of poetry prose, along with painted poems, silkscreen prints, drawings and other graphic works. Patchen’s books, such as The Journal of Albion Moonlight (1941), gained widespread attention and notoriety; his readings of poetry with jazz were a phenomenon in the 1950s. His writings and recordings continue to intrigue and inspire lovers of modern literature and art worldwide.

Patchen, born in Niles, an Ohio steel-mill town, worked mainly on the East Coast until 1950, when he and his wife Miriam moved to San Francisco. Living in North Beach, he created his well-known “painted books” and began performing “poetry-jazz” in the City’s avant-garde clubs. A crippling back injury restricted his activities in the late 1950s; the Patchens moved to Palo Alto, where Kenneth continued to write and paint until his death at age 61.

Printer and photographer Jonathan Clark, who as a young teenager befriended the Patchens in the 1960s, arranged for the transfer of his archives to the UC Santa Cruz library special collections. Clark’s own extensive collection of Patchen material, acquired directly from the writer and his wife, is the source of this exhibition at The Book Club of California.

Jonathan Clark presents an illustrated lecture entitled Out of the World of Patchen at the exhibition closing party on Monday, April 11.

Curated by Peter Stansky