Spaceheater Editions announces a new 2020 title: DELIRIUM

Spaceheater Editions announces a new 2020 title: DELIRIUM
Two-page spread from DELIRIUM

Saturday, April 2, 2022

Adaptation | Artist's Books for a Changing Environment on the Cal Berkeley Campus

The esteemed, prolific, talented, and charming artists' bookmaker, Julie Chen, has curated a terrific show at the Environmental Design Library at UC Berkeley. It is meant to be presented in conjunction with the eighth CODEX Symposium and Book Fair in Richmond, CA, across the Bay. The show runs from March 14th until May 15th on the Berkeley Campus. There is a reception on April 9th, the evening before CODEX opens, and it takes place from 3:00 to 6:00pm. All who attend will receive a handsome catalog designed by Julie.













I was fortunate to be asked to include my book Delirium. Though I have not seen the whole show yet, I have seen photographs of many of the books and the installation, and it looks great. If you live in the Bay Area, or are in town for CODEX VIII, be sure to either attend the reception or make a short trip over to the see the show after one of the two Symposium sessions in Berkeley.

Wednesday, March 30, 2022

CODEX 2022 Coming Soon


Spaceheater Editions, my press imprint, will be sharing a table with Clifton Meador of the Studio of Exhaustion at the 2022 CODEX Foundation Symposium and Book Fair. This is the first time it has taken place since 2019. CODEX used to always take place in uneven years, but having missed two years due to COVID-19, it will take place at the Craneway Pavilion in Richmond, CA. Richmond is part of the San Francisco Bay Area. The event takes place from April 10th through April 13th. CODEX is the premiere selling place for artists' and fine press books in the United States. More information is here.

I will be selling, among other volumes, the last five copies of my book Delirium, which won a 50 Books/50 Covers award from the AIGA, as one of the best-designed books of 2020.

We should have an eye-catching table: Clif Meador has designed some amazing fabric to use as both table cloth for our table and as cover for our table when the book show closes each day. Here is a sneak preview of the fabric:











Clif will be showing a large number of brand new books, never seen before. I will be showing a number of books, old and new, but focusing mostly on sales of Delirium. I have even screen-printed a bunch of book bags for sales, based on the pattern that Clif devised for our table covering.


We hope to see you there at Table 70A+B. It should be a lot of fun, and there is a CODEX VIII Foundation Symposium that always occurs on a couple of mornings in Berkeley before the book fair opens in Richmond.

Tuesday, December 14, 2021

Presentation at San Francisco's Legion of Honor

On December 4th, 2021, I gave a presentation on my book Delirium at the 2021 Reva and David Logan Symposium on the Artists' Book. This year's theme was Bridges: Social Engagement in Artists' Books. I was asked by Steve Woodall, Collections Specialist at the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts, part of the Legion of Honor, itself part of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.

The entire symposium on December 4th and 5th are recorded and archived on the Museum's Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. You can go here on Youtube to watch, and if you want to just see my presentation, it is at 1:08:37. 

There were a number of really great other presenters, including Andre Bradley, Nigel Poor, Clifton Meador and Laura Barbata. The Day 2 presentations (Clif and Laura) can be watched here.

Sunday, August 22, 2021

Delirium part of 'Artists' Books Unshelved' video series.

Catherine Alice Michaelis of Artist’s Books Unshelved has just uploaded a new episode to Bainbridge Island Museum of Art’s YouTube channel. This one displays my book, Delirium, and Kyoko Matsunaga’s The Skin Square, The Pupil Square; Dreams of Scientists, which were featured in the recent release, “The Stuff of Dreams.”

You can find it here.  



Delirium selected as one the AIGA's 2020 '50 Books/50 Covers'

In June the AIGA, the professional association for design, announced the results of the 50 Books | 50 Covers of 2020 competition. My book, Delirium was one of those selected and one of the best-designed books of 2020. With 696 book and cover design entries from 36 countries, this year’s competition recognizes and showcases design excellence from a year marked by unparalleled change.

Since its inception in 1923 as the Fifty Books of the Year competition, this annual event highlights AIGA’s continued commitment to uplifting powerful and compelling design in a familiar format we know and love. As book jackets became more prevalent, the competition evolved with the field to acknowledge excellence in cover design beginning in 1995 when the competition became known as 50 Books | 50 Covers. 

The 50 Books | 50 Covers winners can be viewed in the AIGA winner gallery.

The 2020 winning selections will be archived both in the AIGA Design Archives—a permanent, accessible, and historic collection of notable graphic design—and the AIGA collection at the Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Columbia University’s Butler Library in the city of New York.

AIGA thanks this year’s panel of esteemed jurors: Gail Anderson (chair), Jennifer Morla, Paul Sahre, and Kelly Walters. The jurors evaluated each work’s integrated design approach, including concept, innovation, and visual elements such as typography, illustration, and/or information design. 

I would like to thank the AIGA and the jurors for selecting my book.

Thursday, February 25, 2021

Dueling Covid Books discussion on Sat., Feb. 27.

This coming Saturday! 

 This event, hosted by Chantal Zakari and Mike Mandel, as part of the events at their virtual table at the Printed Matter Virtual Art Book Fair.

Register for the zoom talk: chantal@thecorner.net Visit their virtual table at the fair: mandel-zakari.pmvabf.org (live beginning Feb 24.)

Friday, February 19, 2021

DELIRIUM: An Artists' Book on the Pandemic



In 1866 Fyodor Dostoyevsky published “Crime and Punishment”. Towards the end of the book, his hero, Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov, has a feverish dream. This strangely prophetic text, quoted and used as the narrative line in this book, is from Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky’s 1992 translation, published by Vintage Classics. Here is the brief text:


He had dreamed that the whole world was doomed to fall victim to some terrible, as yet unknown and unseen pestilence spreading to Europe from the depths of Asia. Everyone was to perish, except for certain, very few, chosen ones. Some new trichinae had appeared, microscopic creatures that lodged themselves in men’s bodies. But these creatures were spirits, endowed with reason and will. Those who received them into themselves immediately became possessed and mad. But never, never had people considered themselves so intelligent and unshakeable in the truth as did these infected ones. Never had they thought their judgments, their scientific conclusions, their moral convictions and beliefs more unshakeable. Entire settlements, entire cities and nations would be infected and go mad. Everyone became anxious, and no one understood anyone else; each thought the truth was contained in himself alone, and suffered looking at others, beat his breast, wept, and wrung his hands. They did not know whom or how to judge, could not agree on what to regard as evil, what as good. They did not know whom to accuse, whom to vindicate.”


During the early days of the pandemic, the news media and print and online media, started producing illustrations of what a coronavirus looked like. This came from an understandable public thirst for information about how this deadly virus and how it worked. Many of the images produced were stunning: surprisingly lush and jewel-like. The colors used were often saturated and seductive. But of course, those beautiful colors and that beautiful subject matter, the virus itself, has already killed almost half a million people here in the US and millions around the world.




At the same time that I was collecting all of the images on the internet, (more than 120 edited down to 36,) columnists and essayists started publishing references to previous historic pandemics that humanity had survived. We looked to these stories of the past for solace and hope. Many had not heard about even the most recent global epidemic, that of the great influenza pandemic of 1918-1919 that had killed many of our grandparents or great-grandparents including the grandfather of the 45th president of the USA. We read these articles and books to create context for the current spread of COVID-19. There were many examples cited of the numerous plagues of medieval times like the bubonic plague also known as the Black Death, which killed half of Europe. But the historical record went back much further, with classical references to the Great Plague in Athens in 430 BCE and the Justinian Plague of 542 CE. Newer books like Albert Camus’ The Plague, and recent movies like Contagion and Outbreak scared us and were objects of fascination. 


But the text cited above, one small paragraph from perhaps the most famous of Dostoyevsky’s novels, struck me as the most startling if for no other reason than its prescience. As I was looking for a text to use for the visual book I had started working on, this one seemed the most powerful and apropos. 


The manipulated images I used were collected from the web during the first four months of the pandemic. As I mentioned above, they were originally made as small web illustrations to show the public what the coronavirus looked like. The original illustrations were then significantly manipulated and changed in color, and by being converted to large half-tone patterns. This was done by separating the four CMYK layers into discreet channels, converting each file into different dither or halftone patterns, and then reassembled them back into a new file with the four process colors.


The narrative text is driven by Raskolnikov’s delirium, his fever dream. I wanted the large full-bleed images to be the theatrical visual accompaniment to that short text: hallucinogenic and furiously color saturated, and using the highly lurid language of a feverish nightmare.





I have long made use of manipulated CMYK images using various swapped separation colors and different halftone patterns. Indeed my 1979-1980 MFA Thesis work at Visual Studies Workshop was in two parts, a written text book that I edited called Options for Color Separation (VSW Press), and a large portfolio series of screen-printed portraits called Portrait Constructions, that used large half-tone and other patterns. Later I made several other artists' books that used enlarged and/or swapped multi-channel process color methods. This included Civil Defense (1982), High Tension (1993), Long Story Short 1997), Paradise Lost (2013), and Ojalá (2015). 


My obsession with patterns and half-tone dots comes from way back. I learned traditional photographic printing darkroom and photo-mechanical work in grad school in the seventies doing my own artwork and then working for the Visual Studies Workshop Press. I served as Chip Benson’s assistant when he did a two-week offset darkroom workshop at VSW. I then trained as an optical color-separator in 1979-1980 with Harry Christen of Christen Lithographic Lab in Rochester. Then I worked as the darkroom camera operator at Open Studio, an artists’ press where we did work for Aperture, most of the galleries in New York and Boston, and Howard Greenberg Gallery in Woodstock, doing 300 line duotones and tritones. And I had my own business for eight years after that doing all sorts of pre-press and design work.

 



Delirium is printed in 2020 by archival pigmented inkjet onto Mohawk acid-free paper, 60 pages, in an edition of 30, handbound by the artist, and signed and numbered. The book comes in an archival, protective, phase box. The dimensions are 37cm x 28.5cm x 1.5cm (14.5" x 11.25" x 5/8").

 

The font used for the text is Northwoods, by Cultivated Mind Foundry in Vancouver, BC, Canada. It was picked because of the way that it looks both like type used in a late 19th century schoolbook primer, yet still appears quite modern. Like many of their digital fonts, it was originally created with the careful strokes of a sign-painter’s paintbrush.


The book is not inexpensive, but it uses over $225 dollars in just archival pigmented ink and archival papers and book cloth for each volume. In addition, each book requires approximately two days of labor to print, handbind and finish.

 

ISBN: 978-1-63649-669-6 ; $650.
© 2020 Philip Zimmermann.

Wednesday, February 17, 2021

Virtual Visit During the Pandemic

 I neglected to post a link to a virtual visit that I did with Canadian book artist Louise Levergneux from this past Fall. Louise and her husband have been doing a grand tour of North America, visiting various other book artists and their studios. Originally they were to visit me in Tucson at the end of March, but the pandemic hit that month and everything closed down.












They ended up stranded in Casa Grande, near Picacho Peak, for six months and were never able to physically make it down to Tucson. So Louise posted this virtual visit on her blog and generously showed some of my work and some pictures of my studio.

Thank you, Louise. I hope that you will be able to come through Southern Arizona again sometime and that we can get together in person then.

Wednesday, September 30, 2020

Swamp Monsters Published Right Before the 2020 Presidential Election


It's been a while since I've posted here. The year 2020 has been quite an earthquake for all of us living on this stressed-out planet. Aside from the terrible COVID-19 pandemic, we have been in the middle of the most unusual and stressful election cycle for president that this country has ever seen. This is thanks to the amoral, narcissistic, criminal conman who inhabits the White House.

In order to try to attempt to fight against his reëlection campaign and the morally bankrupt Republican Party, I decided to try to do something that would use their own 2020 Republican National Convention against these forces of evil and anti-democracy.

Here is the result: The Ice Plant (Los Angeles) and Spaceheater Editions (Tucson) announced the co-publication of Swamp Monsters on September 21, 2020, just three and a half weeks after these photographs from the 2020 Republican National Convention were taken. 



Swamp Monsters is a limited newsprint edition of 666 copies and commemorates that historically frightful 2020 Republican National Convention (August 24-27, 2020) with a series of photographs made by me (Philip Zimmermann) as the spectacle unfolded on the television screen. This rogue's gallery of hideous video portraits was printed in Paris, France by printnewspaper.com in full color in an unbound tabloid newspaper format. 

Many thanks to Clif Meador of the Studio of Exhaustion for suggesting the title.

Thanks also go to Mike Slack of The Ice Plant for editing the 120 images into this commemorative 56-page newspaper, massaging the color-separated images for newsprint, and for designing it. A crazy collaboration that felt necessary somehow.


A portion of the proceeds will be donated to the Arizona Democratic Party and other Arizona Democratic Candidates in the fall 2020 election cycle. Let’s turn AZ blue!


If you would like to see a video of the book, plus all of the two-page spreads, go to the Spaceheater Editions web page here

To purchase, send $12.95 to the PayPal account which is pzim@spaceheat.com . The price includes postage. Please be sure to include a shipping address.


There are some alternative payment methods: 

• by Venmo (to Philip-Zimmermann-2 ) 

• or by regular paper check mailed to me (the old fashioned way, to 5467 E. Placita del Mesquite, Tucson, AZ 85712) 

• or from Printed Matter in NYC

• or you can purchase copies from Vamp & Tramp, Booksellers


Problems? send an Inquiry email to <philipzimmermann @ gmail.com>.


Monday, April 22, 2019

The LAABF 2019

The week before last I attended the Los Angeles Art Book Fair for the first time. It has been operated by Printed Matter Inc. in NYC since 2013 but was not held last year due to the untimely death of the primary fair organizer, Shannon Michael Cane.























I had read that the fair had grown a great deal since it's beginnings and was starting to rival the New York MoMA-PS1 fair in terms of the number of vendors and attendance. Max Schumann, the Director of Printed Matter told me that this year's fair in LA had the greatest number of vendor table of any fair so far, over 390.






































On the backside of the building was a very large mural by Barbara Kruger that had just been installed recently.

Here are some images from the book fair itself:

























It turned out to be a really fun four-day trip. It’s so nice to have a cheap hour-and-a-half direct flight rather than the usual hassle of traveling to NYC. The main expense was the hotel for three nights and the very good meals that we had, not-to-mention the large number of books that we got, but worth it. We stayed at a Japanese chain hotel in Little Tokyo called Miyako Hotel, and we were among the very few non-Japanese tourists staying there. The best thing was that the hotel was literally one short block away from the Geffen Contemporary at MoCA where the fair was held. It was so nice to be able to walk back in less than five minutes and dump book loot in our hotel room. 

We had some truly amazing meals while there. LA is clearly a foodie town. Some of the restaurants we went to were: Sushi Enya (supposedly best sushi in Little Tokyo), a couple of really great Ramen places, Daikokuya and Mr Ramen, weird Japanese breakfast stuff at Café Dulce, and some really great lunch food at the food trucks outside the book fair including the best shrimp and fish tacos I have ever had. Finally, around the Hauser & Wirth complex in the Arts Warehouse district, we ate at an expensive but fantastic restaurant called Manuela,  and a terrific German wurst and beer place called Wurstküche Restaurant.

It was nice seeing Skuta (below), who was at the LAABF making sure that the Artbook/Steidl bookshop area at the fair was running smoothly. When we were at the Hauser + Wirth complex we were impressed with the Artbook Bookshop there. It was only a short ten-minute walk from the Geffen Contemporary and Little Tokyo. He also told us to be sure to stop by an ice cream shop right next to Hauser + Wirth building. It is called Salt and Straw, and he claimed it was the best ice cream in the US. Of course we had to try it, and it was extremely delicious.























The book fair itself is in a much nicer locale than the NYABF and MoMA-PS1: really large rooms with super warehouse style high ceilings. Everything seemed so much less hot and claustrophobic, with none of the little warren-like rooms of PS1. It was so much easier to navigate and find ones’ way back to areas or specific tables. In short a much much nicer experience. However, most of the book vendors and publishers that I talked to said that they sold far better in NYC than LA. Some people made the mistake of getting a table in the equivalent of the PS1 ‘Zine area of the fair where tables were $160. They don’t call it the ‘Zine area in LA, but it was the same sort of vendors on the whole, though not quite as flea-market-y as at PS1. One of the things that I noticed there was that EVERY table in that section of the book fair was full of Rizo-printed crap. The Rizo phenomenon has clearly peaked. I would say that 80% of it was pretty bad. Of course, I shouldn't generalize, there are some phenomenal Rizo book pieces out there like those done by Tricia Tracy, Bridget Elmer, Emily Larned, Clif Meador and some others, but a great deal of it is pretty bad. [ Full disclosure, I am not a huge 'zine fan. ]

Another printing effect which has reached cliché level, I am afraid: metallic or white ink on black paper. I saw dozens of examples. I think that Clif Meador started something with the Tbilisi hotel piece that he did as an enclosure in the CAA Journal years ago. The Richard Mosse books probably help too. Anyway, there are lots and lots of them. Some were done on the HP Indigo 5000 which allows white ink, but most of the ones that I saw were metallic silver ink printed by offset.

Some of the many other people that we ran into were these: I talked for a long time to Paul Zelevansky, who is back living in NYC. I had never seen 24 Pictures About Pictures.  Also, Aaron Cohick had a table in that 'zine area. It was great seeing Kate Albers, our former colleague at the University of Arizona, who is now teaching at Whittier College in LA. Also Tricia Tracey and on the last day, right before we left, we ran into Inge Bruggeman, which was a very nice surprise since we thought we were going to miss her since she was going to be there only on Sunday, the last day of the fair.

























The crowds were large but not sure if they were the same as last year. Supposedly in 2017, they had 35,000 people in LA, very similar to NY, but it seemed like far fewer. I think that that might be due to the much larger spaces that the book fair occupied. Many vendors were the same as in NYC. It was nice to be there Friday morning, before the general public, the hours set aside for buyers and collectors only, just like the NYABF.




























The books we bought were a combination of design and photo/artists' books. We finally got a few smaller books from AnticHam since I always feel bad that I can’t afford their screen-printed books.

This is the full haul, minus a few books that we ended up ordering online since we couldn't carry them back on the airplane back to Tucson.
























There are also a couple of books that I really like from Gato Negro in Mexico City. The Aperture book in the second photo, Feast for the Eyes, about food in photography, sounds like a crappy book, but it’s actually really great. A wonderful read with all sorts of amazing food photos from the 19th century through today. It’s a great read.