Visiting the collection is more like making a trip to a correctional facility than a library: You make an initial appointment, check in at the desk in the basement of the Allen Library, forfeit all possessions except a pencil and loose-leaf paper, receive a number, and get buzzed in. Boxed and numbered books are wheeled out to you upon request, but everything else remains safely behind walls. Even the soap in the restroom is specially intended to inflict the least amount of damage on the books.
Regardless, the Book Arts Collection is famous among national book artists, collectors, sellers, students, teachers, and bibliophiles for being one of the most accessible and exciting collections in the country. For all its one-of-a-kinds, special commissions, delicate bindings, and several-hundred-dollar editions, once you know about this library, the spell is broken--no book is off-limits for handling. Which is, after all, an essential part of reading and being a book.
But these books are not here to be read; they're here to be considered, to be looked at, to be loved. Here at last it is acceptable and sometimes necessary to read books by their covers--not what's inside but the surface supplies the meaning. The collection represents a hands-on museum of weird books: books that stand up and fold out into a "tunnel" of pages; accordion books with envelopes pasted onto each page holding different precious objects; nested books; quilted books; fabric scroll books; Jacob's ladders; pop-ups; pullouts; playthings--basically any imaginable way of binding two-dimensional objects together.
Artists' books (books that are not necessarily about art, but are art) started humbly in the 1960s when, out of desperation, neglected artists began printing their own art in cheap offset catalogs. Simultaneously, writers who couldn't get published started publishing themselves using old letterpress printers. In the '70s, these two groups of artists found each other and the craft has since evolved into an art form itself. In comprehensive book arts libraries like the one at UW, you can see the conversation taking place about what, truly, is a book: Must a book be read sequentially? Should it be read at all? Is it fair to the text (the poem, the novel) to call anything but itself (itself being what it communicates) a work of art?
The question of what a book is has become, strangely, the librarian's job to answer. But according to Sandra Kroupa, the librarian/curator of the UW's Book Arts Collection, her colleagues have been unsurprisingly conservative in their definitions of what a book is--it is just that, a book. For their libraries, books are purchased not for the sake of art but craft, for how well they are made, bound, and printed.
Except maybe in her practical dress and the fastidious accuracy of her assertions, very little about Kroupa seems librarian-like. She speaks glowingly of all the artists she has met over her 27-year career. "I try really hard to get to know the artists whose work I collect," Kroupa told me during a recent visit to the library. "Most institutions acquire from book dealers or book arts galleries, but you miss so much that way."
About once a week, she receives an e-mail from some emerging artist across the country hoping to make an appointment for her to look at and possibly purchase new work. She usually spends about two to three hours with each one of them--and this is in addition to working at the reference desk, teaching classes, being a librarian, and meeting with curious people like me.
Mare Blocker, one of the Northwest's most popular book artists, first met Kroupa in 1979. At the time, Blocker had been working on three separate fine arts degrees at the UW and, after visiting the collection, discovered that books were a way of incorporating all her interests in one venue. Since then, she has made over 300 one-of-a-kinds and 43 edition books from her own press, the M Kimberly Press. "I like to think of myself as William Blake's modern cousin," says Blocker, who currently teaches at Whitman College.
Blocker's books are, simply, crazy: a pie-shaped book, a giant cowboy-hat-shaped book called Moo Moo Buckaroo, and a matchbook-sized series of movie posters called Pagan Love Song. But like most book artists, she is still very attached to traditional printing methods--most of her illustrations are linoleum block prints, and the text is letterpressed.
Anne Bingham is another great local bookmaker, whose day job is actually that of a UW librarian. She finds inspiration in familiar texts, like her hilarious Complete Works of Shakespeare, which stands one and a half inches tall and boasts about 30 lines of generic pentameter. Her next work is a modern interpretation of hybrid printing technology used in the Nuremberg Chronicle (1493).
One of the most striking pieces in the collection is by Bellingham's Elsi Ellis--a red velvet box of letters written by the artist to the suicide hijacker Mohamed Atta between September 11, 2001, and March 11, 2002. Dear Mohamed Atta probably has 150 different letters in all, each printed on different stationary and addressed with a uniquely crafted Atta stamp; the box comes with a letter opener--the design is flawless, so horribly lovingly crafted.
Kroupa has collected more works by Ellis than any other artist, but she still is loath to say whether these objects are books or not. "It's not up to me to determine what books are," she said. "It's my job to get all of the things together that can be books, and you can decide."
The UW Book Arts Collection's hours depend on the academic year, so visit its website first and call to make an initial appointment: www.lib.washington.edu/specialcoll/.
