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(718) 383-9621
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Limited Edition Artist Book Publications
Limited Edition Artist Books
Scream at the Librarian, limited edition
The Slapdown
2006
FOUND IN TRANSLATION: an exhibition
2003
Little Gray Lecture Book, #1
A Preamble to the Constitution
IX XI MI
Souvenir
2001
Eleven
12/11
Haste with the Hasting Current
2000
House of Ghosts
Nervous System
Bookmobile Catalog
1999
Balm: the Flower Folio
Scream at the Librarian, limited edition
Sketches of our Patrons in Downtown Los Angeles
By Joel J. Rane with illustrations by Raymond Pettibon & Cristin Sheehan Sullivan
2007, 9-3/4 x 7 x 3/4 inches, 94 printed pages, edition of 50, signed by author and illustrators
After five years at the central library, I seriously doubted the humanity of my peers.
—Joel P. Rane
Now on exhibit at Clark Humanities Museum of Scripps College in Claremont, CA.
An instant cult classic, Scream at the Librarian sucks you into the flop house grime of downtown Los Angeles at a time when it was abandoned by all but the terminally desperate. The Screamer, Mr. Brain Damage, The Devi . . . these are just a few of the unforgivable characters that people Rane’s real-life accounts from deep within the stacks of a library which had become a refuge for squatters, drug addicts, and the mentally deranged.
Each story is accompanied by stunning new illustrations by native Californian Cristin Sheehan Sullivan and Raymond Pettibon, progenitor of LA's punk rock art scene.
Printed in two-color silkscreen, the deluxe, hardcover edition is an elaborate art object, loaded with novel idiosyncrasies throughout. The front of the “inside out” cover sports a circulation card signed by author and artists, alongside an amalgam of library stickers, stamps, cataloging numbers, and thumb divots.
Designed by Amy Mees and Mark Wagner
Silkscreen printing by Kayrock, Brooklyn, NY.
Letterpress printing and binding by Sara Parkel
Production assistance by Eliana Perez, Cat Glennon, Candice Sering, and Jamie Munkatchy
A more diminutive chapbook version of Scream at the Librarian is also available, (bringing Rane, Pettibon, and Sullivan's vigor to a wider audience at a proletarian price,)look for it on the Buy Booklyn portion of our website.
To inquire about availability, reserve or approval orders please call or email Marshall Weber & Felice Tebbe Lau.
The Slapdown
edition of 50,
10-3/4 x 8-1/2 x 3/4 inches
The Slapdown uses both the kinetic and auditory aspects of the flag-book structure to create a flurry of thwacking and smacking hands. Printed on both sides of the hands, the text assembles and reassembles in a Mad Lib of curse and cuss. Both poetry and construction evoke the dog-eat-dog tension and petty backstabbing of the cramped urban environment.
Hard covers wrapped in red Iris linen bookcloth with black foil-stamped title.
Flag-book binding with letterpress printed Perma Dur concertina spine and 2-ply die-cut museum board flags. Housed in a gray painted wood and bookboard slip case with blind and black foil-stamped title.
The Slapdown
The howling afternoon
A rat-a-tat-tat doomscape
On the filthy bricks
My pulse
In hot pursuit
Rejects in flight
The trip-up crowd a tangle
Of messy limbs & respiration & you there
Must sink
But slow
While I climb
Your Face.
16 flag pages (with 37 printed surfaces)
Signed by artist and author
Concept and drawing by Damara Kaminecki
Text by Jeremy Schmall
Production design by Mark Wagner and Sara Parkel with Amy Mees
Printed and bound by Sara Parkel and Cat Glennon with Jamie Munkatchy
2006
FOUND IN TRANSLATION
An Exhibition of Artist Books and Multi-Media works
Curated by Marshall Weber.
Edition of 250 numbered copies
2003
Little Gray Lecture Book, #1
A Revisioning of the Preamble of the Constitution of the United States
Jen Benka, 2003, published by Booklyn in a bourgeois first edition of 50 and a proletariat edition of 500.
American Book Review, volume 25, #2, January/February, 2003 features a fabulous review of Jen Benka's tour de force of poetry.
Reviewer Bob Grumman wrote that the Preamble "...was a collection of poems, good poems..." with the final poem of the book described as "...a masterful poem...". He finishes his review with the observation that the ...The Preamble... [book] is appealingly designed by Mark Wagner..." - Booklyn's director of Publication.
NYC poet Jen Benka wrote one poem for each of the fifty-two words in the Nation's Preamble to the Constitution in an effort to examine, expose, and rewrite the document one word at a time.
The Preamble book, designed by artist Mark Wagner, offers handy index tabs and sport hand-sewn bindings and letterpress-printed covers. Wagner's artist books have been collected by museums and libraries from sea to shining sea, and exhibited in New York both by the Brooklyn and Metropolitan Museums.
Jen Benka lives in New York City and is the managing director of Poets & Writers, Inc. She has published work in So To Speak, Off Our Backs, Ms. Magazine, The Progressive, and on Cafemo.com and La Petite Zine. She has received grants from the Poetry/Film Workshop, Xeric Foundation, and Intermedia Arts. She was also awarded a 2001 poetry fellowship from the Wisconsin Arts Board. She co-organized a 24-hour reading of the complete poems of Emily Dickinson, which took place in June 2002 in New York City.
by Mac McGill, 2003, book design by Mark Wagner.
Published by Booklyn in an edition of 65 plus artist’s proofs.
This heroically-scaled book collects all eight of McGill’s tumultuously emotional pen and ink images of the events of 9/11, first seen in issue 32 of World War III Illustrated. The work was also featured in the group show Reactions at Exit Art (26 January—30 March, 2002).
This original work was subsequently purchased by the Smithsonian for its permanent collection.
The book measures approximately 11 by 14 inches, with 22 inch page spreads. The images are letterpress printed from magnesium plates, with text in lead type, onto Rives heavy weight paper. End sheets are of blood-red Moriki, with laminated jet-black buckram covers. The folios are pamphlet-stitched.
by Marshall Weber, 2003.
An edition of 35, 28 pages, 8 inches by 5.5, 10 AP copies numbered 1960-1969, on Mohawk Vellum paper and other archival papers and clothes. Digital layout and printing by Amy Mees. Book design and production by Mark Wagner. Collage and page design by Marshall Weber. Signed by the artists, with different talismanic vintage portraits taken from the original to suggest the appearence of the artists. The Galaxy yearbook, in a slipcover.
Souvenir is a deconstruction of The Galaxy, Marion Rudiwitz's 1969 High School Yearbook (from Francis Lewis High School in Fresh Meadows New York, on Long Island) into an old stamp album.
One night early in 1999, I found the yearbook in a pile of (Marion's) belongings, which had been tossed onto the curb on Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village. It was an obvious eviction / split quick / death / illness / landlord-threw-stuff-into-the-street situation. I took the book home and my friends and I cruelly laughed at it for a few days. Then in an act of nostalgic piety and apology I spent the next three years tearing the yearbook apart and reassembling it into a vintage stamp album.
—Marshall Weber
Souvenir is a simulacrum of the acclaimed unique collage book of the same name. The original collages were digitally scanned at a high resolution, color corrected so that the high quality Fiery Laser Jet printed pages match the unique book’s pages. It is constructed with cellophane interleaves that visually and tactilely recreate the reading experience of the unique book.
Souvenir is a talismanic antidote to revisionist attempts to diminish the legacy of the 60’s—a decade which still holds a revealing ethical mirror to our present-day consumer culture’s brutality and arrogance. It recalls a time when college students in the United States had class-consciousness with interests different from those of their parents. The student class, at the time, had idealistic goals beyond securing a super-sized version of their parent’s lifestyle. This traditional class-consciousness, which is an heir to the ‘Fourth Estate’ of Revolutionary France, survives. Yet it is in fragments and has been greatly degraded.
2001
Eleven
by Marshall Weber, 2001
72 pages, 9 x 6", edition of 29, digitally printed Fiery color copies on high gloss photographic quality paper. Hand bound with black Laval velvet, includes an audio CD. Book design: Marshall Weber, Christopher Wilde of Artichoke Yink Press, Brooklyn, NY, and Sara Parkel of Filter Press, Brooklyn, NY. Page design: Marshall Weber and Alison E. Williams of Doublevision Press, Bisbee, AZ. Text design: Alison E. Williams. Binding: Sara Parkel. Illustration: Isabelle Weber.
A photographic essay by Marshall Weber documenting the visual and text environment of downtown New York City in the weeks after 9/11 with texts by various New York writers. The book has an innovative structure of alternating vertical and horizontal page-spread orientation. The alternating orientation prompts the reader to rotate the book 90 degrees with each page turn.
A small white or black silhouette of the WTC Towers rises from the bottom right hand corner of every page-spread to assist the reader with keeping the proper page orientation. Two recessed bars on the front both recall the missing Towers and also act as a mnemonic device to remind the reader where the front of the book is located since the direction of page turning varies with the page orientation. The constant re-orientation produces a visceral experience of vertigo that evokes the intensely disorienting atmosphere of 9/11 yet still keeps the reader engaged with the texts and images. In exhibition the Eleven book is mounted on a turning table for easy manipulation by readers.
Accompanied by a CD (set into the back inside cover) produced by Christopher Wilde, featuring texts from the book recited by the authors: writer Ellis Avery, Judith Foster (director of the Neighborhood School, a downtown Manhattan public elementary school), artist/journalist MT Karthik, poet/chanteuse Jane LeCroy, poet/civil rights activist Peter Spagnuolo and M. Weber.
A photo essay of New York City by Marshall Weber and Mark Wagner. which was photographed all in one day on December 11. 2001. The book focuses on various displays of the American flag and each image has lyrics from the classic song America the Beautiful printed on its back (in antique steel die Empire font no less).
It is the little sister of the Eleven book.
Out of print.
In the collections of: Boston Athenaeum, MA; Marjorie Cohn (private), Boston, MA; Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH; New York University, NYC; Reed College, Portland, Oregon; Smith College, Northampton, MA; University of California, Irvine; University of Minnesota, Minneapolis; Trinity College, Hartford, CT; University of Vermont, Burlington Exhibitions: March/May 2003, University of New Hampshire, Durham; Sept./Oct. 2002, 33&1/3 Gallery/Bookstore, LA, CA
Haste with the Hasting Current
A lyric and romantic photo essay bty Peter Spagnuolo about New York City in the months before the 9/11 attack. The poems are written from the perspective of a poet / paddler in a canoe on the East River and on Newton Creek. The excerpts from Walt Whitman's poem of the same name are overlaid on poet Peter Spagnuolo's hand-printed photographs. Edition of 12.
Exhibitions: March/May 2003, University of New Hampshire, Durham; Sept./Oct. 2002, 33&1/3 Gallery/Bookstore, LA, CA
2000
House of Ghosts
2000, by Marshall Weber, C.K. Wilde, and Mark Wagner. The first edition was 49, second edition of 35, box—20 x 9 x 3 inches, book—11 x 14” inches. The typography and book design was created by Christopher Wilde, and the covers were designed and relief printed by Mark Wagner.
First edition: 2000, 28 pages, 6 x 8 3/4 inches, edition of 50, black and white Epsom ink jet printing over penciled found architectural drawings on onion skin paper. The text is printed backwards on architectural drawings of suburban New Jersey development houses circa 1986. The pliable onionskin paper is then folded over so one sees the ghostly text floating behind the faint drawings. With a relief printed Mylar cover and Japanese stab binding.
Second edition: 2002, 28 pages, 8 x 8 3/4 inches, edition of 35, black and white Epsom ink jet printing on blueprints of the Manhattan water treatment plant. The text is matched and printed backwards on every verso page giving the illusion of transparency to the pages. With a relief printed Mylar cover and Japanese stab binding.
A unique artists' book and box, metal fixtures, plexiglas, various papers, calligraphy, chalk, charcoal, collage, drawing, pencil, and ink. Concept, documents, pages and text, calligraphy and collage by Weber with the binding, book and box construction, by Wagner.
“In House of Ghosts,… a unique book resides in a wood assemblage shaped like a house. The pieces of wood are parts from various lathes, pictures frames and rulers. A book rests inside a box with a Plexiglas window, a found brass fixture in the shape of a skull over the opening of the niche. The concept, documents, text, calligraphy, collage and pages treated with ink, chalk, charcoal and pencil are by Marshall Weber; the binding and box construction by Mark Wagner. The poem is written in a codex book sewn on linen tapes from a variety of papers with hand-drawn architectural plans. The underlying conceit for book and box is the architectural structure of the house as a metaphor for the human body in which a journey of psychic exile and repatriation traverses the interior emotional terrain of the body. The skin acts as pages together with a physiological substratum upon which the story is written, a literal embodiment of a narrative map.” —Constance Woo, Dean of Libraries, Long Island University, unpublished paper for the Rutgers Book Arts Symposium, 2003
Nervous System
Marshall Weber, Kurt Allerslev, and C.K. Wilde. This book was published in 2002, multi-media, 2nd ed. of 9, and 40 pages. Multiplely printed, over-laid, and reprinted with Fiery digital printers, relief press, hand calligraphy, black and white photocopy machines, the Nervous System smells of ink and sweat sweet sour electricity. Lush dense compositions explore the interconnectedness of nerve form, flower structure, letterform and the cognitive processes of human imagination.
Bookmobile Catalog
edition of 100. Out of print.
1999
topBalm: the Flower Folio
Kurt Allerslev, Amanda Taylor, Christopher Wilde and Marshall Weber, unique
This page is maintained by Marshall Weber.