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Just in time for Independence Day, artist and co-founder of the Booklyn Artists Alliance Mark Wagner opens an exhibit tonight titled Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death. Wagner's collage art explores the intersection of art and politics, and he often uses dollar bills as art supplies (called "currency collage"). His monumental 17' x 6' collage, Liberty, (part of it seen above) is an altered Statue of Liberty composed of 81,895 pieces cut from 1,121 US dollar bills. For the current exhibition, Wagner actually built a custom viewing platform that allows for closer examination.  

According to the press release, "Wagner continues to insert his particular brand of word play and satire in everything he touches, proving that a seemingly limited material - the dollar bill - is for him limitless." Considering the economic climate--and with Wall Street just about three miles south--Wagner's ability to impact his viewers is magnified.

Thirty of Wagner's recent works in letterpress, wood and bronze sculpture, abstract painting, and mixed media collage round out the exhibit. Below are a few pieces on exhibit, a vivid and compelling group of works.

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Red Tape, 2011?? Currency collage and mixed-media on panel, 24 x 24 inches.

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*&?#!, 2011 Currency collage and mixed-media on panel, 12 x 16 inches.

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Cutting Ties, 2011?? Currency collage and mixed-media on panel, 30 x 18 inches.

Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death is at the Pavel Zoubok Gallery in downtown Manhattan through August 12.

The Journey Through Hallowed Ground (JTHG) follows the footsteps of our founding fathers in a 180-mile journey along a four-state region, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Virginia and West Virginia, from Gettysburg to Thomas Jefferson's Monticello. Explore the changing landscapes from rolling mountain ranges to softly plowed fields, study the architecture from colonial homesteads to regal plantations and savor the local cuisine from country cooking to wineries and fineries. The book, The Journey Through Hallowed Ground, The Official Guide to Where America Happened from Gettysburg to Monticello, by David Edwin Lillard, journals the trail in regions and towns highlighting battlefields, scenic drives, outdoor excursions, lodging, distinctive shopping and historic tours.  

Jonathan Shipley

Jonathan Shipley is a freelance writer living in Seattle. He’s written for the Los Angeles Times, Gather Journal, Uppercase, and many other publications.

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There have been oodles of illustrious authors on postage stamps, from Mark Twain to Albert Camus. Take a lick, err, look at them, here.

Beginning tomorrow, the Designer Bookbinders, a UK-based group of artists devoted to spreading the word about hand-bookbinding, goes on tour. This is the group's first major tour in years, and it opens at the Sophie Schneideman Gallery in London. The exhibition will remain there until July 23, after which it will travel for an entire year--to The Hull History Centre (Aug. 5-Sept. 16), the Dean Clough Galleries in Halifax (Oct. 22-Jan. 15, 2012), Newcastle City Library (Jan. 20, 2012-March 23, 2012), the Bodleian Library (March 31, 2012-May 27, 2012) and finally to the John Rylands Library in Manchester from June 29, 2012-July 27, 2012).

According to the DB catalogue, "The venues represent some of the best contemporary exhibition spaces available today and we are delighted to be able to bring modern design bookbinding to a new audience, many of whom will be discovering the medium for the first time. The show aims to represent the current state of British bookbinding and includes bindings by some of the most respected practitioners working today. For over fifty years, their constant pushing of the boundaries of technique and craftsmanship has laid the foundations for what can all too easily be taken for granted today."

Here is a sampling of some of the beautiful bindings on display.

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Stuart Brockman's vivid Oxford shows the view of the spires of Oxford from South Park in spring. The covering is full transparent vellum over watercolor painting, with black goatskin onlays, gold tooling, lettering, and edges. This binding has a dreamy fairytale quality to it.

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Lester Capon's The Shepheards Calendar is a stunningly rich and vibrant design, bound in full blue goatskin with multi-colored calf and goatskin onlays and tooled in blind and gold with gold lettering. Inside is a 1930 edition of Edmund Spenser's poem, with illustrations by John Nash.

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Jenni Grey's New York Revisited caught my eye first because it is lovely, and second because the summer issue of FB&C contains an extensive Q&A with Gaylord Schanilec, the wood engraver whose work is bound here in Grey's limp suede. The book is further enclosed in a box made of padouk wood with brass fixtures and name plate.

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Lori Sauer has several pieces in the exhibit, and her Shaman: Anthropomorphic Figures in North American Rock Art is book, art, and object combined. She bound this limited edition miniature in suede with a separate handmade folder containing a map, all of which is placed within a beaded suede bag.

The full catalogue is viewable here.

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Historian Manning Marable's recently published biography of Malcolm X (Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention, Viking) is likely to be the definitive account of X's life for some time. Reviews have been overwhelmingly positive, and justly so. The book is impeccably researched and extensively documented. The larger accomplishment, however, is that Marable keeps Malcolm's story, one already famous from X's 1965 autobiography, so fresh and readable while not sacrificing any authority. Much has been made of some of the revelations about both X's sexuality and murder, but these never overshadow the man himself, who despite the flaws and contradictions Marable addresses -- indeed in many ways because of them -- comes off as more deeply human and admirable.

But even setting these accomplishments aside, for bibliophiles (even those not particularly interested in the history of black America or the civil rights movement) Marable's book has much to recommend it. At its core, A Life of Reinvention is as much the story of the events of Malcolm's life as it is the story of the development of his ideas. In this regard the book does better than any previous biography in demonstrating an aspect of X too often under-appreciated: his willingness to question and reconsider his own assumptions and beliefs. Marable spends much of his time delving into the books and writers both who influenced and who wrote about the black leader. The book therefore is in many ways a narrative of X's travels through the black authors and thinkers of the first half of the 20th century. There is a sort of bibliographic mystery to X and Marable untangles it well. 

Given then Marable's accomplishment as a writer, the book's importance to African American studies, as well as its rich bibliographic landscape, it is especially disappointing that so little attention was apparently paid by the publisher to the physical book itself. The first edition I have just feels cheap. It is bound in plain black paper boards rather than a more appropriate cloth, and is printed on a thin, low-quality paper I strongly suspect is not archival (for more on this unsettling trend, see this excellent Millions post from last year). Even the jacket's design is rather drab and unimaginative. As frequently mentioned in press coverage, Marable's biography was more than two decades in the making and he died just days before its release. He deserved a final product better suited to its importance, commensurate with his efforts, and more worthy of his legacy.
Barbara Werner van Bentham interviews ILAB president Arnoud Gerits -- an excellent read, full of quotes like this, "Since the rare bookseller never closes his shop in his mind, these are also my business interests. When I read a new book for example about Leibniz or Spinoza, I am even more excited to sell the old books by the great philosophers during the business hours. You sell what you read. Once a bookseller, always a bookseller." ... 
In New Orleans this weekend at Neal Auction Company, Arader Galleries is auctioning several lots of nature prints, books, and maps for charitable causes. As Graham Arader posted earlier this month on his blog:

On anything that you buy in this sale I will give 20% of the hammer price to the charity of your choice. Over $2,000,000 has been raised in previous auctions and this sale hopefully will generate $750,000 in charitable contributions!
     This is a sale that includes a spectacular collection of the aquatints of birds by John James Audubon (lot 81 through 146 - all being sold without any reserves.) And then there is the masterpiece of the sale - a complete set of Audubon's Quadrupeds - all 150 of his Imperial Quadrupeds in mint condition in three volumes.
      Then there will be some single examples of his Imperial sized lithographs of Quadrupeds (lots 155 through 166 - again NO reserves). There also are fine examples of the complete works of John Goulds Hummingbirds (lot 167,) Birds of Great Britain (lot 173) and Birds of Europe (lot 174.)...
What else? Check out the full catalogue here.

I have a secret admirer. Recently I received a copy of the Folger Library's new exhibition catalogue, Foliomania: Stories Behind Shakespeare's Most Important Book, without a note or any accompanying information. It is an impressive volume -- and what is immediately striking is the fact that its format and layout mirrors the First Folio. The colophon confirms this and describes the type, the design, the paper, and the binding. This is one example of how thoughtful editor Owen Williams has been in creating this catalogue.

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The catalogue accompanies the Folger's new exhibit, Fame, Fortune, and Theft: The Shakespeare First Folio (open though Sept. 3 of this year). As Folger Shakespeare Librarian Stephen Enniss writes in the foreword, the exhibit takes up where the 1991 folio exhibit left off and reminds us, "what this iconic book has meant to readers over the years." Eighty-three First Folios are on exhibit (82 owned by the Folger, plus one private copy), "the most ever assembled in one place since their original dispersal from Jaggards' print shop."

Anthony James West, curator of the exhibit, provides a wonderful overview of the exhibit and the catalogue. He explains briefly what each essay covers -- one on the paper by Carter Hailey, one on bindings by Frank Mowery (with great images), one on type by Paul Werstine, one of the Droeshout Portrait of Shakespeare by Erin C. Blake and Kathleen Lynch. Steven Galbraith gives a brief history of the First Folio and the Folger Library -- one of the images that accompanies his essay shows the Folger's First Folio vault, practical and yet amazing to behold. West offers an essay on Constantine Huygens' copy of the FF, Steven Escar Smith covers the Shakespeare collections of William Evans Burton and Edwin Forrest, and Don Weingust looks at the FF as an actors' text. If I had to choose a favorite essay, though, it would be Georgianna Ziegler's essay on "Gentleman, Ladies, and Folios: The Lure of the Chase." It details the relationships between Folio collectors, particularly between Mr. and Mrs. Folger, the Halliwell-Phillipps family, and the Burdett-Coutts family. The catalogue ends with an excellent glossary of early printing and Shakespearean terms (e.g., collation, King's Men, vatman).

All together, this seems less like an exhibition catalogue than a 72-page, well-illustrated book of essays about the First Folio by the foremost experts in the field. The price is $24.95 at the Folger shop; I say take money out of thy purse for this one. 
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Bonhams New York has two exciting sales coming up tomorrow -- Fine Books & Manuscripts, and then a double sale containing The Golden Age of Illustration Art and Modern Illustration Art. There's no way to do them justice here, so I picked just one amazing item to highlight: Melville's travel desk. A mahogany lap desk, it has brass handles and a velvet lining, and it contains an agate snuff box, two small pen knives, a glass inkwell, a pair of tweezers, a glass seal ("EMM" for E M Marrett, a relation who owned the desk before Herman), and a
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mother-of-pearl pen. Under the lid are two small mounted sheets inscribed, "Our Box at the Post Office is 1162" and "Herman Melville / 104 East 26th St / New York." And yes, there are three secret drawers! How cool is that. The estimate is $20,000-$30,000, and you can even throw in a first edition of Moby Dick for another $15,000-$25,000.  

Photos courtesy of Bonhams.
Some big news from the NYPL late last week -- it purchased over three hundred boxes of material belonging to psychologist and author Timothy Leary, who advocated the use of  "psychedelic substances to promote psychological well-being, increased creativity, and spiritual renewal" for a trippy $900,000. The archive contains letters, manuscripts, photographs, video and audio tapes, posters and flyers, Harvard research notes, government documents, and more, dating from the 1920s to his death in 1997. Allen Ginsburg, Aldous Huxley, William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, Ken Kesey (and G. Gordon Liddy!) -- they're all here. Read more about the acquisition in the New York Times and the New Yorker.