The University of Michigan Libraries, in collaboration with the U-M Arts Initiative, are bringing book arts into focus at this year’s Ann Arbor Art Fair with Art + Science.
Visitors to the fair will be able to create their own flora-inspired prints using two historically important book art methods: cyanotype and woodblock printing.
“We have a large collection of wooden and metal blocks with pictorial illustrations that would have been used alongside text in letterpress printing. Everything from a sort of vintage version of clip art for newspapers or newsletters to diagrams of teeth used by dentist’s offices,” said Senior Associate Librarian Jamie Lausch Vander Broek.
“In addition to this more mass-produced material, we have some original, hand-carved wood engravings that were used to create cards, fine press books and beautiful endpapers. Many of these are by an artist named John DePol.”
The Ann Arbor Art Fair is an annual juried art fair, running July 18-20, in downtown Ann Arbor spanning 30 city blocks, including parts of the U-M campus. Each year, nearly a half million visitors shop the creations of roughly 1,000 artists, with special events like Art + Science, and community participation throughout.
For this Art Fair collaboration, Vander Broek worked alongside Josey Hanish, a Ph.D. candidate in engineering and a U-M Library Book Arts Studio student assistant, to create facsimiles of two of DePol’s botanical illustrations.
In an effort to reduce wear and tear on the original woodblock pieces, they followed a process very similar to the historical one using magnesium letterpress printing plates mounted on wood for a more durable woodblock press of two prints from “California flora,” a book in the library’s collection that features DePol’s artwork.
“Creating multiples of not only the printed work, but also the printing objects themselves is a big part of the history of printing and book production,” Vander Broek said. “People think Gutenberg invented the printing press, but he actually invented a casting system for making multiples of the tiny pieces of metal type. Being able to quickly make many copies of the letterforms greatly increased the efficiency of the process.”
In addition to woodblock printing, visitors can also create cyanotypes of Michigan plants using illustrations by Mary Vaux Walcott from the library’s collection.
Cyanotype is a technique that involves layering objects on paper pre-coated with a solution of iron salts and using sunlight to develop the one-of-a-kind image. The final product is a blue and white print of the objects pressed to the page.
These forms of artistry, and others, are in practice every day at the U-M Library’s Book Arts Studio where students, faculty, staff and community members can interact with library collections and materials to make new works of art.
“Now that we’re at a point of not even needing to print something out to read it, or to quickly digitally produce printed books on demand, there’s a resurgence in interest in the slower historical processes that led to the current moment,” Vander Broek said.
“Understanding how these things work by using our hands is what we do at the Book Arts Studio every day.” Art + Science is free and open to the public during the Ann Arbor Art Fair. It is located off Liberty Street between Fifth Avenue and Division Street.
