book stuff, old things, my writing

Portrait of a reading youth, surrounded by Persian verses, with a set of calligrapher’s tools—a case to hold the pens and inkwell, a pair of scissors for cutting paper, a wad of raw silk threads (liqa) to absorb the ink in the inkwell—and three pieces of fruit laid out next to him. The page is signed at the bottom by the painter, ‘Ali al-Husayni, and by the calligrapher of the verses. Shah-Mahmud al-Nishapuri.

Part of a manuscript anthology of poetry, commissioned by Prince Bahram Mirza, the younger brother of the Safavid ruler Shah Tahmasp. and produced at the court workshop in Tabriz, Iran, ca. 1540.

Manuscript Revan 957 in the Topkapı Palace Museum Library, Istanbul, Turkey, folio 2a.

The Annual Congressional Art Competition, sponsored by the Congressional Institute, broadcasts a call to high school artists nationwide to share the best their congressional districts have to offer. The rules are simple: the works must be two dimensional, be no larger than 28 x 28 inches, weigh less than fifteen pounds, and be original in concept, design, and execution while not violating any copyright laws. When eighteen year old David Pulphus’ painting won first place in Missouri’s First District, it was flown to a gallery at the U.S. Capitol Complex, where an ongoing spat has seen it hung, removed, then rehung a number of times.

The painting is packed with motifs – a black man in sweatpants, a graduation cap, and bold red sneakers hovers, crucified, his arms bearing the scales of justice, occupied with the black and white whorls of yin and yang. The city skyline recedes into prison bars, through which two brown eyes gaze plaintively at the viewer. Placards emblazoned with the phrases “RACISM KILLS” and “HISTORY” call out to the viewer, while a black and white bird fly headlong at each other. The scene ultimately unfolds and opens up towards the viewer, where a black panther stands, face-to-face with the barrel of a gun wielded by a pig in a police uniform.

The depiction of cops as pigs has been traded verbally as well as visually – Cypress Hill’s track, Pigs evokes a cop “…standin’ eatin’ donuts while some motherfucker’s out robbin’ your home.” But perhaps one of the earliest and most widespread depictions of cops as pigs must be attributed to one man: former Minister of Culture for the Black Panther Party, Emory Douglas.

July 26, 1969

November 15, 1969

March 7, 1970

Known today for his iconic representation of the struggles of black Americans throughout the 1960s and 1970s, and the subject of several exhibitions within the last decade, Emory Douglas’ style is nothing short of staggeringly incisive. Responsible for much of the artistic production and layout of the Black Panther Paper, a biweekly newspaper circulated worldwide from its headquarters in Oakland, Emory Douglas was the designated artist for many of the back covers of the paper—creating bold illustrations to fill up the entire page, usually accompanied with blocks of bright, fluorescent colors. The illustrations brutally confront the plight black Americans felt living in the 60s and 70s, depicting such subjects as disenfranchised children, decrepit living conditions, and shocking acts of police brutality. Pigs with sharp teeth, adorned with clouds of flies and clad in human clothing frequent these illustrations, usually identified as cops, politicians, fascists and capitalists. In several cases, then-president Richard Nixon is among them, gorging himself on dollar bills, engaging in sexual acts with other members of his inner circle (similarly depicted as pigs), and carrying out orders against the black community, the Panthers, and the Vietnamese—the war was in full swing, and the Black Panther Party threw their ideological support behind Ho Chi Minh and the Viet Cong. 

February 12, 1972

November 15, 1969

With the media’s constant inundation with acts of protest against police brutality, and calls for police surveillance and accountability, it comes as no surprise that Emory Douglas’ art bears a remarkable significance to David Pulphus’ equally controversial painting. While Douglas’ art and ideology are regarded by many today as emblematic of a time of great distress, one from which we have long since departed, the fact remains that the knee-jerk reaction to Pulphus’ pig-police unabashedly proclaims otherwise. The issues and criticisms he raises—at age eighteen, in a high school in Missouri—resonate word for word with those Douglas raised almost four decades ago. Furthermore, judging by the fact that his painting has gone back and forth from on the Congressional wall to out of sight almost four times as of this date, there can be no mistake about declaring how divisive issues of race, police violence, and freedom of expression (artistic or otherwise) are to us even now.

Typography Tuesday

We’ve always loved book artist, graphic-design scholar, and book-arts theorist Johanna Drucker’s typographic presentation in her artist’s book The History of the/my Word, from the reference to the typographic opening of the Doves Bible and the use of typographic lines to affect movement and direction to the variance in point-size for balance and hierarchy, and the use of typographic forms as graphic elements. Drucker has mainlined a long interest in typography and the meaning of letter-forms, as evidence in the titles of some of her other scholarly and artists-book works: Otherspace: Martian Ty/opography (1992); The Visible Word: Experimental Typography and Modern Art Practice (1994); The Alphabetic Labyrinth: The Letters in History and Imagination (1995).

Here is a bit of book-related women’s history—from 1898 to 1904 there was a Guild of Women-Binders in London. The guild trained women in the fine art of bookbinding while creating decorative bindings themselves. Like other areas of the Arts & Crafts movement, the traditional craft of bookbinding was finding its niche in an era of mass production by focusing on quality and creativity. 

Special Collections recently welcomed students from Professor Chloe Hogg’s “Global French.” Professor Hogg introduced students to volumes of the 1780 edition of Guillaume-Thomas Raynal’s Histoire Philosophique et Politique, various maps, and editions of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s Paul et Virginie.

Students especially enjoyed this fore-edge painting from the 1799 edition of Paul et Virginie:

Pictured (in order of appearance):

Hennepin, Louis. Description de la Louisiane… Paris: Chez la veuve Sebastien Huré …, 1683.

Raynal, Guillaume-Thomas. Histoire Philosophique Et Politique (vols. 1 & 2). Genève: 1781.

Bellin, Jacques Nicolas. Le Petit Atlas Maritime…Paris, 1764.

St. Pierre, Bernardin de. Paul and Virginia (translated from the French of by Helen Maria Williams). Boston: Lilly, Wait & Co, 1834.

St. Pierre, Bernardin de. Paul and Virginia (with illustrations by Maurice Leloir). New York : T.Y. Crowell, 1892.

St. Pierre, Bernardin de. Paul et Virginie. Londres: l’Impr. de Baylis, 1799.

“The President’s proposal to eliminate the Institute of Museum and Library Services in his FY2018 budget just released, and with it effectively all federal funding for libraries of all kinds, is counterproductive and short-sighted. The American Library Association will mobilize its members, congressional library champions, and the millions upon millions of people we serve in every zip code to keep those ill-advised proposed cuts from becoming a congressional reality. Libraries leverage the tiny amount of federal funds they receive through their states into an incredible range of services for virtually all Americans everywhere to produce what could well be the highest economic and social ‘ROI’ in the entire federal budget.

chicago billboard art project by francine leclercq

16th century French encryption book from the court of Henri II

Léo Schnug, ex-libris for Fedor von Zobeltitz.