blue bluer books: artists' books.

Inspired by Pablo Neruda's The Book of Questions several years ago, I started working on a collection of question-poems. Eventually I started to gather 'answers', too -- snippets of conversation overheard in public, or quotations pulled from books and songs. Given Timbuk? #1: A new book of questions is the first artists' book to come out of the project so far. See more photos here.

The Deedbook is the second book of the Googled English Frontier Project. Each Deedbook features 10 of the word combinations discovered in the project, hand-stamped on a variety of papers. (See below for details about how the word combinations were found.)

The Deedbooks are bound in a 3-hole stab binding style traditionally used in China and Japan for ledgers.

Available in three different covers: red, black, and black-and-white script.

Edition of 30. $25. Available from Vamp and Tramp Booksellers.

Googled English Frontier Star is made up of 2- and 3-word combinations that bring up no results when searched on Google. Each of the thirty texts is hand-stamped on a separate ray of the star using hand-set rubber type. The book is bound using a new structure developed specifically for this project.

It's surprisingly difficult to come up with combinations of words that aren't out there somewhere. Here are some of the rules I followed when creating these groupings and searching them:

* Each word in the combination must bring up Google search results when searched by itself.

* When searching I didn't use quotation marks around the words, in order to cast as wide a search net as possible.

* The same basic rules as Scrabble: no proper nouns, no foreign words unless they have been accepted into English usage, and no consulting the dictionary.

Like the universe the internet is nearly infinite and expanding. Googled English Frontier Star comes from one step beyond the Web's border.

Edition of 5. SOLD OUT

This is the book incarnation of my poem "heart sutra, remix," which reads in part: "rhythm is form / form is emptiness / emptiness form / form rhythm." The typography acts out the development of the poem's idea across the front and back of the accordion pages. The boards are covered in a red, embossed lotus-patterned paper.

2 copies made: one in the Sloane Art Library's collection; one in private collection.

I had the idea for Pandora's Book while re-reading a poem by Serbian poet Aleksandar Ristovic (translated by Charles Simic). "Untitled," the poem is a catalog of omens that the 'time of fools' is upon us. One of the signs reads "Time of fools is coming, time of the know-nothing professor and the book that cannot be cracked open at either edge."

That was in the spring of 2002, and every indicator pointed to the fact that the time of fools was full-on upon us. I gathered a sequence of poems from Simic's, Ristovic's, and my own work, all of which concerned the Devil or people behaving devilishly.

The structure I eventually created is a variation on an ordinary casebound book, in which half of the signatures of the text block are sewn together with their folds on the right-hand side, and half on the left, alternating throughout. The case is constructed in the conventional way with a cloth spine and paper covering the boards, except that a second spine has been added holding the right edge closed.

4 copies made: 2 in private collections, 1 in my portfolio, and one in the Sloane Art Library's collection.