Hello and welcome back to Bookmarks, a podcast brought to you by the Bellevue Centre for the study.
The book I am Joe Maddocks, aerobics librarian here at Odeon.
And I'm Alice Evans, a book conservator in this season of fitness with thinking about pop up and movable artist books.
And today we're joined by graphic designer Kevin Steele. Kevin, it's lovely to meet you.
It's a very sunny afternoon here in Oxford where you joining us from today?
It is very sunny here, too. I live in Atlanta, Georgia, in the States.
Very nice. So, Kevin, we start each podcast by asking the book artist to describe their work.
And as we currently have your work, the movable book platforms on display as part of our aspects, a live exhibition at the Body.
And we'd like to ask you to start the podcast by describing this for us, please.
Sure. So the book we're talking about today is called The Movable Book of Letter Forms.
It was a small edition of three books, and it's meant as a introduction to typography students or anyone interested in type in graphic design.
And it gives sort of a basic overview of letter forms and their history, their anatomy, their origins,
and how they're used and their spacing and their the shapes and how they work together.
The book is it comes in a a box that is flocked to the floor.
So it's very soft to to handle. And then the book cover itself is also in the Lords.
It's a book that's meant to be handled, hence why it's kind of pleasant to to hold and to feel.
There's about ten, I think 11 spreads in the book.
Each one addresses a different topic related to letter forms and typography.
It kind of starts with history and then it goes into some sort of nomenclature and anatomy.
It goes into how letters are formed together to create words,
and then it goes into some differences about how you might compare one typeface to another typeface,
and then ultimately gets into slightly more complicated things about variations of typefaces,
how you can alter them for various reasons, and then talks about some different categories of typefaces.
And, you know, I created the book as a tool to help convey information, as a as a graphic designer.
We have lots of different tools at our disposal.
We can use, you know, illustrations, imagery, colour.
We can use paper or technology.
And so for me, the ability to have components in a book that can move or you can interact with was just another tool in my toolbox.
I when I was creating this book,
I was looking at a lot of early examples of printed books back to the 16th century and earlier where people were using moving parts on a page,
not for entertainment or for visual flash, but for practical reasons to help convey information.
So there's books about anatomy, astronomy, mathematics, etc. that use these moving parts to help communicate something.
And I was really inspired by that for this particular work.
So I tried to be very strategic in how the different pieces move or come off the page to help communicate something.
Most of these are pretty basic concepts,
but I thought a little a little extra something on the page could more clearly explain some of that information.
Could you talk us through your design process? How did you go about choosing and making the different types of the pop ups, the ease and the book?
I think I started with really kind of dissecting that.
The information that I wanted to include in the book.
And then I was searching for simple mechanisms and movements that could help convey some of that information.
So the very first spread that that gives some historical context for what we know is the Roman alphabet.
It just sort of talks you through how people first started to write with pictographs,
you know, pictures of animals and other things to help communicate something or tell a story.
And as those cultures started trading with one another, they borrowed the symbols.
And depending on the direction that those cultures wrote or the instruments that they wrote with, those shapes started to rotate and change.
And so the example that's explained in the book is how the Phoenicians had a symbol for an ox, an ox head, and as they later traded with Greeks,
and then that was later traded with the Romans,
that symbol of an ox head eventually rotated 180 degrees so that it looks like what we know as a capital upright Roman a.
And so the device on the page is of those owl, which is a rotating disk.
So as you read the text on the left side,
you can rotate this disk and it shows how each of these cultures rotated it in a different direction to the eight that we know today.
So I tried to apply that same sort of dissection of the information I was trying to convey and then what device or mechanism,
what would best help convey that information to the reader?
Thank you.
I've been thinking about pop up books in terms of what's hidden and what's revealed, and I think those are very private when they're closed.
But when they open up, they do so more than a normal book does.
More than the kind of stuff equipped us. I wonder if you have any thoughts about that.
I think movable books definitely have a sense of discovery about them because
something is revealed either by the nature of opening that spread and it just.
Presents itself, but there's often additional components that you can explore,
either by maybe rotating the book, maybe something is printed on the back side of a surface that you wouldn't,
you know, see when you just open the spread and it's sitting on a table or in your hands,
or there might be a desk or a tap or something to enter interact with.
And I think that for the purpose of.
Trying to teach something or learn something.
If you can have a personal interaction with it, it makes a stronger impression on you versus if it's just a passive thing.
You open it up, it's on the page. That's different than if you have to kind of put something into it to get that information out.
If you have to pull that tab to to show something.
That makes a stronger impression on you than just passively being visible on the page.
That's interesting as well, because you made this only in an edition of three, which means that there's a fairly well,
a very limited audience in terms of the number of people that can physically interact with it.
Was that an artistic decision for you or was it more of a practical decision
based on how many of these components you could actually make realistically?
I originally just created one of these. It was for my master study program.
I made this in my first semester, the first movable book set that I had made,
and then after I had heard there was a little bit of interest in it, I made two other copies so that I could send those out.
And I had actually talked to a couple of publishers about the potential of it.
Ultimately, we didn't end up in mass producing this for a variety of reasons.
It's a it's a niche subject matter, right? Like. Graphic designers and typographer and book enthusiasts can really geek out over.
Yeah. Yeah. For the, you know, everyday consumer it might be a little bit too much of a niche subject.
Alphabet books, on the other hand, you know, our appeal to lots of people,
including young people, but this might be a little too specific of of a topic.
And then some of the components here in here are a little delicate as well,
which kind of prevented it from being accessible to be handled by lots of people and manufactured.
We've seen that. You've also made a video showing the book page by page.
And I guess that does mean to some extent that now it can be viewed by anyone online.
But we're just wondering how does that perhaps differs a reading experience in your opinion?
Because obviously, ultimately you're saying it would be great if people could open it themselves, but they are able to see online.
Yes, that was a way to, you know, share with with other people since, as you said, I only have three copies.
It's certainly not the same to watch a video of someone flipping through a book versus being able to interact with it yourself.
So I'm glad that other people can kind of share it.
And I occasionally see it popping up on blogs and different things.
So I'm glad people get to interact with it in some way,
but it's certainly not the same as being able to hold the book in your hands and be able to pull the tabs yourself.
I think of it as a as a conservator, part of kind of digitisation and things like that is a is a big part of preservation as well,
because you are able to give people an experience to some extent of the object without that direct handling.
So but normally, like in our digital body and we have lots of images online, but they're all static because and you can like go through them.
So you are like reading a book. But having the video is always quite wonderful because your book does move.
So having it as a video that you can play and you can see the page is actually moving and flaps being lifted and things like that was actually really,
really lovely and a bit different from my usual kind of digital preservation.
I've seen that, you know, my book here has it is a pop up book, so there are things that come off of the plane of the book spread,
but I have seen it movable books, digitised really well for Lothar.
Megan Stauffer If you're familiar with him, 19th century German illustrator and paper engineer,
he's known as kind of the the grandfather of the golden era of movable books.
But his works and I have one here that I a reproduction that I can show you,
but I've seen these digitised really well and the reason they digitised so well.
So he wrote cute little sort of poems for children.
And then you pull a tab and the illustrations move. So the one to Oh lovely up here has kind of a little guy that's ducking behind a fence
and there's a turkey beside it beside him that's kind of moving its tail around.
But these digitise really well because they're flat, essentially.
So I've seen these translated into animated gifs that you can include on websites
because it doesn't have something coming up off of the plane of the book.
So it translate really, really well to digital media.
I think it's also probably similar to how in the exhibition, obviously it's behind glass, so you're unable to you're unable to get to it to interact.
So this is like another step removed. You go that you can see it kind of in real life.
So you can see it in three dimensions, which you can't on a screen, but you can't actually get your hands in that to move around.
You'll see more than one opening, the opening it has done.
It's moving as well when we installed it into that case.
So the is the one with the type case. So that's obviously lift lifted upwards, but it is not static.
And just wondering, do you have any thoughts about that.
How I mean it's it's incredible that is seen by a hundred people every day who passed and see the exhibition.
But yeah, they only see that one opening.
And I say they don't see the performance of you.
You did the performance when Yes when when when when the story was close,
the movement happened and then it won't happen again until the exhibition is closed.
I guess. Then we take it out and then we can change the. Yeah.
Do you have any thoughts about that?
I'm always fascinated by the performance of movable looks, especially when that actual movement is communicating something.
So it's not just about the like final, you know, display when everything's open, but it has something to do with the movement.
There's some engineers that do that really well.
And I think that, you know, there's a couple of spreads in here that the movement actually does lend something to the story.
And I think that there. The spread you mentioned with the uppercase lowercase does help in that because as you open the page,
the two type cases separate apart and sort of, you know, further reinforce.
The point of this page was talking about the difference between minuscule letter forms and
magic skill or lowercase in uppercase and how they got their names from type cases of,
you know, metal letter press type that were stored in two separate cases.
So I think that that's a that's a good example of how movement is important,
an important component as part of the paper engineering, some of the other spreads, it's not as important.
It's more about just what it looks like when it is fully opened up.
Yeah, sure. Um, so I quite wanted to circle back to something that got mentioned earlier,
which is that you do have a great job title, the occasional piece of paper engineer.
And to me, that suggests that there is a precision that appeals to you, which is interested me, particularly as a conservator, because I wonder,
how do you feel about potential changes that will happen to your work, which are inevitable through use,
especially with a movable book that has these elements that will move?
And yeah, I was wondering if you could speak a bit about that.
Yeah. So I I'm really fascinated by the area of paper engineering and a lot of people, you know, that's not sort of a common title.
People might think that means you make paper or you work in a paper factory or something like that,
but it's somebody that takes paper and sometimes other materials and using,
you know,
mechanisms that are made out of paper and a lot of math and sometimes physics and lots of experimentation and folding and trial and error of paper.
The idea is that when you open a book,
spread something about that spread physically transforms or presents an opportunity for the user to create, to create a transformation.
And paper engineering dates back as far as the I believe it's the 13th century was the first example of paper engineering.
But the real kind of golden era is just in the past hundred or so years.
And there are people now that are doing amazing things with paper engineering that will just blow your mind.
You'd never expect this kind of transformation to happen on a page and as you mentioned.
Paper does change over time and books.
Start to fall apart over time if they're not looked after and even if they are looked after.
So it's it's a very like specialised, often self-taught discipline of paper engineering.
There's there are some great books about how to. How to create pop ups, but there's no like reference guide.
Like if this thing falls apart, go to this, you know, this is what you need to do.
Do you have any personal kind of feelings about how those changes might happen to this work that you have like created so precisely?
Yeah. It's the idea that there could be change.
My book definitely happens.
I'm sitting here with one in front of me and I can see that there's already sort of paper starting decreases in places I didn't want it to crease.
And you know, there's some dog years and, you know, just things that happen with with books and paper.
So, you know, at some point I'll open this and there'll be, you know, a flap that's no longer glued down or something.
Won't be performing as I had intended it to originally.
And as somebody that likes things, kind of. Precise.
And I like things, you know, aligned and centred and you know, it's well thought out and planned for that.
It is sometimes hard to see like things change over time like that,
but I guess that's just inevitable that eventually things change beyond your control.
And how would you feel if in the future your book did need conservation treatment by someone like me in a in a library in the future,
like all these signs of where something you're happy to be seen because it I guess
it shows the history of the object in the success of the object in some ways,
isn't it? Yeah. Like with a book like this, it's having been readiness is something that it kind of was.
Yeah. Because people have then been able to reveal and experience those things that you intended.
Or I guess the other side is would you like it to remain as pristine forever?
Like, I was just. Yeah. Wonder if you had any messages for the Conservancy in the future?
Yeah, I think it would make me very happy. Just, you know, looking in the future, I saw that the book was very well worn and used and read.
Even if you know it, it's needed some repair or was beyond repair if you know if it.
The book was not created as.
You know, a personal self-expression or something. It was created as a learning tool using these moving pieces.
So if if those get worn down because people are actually using them, then I think the book has served its purpose.
And if it can be repaired in the future, then that's fantastic.
And if it can't be repaired, then maybe I need to make another one.
Sounds like a good plan. Yeah.
Because your website says that the piece is meant for all ages.
And I just wonder, would you be happy for a child to play with it?
Under supervision. I say that just because I only have three copies of it.
Yes. Yeah. You know, if you if you look at it, a mass produced pop up book on a child's shelf, you know, it's got tears.
And, you know, all those things you would expect to see from kids that are really excited and and handling it,
but not necessarily with the same carefulness that maybe a conservator would.
But, you know, they love the book. It's fun. It's exciting.
I'm just a little bit more careful with it because I only have three copies of it.
We had a lovely event over the summer, this summer,
just gone where Alice ran a book hospital for kids to bring in the pop up books, and the conservation team fixed them up.
Yeah, and it was adorable. It was very successful.
But it was it was with that in mind, it's like pop up books at home of being loved in a very different way after death.
Yeah. In a very different way. Through the way that we loved them in the reading room and on display.
And so we had some slightly different approaches that we were talking them through that we would do in the conservation studio,
for example, with different materials. But it was fantastic and it was really nice to see pop up books that, yeah, are being read every single day.
Very, very holiday favourites and yeah. There's a kind of a joke amongst paper engineers that when we buy Papa books, we always buy two.
One is to sit on the shelf and be perfect. It is to completely deconstruct and take apart and understand so you can figure out how to lose.
So one will definitely be destroyed and the other will be perfect.
I wish we'd have had that policy at the Bodleian for several hundred years because we quite often have people in
the reading room with our full veils trying to peep underneath and see how the how they've been put together.
Yeah, that would be ideal. That feeling now?
Yeah. Book cuts. See inside book.
And that note. Yes. Yes. To bring it to an end?
I think so. Thank you so much, Kevin. Yeah, Thanks, Kevin.
You've been great. And yeah, just to say that people can come and see your work on display until the end of January 2024 to do that.
Thank you so much for having me. It was great talking with you. Thanks again to Kevin, Steve, for joining us for this episode.
But you can see Kevin's work in this will put the platforms on display at the bottom
libraries until the 21st of January 2024 as part of the Fantastic Alphabet Alive exhibition.
And we will also be sharing some photos of this piece on the Centre for the Study of Books blog The Conveyor.
See you next time.