Biblio on Altered Books

Altered Books-- A Biblio

"From A Lunar List by Nancy Culmone"

Craft Books | Samples | Web Sites | History

How to/ Craft Books

Altered Books, Collaborative Journals, and Other Adventures in Bookmaking by Holly Harrison (Paperback - October 2003)	Altered Books Workshop: 18 Creative Techniques for Self-Expression by Bev Brazelton	Altered Art : Techniques for Creating Altered Books, Boxes, Cards & More by Terry Taylor
Artists' Journals and Sketchbooks: Exploring and Creating Personal Pages by Lynne Perrella	Altered Books 101 by Beth Cote, Cindy Pestka	The Decorated Page by Gwen Diehn
True Colors: A Palette of Collaborative Art Journals by Kathryn Bold	Altered Book Collage by Barbara Matthiessen (forthcoming in 2005)	Altered Board Books Basics & Beyond: For Creative Scrapbooks, Altered Books & Artful Journals by Jan Bode Smiley (forthcoming)

Examples of Altered Books

Humument: A Treated Victorian Novel by Tom Phillips (new edition forthcoming/ on order at Amazon) Product Description:

In 1966, the British artist Tom Phillips purchased an obscure Victorian novel entitled A Human Document from a secondhand bookshop. He then proceeded to "treat" it: he colored and blacked out many of the lines and even pages so that certain key words and phrases formed new images and sequences; he cut up and rearranged other pages to form new narrative passages. Miraculously, the rather staid original novel was turned into an entirely new work, full of stories, erotic incidents, poems, surrealistic catastrophes, and visual beauty. The treated novel became known through literary and art magazines and quickly acquired a cult following. When it was first published in book form in the United States in 1983, New York magazine said, "It may be the closest a paperback book has come to being an art object." Tom Phillips has continued to transform the Victorian novel, and this third edition of A Humument includes one hundred of his latest treatments.--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. On-Line Samples

Lisa Vollrath's Altered Books
Jenny Taliadoros
Gallery for the International Society of Altered Books Artists
Wellesley Exhbition on Women in Book Arts

Web Sites

History

Altered books is an art form in which existing books are reworked into works of art, often manifests in a variety of ways. The existing book becomes the canvas for the new ideas and images. Sometimes words or images from the book are retained as a part of the altering. At other times it is the books is entirely obscured to become a new idea totally.

Altered books are actually an old way of recycling. In the 11th Century Italian monks recycled old manuscripts written on vellum by scraping off the ink and adding new text and illustrations on top of the old. This was known as "Palimpsest."

In the late 19th century people used old books as a sort of scrapbook, pasting on its pages the ephemera from their society including magazine images, personal recipes, and family pictures. This is "Grangerism", a Victorian practice of illustrating a particular book with engravings torn from other books.

Today artists are exploring the form of the book along with its substance. Existing images and text become something entirely new. Tom Phillips' Humament is one of the first contemporary examples of this art. By covering, cutting, and changing the structure, altered books run the gamut from books that have become shrines to books that are transformed into colorful images totally unrelated to their origins. Source: Michal Austin, K-12 Kansas Art Teacher

Altered Books by Craig Stark