Big Jump Press ~ New York
(Sarah Bryant)

cutaway
By Sarah Bryant
Gordo, Alabama: Big Jump Press, 2007. Edition of 45.

5.25 x 8.25 x .75"; 14 pages. Printed on mylar, Rives BFK, and Hahnemuhle Copperplate. Text set in Century Schoolbook and printed from polymer plates. Bound in cloth-covered boards and housed in a cloth-covered slipcase.

A puzzling book, so meticulously crafted that it carries the sense that something important is happening; however, what that something is is not obvious.

Designed to suggest a dictionary (each page seems to have a finger index tab), but with a single image and corresponding word-plus-definitions per page. The top portion of each page has an image, a slice or cross-section of an object, outlined in black on mylar. The pages are of double thickness and in between the sheet is a removable card that gives the image color. Beneath each object is very dictionary-like text: pronunciation key and list of definitions. But some of the definitions don't fit: the brain as "the lair of a burrowing animal"? Adjacent to the definitions is lightly printed reversed text that turns out to be the definitions of the work on the backing page.

The words: shell, trunk, brain, influenza, earth, bulb, egg, tide, apple, atom. Like a list you give to creative writing students: make a story.

Correspondences? Resemblance? Wittgenstein's fuzzy categories? How format suggests genre and genre guides – or determines – our expectations and thus our thinking?

This work plays with our need to make sense of things, and our human facility for seeing patterns.
$350

Index
By Sarah Bryant
Tuscaloosa, Alabama: 2006. Edition of 45.

5.5 x 8.5 x 1.25" flutter book in gray linen clamshell box. Printed using Caslon and Bell type on Rives heavyweight buff. reference used for the body index from 'Mosby's Atlas of functional Human Anatomy.'

Sarah Bryant: "I first conceived of the skeleton project last May as a series of broadsides which would all fit, loose, in a box but which could be assembled in a particular way to make a life-sized body. As I considered it more and more, I decided that I wanted it all to be one piece, a huge skeleton, but a little package.

"Lucky me, I had just agreed to do some house-sitting, and so I spent my time there tracing my own body onto big sheets of newsprint. With piles of anatomy books beside me for reference, I filled in all the bones, occasionally poking myself in the side to double check a rib position. After finishing this rough sketch, I taped the swaths of newsprint together and hung them onto a glass door, which I used as a light table to trace the bones onto smaller pieces of paper, which I then folded and taped together to make rough mockups of the structure.

"Once the mockup was done, I made linoleum blocks, started to carve, and began to think about color. It took forever to decide what colors to use. I wanted to avoid anything morbid or hospital-like. It was harder to pick two colors than I think it is to pick eight or twelve. Every color pairing I tried seemed to reference a holiday (Christmas, Halloween), or a cartoon character (a Smurf, a Simpson). In the end, I bought a fashion magazine, and tore out colors that I liked together until I settled on the green and blue that I eventually used.

"I began to print the linoleum blocks in September. I printed the book in twelve separate pieces which were later hinged together to form the 5'6" skeleton (that folds up into a 5 x 7.5" book). As I printed the imagery, I began to consider the text. I visited the special collections library here at the University of Alabama to look at old anatomy and botany books. When I decided on the idea of using an index of all the parts of the human body, it was just a matter of culling through one to remove all the boy parts (this was my own skeleton, after all) and creating polymer plates for the text.

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