Ken Campbell ~ England

EXECUTION
By Ken Campbell
London, England: Ken Campbell, 1990. Edition of 40.

12.5 x 15.25"; 74 unnumbered pages and printed endpapers. 39 single sheets in polychrome letterpress and handwork on 280 gsm T.H. Saunders paper. Bound within printed covers and printed and hand-painted slipcase.

Ken Campbell: "EXECUTION plots the dismantling of a diagram (after Tschichold) that establishes a possible disposition of text on a page. The elements of the diagram are made from steel plate progressively cut, etched and ground to hasten their dismemberment and decay. The double-page spread is like two halves of a head, and there is a notion running through the book of a wolfman revealed. That's a Jungian notion, and a powerful one to my mind. It offers that there are two people looking out of any one face. Once again the book spread is used as an arena for corporeal display.

"The diagram is progressively destroyed through the book to reveal a cracked black mirror, which is the mirror in which one half looks at the other. Rectilinear wood blocks and heavy lead rules make up an abstract of the page described by the angular diagram. These too are manipulated, the rules' movement sometimes suggesting lines of type, and sometimes the ribs of a corpse.

"Three faces, printed letterpress from etched plates, appear throughout the book. They represent three ages in search of a persona and are accompanied by the figure of a sprite or demon, who apparently converses with his own shadow. Lead blocks are deployed to represent the Egyptian crocodile god Zebek, god of justice; and, when doubled, two halves of a face.

"EXECUTION abandons narrative form to use its text as prompts to the drama in the printmaking. The book is about left and right, dark and light. In its establishing of elements to be subsequently manipulated it aspires to musical form. In its assault on the book structure it supplies the means of its own demise. EXECUTION offers the wolfman on our other side an escape to the shadow self."
£3,500

TILT: the black-flagged streets
By Ken Campbell
London, England: Ken Campbell, 1988. Edition of 80.

12 x 9"; 62 unnumbered pages. Letterpress composed of Albertus type, found lino blocks, and handmade zinc blocks. Many passes including metallic dusting and handwork. Bound with black cloth spine and decorative paper boards in trapezoid shape. In printed slipcase.

Ken Campbell, The Maker's Hand, Twenty books: "'Tilt' was the widest-cast net so far, bringing the most disparate things together. I wrote a poem called Storm Song in Canada in 1981, after listening to a sung account of a maritime disaster on one of the Great Lakes (The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, I think it was). I also had in mind the vertiginous steps of flagstones up to the old cathedral at Whitby and the black flag of anarchy and disturbance. I had found some old mounted lino blocks which were random-sized squares, black flags of different sizes, and some Albertus type, rather beaten up.

"While in Zürich I walked into the Museum Rietberg and up to a statue of Shiva, with limbs hanging out in funny angles, and lightning in his/her hair, all in a big wheel of fire. I can remember the statue saying to me, I'm coming into your book. I thought, what the hell has Shiva got to do with this book about a Storm Song and the Whitby steps and black flags? And I thought, well, I'll do as I'm told, as ever. The following morning at breakfast I drew the figure of Shiva, with breasts, and realised it was a puppet that I was going to dismantle. I made a puppet out of zinc pieces; it is disassembled from the right-hand page by repeatedly having a piece of its body nominated by a decorative silver star. Each piece is removed and replaced on the left-hand page. Alongside this cycle of nomination, removal and redisposition, the poem accumulates line by line. In this way Shiva is removed from the wheel of fire of the material world on the right, and repositioned and rebuilt in a calmer place on the left.

"Each new line of the poem is revealed between black flags, the flags being arranged to suit the disposition of the line that they enclose. A decorative border is used to re-affirm the rectilinear nature of the page to counter what I did to the cover, which was to make it tilted and disturbed.

"A line in the poem refers to 'the kingly fisher of men.' A Christ or Osiris figure perhaps, but I discovered that Halcyon, the kingfisher, mythically made its nest on stormy waters, thus calming them. This seemed to complete the circle proposed by the poem.

"I also discovered, as an act of necessity, an odd process which I have called offset letterpress. To enable a previously printed coloured element to show better through a recently-applied dark solid, I immediately ran the wet page through the press again after having wiped the solid plate clean. This removed ink from where it sat on the underlying image but not from where it was sitting in the virgin paper.

"The statue of Shiva that spoke to me had, unbeknownst to me at the time, been a childhood obsession of our Zurich hostess. The statue in the Museum Rietberg was accompanied by a dancing girl, who appears at each end of this book."
£750

IN THE DOOR STANDS A JAR
By Ken Campbell
England: Ken Campbell, 1987. Edition of 40.

9.5 x 9.25"; 44 unnumbered pages. Polychrome letterpress, metallic dusting and handwork. Printed slipcase.

Ken Campbell: "'There's usually some kind of formal problem in the books - a way of dividing space up for good clear reason and for making things work in a useful sequence. I had a notion of putting a reduced version of the book's two-page spread, which is a designer's term for an opened book, on one page and putting the same two-page spread reduced on the opposite page, so you're looking at a kind of visual pun: two spreads on the whole spread.

"On each page is another, smaller two-page spread printed on a black background. In each smaller spread is what is left after I have printed black solids as a window over and around the female forms. Black over colour gives ghostly images of the complete form. The poem runs laterally through the colour and bleeds off into the darkness on either side. There are very large dark borders. I had started to play with borders both as ways of containing the work in a field and as a dark space at the edge of things; a free-fire zone in which things seen in other parts of the book and things remembered can affect that which stands in the light.

"I wanted to bury words in those borders as a kind of visual echo of the words being used in the poem, a metaphor for where words come from in one way of creating poetry: hearing echoes of sound and meaning from other places. This process is pursued in other, later books.

"I cut a female form out of a background of zinc and wood, and then cut it in half so that there were four blocks which were then manipulated and printed in a variety of colours. The jar that stands in the door is both a woman's thick-waisted torso, and a jar which is cut up, dismembered and moved around. It was a tilt back to my designer past, making a page move almost in a cinematographic way through the book, in the spaces between the two verses. It was a very formal piece, a very sculptural thing to do. So the book is about joy and darkness, and the sensual face of this world, and the fact that death moderates all."
£1500 (Last three copies)

AbaB
By Ken Campbell
London, England: 1984. Edition of 50.

9.25 x 13.5"; 68 concertina-folded pages. Formed from 17 joined sheets as one long strip, pasted onto heavy endboards of varnished wood, in a cloth slipcase. Silkscreened by Jim Birnie at Norwich School of Art on Heritage Rag acid-free paper.

Ken Campbell: "''I wrote and artworked the book in three parallel and overlapping lines that run its length disregarding the concertina folds. The centre line records a conversation that took place between 'A' and 'B'. It stands as a proposition for a piece of sculpture, and also floats whisky on 'an ocean made of paper.' The other two lines help or hinder the progress of this notion: all three lines are in expanded or condensed woodletter forms deployed to assist this book's stammering progress from left to right.

"I had two cases of woodletter, of different printing heights: one Anglo-American, an extra fatfaced serif; the other Didot, a Continental sans serif, very condensed and beautiful. They were so different in their respective fatness and thinness that they represented the polar ends of type design. As an act of cussedness I thought to do a book that brings the two together and see what happens. A formal problem to run ragged the poetry to come. Then I thought of an ocean made of paper; 'think of an ocean, think of a notion.' The text followed a conversation between 'A' (me) and 'B' (Bruce Brown, in brown). We were discussing Borgesian convolutions. We began thus: A: 'Think of a sea.' B: 'You mean the letter?' A: 'No an ocean made of paper...' The conversation continued and I wrote it down. This was the first time I had generated text for a specific book. Up to that point the books had been slim volumes of verse attempting to break out of that mould."
£500

The Maker's Hand
Twenty books by Ken Campbell. Introduction by Marcia Reed.
London, England: Ken Campbell, 2001.

9.375 x 12"; 104 numbered pages. Written, designed and published by Ken Campbell. Printed by Specialblue, London. 70 colour photographs and 16 monochrome images.

Trade edition, open. Softcover with glossy black pictorial covers.
Deluxe edition of 100. Hardcover with glossy black pictorial covers. Signed and numbered by the artist.

Ken Campbell: "The Maker's Hand is about the twenty artist's books that I have made between 1975 and 2000. The publication marked an exhibition of my artist's books at the Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel, Germany, which opened in March 2001. There is an introductory essay by Marcia Reed, Curator of Rare Books, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles. The Maker's Hand' gives an insight into the physical and mental processes deployed during each title's gestation and might be seen as an affordable reader in my work as a book artist over the past 25 years."
£ 35 trade edition
£100 deluxe edition