Introduction
The Art of the Book '08 show celebrates the 25th anniversary of the Canadian Bookbinders and Book Artists Guild.
The exhibit was held at the Ontario Craft Council Gallery in Toronto in October 2008, and featured work in fine printing, paper making, box making, fine binding and artists' books.
The exhibition was freely available to visitors, but there was no touching permitted, and while pictures of displays and groupings were allowed, close-ups of individual works were not. Some images, therefore, have been taken from the online exhibition; the rest are my own. Images in the box to the right are thumbnails - to view full size versions, click on the image. You may use your browser's back button to return to the text.
Most links within the text of this website are to external resources and will open in a new window, while links provided in the navigation bar are my own, and will open in this window.
In his essay, Peter Sramek discusses considerations used to evaluate the works selected for the exhibition. These include coherence of concept, content, enclosure, and structure; the relation between contents and form, and ‘bookness'.
It seems clear that some attributes must remain of what constitutes a book, be they pages or binding, linking of sequential content, etc. Exactly where the boundaries lie is a topic constantly under debate. The jury suggested that, "Straying too far from the book's functionality" was problematic.
While the printing, paper and box making, and fine binding category offerings were beautifully done, it was the artists' books which were the most interesting. They provide excellent fodder for considering the question 'What is a book?'
