The Art Assignment

Hi.

I'm Ben Denzer.

I'm an artist and designer.

Your assignment is to make a book that's atypical in terms of its form or material.

A book doesn't have to look, or feel, or even taste, for that matter, like what you typically have on your shelf.

Look around your house or your neighborhood.

What do you find, and how can you make a book from those things?

I took a hardcover bookbinding class at this place called The Center for Book Arts in New York.

Taking a class on how to make a book really demystifies the process and shows you that this is actually just three rectangles glued onto a piece of flexible material, and you fold the edges, and then you have a hardcover book.

And so, it was through taking this class and realizing that I can make my own books, and then being at The Center for Book Arts-- its mission is to promote artists' books and book arts.

And they have a wonderful collection of artists' books there, and so I got to see examples of people treating the book itself as an artwork.

So Cadillac Press is a small edition artist press that I make and publish myself, where all the books are catalogs in one way or another.

So catalogs of images, catalogs of words, and catalogs of physical objects, playing with this idea of the book as an object.

And what is a book but a collection of things bound together?

And so how far can you stretch that?

So you go to the grocery store and you see a packet of slices of American cheese.

If you put a cover around it, then instantly it becomes a book.

So some of the books I've been making play with this idea of ready-mades, in a sense.

This is a book of 200 $1 bills that are used bills that I sorted in order of serial number.

This is a book that I recently made in quarantine of one roll of Charmin Ultra Strong toilet paper.

I recently made a book of scratch-off lottery tickets.

So this is 77 Lucky 7s, and so they're all lottery tickets that you can scratch-off.

So this book is worth potentially quite a bit, if all of these is a winner, but who knows.

I wanted to do a cover so that it would open perfectly flat, and so I went to a bookstore and looked at all of the kid's book section because there are board books which open perfectly flat.

The world of bookbinding is this kind of rabbit hole of lots of ways that people have figured out how to do things.

So there's normally always a solution, it's just a matter of inventing it or finding it.

I think part of the fun for me is trying to take this thing that people know and have an expectation for--the book.

People have bookshelves in their house, maybe, they have books around, so they kind of know what to expect.

So part of the fun for me is trying to subvert those expectations and finding interesting, ideally funny ways of doing that by using different materials, or different scales, or different ways of combining things.

And so I think there's no bad material for making a book.

So I think the most challenging book I've tried to bind together was this book I recently made at the University of Michigan called 20 Slices of Meat.

I've been wanting to make a book that was made out of 100% meat for quite a while.

And while I was there, I went to Zingerman's Deli, and they were kind enough to show me all the meats and guide me towards the mortadella.

And I got these huge slices of mortadella that I then had to figure out how to bind into a book.

So it was a process of trying different threads, different things from the butcher shop.

After a lot of experimentation, I ended up using Gorilla Glue, which on the bottle says, "This will stick to your fingers."

And meat is just like fingers, and so it worked out actually surprisingly well where I was able to perfectly bind this book of meat, gluing these mortadella slices together and making a cover and a spine all out of meat itself, and actually using the fat from mortadella to inlay the words, "20 Slices."

So it worked out really well, but it was quite a challenge to figure out how exactly to make it all stay together.

Making a book doesn't have to be difficult.

There are a few basic, easy ways to bind pages together.

One, you could perfect bind something, which means taking a stack of pages and gluing them along one side.

Another way to bind a loose stack of paper is stab-binding.

In stab-binding, you poke holes along the side of the page near your spine, and thread a thread through them.

Another method is simply folding.

You could fold paper to make an accordion book.

And lastly, there's signature sewing, which involves taking sheets and making signatures from them, and then binding these signatures together.

That's how this book works.

There are lots of things that are already books around you.

On your desk you may have a pad of Post-it notes, and that itself is a book.

You could either add content by writing on it, or leave it as it is.

There are things in your fridge, slices of things that are inherently already books.

You go outside, there are leaves all around you which can act as pages.

When you're going about this assignment, think about either trying a different weird material to use that might not be paper.

But if you want to use paper, what can you do with it that's different?

Can you fold it in an interesting way?

Can you make a book that's really tall, or really long, or is a circle?

There are all sorts of ways to take this assignment.

It's all about trying to deviate from the expected form of a rectangle book that you might have on your bedside table.