american narrative – PAPER SOUVENIR

Cause and Effect

This is an editioned artists’ book about how racial identity is formed through geography and history. It is an autobiographical story about the connections between a race riot in my hometown, my upbringing and my racial awareness. Cause and Effect is a drum leaf binding in an edition of 55. The content is letterpress printed on handmade paper with photopolymer plates. The imagery in the book consists of printed trompe-l’oeilstyle newspaper and microfilm clippings, which are reproductions of the sources I learned from.

16 pages, 5.75″x 8.25″ (closed), 2009

For more information, please download
the production summary. pdf

Collected by:
Lafayette College
Wesleyan University
Union College
University of Central Florida
Yale University
Texas Tech University
University of Vermont
University of California San Diego
University of California Los Angeles
Ella Strong Denison Library

Habitat

During the summer of 2007, I spent time in Mississippi working with the Biloxi Public Library on a book and document conservation project. I had never been to the Gulf Coast before. I was shocked by how much of Biloxi had been destroyed by Hurricane Katrina, and how little repair there had been since. The effect of this was even more powerful after I spent a few weeks working with people whose lives and homes had been completely altered by Hurricane Katrina’s destruction.

Habitat is a letterpress printed artist book about the effects of Hurricane Katrina on Biloxi. I used image and personal narrative, as well as historical and scientific facts to evoke the emotional side effects of a natural disaster. Habitat is a thirteen-fold accordion structure, made entirely of handmade paper. Experimental papermaking techniques, such as pulp painting and collage, are used to enhance the content.

Accordion, 13 folds. Letterpress printed on handmade paper with photopolymer type and image. 7″ x 10″, folded. Edition of 25. 2007.

Collected by:
Duke University, Perkins Library, Special Collections
Lafayette College, Special Collections
Mills College, Olin Library
Stanford University
Texas Tech University, Southwest Collections
University of California Santa Barbara, Davidson Library
University of California San Diego, Mandeville Collections
University of Delaware, Special Collections
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, Sloane Art Library
University of Washington, Special Collections
Wesleyan University, Olin Library, Special Collections

Ma’Cille’s Museum of Miscellanea

Ma’Cille’s Museum of Miscellanea
An incomplete catalog of the collection
Drawings by Glenn House, Sr.
Gordo, Alabama: Paper Souvenir Press, 2012.

This book is an attempt to catalog Ma’Cille’s Museum of Miscellanea ten years after it closed, based on the memories of the people who visited the museum and newspaper archives. Ma’Cille House, formal education stopped at 7th grade, began collecting for her museum in the 1950’s after she had raised seven children. She established her museum on a rural back road near Gordo, Alabama. By the time the museum closed 40 years later, it was a world famous, multi-building institution, visited by thousands of people. Before this book, the story of the museum was preserved primarily through the oral narratives circulating in the town of Gordo.

Ma’Cille’s Museum of Miscellanea is available as a deluxe letterpress edition and as a commercially printed edition.

Visit the Paper Souvenir etsy shop to purchase.

Deluxe edition, $400: Letterpress printed on textblock cotton rag handmade paper from Alabama clay colored t-shirts. Paper covered boards with exposed stab binding. Laid in a printed four-flap paper folder. 5.5 x 8.5 inches; 80 pages with five pull outs.

Laser printed open edition, $25: Laser printed with letterpress printed cover. One printed memento of Ma’Cille’s included (possible mementos: copy of Ma’Cille’s taxidermy ceritification, New York Times article about the museum from 1974, letter from game warden to Ma’Cille or Daddy Norman fishing poster.) 5.5 x 8.25 inches; 80 page