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Horton hears a universe

You know, I spent the whole time I was at Codex just trying to process everything around me. I thought the few weeks since that I’ve been telling stories and rehashing memories would make it easier to sort it out in my mind, but I still just can’t seem to articulate the impressions bouncing around the inside of my skull.

It was just too big … too rich … too much.

Which probably explains why I never managed to get any decent photos. I was too busy standing there goggling at the enormity of it all to document the experience properly. It was all I could do just to man my own table and keep track of all the folks who stopped by to talk to me.

Let me backtrack a bit, and explain what all of this was about. For every discipline, subculture or interest group out there, there’s some sort of club, or society, or conference, or symposium, or bee, or knitting night, or comicon, or hot-dog-eating contest, or what-have-you—some organized gathering for like-minded people to get together and share what they do. If you can think of it, there’s probably a group of people meeting about it somewhere.

The trouble with the book arts is that our world is small and spread out. There aren’t too many of us who do this sort of thing in the first place, at least when compared to photographers, or children’s book writers, or web developers. And then within our little group, everybody follows such a different path that getting us together is like herding cats. We’re hard to pin down because there’s a whole universe in our little speck of dust. Printing, bookbinding, papermaking and typesetting are just the tip of the iceberg. Within each of those disciplines is an incredibly broad spectrum of different and often contradictory artists and art forms. And yet each of those fits comfortably, easily, infinitely under the same, paradoxically small umbrella of the book arts. (Now you know why I’m not great at elevator speeches.) If you tried to graph it out, you’d end up with either the world’s best or worst Venn Diagram—I can’t decide.

So because we run such a crazy gamut, we can’t be shoehorned in neatly with some other event, even though the “average” book artist can and probably does moonlight quite easily as a dozen other things. There’s no “book arts corner” at SXSW, or BlogHer, or the Venice Biennale. Exhibitions and summits dedicated entirely to the book arts are few and far between—large international events are rare, indeed. So for our lot, Codex is a big deal.

This year there were over 140 exhibitors at the book fair, representing artists in every conceivable discipline and style, and every corner of the globe. The exhibitors hailed from 20 states and over a dozen countries outside the U.S., including Russia, Germany, France, Israel, Colombia, Japan, Mexico and Canada.

And it isn’t just for artists: students, educators, private collectors, librarians, museum curators, conservators and archivists, hobbyists, publishers, supply vendors, gallery reps and dealers, bookstore owners, clubs and organizations, and every stripe of enthusiast were in attendance.

Photo courtesy of the Codex Foundation.

So yeah. Codex is huge.

It was both intimidating and inspiring. I was immediately and constantly confronted with my own insignificance (I kept imagining that at any moment, some cartoon alarm would go off—woop! woop! woop!—alerting everyone to the fact that I didn’t belong there)—yet at the same time, everyone I met was warm and welcoming.

I had the chance to catch up with old friends, meet many of my long-admired art-heroes, and be introduced to a whole host of new faces.

But most of all, Codex was completely, utterly overwhelming. I had my brain cranked up into overdrive for four solid days. After meeting literally hundreds of people, answering thousands of questions, asking another thousand myself, handling many dozens of handmade books and artworks, absorbing new information and taking copious notes, and just being exposed to the ultimate sensory overload of it all—well, by the end, I was a deer in the headlights.

And I feel like I barely scratched the surface of what was there. Imagine that you’re visiting the Louvre, or the Smithsonian, or some other enormous museum. Only instead of picking and choosing which galleries and pieces to see, and making your way through room by room, you discover that every painting, every sculpture, every piece of art in the whole place is crammed into one huge hall—each with the artist who made it standing to the side, waiting to meet you and hear what you think. I’d go mad—I think I did go mad!

Everything I saw was phenomenal—it was hard not to just stand there, slack-jawed, struck dumb by the realization that there I was, in close proximity to some of the best work being done by anyone, anywhere.

I could go on and on. And I’m sure there were a thousand other great things I never had a chance to see, because I also had a table to man. Jessica and I made the trip together (that’s her showing one of her books), and as we had adjacent tables—

—we met in the middle with our Dead Feminists stuff between us.

Jessica’s done Codex once before, so she was prepared for the overwhelming onslaught of people. She suggested that we put together a letterpress-printed take-away catalog of our work so that after the fair, when everyone was just as dazed as I was, they’d have something to remember us by. (And that ended up being a great idea, and a big hit—we had tons of follow-up messages afterward, and we didn’t see anything like the catalog at the book fair.)

Since we collaborate on so many things, we decided to combine our efforts into one joint catalog—with a twist.

We figured we had an opportunity to clear up a little of the confusion over who does what around here, so we had fun playing with the design possibilities. Jessica came up with a flip-flop format, and I designed two covers that would come together at the spine to form a single image if laid flat.

Held one way, you’d read her half of the catalog; flip it over and read from the back, and it becomes my half. We converged in the middle with a Dead Feminist “centerfold” (ha!).

For my part, the most gratifying part of Codex was watching a steady crowd playing with Local Conditions. The response people had to the book was both intensely gratifying and humbling—and it was wonderful to see that students, fellow artists, dealers, curators, professors and collectors were equally excited about it. But my favorite bit was being a bystander to all the different scenes people designed with the image flats.

The cow completely stole the show there. It was hilarious to see how many times it turned up in a scene, either a fitting addition I hadn’t thought of—or as an absurdly out-of-place monster.

(Best of all was the cow that stood on the airplane wing and pretended to be a gremlin.)

It’s hard to remember that we were in a city as fabulous as Berkeley—the folks at Codex had created a complete world just in that one room. (Though we did get out enough to discover that when the overstimulation had us in a daze, a hot-cookie ice cream sandwich down the street was just the ticket. Thank you, Berkeley!) The next fair is two years away, but I came home with what seemed like a decade’s worth of inspiration. And I find I’m already looking forward to Codex 2013—sensory overload and all.

Bring it on. I’ll be there.