Artist's Book: Confidence

This small book measures 95mm x 95mm.
Stitched binding, 12 pages printed in black & white with a pink centerspread.
Each book contains elements tipped-in by hand, such as tickets, cards and rubber stamps.
Produced in editions of 25, First Edition produced in 1997.

This book was inspired by the idea of cheating. There are pages on how to cheat at various games such as monopoly, cards, rolling dice as well as bigger cons such as winning a raffle through to the lottery jackpot. The book itself however, is as fake as the cheats it describes, obviously written by a fraudster. This book comes with a slipcase belonging to a different book (sporting themes), in order to hide Confidence on the bookshelf - The slipcases all have unique titles. The tone is humorous targeting the gullible who believe you can really, get-rich-quick.

Artist's Book: Surely Not!

The book measures 102mm x 202mm.

Stiched binding, containing 8 pages, a central gatefold on orange card with an orange card cover. 

This book was part of my practice-based PhD on anxiety in advertising.

This book was inspired by the notion that, when looked at closely, smoking a cigarette is a strange activity. The Bob Newhart monologue 'The Introduction of Tobacco to Civilisation' is a case in point. Smoking is not a basic need such as eating or drinking but rather a skill that, once the fundamentals are learnt, requires practice and patience to develop. The "believe-it-or-not" strategy was based loosely on Ripley's regular feature in newspapers and collections from the 'fifties, but the images were developed from cigarette advertisements from the U.S. between 1938-72 and then redrawn to place emphasis on the absurdity of the activity. Grubby marks on the illustrations were enhanced to give the feel the images are 'dirty' as printed.

I composed the text in a style aiming to satirise the short-snappy 'Amazing Facts' tone of children' comics or encyclopedias. Texts aimed at younger readers often seem to convey the anxiety that the reader will tire of a subject should the copy spread to more than 5 lines. I have made sure that the concepts in Surely Not jump breathlessly from theme to theme at high speed never allowing the reader to dwell on one story for long. The font chosen was one resembling a style often employed in comics to give the feeling that the text had been hand written. 'Comic Sans' is heavy and stolid but its informal structure tries desperately to imply jollity. The central gatefold shows the Smoking Beagle, hopefully reminding the reader of the vast number of beagles that were used to test cigarettes (to public outrage in the late eighties). The gatefold was designed to sit on orange heavy weight paper, along with the cover. The main pages were printed on 130g cartridge paper. The orange and white colours are reminiscent of the colours used in marketing a regular cigarette of the period.

This book is held in various permanent collections including:

The V&A Museum, UK

Golda-Meir Library, UWM LIbraries, Milwaukee, USA

The Culture Archive, Brighton, UK

Eton College Library, UK

Joan Flasch Artists’ Book Collection, Chicago, USA

The British Library, London, UK

St. Peter's House Library, Brighton, UK

Knights Park Library, Kingston University, Kingston-Upon-Thames, UK

Howard Gardens Library, University of Wales Institute, Cardiff, South Wales

Artist's Book: Null and Void

This small book measures 100mm x 100 mm
Folding concertina with 17 pages printed in black and white with spot red.
Produced in editions of 17, first produced in Brighton in 1999.

A humorous if bogus history of the concept of 'zero' packaged in a bag so that 'nothing' falls out.

First edition cover

Artist's Books List

These are the links to all my artist’s books. There are also direct links on the right side of this blog menu. Click on a thumbnail to visit the site.