I went down to Washington DC for a quick minute last month; there’s some funny things about it. For one thing, there’s a strange lack of food in places you would expect to find it, except for too-expensive food carts that all have the same signage:

The city itself is really surprisingly small. I went for a run and almost ended up in Maryland. Other things that you expect to be big are small, and vice versa. I went partly to see this exhibit at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History. Which turned out to be only two small cases, with some books. Once there were billions indeed.

I comforted myself with an assortment of taxidermy:

And a visit to the birdhouse at the National Zoo:

The transit system was sufficiently dystopian:

The signs outside of the tourist zone were EXCELLENT:

All in all a good trip.

Training. I’m still getting used to the whole “running in the evening” thing. My left foot has a touch of plantar fasciitis, the spelling of which freaks me out. Double i’s? I wake up Tuesday morning starving and tired and hobbling. I feel slower than last year, but can’t tell for sure until it gets cooler. The pictures are pretty, though:

I get to watch boats sail by while working. More soon.

Guess what I get to do for the next five months?

Take a boat to my studio!

I’m one of the artists in this session of the LMCC Swing Space residency on Governor’s Island. I’ll have space there till the middle of December to work on new and exciting free informational pamphlets. I just started this weekend and it’s glorious.

I love that I can go there during the week when it’s not open to the public. I remember that the first summer it was open, I went and was amazed by the abandoned ghost town quality of the place, which is disappearing now, what with the dance parties and teeming crowds of families and the carnival rides. But it’s quieter during the week, even with construction and rehabilitation of the old buildings going on.

Here’s some photos of the buildings on the island leftover from its time as a military base:

the obsolete technology.

Took the day off yesterday and did something pleasant.

The print show at MOMA is great and there’s a Dieter Roth show for the book fan in you as well.  The teenagers next to  me really liked the bunnies made out of bunny droppings.

But my favorite was the video installation of the elephant walking slowly in circles.  Very relaxing. (It’s on the internet too! You can watch it here, though smaller.)

Birds books didn’t start with John James Audubon, and they didn’t end there either. Before Audubon, there was Mark Catesby, who in 1722 was sent by the Royal Society to the Carolinas on a plant-collecting expedition.

Over the next four years Catesby traveled around Eastern North America and the West Indies, collecting samples of plant and animal life. After returning to England, he spent seventeen years working on his Natural History of Carolina, Florida, and the Bahama Islands: drawing samples and etching plates himself for the publication, the first to use large. folio-sized color plates in a natural history book.

He learned to do the engraving and hand-coloring of the plates himself to keep the cost of producing it down, bookmaking being as foolish a financial investment then as it it today. He painted more birds than anything else, placing them in the middle of the page with some element of their habitat. It is the first true ornithological text dealing with American birds, and sparked a wave of interest in the topic.

AND you can read his masterwork here, online, because the internet is amazing, when it’s not terrible:

Biodiversity Heritage Library

In the interest of research for my new book, I went to the American Museum of Natural History on Sunday; it’s a strange place, which I haven’t visited in years. I thought I knew what natural history was, but perhaps I’m wrong about that. In any case, I enjoyed taxidermy at its finest. Birds of the World! (and also of NY State.)

Also some mammals:

This year I’ll be working on a new book project: a field guide to extinct birds. There, I’ve said it, now it has to happen. At this point I’m thinking about producing it in three versions: a deluxe letterpress edition in a box with accompanying prints; a digitally-printed version with a letterpress wrapper; and an animation that you can watch for free-which will actually be different content, but complimentary, talking about migration.

I’m interested in the field guide since it’s one of those kinds of books that probably aren’t going to continue to exist in paper form for much longer-digital apps just seem like they will do the job of helping you identify a birds much quicker and easier that a field guide can, what with video and sound and all. But whenever I see birders in Prospect Park, they’re still carrying their dog-eared paper books with them. I have a feeling that the average birder is pretty attached to whichever field guide they began birding with. And the ways that people have come up with to classify and represent birds in two-dimensional form so that an amateur can identify them is interesting, and the ways that has evolved over the years is interesting, and amateur scientists are always interesting, and so on…

To start off, I’ve been collecting field guides of my own, and drawing up a reading list on the history of birding in America. Here’s some of the guides I’ve been accumulating:

And here’s what is going to be an invaluable help, Extinct Birds, by Errol Fuller, who has apparently written the definitive book on the subject, covering more than eighty species that have disappeared since 1600. He’s also written a book called Dodo, and one on the Great Auk. Apparently the Great Auk book is partly about the bird itself, and partly about all of the stuffed auks in collections around the world, all of the egg specimens, and the collectors who have collected these items. I’m super excited to get my hands on that one.

I’m still not totally sure where I’m going with it at this point, but there will be birds, there will be some history of birding, and some discussion of the process of extinction. Good start, no? Aside from Errol Fuller, I’ve been reading up on John James Audubon. Here’s a great biography, if you’re interested.

I started making pamphlets because I live in New York, and something that we have a lot of here are people who stand out in public and scream and yell about something, the thing varying, but the tone of voice generally similar. And when I pass these people if I am not paying much attention I generally find myself agreeing with them, at least in intention, if not in detail. There are many reasons for this, some of them being:

1. Aesthetics. I come from a family that is full of mentally unstable alcoholics, who spend most of their time shouting and gesticulating wildly, so when I come across strangers in public acting similarly, it’s like home.

2. Often, what they are shouting about is generally related to Our Imminent Death, and How We Should Think About These Things. Which I really do completely agree with, even if I’m totally paying attention. I’m 100% behind the idea that we are all going to die really soon, and we should all be thinking about that, because that’s really important. I think I probably come to different conclusions that they do on the subject of what to do about that fact. But still.

3. They often have printed materials that they would like you to read. This one really gets me: Because usually it’s religious printed materials, which means that they are trying to give you a pamphlet because they think it is going to save your soul. Think about the level of faith in the printed word that that demonstrates. I love me some print, but I have never run something through a press and then taken a look at what I have done and thought, Now this is going to get someone into heaven.

I really have only half the amount of faith in print that the average proselytizer has, but in honor of that staggering leap of faith I make free informational pamphlets. I’m working on a new one right now, based on the 17th century, a heyday for the pamphlet in many ways. Hopefully it will be done this fall, fingers crossed.

This past weekend was the NY Art Book Fair, which means I got to table-sit amongst the finest in artist publications, and their legions of fans. Look at all of these people who came  to Queens just to look at paper books with pages and obscure content in person!

It makes me think there’s still hope. And this was on the less crowded third floor. Below us was a hot sweaty madhouse. Is there a portal to hell in PS1? Because it’s always so damn hot at the book fair.

I promoted the Center and its programs and sold some pamphlets, and talked to nice people that I like. I bought this, my one and only purchase, which I love:

From Lubok Verlag, whose books I always love and have been coveting for the past two fairs.  From their website:

Since 2007 a series of original graphic linocut books is published by Lubok Verlag. For each volume publisher and artist Christoph Ruckhäberle invites about 10 contemporary artists to realize their own artistic signature in linocuts. The artists happily accept the challenge and often use the Lubok series as an experimental field. The results are correspondingly manifold….Lubok books thereby continue a russian tradition of the same named popular broad sheets: inexpensive originally printed graphics that were sold on funfairs well into the 19th century. Like then art should become available for broad sections of the population, should become democratized without losing the pleasure of an original, its colours, its haptics and its smell.

My book, by the way, smells wonderful. Look at the beautiful press they print on!

I love everything about this. I should start sending them pamphlets. This is what the insides look like:

The names of the artists are printed on the fore edge in red:

Wonderful.

This makes my heart beat faster.

TheMiehle