{"id":17261,"date":"2013-02-06T08:35:42","date_gmt":"2013-02-06T14:35:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/?p=17261"},"modified":"2020-02-12T10:23:41","modified_gmt":"2020-02-12T16:23:41","slug":"red-queen-book-arts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/red-queen-book-arts\/","title":{"rendered":"Red Queen Book Arts: Melissa Sanders opens a showcase for artists’ books on Broadway"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"redqueen\"<\/a><\/p>\n

photos by Kelly Green<\/span><\/p>\n

Throughout history, advancements in technology have brought about significant changes for the book. In the 15th century the printing presses began making the written word available to the masses and today a person can tote around an entire library on a Kindle. The full impact of the information age on the book has yet to be seen, and forums like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology\u2019s (MIT) 2012 symposium \u201cUnbound: Speculations on the Future of the Book\u201d demonstrate that even some of the greatest minds can only speculate about the future of books. While many are predicting the disappearance of books as we know them, other people see arrival of the ebook as an opportunity. Melissa Sanders, owner of Red Queen Book Arts, the first book arts gallery in Salt Lake City, sees an analogy to the arrival of photography. \u201cPhotography came along and freed painting from the need to be representational.\u201d Electronic books are having a similar effect on books she believes, and \u201cthe result, to me, is all of this playful stuff we have going on in the artist’s book world.\u201d<\/p>\n

Visitors who step through the door of Red Queen Book Arts, which held its grand opening on January 19, will find themselves in a showroom of creative work that may illustrate the future of books: books as art. Sanders is drawn to the art form, in part, because of its ability to pose questions to the viewer and challenge him or her to redefine exactly what a book is. \u201cYou talk to someone and ask, \u2018What\u2019s an artist’s book or what are the book arts?\u2019 and you\u2019re going to get individual answers from everyone, which I love. It\u2019s kind of like a Venn diagram where everybody falls a little differently where their overlaps are. Is it a book if it doesn\u2019t have pages but it does have text? — I have a scroll snake book over there; I would call that a book but maybe somebody else wouldn\u2019t –versus what if it has pages but no text, is that a book?\u201d Sanders asks.<\/p>\n

The scroll snake book by Sara Press is a paper snake coiled inside an egg. After opening the egg and lifting the snake out, one reads text on spirals of paper. \u201cThere is a current evolutionary theory that one of the reasons we have such good peripheral vision is because we coevolved with lethal threats like snakes. This book is meant to bring that up as a theory and both visually and viscerally suggest maybe that\u2019s true,\u201d Sanders says. Another example of a book that challenges traditional form is\u00a0I, Robot<\/em>. The small piece could be mistaken for a child\u2019s action figure, when its message is actually more profound. An accordion of pages can be pulled gently from the robot\u2019s back, and an origin story is told. \u201cIt\u2019s a little book explaining that, with all due respect to Isaac Asimov who wrote the three laws of robotics and became pretty well known for that, the guy who coined the term robot was actually a Czech man named Karel \u010capek.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sanders first came across\u00a0I, Robot<\/em>\u00a0at the Seattle Book Fair in 2007 when the Miniature Book Society of America\u2019s meeting coincided with the annual fair. She was charmed by the piece, which was one of the catalysts for her love of art books. The daughter of renowned antiquarian book dealer Ken Sanders, she discovered her general love of books at a much younger age.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy dad used to take us in to Utah Book and Magazine on Main Street. We would wander the stacks and he would buy us any used books. We\u2019d both come home with not just a bag of books, but one or two paper grocery bags full of books,\u201d she says. When Sanders was a teenager, her father asked her to help him at book fairs where he would sell and acquire antiquarian books. She traveled the country and recalls seeing the first American edition of Charles Darwin\u2019s famous work, \u201cOn the Origin of Species,\u201d and viewing books signed by Albert Einstein. \u201cThat pretty much ruined me for any other kind of employment,\u201d she says. Sanders worked for her father full-time, only taking enough time off to earn an English degree from University of California, Berkeley. As she became more interested in the book arts, she found herself wanting a unique space to display her finds. \u201cI really wanted to be able to showcase them in the way I felt they deserved, and to spend more time with them,\u201d Sanders says.<\/p>\n

She has found a space for that showcase on Salt Lake\u2019s Broadway, right around the corner from her father\u2019s iconic shop. Her years of employment there didn\u2019t entirely prepare her for the new venture. \u201cI knew it would be mentally and physically exhausting but without the support that I had from my husband and my friends and relatives, I couldn\u2019t have done it,\u201d she says. But with a strong support network, she has been able to open the doors to Red Queen Book Arts. Her collection focuses on book arts from eras that she is particularly drawn to including Art Nouveau, Art Deco, and American Arts and Crafts.<\/p>\n

Sanders also has a fondness for Lewis Carroll and several shelves are dedicated to work by or inspired by the famous author. \u201cI\u2019m a huge fan of illustrated books. I love that he has stayed so current in pop culture throughout the years.\u201d She notes how many young people use phrases, like chortle, without knowing Carroll coined them. His words and the tales themselves remain compelling. \u201cBecause he\u2019s captured so many people\u2019s imaginations he\u2019s been constantly visually reinterpreted, and the best of them bring something new to the story.\u201d<\/p>\n

Just as Carroll is constantly being reinterpreted, so is the role of the book and Red Queen Book Arts is open to show people a new chapter of possibilities. \u201cMy hope is that people walk away with maybe a little more knowledge of what book arts are and that they walk away realizing that the world of books is maybe a little wider than what they thought it was when they walked in. That\u2019s exactly why we decided to have a showroom instead of an office with a locked door, because with this kind of material, no matter how many pictures you see of it, it\u2019s so physical. And we really wanted people here locally to have that experience of being able to see these things. The other reason behind that is a lot of the books I have here are one-of-a-kind, or one of only 5 copies in the world, or the next closest copy is 3,000 miles away. It is important for me to be able to do that kind of education and outreach,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

In the coming year, she hopes to educate people by bringing in work by local artists as well as a showcase of the tradition of papermaking. Sanders is also hoping to show the work of Jim Croft, a book artist who lives in Idaho. He makes his own paper, uses a stamp mill powered by the spring run off, and crafts book covers from the wood he takes off felled trees on his property. But even with the exotic displays, Sanders wants to stress that at her store she has something for everyone. The books at Red Queen sell for as little as $5 or for thousands of dollars. \u201cI really like people to come here and meet the books. So I want to encourage people to come here and browse. Part of my mission here is education and outreach, so I\u2019m not always trying to sell something; I just want to share what these books are about,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

Perhaps one thing book art is about is not only a demonstration of how technology has shaped books, but also how books have defied technology. \u201cWhen was the last time you tried to read a floppy disk on your computer? But if you went to the Marriott Library or BYU and asked to see a book from 1500, they have them and you can still read those,\u201d Sanders says. While the Kindle may go the way of the 8-track tape, and experts at MIT can only venture guesses about the future, there is one certainty: in one form or another books will endure.<\/p>\n