Amelia Bird

New Orleans, Louisiana

Walden Marginalia

paper, book cloth, book board

9½ x 6 x ¼ closed; 9½ x 12 open

edition of 50

© 2012

$500 (click here to order this book)

This artist’s book examines marginalia found in twelve copies of Walden and provides commentary on the reading habits of strangers, assumptions about nature writing and learning, and the lingering effects of Thoreau’s classic work. By withholding the original text to focus solely on margin notes, Walden Marginalia turns the same kind of close attention Thoreau inspired in his readers onto the readers themselves.

Letterpress printed with photopolymer plates and hand-set Scotch Roman and Bodoni types. Case binding.

Letterpress Erasure utilizes the process of letterpress printing to erase a pre-existing text. On each page, a single block of type has been erased by one of several reductive or additive methods. The visuals of this artist’s book are a tour of color and technique; the text is a commentary on the erasure poetics movement and erasure as both a creative, destructive, and collaborative act.

Multiple imagemaking methods were employed, including pressure printing, blind embossing, reduction
linoleum, various relief surfaces, and photopolymer plates. The structure is a variation of a paper case binding.

Amelia Bird is a book artist, writer, and educator living in New Orleans. She studied Nonfiction Writing and Book Arts at the University of Iowa and was recently a resident of the Women’s Studio Workshop. Her books can be found in a growing number of libraries and private collections.