http://lostbooks.deviantart.com/journal/16501216/ Fri, 22 Feb 2008 16:14:43 PST

Lost Book Finds Use in Real World
First of many, I suspect.



The winner of our DREAM BOOK CONTEST, is , with her Key to Imagination:



WHAT IS THE LOST BOOK CLUB AND MUSEUM?

It is a gallery of fragments, both text and image artifacts, connected by a common theme: The Deconstruction and Reimagining of Books and Book Culture in our Post-Literate Age.

EXAMPLES: Fragments of ancient texts in forgotten languages, scientific & technical illustrations from unknown sciences and technologies, false starts of books, covers or title pages for non-existent books, impossible bindings, enigmatic fragments of torn burned or rotted pages from mysterious religious works, histories, cosmologies, fragments of art, diaries, found poetry, interesting scraps of paper found in the street, books made of unexpected materials or hollowed out to contain unexpected objects, banned, burned, forbidden, unfinished, unwritten books, unidentified alphabets, hieroglyphs, ideograms, iconography, books from prehistory, books from the future, books from parallel universes, books with built-in lenses and peep-holes, pop-up books with animated scenes, magical books, books of pressed flowers, pressed bugs, pressed dreams and nightmares, catalogs of stains and odors, unnatural histories, abnormal philosophies, Readers' Digress condensed and compacted books, Books of tree rings and geological strata, books of Tibetan sand paintings that spill into the gutters as you turn the pages, broken books exposing their inner workings, or with their guts spilling out, neodada collage, putting bits of image and text together haphazardly like the early attempts to reassemble dinosaur bones, books made of folded-spindled-mutilated IBM punch-cards, books written in UPC code, suggestive receipts and office memos, shopping lists and telephone doodles, fragments of catalogs of fragments of catalogs of fragments, et cetera, et cetera...

(The above list of examples is, itself, a good example of an acceptable text submission)

SUBMISSIONS: Entries may take the form of images of these artifacts, text descriptions of physical artifacts, text excerpts from lost books, and/or image and/or text explorations of things related to the main themes of this club. As with other clubs, you submit via note with a link to the image or text already placed in your personal gallery.

IMPORTANT NOTE: I, James Koehnline shall be, for the foreseeable future, the sole curator, librarian, gatekeeper and judge, making all decisions regarding what gets into the club gallery.

If the quality is high and the quantity sufficient I may have discussions with the contributors of the best submissions regarding the possibility of publishing a real book in the form of a catalog of our imaginary museum.

I am looking forward to hearing from you who find this an interesting experiment.

MEMBERSHIP CATEGORIES

To be a member you must add the club to your Friends List, and choose your membership category. There are to be two categories, and you are welcome to sign up for both, if you like.

1. DONORS: This is for those of you who intend to submit works from your own galleries to The Lost Book Club and Museum. Submitti... ]]> *lostbooks http://lostbooks.deviantart.com/journal/16368893/ http://lostbooks.deviantart.com/journal/16368893/ Fri, 18 Jan 2008 20:44:35 PST Finalists Announced



I have chosen five finalists. It was difficult, and I have decided to leave you with the freedom to vote for an entry that I have not included among the finalists. You get one vote and you have one week, until Saturday night (Jan. 19) at Midnight PST. One winner gets all the prizes: a one-year subscription to DA (from member *Adeimantus, a print of your choice from my works in the club gallery, a feature in the club journal and a news item. Vote via note, please.

FINALISTS





ENTRIES



http://lostbooks.deviantart.com/journal/15897374/ Thu, 10 Jan 2008 22:05:41 PST Finalists to be Announced Very Soon

Sorry for the delay. I will get to it this weekend.

Our club subscription, which would have expired December 21st, has been extended through the generosity of Leonard Clagett , early Scout and Donor, and now the first Patron of the Lost Book Club. Thank you Leonard!



Dream Book Contest Now Open for Entries
Prize Package Growing!

This may be premature, but I have decided to announce a contest. As prizes I am offering a print of your choice from my works in the club gallery, a feature in the club journal and a news item. In addition, our newest Scout, *Adeimantus, has pledged a one-year subscription to DA for the winner.
Thank you, !

The theme of the contest is DREAM BOOK, which you can make of what you will - a book that appeared to you in a dream, a book you daydreamed or pipedreamed, or a book that explains all dreams. Or perhaps it is a catalog of dreams that you can choose to have. Whatever you decide it is, your entry should be its cover, its title page or a sample page from the inside.

It can be an illustration in any media, or pure typography. Plain text will also be accepted - and could win - but I encourage you writers to try to make a page image. I find it much more satisfying than default font/formatting on the screen. Works already in the gallery are acceptable, as are other works already completed.

Entries will be displayed in the club journal, and all of the ones I really like will end up in the permanent gallery.

The contest is open to all deviants. Entries should be submitted via note, with "contest" in the subject line, and a thumbnail or link to the piece in your gallery. I will choose a group of five finalists, and the membership will decide the winner. Deadline for entries is Decmber 31st, 2007.

You may now begin dreaming books.

I'd also appreciate any help with spreading the word, and the donation of any additional prizes.

ENTRIES


http://lostbooks.deviantart.com/journal/15342681/ Tue, 04 Dec 2007 23:59:12 PST


"Vertical Complexity Engine" was a term coined by Brian Eno and applied to a method of his for producing ambient music. It involves inputting a relatively small number of elements, but combining them in as many different ways as possible. My Chaos Chronometer: [link] employed this idea to produce collages. At one frame per second it takes twelve days to repeat the same collage. There are only eighty image elements, but they combine in over a million ways before repeating. I did this five years ago, and it was only a prototype. I just never got back to it to switch in better images.

What I'm wondering now is how many interesting ways we might come up with (possible and impossible, serious and whimsical) to make a book that is a vertical complexity engine. Something to think about while you are all working hard on your entries for the Dream Book Contest, which I am sure are coming... aren't they?

I guess you could say that Julio Cortazar"s "Hopscotch" was such a book, and Borges seems to have something like this in mind in his story, "The Garden of Forking Paths." Other examples from actual literature would be appreciated as well. If I get enough material together (images welcome, too) I'll give it a journal page. Thank you for indulging me.
________________________________________

Dream Book Contest Now Open for Entries
Prize Package Growing!

This may be premature, but I have decided to announce a contest. As prizes I am offering a print of your choice from my works in the club gallery, a feature in the club journal and a news item. In addition, our newest Scout, *Adeimantus, has pledged a one-year subscription to DA for the winner.
Thank you, !

The theme of the contest is DREAM BOOK, which you can make of what you will - a book that appeared to you in a dream, a book you daydreamed or pipedreamed, or a book that explains all dreams. Or perhaps it is a catalog of dreams that you can choose to have. Whatever you decide it is, your entry should be its cover, its title page or a sample page from the inside.

It can be an illustration in any media, or pure typography. Plain text will also be accepted - and could win - but I encourage you writers to try to make a page image. I find it much more satisfying than default font/formatting on the screen. Works already in the gallery are acceptable, as are other works already completed.

Entries will be displayed in the club journal, and all of the ones I really like will end up in the permanent gallery.

The contest is open to all deviants. Entries should be submitted via note, with "contest" in the subject line, and a thumbnail or link to the piece in your gallery. I will choose a group of five finalists, and the membership will decide the winner. Deadline for entries is Decmber 31st, 2007.

You may now begin dreaming books.

I'd also appreciate any help with spreading the word, and the donation of any additional prizes.

FIRST ENTRIES

*lostbooks http://lostbooks.deviantart.com/journal/14728051/ http://lostbooks.deviantart.com/journal/14728051/ Thu, 22 Nov 2007 22:46:44 PST LINKS:

Brody Neuenschwander Art Great text and book related art.
[link]

Jean Benoit's "Encasement for the Manuscript of Les Champs Magnetiques" ("Les Champs Magnetiques" or "The Magnetic Fields", 1920, was a book by Andre Breton and Philippe Soupault, which Breton called the first surrealist book). This is a page scanned from the catalog of the 1976 World Surrealist Exhibition in Chicago, "Marvelous Freedom, Vigilance of Desire". I spent a lot of time there. I also inserted a couple other small photos of this remarkable book cover: [link]

Secret Books: Unpublished Images by Sean Kernan. Photos that didn't make it into his book of Borges-inspired images: [link]

Brian Dettmer carves into books revealing the artwork inside, creating complex layered three-dimensional sculptures. [link]

Internet Sacred Text Archive The largest freely available archive of online books about religion, mythology, folklore and the esoteric on the Internet. The site is dedicated to religious tolerance and scholarship, and has the largest readership of any similar site on the web. [link]

Undeciphered Scripts: [link]

The Codex Borbonicus is an Aztec codex written by Aztec priests shortly before or after the Spanish conquest of Mexico. The codex is named after the Palais Bourbon in France. [link]

An amazing book from Alphonse Louis Constant, (February 8, 1810 - May 31, 1875) a French occult author and magician, alias ELIPHAS LEVI.
[link]

Rare Book Room: A company called "Octavo" embarked on digitally photographing some of the world ’s great books from some of the greatest libraries. This site contains all of the books (about 400) that have been digitized to date. These range over a wide variety of topics and rarity. The books are presented so that the viewer can examine all the pages in medium to medium-high resolution. [link]

THE OCCULT: An Exhibition of material from the Monash University Library Rare Book Collection 4 June-24 July 1998: [link]

Science and the Artist's Book, an exhibition by the Smithsonian Institution Libraries and the Washington Project for the Arts is an exhibition which explores links between scientific and artistic creativity through the book format: [link]

The Getty Museum: The Artist Turns to the Book. This 2005 exhibition features works from the Research Library at the Getty Research Institute, which holds over 5,000 artists' books and several artists' archives: [link]

CFPR Artists' Book Exhibitions & Events Archives: [link]

Sudanese Zoomorphic Calligraphy on BibliOdessey:
[link]

The City of Dreaming Books by Walter Moers.
[link]

A History of Reading by Alberto Manguel
[link]

autoportret Issue on "Spaces of Books".
[link]

LIBERATURE: appendix to a dictionary of literary terms by Zenon Fajfer
[link]

Book Art Site (in Polish)
[link]

Piotr Rypson, Books and Pages. Polish Avant-garde and Artist's Books in the 20th Century
[link]

The Guild of Bookworkers: The National Organization for All the Book Arts.
The Guild of Book Workers was founded in 1906 to "establish and maintain a feeling of kinship and mutual interest among workers in the several hand book crafts."