Bill and Vicky Stewart, proprietors of Vamp and Tramp Booksellers, will be visiting Furman on Thursday, January 21st, from 10-11:30 in the Pitts Room on the second floor of James B. Duke Library.
Vamp and Tramp is one of a select group of booksellers in this country who specialize in contemporary book art, artists’ books, fine press printing, and bookworks. They will be bringing a wide variety of new work from their respective artists and presses and will have them out for informal browsing in the Pitts Room. Bill and Vicky are interesting and extremely knowledgeable and they take their mission of education and evangelization for the book arts as seriously as any other part of their business. This is a rare occasion to see some of the best works from contemporary book artists across the country in one place AND in a hands-on environment. This event is for perusing and seeing the great work, not for promoting sales.
For a representative selection of the types of works to be seen, visit their website at: http://www.vampandtramp.com
Reliquary by Ginger Burrell: “It is not hard to imagine, in a not-so-distant future, a time when all but a few physical books have been destroyed. Perhaps to make room for more people, perhaps because everything has been digitized, or perhaps because they are no longer valued. “Reliquary represents the rarity of the last remaining paper copies. As with the fragments of the holy, the volume is too precious for anyone to hold in its entirety. Instead, small preserved pieces are parsed out to those most suitable to protect them, or those wealthy enough to acquire public treasure for private use. “Each Reliquary features 5 different books, 50 titles in total. Books are library discards that are shredded and displayed in glass test tubes with a cork stopper, sealed with beeswax, and tied with tag titles cut from the original books. Each set of 5 test tubes is presented in a display case.”
Elephants Dinosaurs & Dodos by Mari Eckstein Gower: “Recently, I read a newspaper article about poachers invading a game preserve in Tanzania and slaughtering a herd of elephants. They took only the tusks, leaving the rest of the animals’ carcasses to rot. And, the reason for this atrocity? The Asian illegal ivory market pays handsomely for the tusks to make chopsticks, key chains, and other brickabrack. Reading the story made me feel angry, sad, and sick to my stomach. Anger: because in my opinion, the world needs fewer key chains and more elephants. Sad: because these magnificent animals are dwindling at an alarming rate. And, sick to my stomach: because I feel helpless to stop this from happening. “So I did what I often do when I feel such strong emotions: I channeled them into art. Before I even started working on the visuals, the words, ‘do elephants dream of dinosaurs and dodos,’ came to me, setting the stage for how I would approach the project. I wanted the book to have the sense things dwindling and being lost. I chose to work with translucent parchment paper overlays, to give the pages a feeling that portions of the images were being peeled away just as the elephants are being peeled away from the African landscape. “I chose to start with images of mammoths from prehistoric cave paintings as a reminder: this has happened before. The rest of the poem and images seemed to flow naturally from that beginning. I don’t know how hopeful I am that we can save our animal treasures from extinction. But at the very, very least, I would like the world to understand the value of what is being lost.”