Concertinas and Folded Structures
The largest group is the concertinas. A sheet of cartridge paper is folded and cut so it can be read two ways: page by page in sequence like an ordinary book, or opened out flat as one large image. Narrow Boat, Wooden Horse, Paper Plane, Folding Bike and Peter and Jane all work this way.
The structure is not a novelty. A screen print wants to be a single flat sheet, because that is what the press produces and what the drying rack holds. The concertina keeps the sheet intact and adds a reading order on top of it, so the same object can be a picture and a narrative without either being a compromise.
Folding Space Ship takes the idea further with a cross cut fold registered as a design, where the paper opens into a shape rather than a plane.
Science Fiction
A run of the books sits in science fiction: Folding Space Ship, Galactic Narrowboat, Europa, Planets, Alien Invasion and Journey to the Centre. The genre suits the medium. Flat colour, hard edges and a limited palette are how mid century paperback covers and Soviet space posters were printed too, and screen printing reaches that register without imitating it.
Picture Books and Satire
The Octopus Would Like to Put a Stop to Us, Invasive Species, The Dark Tribe, Cook Food Book, Frog Heart and We Will Rule the World are narrative picture books, several of them with a political edge that the flat poster language carries well. Money Printer began as a print and was sold as a folded book for part of its edition.
Visa and Solo, What Is to Be Done and the Modern Constructivist booklets are shorter pieces, some made for a single fair or shop.
Places
A smaller group works from specific locations instead of invented ones. Camino de Santiago came out of a pilgrimage walked in 2015. Flat Holm records an island in the Bristol Channel. Bristol Retail Centres turns a survey of ordinary shopping parades into a print series.
The Manuals
Alongside the picture books are the instructional titles: Screen Printing Manual, Advanced Screen Printing, Screen Printing Basics, Photoshop for Screen Printing, Multichannel and Image Making. These were made in the same way as the rest — screen printed, self published, small editions — which makes them unusual as technical books. A manual about separating colours for screen printing that is itself screen printed shows the result on every page it explains.
Photoshop for Screen Printing is the one that goes furthest in that direction. It covers the digital half of the job — converting an image to bitmap, choosing a halftone screen frequency and setting the angle of each colour’s dot grid — and then prints its own examples through a mesh, so the rosette on the page is the thing the text is describing and not a reproduction of it. The pages reproduced here show a Photoshop dialogue printed in flat blue beside a halftone circle in red, green and black, with the line frequency and screen angle of each colour printed underneath.
Screen Printing Manual and Screen Printing Basics cover the physical half: coating, exposing, washing out, registration and the press itself. Basics is the short booklet a beginner is handed; the manual is the longer reference behind it, and Advanced Screen Printing carries the exposure tests and tension figures that only matter once the basics are reliable.
Editions and Availability
Edition sizes run from a test edition of thirty to signed editions of one hundred, with most between forty and eighty. Several titles went out of print and were not reprinted; once screens are reclaimed, remaking an edition means remaking the stencils from the start.
Reclaim the screens and the edition is closed. A reprint starts from the stencils.
This catalogue is a record of the work and not a shop. Titles, formats, paper weights, colour counts and dates are listed as they were published.
Where the Books Were Shown
From 1995 the books travelled to artists’ book fairs in Britain, the United States, Germany, France, Italy and Spain. The circuit ran through the Small Publishers Fair and the London Art Book Fair at the Whitechapel Gallery, Artbook Berlin at the Kunstquartier Bethanien, the Minipressenmesse in Mainz, Codex in Richmond, California, Fruit in Bologna, Pages in Leeds, the Fine Press Fair in Oxford, BABE at the Arnolfini in Bristol, Ink Paper & Print at the Towner in Eastbourne, and Buchdruckkunst at the Museum der Arbeit in Hamburg.
A fair is the natural venue for books that have to be opened to be understood. Nothing in a photograph explains a cross-cut fold, and an edition of forty does not need a wider audience than the few hundred people who walk past a table over a weekend.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is an artists’ book?
A book made as the work itself, never as a container for a text written elsewhere. The format, the folding, the paper and the printing are all part of what it means, which is why every entry here lists the structure alongside the subject.
What does screen printed mean for a book?
Every colour on every page was pushed through a mesh screen by hand, one pass at a time. A four colour interior means four passes over every sheet in the edition, with the registration holding across all of them.
Why are the editions so small?
Because the press is hand operated and every copy passes through it once per colour. Runs between thirty and one hundred are what a set of screens can reasonably produce before the setup stops earning its cost.
What is a concertina book?
A single sheet folded into panels so it can be read page by page in sequence or opened out flat as one continuous image. Several titles here use the form, and a few extend it into cuts that open into a shape rather than a plane.
Why do so many titles say out of print?
Screen printing screens are reclaimed after a run and the stencil is stripped off. Reprinting means remaking the stencils from the start, so a sold out edition usually stayed sold out.
Are the books available to buy here?
No. This catalogue is a record of the work — titles, formats, papers, colour counts, dates and edition sizes as published.