Western New York Book Arts Collaborative Grand Opening

I'm in NYC so unfortunately I'm going to miss the grand opening of the Western New York Book Arts Collaborative tomorrow night. I urge everyone in the Buffalo area to go to the opening, it's going to be great. Here's some more info:

The Western NY Book Arts Center opens in downtown Buffalo

The Western New York Book Arts Collaborative (WNYBAC) a new not-for-profit Cultural Organization, existing to promote the art of the book in all of its manifestations is having its Grand Opening May 21, 2009, from 6-9pm.

The Western NY Book Arts Center is conveniently located at 468 Washington Street, on the corner of Washington St and Mohawk in downtown Buffalo. The newly remodeled space features a gallery, bookshop, event space, print studio, reading library, printing museum & more. On May 22, the center will be open regular hours 12-6 pm, Wed-Sat. In addition, the bookshop will offer book making supplies, art papers, books, stationery, and fine art.

The Grand Opening of WNYBAC coincides with the first members' exhibition. The members' exhibit features established and emerging artists, craftspeople and self-published authors, such as Jozef Bajus, Julian Montague and Diane Bond.

Through workshops and community studio access, individuals can learn old and new techniques to create their own printed ephemera, bookworks, prints and editions, and everything in-between. The summer workshop series will be announced at the opening as well as a special surprise announcement!

For more information on resources and membership details visit www.wnybookarts.org, email info@wnybookarts.org or contact Richard Kegler,

716 903 6875

The Western NY Book Arts Center
468 Washington St (at Mohawk)
Buffalo NY 14203

I assembled metal type into a hemispheric map for a book cover at WNYBAC last year

A New Blog Project: Daily Book Graphics (#1)

So today, (the first day of the rest of my blog), I'm starting a new project where I mine my own personal library for interesting visual material on a daily basis. I was inspired by the numerous projects where people take and post a photograph everyday for a year, and by my friend Mike Kelleher's blog Pearlblossom Highway, where he writes about a book from his collection everyday. I buy a lot of books just for the covers or visual content, unfortunately once they go on the shelf it can be years before I revisit them. This project is going to make me dig into my library in a new way and give me a chance to think about, and curate a collection of visual information. Once I get rolling I'll be setting up a Flickr set to accompany this project.

Book Graphics Daily #1
I bought these dirty (they are pretty tame by today's standards) pulp novels at a garage sale some years ago. They were published in the mid 1960's and are all from different imprints from the same publisher. I'm not as interested in kitsch as I used to be, but boy do I love these smarmy covers! The tag lines are great too, you can't do better than "They hunted for sin in passion country!"

This may be the most brilliant book cover I've ever seen.