Artists' Books and Rare Books for Sale » Ken Campbell

Ken Campbell — Father’s Hook: Songs from a Living Son

wstahl — Sun, 08 Jan 2012 02:22:22 +0000

(Campbell, Ken) Father’s Hook: Songs from a Living Son. By Ken Campbell. Bath Academy of Art. 1978. (24p.) 13” x 6.5”. Printed letterpress/lino. With full page illustrations in various colors; text in black and red on Japanese paper. Bound in the Japanese manner with clear thread, title on orange paper within an opaque wrap. Wrapped between two pieces of birch plywood held together by a thick rubber band. No. 29 in an edition of 100 copies. Fine,
The imagery of Father’s Hook is caught in the horizontal line that travels through the illustrations, in the lightness of the paper and in the invisible thread of the binding.
“The imagery is gained from the manipulation of flat, rectangular lino blocks exactly the same size as the book which are worked and turned; and printed in split duct colour in black, yellow, orange, green and red. The texts are printed letterpress, from Akzidenz Grotesk type.” – Campbell.

Campbell, Ken – Firedogs

sara — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 18:25:15 +0000

(Ken Campbell) Firedogs. Artist’s book by Ken Campbell. 1991. 86p. 15” x 10”. Printed by polychrome letterpress deploying handworked zinc plates, type-high nails and sandpaper. Text set in monotype Spartan, Stephenson Blake Bodoni, and a variety of woodletter types. Pages divided into four vertical columns and five horizontal, with six poems set in Bodoni printed within the largest rectangle so created, and with textual echoes in 6-line san serif within the dark margins. Outer areas impressed with type on its side. Endpapers printed deeply from the heads of nails hammered type-high into a base. Printed boards and slipcase. No. 2 of 33 copies signed and dated by Campbell, plus 7 A.P. copies. Fine.

“Firedogs is a rich, dark, bloody book, full of threat and doom and yet intimating redemption by virtue of its own coher- ence and integrity … Before anything else, [it] is a gorgeous feast for the eyes, luxuriating in a limited palette of rich and glossy colours veering from warmth to chill …” – Cathy Courtney: Art Monthly, October 1991, London.

Campbell, Ken – A Knife Romance

sara — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 18:23:22 +0000

(Ken Campbell) A Knife Romance. Artist’s Book by Ken Campbell. 1988. 19.75” x 12”. 32 leaves, including endsheets. Printed letterpress in several colors on T. H. Saunders mouldmade paper, with etching and blind embossing, silver and gold dusting and handwork. Full page illustrations in various colors and techniques, including letterpress and relief engravings. Bound in illustrated black boards with black cloth spine. Illustrated board slipcase. No. 14 in an edition of 25 signed copies for sale. Fine.

Two poems, Knife and Widow’s Song, and other fragments by Campbell; also quotations from various sources. A stunning book.

“During my adolescence my mother kept burying my sheath knife in the garden to guard me from ‘the crimes it might commit me to’. This almost farcically Freudian compulsion called forth a poem many years later called A Knife Romance; thereafter a book in the 1980s. This work took around four years to resolve. “The basic pulse to the book came about by the following process. The main poem was printed in the condensed woodletter of AbaB and laid out on a table to reasonable typographic laws, as in Terror, Terror. There was insufficient vertical space for the whole poem. The table was photographed in perspective and at an angle. Then the first six lines were removed, the next six added to the poem’s foot, and the whole moved up and photographed again. The process was repeated until it was complete.

“The resultant oddly wedge-shaped plates, bearing the words in apparent perspective, were photo-etched and printed while nestling in a background plate that positioned them and supplied a pale ground. The poem rolls like a film credit while shape – as knife or tombstone – cuts into the surface of the paper. “Meanwhile the story of Solomon, two women-who-would-be-mothers, a child and a knife is graphically alluded to. A surface as skin, or lung, was etched and contained a knife that roved. Widow’s Song as verse recorded the sickening and demise of my mother. The ugly-mindedness of the poem and the knife’s inherent violence is acknowledged by the history of the Nazi salute. The cut hand of the maker is shown in pain and triumph.

“A Knife Romance was the first book to deploy graphic and verbal elements at its beginning to give tongue to a drama found in their articulation.

“At the end mother and son as twinned weapons rest in a common grave” – Ken Campbell website.

Campbell, Ken — Father’s Hook

sara — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 18:21:22 +0000

(Ken Campbell) Father’s Hook. Artist’s Book by Ken Campbell. 1978. 48p., of which 6 leaves fold out. 13” x 6.5”. Printed letterpress at the Bath Academy of Art. Sheets of thin Chinese handmade paper folded at the fore-edge. Chinese bound with invisible thread and held between two pieces of varnished plywood, secured by an elastic band. Text in Akzindenz Grotesk type. Imagery achieved by the manipulation of rectangular lino blocks which were worked and turned and printed in black, yellow, orange, green and red. No. 4 in an edition of 100 copies, signed by Campbell. Fine.

The text is a cycle of poetry written during and after the death of Campbell’s dock-worker father, and dedicated to him and his laboring. Campbell: “To attempt … to float images in colour fields and work within structures of feeling rather than structures of injunction … while describing my father’s life of grinding labour was irresistible. The book is on very fine Chinese paper – it was the first time I fell in love with paper; it was sensuous but could not be pushed around; it had to be worked with; … As a result of the paper being so thin and the pressure so great the ink went right through it and came out the other side. The backs of the leaves were very beautiful, and the pages were folded to reveal the reverse.”

Campbell, Ken – Tilt: The Black-Flagged Streets.

sara — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 16:23:47 +0000

(Campbell, Ken) Tilt: The Black-Flagged Streets. 1988. 56p. 12″ x 9″ at its widest point. Found lino and handmade zinc blocks with metallic dusting and handwork. Paper bound in a trapezoidal shape over boards; masonry design; black cloth spine. No. 20 in an edition of 80 copies, signed by the artist. Fine.

“Tilt: the black-flagged streets, housed in its crooked slipcase, provokes unease. Using mounting blocks to represent both paving flags and the anarchist emblem, Campbell structures the left-hand pages as he adds, line by line, to his ‘Storm Song’ which moves through the book. The figure of Shiva, mysterious God from Indian mythology, changes as the verse unwinds and the balance of force alters. The poem begins with undertones of mob unrest but the song is taken up by the lhalcyon (kingfisher) fabled to nest on the sea and to have the power to quiet its turbulence.” – Cathy Courtney, Art Monthly, November 1988.

This work was included in an exhibition, Ken Campbell: an Artist’s Books, at the National Art Library, Victoria and Albert Museum in 1989 (No 8).

Ken Campbell

sara — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 18:48:13 +0000

Ken Campbell is a painter, poet and designer who seeks to bring these various disciplines together in the production of what has come to be called ‘artist’s books.’ His professional experience as a designer with an interest in appropriate methodology, and his early life as an apprentice printer, bring to his books a search for form through process; such form as may be found becoming part of the message. In this he hopes that the poetry is not so much illustrated as enlarged. His books have been acquired by many private and public collections including the Victoria and Albert Museum, the New York Public Library, the Library of Congress, the Houghton Library, Harvard, and Yale University. His work has been widely exhibited internationally.

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Hadrian’s Dream, from Circle Press

sara — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 19:56:46 +0000

(Circle Press) Hadrian’s Dream. By Asa Benveniste. London. 1990. [26p.] 11.75” x 8”. Designed and printed by Ken Campbell. Multicolored relief design and letterpress text by Ken Campbell. Fold-out on Rivoli paper. Paper wrappers. One of 75 thus in an edition of 120 copies. Fine.

One of 8 poems specially published to mark the move of the Circle Press from Guildford to London. 1990.