Princeton University Press, Princeton & Oxford 2017

283 x 222 x 34 mm

now to be found in the collection:

Cloth Worker Guild, UK

the binding:

Full leather binding in dark purple goatskin with green sewn silk headbands, leather joints, and moss green coloured bord-à-bord doublures and purple flyleaves. The book is housed in a chemise and lives in a slipcase.

The book’s design is tooled in a free flowing arrangement of abstract organic shapes and lines, and is executed with three shades of metallic foil, nine shades of colour pigment foil (4x blue, grey, green, and white), and is occasionally topped off with transparent pearl foil. The title runs up the spine in various type sizes and is tooled in matt silver. The chemise is covered with dark purple goatskin and an inlaid centrepiece of matt silver paper, and lined on the inside with yellow Alcantara. The title is tooled with matt silver metallic foil. The slipcase is covered in bright blue paper and lined with yellow Alcantara.
All papers used are hand-dyed.

the novel:

‘On Weaving’ is the passionate love-letter of a weaver to her craft. Anni Albers was not only a maker but also a thinker, educator and collector. It is a beautiful book, where she reflects on the art of weaving as the ‘event of the thread’, on pattern, on historic examples, and on its implications on modern design. And though she
loved the abstract figurative forms of Mexican and Peruvian pattern, she looked
with a wry eye on European renaissance tapestries, where they strove to translate paintings into tapestries.

She advised her fellow weavers: ‘Don’t pretend to be anything that you are not.’

This advice is true in a much broader context, too, for each artform has its very own language and realm of possibilities. I paired my design right back to dots and lines, and focused on the core elements of rhythm and repeat that arise when using the books spine as an axis for mirrored action.

bound 2020