Paper Botanists: Cultivators of Artifice.
[ Vancouver, British Columbia:]: Byzantium, 2022. With approximately 140 sample leaves of herbaria, drawings, and prints, plus a folder with extra oversized sample leaves from eleven different sources. The leaves originate from broken volumes of botanical texts from the last 350 years or were created by the authors for the present book. The prints include woodcuts, engravings, etchings, lithographs, photographs, marbling, and more. Explanatory text accompanies the imagery. The last five pages of the book comprise a comprehensive annotated bibliography. The text is set in Fournier, printed with a handpress on dampened Arches at by Rollin Milroy Heavenly Monkey in Vancouver, BC. Bound by Claudia Cohen in green leather over green-and-white striped pastepaper boards. Leather titled and tooled in gilt. Enclosed in a matching green leather and pale green cloth clamshell case made by Cohen. A fine copy, as new, of a stunning production by two of the most accomplished book artists alive today. One of twenty regular copies. Ten deluxe and six hors commerce copies were also produced. Signed by Hodgson and Cohen on the colophon. 8 x 12 in. 50 pp. Item #17370
“Here [Hodgson and Cohen] direct their distinctive talents for combining historic material with their own creations to explore the connections between paper and botanical arts…The focus of Paper Botanists is on how plants have been historically represented by artists who struggled to capture realism while aiming for an aesthetic ideal. These artists, some of whom were also botanists, carefully studied all parts of the plants they portrayed, striving to accurately depict the tiniest filament, the faintest vein and the most minuscule seeds, not to mention the visible characteristics that would allow anyone, anywhere, to identify the plant and cultivate it appropriately.”.
Paper Botanists is the first collaboration between Hodgson and Cohen to be published by Byzantium, an imprint established by Hodgson in 1995 for trade book publications. Their previous collaborations have been published by Heavenly Monkey, including PatternPattern (2019), Folding Paper (2017), and The WunderCabinet (2011).
Price: $8,900.00