Collaboration

A chronology of important events

Phyllis McGibbon and Barbara Tetenbaum. A chronology of important events: as originally published in the Hill’s manual, Chicago, IL 1876; extracted from Thomas E. Hill’s Manual of social and business forms. Madison, WI: Triangular Press & Isolde Press, 1989 ([Madison]: University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Lithography Studio and Silver Buckle Press).

Mani-fold tales. [By the Fall 1992 Typography class at Scripps College]; encouraged by Professor Kitty Maryatt. [Claremont, CA]: Scripps College Press, c1993.

Guillermo Gomez-Pena, Enrique Chagoya and Felicia Rice. Codex espangliensis: from Columbus to the border patrol. San Francisco, CA: City Lights Books, 2000.

Division of labor is a long-standing model of collaboration within book production. The specialized skills needed to make books (papermaking, typesetting, illustrating and bookbinding, to mention a few) necessitates collaborations. On exhibit here are examples of different ways artists work together in making books. (It should be noted that few books in this exhibit aren’t collaborative works.)

For many years, Kitty Maryatt’s students at Scripps College have produced collaboratively conceived and editioned work of originality. Mani-fold tales contains eight panels, in each of which a story is told and illustrated. The book folds up into a small portfolio, and is a speciman case of fine student work skillfully choreographed by a master teacher.

Codex espangliensis is a collaboration among a writer, visual artist and bookmaker. The latter, Felicia Rice, brings the work of the former two together. The work is a collective of commentary on the representation and perception of Chicano/Chicana identity and culture.

In A chronology of important events the artists Phyllis McGibbon and Barbara Tetenbaum combined found imagery with excerpts from a 19th-century book of knowledge. Though each artist had separate skills (Tetenbaum as typographer, McGibbon as lithographer) they worked side by side in all aspects of the book’s production, and share artistic credit for the whole.