Image and Text

Dorothy during wounded knee

Katherine Kuehn. Dorothy during wounded knee: a portrait at sixteen: poem. By Karen A. Snider; illustration by Patricia Scobey. Madison, WI: Salient Seedling Press, 1984.

Jim Escalante. Tomorrow we smile: a short story. By Naomi Shihab Nye; drawing by Rodney Frew. Madison, WI: Iguana Press, c1990.

Bill Kelly. Force = equal [San Diego, CA]: Brighton Press, 1997.

Claire Van Vliet. The circus of Doctor Lao. By Charles G. Finney. Vermont: Janus Press, 1984, c1935.

Book artists collaborating with authors have the challenge of presenting a writer’s words in a visual context that supports and relates to the text. Here are some examples of books where literary works are presented with illustrative matter. In most cases the artist presents the visual material adjacent to the type; image and text each has its discreet space. In Force = equal words are printed directly within the picture plane, a possibly more disruptive approach to combining visual and textual elements. (Since Bill Kelly is the author as well as the artist, it may be he felt freer to intermingle the visual/textual fields.)

Claire Van Vliet places the illustration over the type in this spread from The circus of Doctor Lao. Other pages have completely different, inventive pairings of image and text, and the effect keeps the reader’s eyes moving to all territories of the book. Katherine Kuehn uses shaped type on the title page of Dorothy during wounded knee to give a windswept look consistent with the poet’s subject: Frank Baum’s Dorothy character. Jim Escalante employs a frieze-like space that runs above the text in Naomi Shihab Nye’sTomorrow we smile as the field for visual play. This illustration is a running counterpoint to the words.