Threadless

This may be more relevant to the screen printers of the world than the book-makers, but it seems like something you all might enjoy . . . In fact, I have the feeling it's probably something you already know about, switched-on, plugged-in hep cats that you are.

Threadless sells t-shirts designed by visitors to the website. You can submit your t-shirt design, and if it gets enough votes, they pay you and start printing it. There are also prints on paper. Some of them are pretty fantastic. My favorite might be Mister Mittens' Big Adventure, although it's hard to pick.

Anyway, just thought it might be incentive for those of you who were thinking about rigging up Amy's home silkscreen . . . or maybe just for those of you who want fun t-shirts. I wonder if there are others websites that are running this sort of operation . . .

Brian Dettmer

The first artist featured on the list of unusual books I linked to the other day is Brian Dettmer.

As it turns out, he seems to have some work showing at a gallery in Manhattan, Kinz, Tillou, & Feigen, so those of you who'll be staying in the tri-state area could go check it out in person. For those of you departing New York, there's his Wikipedia page and a bunch of pictures of his modified books to console you.

109A!

Hey, all! Ali and I talked about starting a blog for our class, so here it is. It's called 109A, so it'll be like we never left the studio at all. Possibly that's a little perverse, but Kris says never apologize for yourself, so there.

For your perusing pleasure on this inaugural post, a collection of The Most Unusual Books in the World, courtesy of Kristin Maffei. I'm not quite sure why some of them are supposedly unusual, but my personal favorite is the teeny-tiny New Testament. And one book that isn't on this list but should be is Well Done, a book that must be baked before it can be read. Oh, yeah.

So I'm just getting started here. If anyone has any ideas about how to make the blog better, say so--Lauren, I know you know your way around Blogger better than I do, and Ali, you design minx, I'm sure you have something to say.

More links about books and book arts coming soon. If you come across any interesting book stories, send them along. And, of course, what this is really about is the books we've been making since the end of Kris' class, so send pictures or bookmaking anecdotes. Maybe I'll finally tell the story of my corn palace.

I'm gonna miss you guys, but not really because you're gonna send me pictures of all your new projects, right? Right?