Contact me through GalateaTen@aol.com

Sunday, January 13, 2013

INVITATION to "BOOKS ON CHAIRS"!

You are invited to send a "book" that would sit on one of the miniature chairs in the "Sit With Moi" collection.  The miniature book should be sized to be no more than (though can be smaller than) 2 inches in both width and length. 

The book can be an empty miniature you filled yourself with your text, art or whatever you wish as author. 

Or it can be handmade -- you might cut up slips of paper, for example, and bind them together with a single staple (I am not crafty at all, but I did one example HERE; you can emulate that process to make your own book!). 

There are no limitations on the content of books.  Some of you have also expressed willingness to make your own chair -- feel free to do so; ideally, the scale would be "1:6" or "Playscale" (about what would be fitting for a Barbie doll).

Each book (unless you wish otherwise) will be documented with photo(s) and Moi loving review (I occasionally review books) on this Sit With Moi blog.  After the project has expanded to a sufficient quantity, one goal is also to exhibit the "Books on Chairs" non-virtually.

I am happy to trade (non-mini) books for your mini book.  One example is to trade books from my Community Book Shelf. We can discuss other arrangements if you wish...

Please contact me at GalateaTen@aol.com for questions or clarifications or just to chat about this project.
*****

BACKGROUND:

Great ideas sometimes surface from letting things unfold organically instead of trying to control the creative process.  I originally conceived of the "Sit With Moi" blog as a documentation of my growing miniature chair collection because I thought blogging would facilitate my education on design.  I was open, however, to how this project might evolve.

I started placing the chairs in an empty bookshelf -- see the photo "Some of the Chairs" on the right side of this blog.  At one point, I paused in front of the bookshelf now containing chairs to consider how I was filling a bookshelf with chairs instead of books.  It didn't sit right with Moi (so to speak), perhaps because I'm a writer and avid reader.  So I started putting some miniature books on the chairs.  I scoured the house for teenybooks that would fit the scale of the chairs and found a mere seven "books":

The second row of books are decorative items from my Mom's collectibles and while I do consider the Holy Bible one of the greatest books to be created, I want to have a more diverse library (and with a strong representation of poetry and art).  One of the books is actually a book necklace created by Cynthia M. Philllips, a poet-artist; here's a close-up:

I may as well share the details on the other three books -- I had bought some empty miniature books.  I filled several of them with text (mostly hay(na)ku as this is a minimalist poetic form).  The three surviving ones ("surviving" in that I gave the others away or sold them through a Heifer International fundraiser) include a 2006 title, NOTA BENE, and a 2007 title, ALPHABET: Hay(na)ku Drawings with Poem For Rimbaud (I'll share the poem in the Comments Section). Here are two interior photos of  ALPHABET:





To fully understand the above image, it may be useful to know that the hay(na)ku is a tercet with the first line equal to one word, the second line equal to two words and the third line equal to three words.

Here is a photo of an interior page from NOTA BENE:

(Footnote / become larger / than the book)


The third book was written by a wonderful poet whose physicality (he's tall!) made it a challenge, I suspect, to work on such a small scale.  But dear Tom Beckett was game and wrote Steps: A Notebook.  Here are photos:




Actually, as I'm taking down the Christmas trees this week, I also found another book that was used as a tree ornament which I'll now use as a "Book on a Chair"!  This will be a VERY LARGE COFFEE BOOK at its scale -- The History of Santa Claus by Elizabeth Marraffino (Kurt S. Adler Inc., 1986):


So that makes for eight books total.  Eight books?!  Ridiculous.  As you can see, I need to expand the library!  Please participate -- I will promise to READ any book  you write for this project!

Eileen Tabios
Curator, "Sit With Moi" and "Books on Chairs"

1 comment:

  1. Here's the poem referenced in the post:


    Rimbaud in Paris


    A thousand poems
    burnt through
    his

    brain, while one
    night pooled
    wetly

    at my feet.



    {Poem is after Holy The Firm by Annie Dillard)

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