Beth Shoemaker and the Rose Library

Visiting the Rose Library at Emory was an interesting experience for several reasons:

1. I have never been to the Emory Library and it is massive
2. I have never been to the Rose Library
3. Rare books

The way in which Beth setup our visit was super fun and interactive. I never thought I would be speeding dating with artists’ books, but it did force us to interact with more books than what we would have done. The first book I encountered was Touchstones by Paula Paulsrud. It was a punch out of a book that had been smoothed out into a stone shape, very satisfying to touch. Beth told us that the piece was one of many other such book stones by Paulsrud and would be mixed with actual stones in which the viewer has to figure out what is stone and what is book.

The second book that I encountered was the “Lodestone House” by Susan Collard. The work was composed of several different moving parts and was an amalgamation of paper, wood, metal, and stone. It was truly a beautiful and interactive piece that allowed the viewer to make their own creation and experiment with the different layers of the book.  The Trump and Judy book was a beautifully satirical and interesting.

Exquisite KKorspes was the most interesting out of the books due to its content and its structure. The whole book is centered around the history of terror carried out by the Ku Klux Klan. The format exquisite corpse book forced the reader to actively participate in history through the construction of the stories and images. The puzzle-like structure forces you to pay attention and to engage with hard material. That to me made it a truly impactful book and it drove home a recurring pattern that I was seeing across the books.

The common theme between all the pieces we were shown at the Rose Library was the organization and formats in which the each artist used for their work in order to straddle the line between written word and visual art. The Touchstone was still a text, but its smooth abnormal form transformed into a different context. Trump and Judy, through its use of jester-like characters and playful format, captured the ridiculousness of the 2016 election while simultaneously being a whimsical political satire. Exquisite KKorspes was fragmented into different pieces that had to be actively put together by the reader. The format is key.