In July, Toronto-based artist Francisco Fernando Granados was in Vancouver for one of his hometown visits. This time he brought along a stack of colourful miniature artist books which he was gifting to the friends he met, and slipping into local library books. I noticed a social media post that described how he had dropped one of these mini-books from what he calls Hometown Studies in Minor Abstractions into the pages of a library copy of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s Aesthetic Education. He wanted his abstractions to touch the words that continue to inspire his art and thought.
The booklets are made from two-sided colour prints of his digital abstractions. With colours that seep right to the edges, the book’s 16 pages are from letter-sized prints cut in four, that have been folded and staple-bound.
Granados’s three mini-books are sitting on my table with another folded eighth-of-a-letter-sized-sheet booklet, Susan Mill’s night book addendum. It was also made with a glossy two-sided colour print, this time in black with whitish printing, and a folded “flutter book” style of construction (i.e. without any staples). Mills gave it to me when I visited her vendor table at the Vancouver Art Book Fair earlier in summer. night book addendum is a memory tool that lists six local species at risk: little brown bat, woodland caribou, spotted owl, northern abalone, steambank lupine, and purple martin. Mills made this free publication in an edition of 75 as an introduction to her forthcoming Night Book with Jackpine Press. The concept recalls Victorian “night books” that featured photographs that had to be viewed in moonlight to preserve their image, in a time before photographic fixing agents.
The concept of the night book is eerily close to Erica Wilk’s Tending that also came home with me from the VABF. Printed with black ink on non-archival black paper the book is another memorial, this is an ode to Wilk’s late grandfather, and in memory of his gardening. The pages are expected to reveal their images and texts when the paper is subjected to long exposures of sunlight. It is sitting open at the end of my table next to the window, where the sun shines in late morning.
Granados’s Hometown Studies and Mills’s night book addendum are eighth-letter size, along with many others that have arrived as RML exchanges. A folded version of this format was used by the students in the Independent Publishing and the Democratic Multiple course that I wrote about in this post .
I also described books of this size in a post about three little books, linked in topics and aesthetics, that coincidentally arrived around the same time from three different artists (Elizabeth Mackenzie, Ginger Mason, and Elaine Rounds). Mackenzie has recently followed up with a second volume in the series, Cleave. As with Cleave 1 it offers an archive of Mackenzie’s drawings of bubbles captioned with text fragments that have been gleaned from the media coverage of the war in Gaza.
To say that the letter-size page (similar to A4 in the EU and Britain) has formatted zine and artist book (mail art, mostly) culture is not too much of an overstatement. The RML project has used the quarter-letter size as a unifying element for the highly diverse approaches that artists have brought to themes of migration, displacement, and diaspora, while the half-letter size is the preferred format for veteran zine publishers, Half Letter Press (Brett Bloom and Marc Fischer).
I got to pick the three zines from the fistful of Hometown Studies that Granados pulled out of his backpack. They were exchanged for these three RML3 productions:
- Tania Willard and Leah Decter (2024), Directions to BUSH Gallery
- Peter Morin and Leah Decter (2024), x: the meeting place makes the spine
- Sarah Shamash (2024), Didactics to Postpone the End of the World