Iowa City, IA: Emily Martin, 2024 • Twenty-four pages with five paper tools, illustrations, 8 × 8 in. • Baskerville, Gill Sans, and Trattatello typefaces letterpress printed on Rives BFK and Chancery paper. The tools are backed with Text Wove paper, hand- cut, and assembled. The binding is by Mary Hark • 25 standard copies ($1,500), 2 deluxe copies, and a couple of artist’s proofs • emilymartin.com.
Emily Martin’s latest artist’s book, Navigational Tools for the Willfully Lost, is a timely and thought-provoking work born out of her experience at Chicago’s Newberry Library, where she was the recipient of the Jan and Frank Cicero Fellowship in the spring of 2023. During the month-long fellowship, Emily investigated the Newberry’s EdwardE. Ayer Collection of navigational and cosmographical texts, including the various editions of the sixteenth-century treatise Cosmographia by the German mathematician and astronomer Peter Apian. This work was significant enough to see thirty printings in fourteen languages, and addressed the fields of astronomy, geography, geology, astrology, cartography, navigation, and instrument-making. Several of these themes are influential to Emily’s own work. Cosmographia included several volvelles (moveable circular constructions) within its pages, by which the reader could calculate movements of celestial bodies. Emily’s experience with these still-working, 440-year-old volvelles inspired her to engineer five of her own unique, moveable paper interactions for Navigational Tools for the Willfully Lost. As with many of Emily’s artist’s books, she draws on themes and primary sources from previous centuries and deftly blends them with modern events and concerns. A few such examples from her previous work include Madness: Reading Hamlet in the Time of COVID-19 and Other Plagues (2022), Gertrude Has a Few Questions (2021), The Tragedy of King Lear (2019), and King Leer: A Tragedy in Five Puppets (2017). In Navigational Tools, she masterfully uses the historical Cosmographica as a springboard for her own modern interpretation of our need for navigation aid in a world that she notes, “seems to be very much off its axis.” Emily goes on to say,
We are in a time of plague, not just medical but
political, ecological, and more. The wholesale denial
of science and rational thought coupled with the
embrace of superstition and misinformation are
signaling a return to fact- based actions and ideas,
a renewed age of enlightenment.
Harkening back to Apian’s volvelles, Emily has created her own delightful and playful computational paper instruments that are juxtaposed with weighty commentary. I particularly appreciate the way in which she has taken a historical and scientific treatise, rooted in understanding terra firma and the surrounding cosmic environment with instruments to aid in the understanding of celestial navigation, and reinterpreted it to address the landscape (albeit political, ecological, and social) of our own time. Emily’s tools invite us to navigate the terra incognita. Her volvelles are less about a scientific understanding of the known world, and more of a clarion call of judgement, warning, and social commentary. And yet, she delivers these messages through whimsical and witty volvelles incorporating her signature trace monoprint drawings. Emily’s five volvelles are entitled “Respect Rewind Clock,” “Authoritarian Decoder,” “Dial A Disaster,” “Insignificance Indicator,” and “Realigning Moral Compass.”
Emily Martin, Navigational Tools for the Willfully Lost. Photos by Sha Towers.
Navigational Tools for the Willfully Lost was printed on Emily’s Vandercook SP15 press using polymer plates fabricated by Boxcar Press. The text incorporates Baskerville, Gill Sans, and Trattatello fonts printed on Rives BFK paper. The hand-cut and assembled volvelles were printed from polymer plates of her trace monoprint drawings, and were printed on Chancery paper and backed with Text Wove paper. The binding incorporates slotted tape and long stitch construction using a cover of handmade flax and abaca paper by Mary Hark. The twenty-four-page book with five volvelle variations is eight inches square when closed, and the edition consists of 25 standard copies and 1 deluxe copy to be bound by Sol Rébora, an award-winning experimental design binder working in Buenos Aires, Argentina. I had the pleasure of meeting both Sol and Emily at Miami’s first international artists’ book fair, Tropic Bound, in 2023.
Best known for her limited-edition moveable books and paper sculpture works, Emily Martin’s artist’s books appear in public and private collections around the world. She teaches book arts, paper engineering, and traditional bookbinding at the University of Iowa Center for the Book, where she’s been a member of the faculty since 1998. She has received grants and residencies from the College Book Arts Association, the Center for Book Arts in New York City, and the Bodleian Bibliographical Press in Oxford, England, and the Newberry Library in Chicago, among others. You can follow her on Instagram at emilymartin53 and on Facebook at Emily Martin.
Emily concludes her compelling artist’s book with a wish and a challenge: “I wish these devices that I have made . . . could be a call to action, to rouse people (myself included) to make the changes needed to save us all.”