Union de Hojas: UH Book Structure with Sol Rebora

Saturday & Sunday, February 10 – 11, 2024
10 am – 6 pm (with a 1 hour lunch break)
$410 (includes most materials)
Please contact us for more information and to sign up for this amazing workshop!

Design + Conservation

Leather spine and Japanese textured paper, hard covers and rounded spine binding.

This structure proposes a case binding construction with fine finishing details, combining design and conservation concepts along the process construction. We are going to work with a book printed by Ediciones Urania: Ral Veroni - The Princess with an illustration of Ral Veroni. 

The sewing for the signatures provides a flat spine with a very even volume to create a nice rounded spine, and a small shoulder, which is going to be connected to the textblock by a hollow back.

On this structure the endpapers have a particular construction to work with very thin papers playing with possible transparencies, colors and textures, using this part of the construction as a beautiful way to get into the book. Conservation, design, and technology of the materials works for the structure to provide a perfect opening of the book.

Heavy Lifting: Felicia Rice and Theresa Whitehill

Sunday, September 10, 2023
4:00 pm - 6:00 pm
$10
​Please contact us to reserve your spot!

HEAVY LIFTING continues its tour through Northern California, one community room, gallery, and theater space at a time—wherever people gather—to reflect on issues of crisis and renewal in these difficult times. Each event in the series presents the artists’ book, Heavy Lifting, together with film, poetry, and conversation. 

The Dafi Kühne Printing Show™

The CODEX Foundation is pleased to announce our first-ever visiting artist talk at The CODEX Foundation Logan Book Arts Center.

The Dafi Kühne Printing Show™

Sunday, January 15, 2023, 4:30 pm

Standard Tickets: $25
Student Tickets: $20
*Sliding scale tickets will be offered to those in need of assistance. Please email us with a request.

Tickets are extremely limited and will sell quickly! Limit one ticket per person.
EMAIL US if you would like to sign up to attend this in-person talk.

About the artist, Dafi Kühne:

Dafi Kühne is a Swiss designer and letterpress printer. He studied in the Visual Communication Department of Zurich University of the Arts, Switzerland and he holds a Research-Masters Degree in Typeface Design from University of Reading, UK. In his studio (babyinktwice.ch) he uses a wild mix of analog and digital tools to produce posters for for music, art, architecture, theatre and film projects, and also for products. With this one main rule in his studio «No PDF ever leaves the studio as a final product», he prints all his posters with letterpress printing presses. His mostly typographic letterpress printed posters have won many international poster design awards and been in exhibitions all around the globe. His designer monograph True Print has been published by Lars Müller Publishers in 2016. 

Dafi runs his own Typographic Summer Program (www.typographic-printing-program.com) in Switzerland and Pasadena, CA—a two week intense program for students and professionals to learn new approaches to Swiss Typography. While the summer program is a physical workshop Dafi has been looking for a way to document his craziest techniques in a faster online format. With «The Dafi Kühne Printing Show™», he entertainingly documents and explains his process and techniques. Freely available for anyone to enjoy! Besides other international awards, «The Dafi Kühne Printing Show™» won one of the prestigious Swiss Design Awards in 2021. 

For his talk at The CODEX Foundation, Dafi will give us some technical insights into the processes used to create his poster work. 

Luminous Books at the Boston Athenæum

Materialia Lumina | Luminous Books: Concept & Craft in Contemporary Artists’ Books

NOVEMBER 15, 2022 – MARCH 11, 2023

Materialia Lumina | Luminous Books showcases a selection of outstanding contemporary artists’ books created by some of the world’s most accomplished makers over the past twenty-five years. The books embody a distinctive marriage of “high craft” with “high concept.” They demonstrate a mastery of the traditional arts of the book—printing, printmaking, typography, calligraphy, bookbinding, papermaking, and graphic design—intersecting vigorously with the conceptual daring and exploratory nature of the best contemporary art. The exhibition explores the extraordinary level of skill and persistence involved in creating these beautiful works, as well as their unique power to speak to a range of contemporary issues and concerns. 

These forty selections from the Athenæum’s holdings and the collection of a generous private lender were drawn from a curated list of 75 exemplary works, out of more than 6,000 pieces exhibited at the CODEX International Book Fair, the world’s largest venue for contemporary artists’ books, since the fair’s inception in 2007. The Athenæum is one of three venues for this international exhibition, along with Stanford University Libraries and the Klingspor Museum in Offenbach, Germany. A substantial catalog, with descriptive essays and extensive illustrations, accompanies the exhibition. 

Unfortunately, because of space constraints and local availability of works the Athenaeum was not able to show all of the works in the catalog, so we encourage you to experience the imagery and in-depth writings about all the wonderful works in the entire exhibition through the printed catalog.

Artists featured in the exhibition:

Sue Anderson and Gwen Harrison, Karen Bleitz, Ken Botnick, Inge Bruggeman, Carolee Campbell, Julie Chen, Donald Glaister, Peggy Gotthold and Lawrence Van Velzer, Leilei Guo, Romano Hänni, Thomas Ingmire, Peter Koch, Clemens-Tobias Lange, Russell Maret, Suzanne Moore, Tim Mosely, Didier Mutel, Robin Price, Sandra Reese and Harry Reese, Felicia Rice, Gaylord Schanilec, Veronika Schäpers, Leonard Seastone, Two Ponds Press, Claire Van Vliet, Sam Winston

Special Project: EXTRACTION

EXTRACTION: Art on the Edge of The Abyss

EXTRACTION: Art on the Edge of the Abyss is a multimedia, multi-venue, cross-border art intervention that will investigate extractive industry in all of its forms (from mining and drilling to the reckless exploitation of water, soil, trees, marine life, and other natural resources). The project will expose and interrogate extraction’s negative social and environmental consequences, from the damage done to people, especially indigenous and disenfranchised communities, to ravaged landscapes and poisoned water to climate change and its many troubling implications. 

A constellation of simultaneous and overlapping exhibits, installations, performances, site-specific work, land art, street art, publications, and cross-media events, EXTRACTION will take place in multiple locations throughout the U.S. and abroad during the Summer of 2021. The project will be de-centered, non-hierarchical, and self-organizing, which means that artists, art venues, curators, and art supporters will participate and collaborate as they see fit, including helping the project expand geographically. Everyone can be both creator and catalyst. At a time of growing despair and paralysis, people from all backgrounds and levels of experience—from the amateur to the virtuoso—can take action. We invite everyone to join us in creating an international art ruckus.

Nothing like EXTRACTION has been attempted before: All art forms, all happening at roughly the same time, with hundreds of artists spread across at least four continents (North and South America, Europe, and Australia). And all addressing a single theme—the suicidal consumption of the planet’s natural resources, which is the most pressing environmental issue of our time, encompassing all others, including climate change.

EXTRACTION: A collective global exclamation: “ENOUGH!” 

Prominent writers, critics, historians, educators, environmentalists, and other experts have been enlisted as advisors, to provide related texts, and to help us forge affiliations with non-art organizations. The Nevada Museum of Art, a national leader in the exhibition, collection, study, and promotion of environmentally related art, has agreed to archive all project documentation.

EXTRACTION: Art on the Edge of the Abyss is a special project of the CODEX Foundation.

Grolier Club / CODEX Foundation Symposium

The CODEX Effect and the Emergence of the “Third Stream” in the 21st Century

A conversation between artists, curators, scholars, and collectors

THE GROLIER CLUB, NEW YORK - OCTOBER 18 - 19, 2019

Since the turn of the millennium technological as well as cultural exchanges in the fields of printing and graphic arts have enabled new areas of artistic inquiry and therefore new collecting practices to emerge.

While private press, artist’s books, hybrid books, democratic multiples, book-like-objects, and zines are all competing for the attention of the private, museum and academic collections throughout the Western world, the biennial CODEX International Book Fair has emerged to represent the global reach of the high-craft spectrum in both art and literature.