Books in the Wild is a podcast investigating the hidden stories behind books and printed matter. Instead of reviewing books for solely on their written content, we try to offer varying perspectives on everything from conception to creation to reception. This is a podcast about book arts: letterpress printing, bookbinding, artists' books, small press and independent publishing, and stories from book history.
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A podcast that seeks to capture the creative pulse of artists of color in the bay area.
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Dictionaries are an ever-changing record of language, constantly being updated, amended and added to. This goes for all dictionaries: Merriam-Webster, Oxford English Dictionary, Collin’s. Updates to the dictionary can be new words entirely, or amendments for new meanings of existing words. As you can imagine, 2020 was a heck of a year with both Mer…
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Today’s episode is about the documentary film The Book Makers. If you haven’t already seen the film, I recommend watching it before listening to this podcast. I speak with filmmaker James Kennard, and book maker Mark Sarigianis, and although we do some talking about books in general, I think this podcast episode would be more enjoyable as an accomp…
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Welcome to 2021 everyone! Today I talk a little about pandemic projects, zines, and artist’s books, and have a wonderful discussion with the Quarantine Public Library. The Quarantine Public Library (QPL) is a collaborative project dreamed up by artists Katie Garth and Tracy Honn in May of 2020. QPL is an online book repository that features downloa…
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In 1917, Mark Twain published a new novella titled “Jap Herron” about a young man from Missouri who left town to become a printer’s devil for a local newspaper. The weird part about all of this? Mark Twain died in 1910… The novel Jap Herron was purportedly transmitted entirely via Ouija board through writer Emily Grant Hutchings and her psychic med…
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Today we investigate a combination of book and printing terms and phrases. We also have several special guest book makers sharing their favorite bookish terms. Some of them are probably familiar, though you might be surprised of their book art origins, like “hot off the press!”, or “mind your p’s and q’s”. Other terms are fairly specialized, but fu…
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Today I speak with Mary Baughman, co-founder and chair of the governing board for the Austin Book Arts Center, and retired conservator for the Harry Ransom Center at University of Texas Austin. We talk about the history of book arts in Texas, the mission of the Austin Book Arts Center, and the use of book arts education to encourage literacy. Mary …
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Tonight we have a true crime tale of a 19th century English bookbinder gone bad, the murder of tool maker John Paas by bookbinder James Cook. And then for some added perspective, I interview bookbinder and tool maker, (but not murderer) Brien Beidler. Quick warning, this story is particularly gory, but I try not to be too gratuitous with details. N…
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Hello, welcome to Books in the Wild, the podcast about book arts and book history. It has been quite awhile since our last episode, but we are back just in time for Halloween! Today we have a special spooky episode about a famously haunted library. So get cozy in your favorite chair, turn off the lights, and get ready to hear the tale of the Grey L…
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Books in the Wild is back! It’s been a wild year, friends! For a brief recap, I now live in Texas and work at BookLab2, a limited-edition bookbindery, though I still sometimes work for Flying Fish Press and am still producing my own work under the imprint of Coyote Bones Press (this information is relevant to the episode, I promise). This episode w…
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If you've ever watched any television shows or movies ever, you may have seen a familiar looking newspaper read by many fictional characters for decades. This exact same newspaper has been spotted in Scrubs, Modern Family, No Country for Old Men, Everyone Hates Chris, Back to the Future, Desperate Housewives, Married With Children, Charmed, That 70…
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Today’s episode is all about unreadable books. What does it mean to read? How do we garner read meaning from text written in a language that we do not understand? Today we will talk about the process of reading, and I have some fun historical and contemporary examples of indecipherable books. We will go into the mysterious Voynich Manuscript, the s…
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Episode 9: A Guide to Witch Hunting - The Malleus Maleficarum
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Now that we are in October, we are getting into the Halloween spirit by talking about an infamous book called The Malleus Maleficarum, also known as The Hammer of Witches. A book responsible for fueling the heinous witch trials throughout medieval Europe for centuries. We delve into book history and talk about the author and inquisitor Heinrich Kra…
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What is book art exactly? What is an artist book? Are all art books book art? What do you mean by codex? Or livre d’artiste? Are you making these words up? I have been getting questions like these for the past... seven or so episodes. So today I’m going to reel it in and start at the beginning with the book art basics. We have guests Ariel Hansen S…
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Episode 7: An Interview with Lyall Harris
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A few months ago, I had the pleasure of speaking with book artist Lyall Harris. Unfortunately, due to some technical difficulties, I was unable to release the episode before the opening of Lyall and Patricia Silva’s exhibition at the San Francisco Public Library in June. It took some time and YouTube tutorials, but I managed to clean up the audio t…
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Episode 6: Detective Pilcrow and the Search for Missing Punctuation
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Today we are on the hunt for missing punctuation. Like many letters and even entire words, quite a few good punctuation marks have been lost to modern English. In this episode, we’re going to track down some forgotten and elusive marks, from the mysterious Pilcrow to the playful interrobang. Today I have a very exciting noir-themed audio drama fill…
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"Shall We Have Common Sense" image from The Linnean Society For his 90th birthday in February 1913, renowned British naturalist and evolutionary biologist Alfred Russel Wallace received a mysterious package containing a small booklet called Shall We Have Common Sense. This booklet, dated 1849, contained essays on evolution through natural selection…
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Episode 4: A Commonplace Audiobook / Overcoming Creative Block
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Image from Henry Tiffen's Commonplace Book, 1760 A commonplace book is a compilation of information or inspiration - anything that one would like to remember or save to reference later. They differ from diaries or journals, in that it usually organized by topic instead of date, and culls information from many sources instead of being autobiographic…
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Every Moment in a Book: Three Decades of Work by Julie Chen is now on view at the Allen Library Special Collections at University of Washington through June 30, 2017. On March 16th, a reception and artist talk was held and I was lucky enough to attend and record the momentous event. Julie Chen is a renowned book artist and professor of book art at …
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Episode 2: The Wipers Times - Newspapers from the Trenches
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In early 1916 on an excursion through the ruined city of Ypres, Belgium, British soldiers came across a damaged letterpress machine in a bombed out print shop. Over the next two years, Captain Frederick J. Roberts and his men produced twenty-three issues of gallows humor, poetry, and prose. In this episode, we’ll delve into some of the history, the…
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Today's episode is all about reading - what it means to read, how we read, and a brief history of reading. I'll talk about literacy rates, the alphabetic principle, phonetics, and nonsense poems by Lewis Carroll. I am also very excited to announce that Books in the Wild has been awarded a Project Grant by the College Book Art Association ensuring t…
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Human Skin Books and Desert Rat Scrap Books
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Originally published as Marginalia Podcast in November of 2016, this is our sample/pilot episode for Books in the Wild. In this episode we cover the gruesome book of John Horwood, a man whose punishment for his crimes didn't stop at just execution. We also go into the tall tales of Harry Oliver, self-proclaimed Writer, Editor, Publisher, Distributo…
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Episode 3: World Around Town (Christine No)
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Christine No is a writer and filmmaker living in Oakland. She makes her own chapbooks and considers her pit bull Brandeh to be her soulmate.By Kaleidoscope Podcast
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Episode 2: Becoming the Drum (Stacy Johnson)
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Stacy Johnson is a Samba dancer and writer who lives in Castro Valley and is obsessed with photographing and drawing the trees she encounters in her daily life.By Kaleidoscope Podcast
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Episode 1: Ghosts (Keri Miki-Lani Schroeder)
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Keri Miki-Lani Schroeder is an Oakland-based book artist, writer and illustrator who's obsessed with an abandoned boat she found in the desert outside of Las Vegas.By Kaleidoscope Podcast
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