The
autumnal re-opening of school doors calls us back inside to the world of books.
Summer paperbacks with sand trapped between the pages get shelved. The cooler
season goes better with the sound of book spines cracking and of heavyweight
paper turning; the squeak of highlighters against textbooks’ lines; the smell
of preserved paper trapped in library stacks; the well-appointed bookstore
displays weighted with the literary harvest.
Local
bookworms have made several very handsome books available to our thirsty eyes
and minds. Why not strew one or more across your coffee table? Your guests will
think you oh-so-smart.
You and Yours
Naomi
Shihab Nye
BOA
Editions, Ltd.
Rochester
publishing house BOA Editions will publish its third volume of Naomi Shihab
Nye’s poems this fall. Nye has written over 20 volumes; You and Yours won the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award, and her 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle
East was a National Book Award finalist in 2002.
Nye,
a Palestinian-American who lives in Texas, wields the simplest language to
craft extremely accessible and effective poems, and though she writes
conversationally, her reverence for words is clear and her writing has a
deliberate and powerful gait. Her open “Letter to Any Would-Be Terrorists,”
available widely on the web, offers an example of her grounded eloquence; she
grabs at you without any looks in a thesaurus’ direction. Her latest volume
continues her contemplation of the everyday sacred.
BOA
is publishing four other volumes this fall: Consideration
of the Guitar by Ray Gonzalez, Off-Season
in the Promised Land by Peter Makuck, The
Hoopoe’s Crown by Jacqueline Osherow, and Willow, Wine, Mirror, Moon: Women’s Poems from Tang China. All are
(or will be as soon as they publish) available at local bookstores and at
boaeditions.org.
C(a[e{I}o]u)P: Autobiography #5
Scott
McCarney
VSW
Press
The
VSW Press at Visual Studies Workshop helps artists complete books of pretty
stunning artistry. In addition to offering courses in bookmaking, VSW also
takes on artists for month-long bookmaking residencies. There was once a
working press at VSW’s Prince Street campus, but now the actual printing is
done off-site at a Rochester printer. Some of the books are intricate, some are
simpler; some involve words as much as art, some let the imagery and the design
do the talking.
Scott
McCarney’s C(a[e{I}o]u)P: Autobiography
#5, one example of the 2005 crop, uses a dos-a-dos cover to combine two
booklets (they share a back cover). It’s all about memory, and he combines
images from his and his parents’ collections: teacups with baseball caps, VHS
tapes with to-do lists, both sides of postcards he sent to his parents and they
kept. Together, with very little literal narrative, the images and lists and
tape labels tell a portion of his life’s story.
All
VSW Press books are available for purchase through Visual Studies Workshop,
either on the website, www.vsw.org/press, or in the bookstore, 31 Prince
Street, which is open Tuesdays through Saturdays from 12 to 5 p.m. 442-8676
Cobblestone Quest: Road Tours of
New York’s Historic Buildings
Rich
and Sue Freeman
Footprint
Press Inc.
They
don’t build ’em like they used to. In the pre-Civil War era Western New York
masons built approximately 700 cobblestone buildings, constructed with the
small stones found in the region’s soil (it could take several years to gather
enough for one building). And because they were built so well, many of them
still stand. It is an architectural form unique to the Rochester area. Rich and
Sue Freeman, a husband and wife team that writes prolifically about the Western
New York landscape, now take the reading public on a tour of these buildings.
As the Freemans do so well, they’ve divided the book into 17 driving or biking
tours illustrated by maps and photos and balanced them with chapters on history
and architecture. Available at www.footprintpress.com, local bookstores, or at
www.landmarksociety.org
The Hands That Feed Us: 100 Years at the
Rochester Public Market
Nancy
Rosin and Karen Burns
Few
places capture the spirit of Rochester better than the Public Market — one of
only a handful of public markets that have been in continual operation for the
last 100 years. 2005 is our market’s 100th year, and the city is rightfully
celebrating. It’s still the place for the cheapest, freshest food, and it’s a
vital link between city residents and their farmer neighbors. Do you want to
meet the people who grow and harvest your food? Do you want a bag of tube socks
for pocket change? Then to market you must go. Nancy Rosin and Karen Burns
researched the market’s history and collected more than 175 photos, images,
drawings, and newspaper clippings to make this visual tribute. Available at
www.landmarksociety.org
Treasures from Olana: Landscapes by
Frederic Edwin Church
Kevin
J. Avery
Cornell
University Press
Treasure from Olana: Landscapes by
Frederic Edwin Church is
the title of a new book published by the Olana Partnership and Cornell
University Press. It is also the title of an accompanying exhibition that was
on display at Fenimore Art Museum in Cooperstown through September 19, and
which will also travel to, among other venues, the National Academy Museum in
New York City in February 2006.
For
those of us living in Upstate New York, the names Olana and Frederic Edwin
Church should have a vaguely familiar ring to them — or, at the very least,
we should become familiar with them.
Olana
is the former home of Church, a member of the Hudson River School, a group of
landscape painters that focused on, and even encouraged, cultural myths about
the future of the new American nation and the primeval vastness of its
wilderness. For Church, that included South America as well, as seen in the
Metropolitan Museum of Art’s breathtaking, “The Heart of the Andes,” painted in
1859.
His
home, the “castle on a hill” with a view of the mid-Hudson valley, is in
Hudson, New York. Today, it is a living document of the world travels, the
objects collected, and the art produced — including notebooks, drawings, and
both oil sketches and paintings — by this acclaimed 19th-century artist. The
book and the exhibition detail a selection of paintings from the collection at
Olana and places the work not only within the context of the artist’s life and
travels but also considers Church’s influence on others and the public’s
reception of him.
Of
course, visiting Olana is a great weekend destination, especially in the fall
when the surrounding foliage begins to turn. Or, try to catch one of the upcoming
venues of the exhibition. If all else fails, get the book: There are lots of
good color reproductions and an informative essay.
Available
through Cornell University Press, www.cornellpress.cornell.edu.
— Heidi Nickisher
This article appears in Sep 21-27, 2005.
