For the safety of our customers and bookseller, our physical location is temporarily closed until the threat of the spread of COVID-19 has abated. In the meantime, we are open by appointment only and are happy to make local deliveries. Stay safe and we hope to see you soon.
Open since September of 2008, we are celebrating our seventh year buying and selling old, used, and rare books in historic downtown Staunton, Virginia.
Barrister Books continues our series of exhibits featuring work by book and paper artists. We have taken on this direction in an effort to expand opportunity for book arts venues and broaden the discussion about the nature of books. It is a natural extension of the bookshop's mission. In addition, we are excited about the possibilities to collaborate with book and paper artists, teaching venues, and arts organizations for future book arts exhibits at Barrister Books.
Come celebrate with us!
In September of 2008, Barrister Books opened on the corner of Lawyers Row and Barristers Row in the heart of historic downtown Staunton. We are so grateful for your continuing support and patronage. In celebration of our twelfth anniversary, we are giving away a set of two letterpress prints by printer, book artist and paper maker Amos Paul Kennedy, Jr.
Layers of color and bold type, letterpress printed on chip board, characterize Kennedy's challenge to each of us to be an active participant in conversations about equality, opportunity, race and the nature of craft.
Kennedy says of his efforts in establishing The Detroit Printing Plant: "What I want to do is have people help me create a model for sustainable industries built to human scale. I want others to explore this model so that they too can pass on your love and devotion of a craft. The Detroit Printing Plant is about sustainability: it's not about being so big that you have to maintain your bigness, it's about being just big enough that your craft can maintain you."
To take this set of wonderful prints home, all you have to do is come by Barrister Books and enter your name and email address in the drawing. We have framed the set of Kennedy prints in custom black lacquered wooden frames, so if you win, you'll take them home ready to hang. We'll draw the name of the winner on October 31, 2020 at 5:00 pm and let you know if you win.
To read more about Amos Paul Kennedy Jr. and see more of his work, visit his web site Kennedy Prints! and on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/kennedyprints/?hl=en and https://www.instagram.com/pile_of_bricks/?hl=en
Lyall Harris “Winter Flame”
november 29 - january 14, 2018
A selection of book art by Lyall Harris will be on view at Barrister Books from Nov 29, 2017 through Jan 14, 2018. These works include structures from Harris’ A Year in Books during which she made a new project every week for one year, book objects, such as Outing Yourself, featuring text on miniature hangers, and fully developed artist’s books like Interior Landscape, a reflection on Sylvia Plath’s journals, and Paper Boats, a collaborative book Harris made with Patricia Silva about contemporary mass immigration to Europe. Most works are for sale, prices start at $10.
About “book art,” Harris says: Book art might indeed look like a book and it usually references the book form in some way, but this art medium doesn’t have prescribed parameters. It allows for a broad range of expression through a unique combination of text and/or image, sequence, and structure, and in so doing, it does something a “regular” book just can’t do. Works on display at Barrister Books run the gamut from very simple structures to more elaborate works. Even in easy structures, I try to conceptually push what a “simple gesture” can accomplish as I often explore charged and layered content. My identity as an artist-mother is near at hand in much of my book art. Originally from Virginia, I am happy to be back, now living in Charlottesville, after 30 years on other coasts and continents.
Artist Books and Paper Objects
Now featuring collected small, surprising, fun, and affordable artist books and paper objects from Printed Matter in New York:
Yearbook by Sophie Arnold; paper tags, vintage yearbook pictures
Earbooks by Purgatory Pie Press; letter press, paper books, featuring the poetry of Sommer Browning
Le Travail by Susanne Bürner; folded heavy paper, photographs, map
Patterns by Sara Diamond; paper, stapled spine
Coffee by Evah Fan; paper, stapled spine
DNAids cups by Creative Time; set of five paper cups
Handling, Miniature Garden 2015; digital print on gray paper, edition of 50 by Claudia Peña Salinas and Denise Shatz
Float Float by Sandy Son; paper, stapled spine
Deborah O’Keeffe “altered books, 2015”
october 24 - november 28, 2015
Staunton artists Deborah O'Keeffe returns to Barrister Books with her thoughtful and engaging altered books. “First I am a writer. My creation of mandalas, altered books, and mixed media assemblages grew out of that profession, and out of my practice of mosaic collage which has been evolving for more than a decade. I work with materials salvaged and collected from nature, the street, demolition sites, thrift stores, and with papers I have salvaged or bought.” Deborah’s work is a feast of patterning, color, and story telling, demonstrating a reverence for the acts of collection, sorting, and hand assembly. Photographs courtesy of Deborah O’Keeffe
https://ameliamandala.wordpress.com
http://www.newsleader.com/story/entertainment/2015/10/20/barrister-books-deborah-okeeffe-staunton-artist-altered-books/74223446/
summer 2015, Artist's Proof Editions
Artist’s Proof Editions
june 19 - august 1, 2015
“Artist’s Proof Editions builds digital books and book-like projections for the iPad, and publishes works on paper, including artists’ books and broadsides. We encourage slow literature, word-works formed over time, with deliberation and intention. We produce video poems, multi-touch digital books, artists’ books, and works on paper. We are curious about the origins of art and the beginning of writing. We begin with the word, its utterance, the emotions it evokes from us, the poem that grows from it, the marks the poet makes. We respond with performance: images, sound, text, as montage. We make new versions for the twenty-first century.”
http://www.artistsproofeditions.com
Deborah O’Keeffe “altered books”
october 25 - november 28, 2014
“First I am a writer. My creation of mandalas, altered books, and mixed media assemblages grew out of that profession, and out of my practice of mosaic collage which has been evolving for more than a decade. I work with materials salvaged and collected from nature, the street, demolition sites, thrift stores, and with papers I have salvaged or bought.” Deborah’s work is a feast of patterning, color, and story telling, demonstrating a reverence for the acts of collection, sorting, and hand assembly. Photographs courtesy of Deborah O’Keeffe
https://ameliamandala.wordpress.com
Virginia Arts of the Book Center 2013 Collaborative project a “Bookmaker’s Dozen”
february 14 - march 14, 2014
This exhibit featured a set of fifteen handmade miniature books showcasing a variety of printing styles including letterpress, lithography, etching, and giclée; binding styles including coptic, stiff board, accordion, and non-adhesive bindings. The books are the collaborative work of 27 local artists and were created using a 2″ x 3″ format. Photographs courtesy of Stacey Evans and the VABC.
"Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend, inside of a dog, it's too dark to read." - Groucho Marx
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