SPINE Joan Lyons and Philip Zimmermann (1979)
Spine was a commemorative art publication on the occasion of the Fall 1979 Independent Publishing Conference held at The Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, NY. It was handed out to all attendees during the conference and later sold for $2.50 until it sold out about a year later.
Joan Lyons and I had been talking about book ideas during the early Fall of 1979, We wanted to make something that we could give out on the occasion of the conference. We realized that we were both thinking of making a book that used the parts of the anatomy of a book in a sort of tongue-in-cheek way. Instead of creating two separate books, we decided to collaborate and make a single book combining both of our ideas.
Joan had a child's jacket that we put in the process camera and then made some large lith film for the 'dust jacket'. We brainstormed about all of the other parts of a book that we could use as visual puns. I collected them and did all the prepress production on this book: I made the Kodalith halftone film, stripped them up, and made the offset plates. It was printed by Tom Sullivan on VSW's Heidelberg KORD press by offset lithography. We had decided to use full sheets of paper simply folded in half and gave it out unbound. As I recall, we printed about 200 of them.
The conference was a huge success and there were many luminary attendees, including Ulises Carrión, Felipe Ehrenberg, Clive Phillpot, Richard Minsky, Judith Hoffberg and many others. I remember that the young Minsky was there in his full punk regalia, including pink hair, pointy shoes and leopard-patterned clothes. He had just finished his famous rat-skin bound book for Patty Smith which created quite a sensation.
This book is OUT OF PRINT.
