Collaboration

“More is More”

—The Fox & the Farmer, publisher’s note, 1985

Collaboration is an ethos of the print shop. For students, the experience of working in a shared studio classroom is an introduction to this culture of collaboration.

Making books is a naturally collaborative process. Common book making activities–design, typesetting, illustration, papermaking, printing, and bookbinding–may be divided among many hands. Generally, the conceptual work and design are established by one person, the artist/publisher, who controls the terms of the collaboration, but not all collaborations are arranged as division-of-labor relationships. In some collaborations artists work together–from concept to completion–on all aspects of a book’s production, co-publishing their finished book as a work of joint artistic authorship.

Several books exhibited in Speaking of Book Arts are examples of collaborations by artists who met and first worked together at UW-Madison, and who continue, decades later, to produce artists’ books collaboratively.  As with artists’ books, collaborations are more than the sum of their parts.