Unwritten / David Shapiro ; illustration, Lucio Pozzi

Unwritten / David Shapiro ; illustration, Lucio Pozzi

Lapp Princess Press ; 5

Lapp Princess Press : A Small Press and Artist Books from the late 1970s (Exhibition : 2007)

This work requires the active participation of the reader. An eighteen-by-twenty-four-inch piece of paper is folded at the requisite six-inch-square format, with the text of Shapiro's poem and Pozzi's illustration buried in the inside. A note inside instructs the reader, "Pages are meant to be cut by hand; a poem and image are inside."

Lapp Princess Press : A Small Press and Artist Books from the late 1970s. -- Writer and art critic Amy Baker founded Lapp Princess Press in 1977. As with other small presses of the period, Lapp Princess's goal was to create artists' books that could be purchased by the widest possible audience. Each of the volumes created under Baker's directorship were issued in editions of 2,000--a very large number for this type of material. They each sold for $3, making them even more accessible. -- While the artist was given total freedom concerning the ultimate product, Baker set the format for the Lapp Princess books. Each closed book was to be a uniform six inches square. While some artists maintained a traditional book format of single, uniformly trimmed leaves, others opted to expand the book beyond the six inches, as in Chuck Close's 64-inch leparello or the even more elaborately folded 18-by-24 inch sheet by David Shapiro and Lucio Pozzi. -- Lapp Princess maintained an ambitious production schedule, issuing twelve books from 1977 to 1979, the year Amy Baker left to become executive publisher for Artforum. Lapp Princess continued for several more years, issuing books in the six-inch square format as well as in other dimensions. -- All of the works shown are from the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute Library, which owns the complete list of Lapp Princess Press publications.

CAI copy included in Library exhibition titled "Lapp Princess Press : A Small Press and Artist Books from the late 1970s" October 1, 2007 -- January 15, 2008

Item exhibited open (Detail)

Exhibition webpage: http://www.clarkart.edu/museum_programs/exhibitions_past_detail.cfm?ID=61&nav=2

Pozzi, Lucio, 1935-

New York : Lapp Princess Press, in association with Printed Matter, c1977

Shapiro, David, 1947-

Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute. Library

[23] p. : ill. ; 16 cm

eng

ND237 P683.8u

nyu