In the fall term of 2024, our third year communication design class at Emily Carr University of Art and Design, called “COMD300: Publishing Design — The Book Object,” started an imprint. Each student made a book over the term and then we collected those books for exhibition. This essay, Paper Chain, appeared in our exhibition catalogue, Rete: Published Objects as Network: An Exhibition of Books Made by the Students of COMD300. The online version is expanded from the printed version.

Paper Chain

Our Theme

The theme of our book collection was “net.” Each student was invited to make a book connected to this theme. Responses ranged from sport to spiderweb to nest. When we began planning our exhibition, we named it “Rete,” which is Latin, for “net” or “network.” The root word rete is found in words like reticular and retina. “Rete” is also the term in modern Italian for “net” and “network.”

Our collection's theme and name were inspired by a talk by writer Michele Mari at Festival della Mente in 2017 called  “Fra le maglie della rete,” or, “In the net’s mesh.” Michele considered his own books as nets and his concept caught my attention when he explained that he had turned down the festival’s initial invitation to speak on the theme of “rete,” because he had assumed they wanted him to speak about the internet in some way. When the festival suggested interpreting the theme metaphorically, Michele realized his own traditionally printed books fit the theme of “net” well, going on to detail the ways in which his own printed books capture, filter, and collect. I was actually listening to this talk on a podcast as part of research on another project while walking to class early in the term, and suggested a theme of “net” for our group just on this brief happenstance. Students began generating responses right away, and the books they made formed our term collection.

Michele’s books themselves often touch on themes of family connection At the time of the festival he had recently released an autobiography about growing up with two formidable designers and artists as parents, Enzo Mari and children's book creator Iela Mari. Michele discussed his own individuation from his parents at length in his talk. As I’ll detail later, individuation and transformation turned out to be major themes in our class’ books.

Although Michele’s mother, Iela, was featured in our class’ lecture material, I actually left her out of the version of this essay that appeared in our class’ mini catalogue. With only 775 words available to me in three small pages, I couldn’t afford the space to explain who she was. Although her work The Red Balloon (1969) is iconic, she is not nearly as well known as her prolific husband — they later divorced — and therefore I only mentioned one of Michele’s parents, Enzo, in the catalogue, because he provides context for Michele’s talk while requiring very little introduction. This exemplifies a drawback of the printed page, which is that as a container, it can be rigid. This situation also speaks to the challenge of publishing in a recursive information environment: Enzo is famous and therefore it is easier to make reference to him and also his fame generates interest in a reader who already has familiarity with him. I would stress that this observation is not to downplay Enzo Mari’s incredible contribution to 20th century design, but simply to help bring to the surface one of the many systems we navigate in publishing, some of which are promotion and distribution

Mari’s decision not to follow his iconic father Enzo Mari into design was important to his own creative individuation, and in his talk he describes the moment in which he claimed his future as an artist, telling his father that he planned to become a writer. Enzo Mari was an artist famous for his explosive temper and impatience and when Michele recalls this conversation he echoed one of his father’s frequent complaints, which was “wasting time.” The cadence and timbre of Michele’s voice changed, as he said the words, “una perdita di tempo,” (a waste of time). I believe I was hearing that phrase at least partly how he had heard it growing up, so that audio file communicated tone in a way that writing must achieve differently. 

Our Project Brief

The intimacy and immediacy of audio and the abundant space available in online publishing were part of our term brief considerations. We had three main considerations. One was to make a material book, considering that book as an “object” in the current publishing environment. We borrowed this concept from artist and designer Bruno Munari, a mentor to both Enzo and Iela Mari, who created books that express through form as well as through content. 

The second consideration for our term was the printed book in today’s context. Nowadays screen and audio publishing are key venues for circulating content. So, we borrowed Kenya Hara’s concept from the essay “Books as Information Sculpture” that, as paper books lose their place as the default medium for communication, their use becomes a choice, and therefore the book becomes free to be enjoyed as its own charming self, and appreciated for its tangibility, and tactility.” Hara made this prescient observation in the early 00s, a period in which people were either concerned or excited that print was “dead”. Almost 25 years later, this debate over the death of print has died down a little, but it is true that publishing is going through an uncertain time. That was part of our context, too.

The third consideration was network and community. This class’ projects not only help to define their producers individually, and as part of smaller communities — for example of a region, linguistic community, family, or friendship group — but also as part of our community at ECU. Each book was produced and documented with the help of technicians in the Digital Output Centre, the Risograph Lab, the Soft Shop, the Digital Fabrication Lab, and Photography Lab. And we drew from the expertises of other instructors in both Communication Design as well as in other faculties, like Printmaking. Addressing this consideration, we worked with the school’s library on curating our exhibit and we published a catalogue, generously funded by our dean, Celeste Martin. In creating this catalogue, we are able to archive and circulate our work, and the ECU library has a copy of our catalogue in its collection

Printed Books Today

It has been my experience as a book designer and as a teacher that there are waves of interest in printed publications following surges in information technology. The recent wave of interest in material books at our school provides a few reasons why this might happen. One reason is that the codex format is familiar and limited, both in space and in reach. This was the format chosen by all but one person in our class. If we think about the digital environment as (at least apparently) limitless and with the potential to make a thought or image instantly viral, we can appreciate Hara’s point. Digital and print environments each offer something that the other doesn’t and therefore the choice between them becomes an important part of their context.

A second reason may be that technological innovation is happening in multiple systems. Students at ECU have access to digital printing that is much more flexible and of a higher quality than what I could access as a student. They also have access to digital embroidery, 3D printing, and laser cutting. The school also has metal type and a Risograph lab. Many of our students used a variety of papers, and other materials, and reproduction techniques in their books. This meant we could play flexibly with the material form of the book creatively over the course of the term. 

The third and most important reason that printed books gain interest after surges of technological innovation might be the appeal of enjoying our range of human senses. We enjoy working with our hands, working with tactile materials and with one another in a shared making space. That pivot to Zoom during covid made us better at navigating collective online spaces, and at communicating digitally. It was this period that led some of us to start doing audio lectures and podcasts. but it also increased our appreciation for shared physical spaces. The Riso lab at ECU in particular has become a hub of activity in the Communication design area. As we explained in the foreword of our printed exhibition catalogue, this Riso Lab facilitates publishing projects like ours which are both independent but interconnected, including The Stationery Project and Occasional Press which act as nodes in a larger network of pro-social publishing projects going on around the school. Many members of our class were taking multiple courses this year on bookmaking and/or working in printmaking clubs, like Miso Riso. 

In our readings this term, we looked at historical collaborative publishing movements like these, including Cree and Italian classroom publishing in the 1960s and 70s and short-run publishing in Edo-era Japan, where small aesthetic clubs, for poetry or flower arranging, archived and circulated their practices, weaving a larger shared identity in the process. Part of the Rete project was capturing what I think is a golden moment in short-run publishing at our school and before I get to the works in the exhibit, I’d like to add a note from the Acknowledgements page in our catalogue, because it contains a key concept of our term, which is paper and ink as poetics. We thanked Kathleen Jacques, who runs ECU’s Riso Lab, because she brings to book projects like ours a poetics of paper and ink.¹ This term comes from an analysis of artist and designer Bruno Munari’s expressive use of commercial print production by Marnie Campagnaro, the director of the postgraduate course in Children's Literature at the University of Padova. In the Riso Lab, Jacques’ poetics are seen, literally, in the selection of inks and papers she curates. For example, our catalogue is partly printed in a sunflower colour that Kathleen selected for purchase a few years ago. But Jacques also lends her expertise to each person who brings projects through the Lab. She is one of a number of technicians our class worked with who are also designers and/or artists and our ability to create a library of incredible books between September and December partly relies on having this network of expertises and equipment to support us.  

As I mentioned in the beginning of this essay, Michele Mari’s analysis of books as net or network was about human connection. As student McKenzie Knight said about her projects, Girls, a 160 page book that captures fleeting moments memories related to girlhood, we reflect one another. The question, “who am I,” is tied to “who are we?” Michele’s individuation required him to turn away from his parent’s graphic approach to bookmaking, and he embraced the more traditional form of longform writing, combining it with the newer genre of autofiction. But that longform writing often retraces his connection with his parents. This tension between independence and connection is a theme of many of the books made in our class.

Books in the Collection

Grace Hattrup’s Nest, about an impatient baby crow, was adapted from a story by her mother, Mikael, and its bold simplicity contrasts with Abi Simatupang’s prose-poetry book, merantau, menjaring (to wander, to catch), which weaves family histories in four dialects. Simatupang’s book is a “tumble book” with two front covers. Jemma Wooldridge’s Soft Tether memorializes her mother, Joanne, who passed away in 2019, in a “representation of how she continues to guide me, show up in my life, and connect me to the world.” This book is a softcover book, but a special edition of it is bound with a laser-etched wood cover. Shayne Hommy’s book, Dream Catching, ties to each of the previous books, collecting family stories through imagery and fragments of dialect — ᐸᐋᐧᑕᒧᐃᐧᐣ³ — reflecting also on loss and spaces for reconnection. Hommy uses minimal text, allowing Dream Catching’s format to do the expressing, and its use of specialty papers and laser cutting reflects artist Bruno Munari’s concept of the book as a “total object.” As Syd Mercredi, whose A Net is a Box Unfolded features dyed cloth pages, wrote: “My book links to munari’s idea of the book as a total object. I really connected with that theme because i love children and i liked the idea that the materiality of the book itself offers a possibility for learning through curiosity. I got really excited about pushing the boundaries of what makes a book page, so i started experimenting with cut outs and pages made of of other kinds of materials. I liked the idea that the materiality of the book itself offers a possibility for learning through curiosity.”4 

Learning and curiosity is also a focus of both Victoria Griffith’s Salmon Journey, which lays out a salmon’s life cycle in an accordion format, and Eli Brazolot’s Bug’s Guide: Weaving Through Webs, which considers spider webs from a bug’s perspective. Stephanie Auw also explores perspective cleverly in CATCH, which retells a story from three perspectives—of a fisherman, of a fish, and even of the net that catches that fish—in three books. Tiffany Patrick-Isicheli’s magical Secret of the Sea, retells a Nigerian tale about merfolk, echoing Mercredi’s retelling of a Loki fable. Patrick-Isicheli also created a felt dustjacket which appeals to child’s sense of touch, making the book a warmer and more inviting object to interact with, an aspect of children’s publishing that was also important to Munari.

Some works in Rete are ambivalent. Ellis Moltzen’s This Feeling of Safety, about silkworm domestication, has silk  spun by Moltzen embroidered into the cover. The book also uses silk in its sewn binding. This is an excellent example of a book expressing itself through its form. As Munari’s publisher, Pietro Corraini, said to me in an interview, “Also the binding is useful to tell a story sometimes.”5 Moltzen’s bittersweet meditation on freedom  is echoed in Caitlin Cheung’s gentle Solace, the tale of a sailor who loses his boat. Luckily he is an otter, who finds he can navigate the ocean without it. Kamolnan Leelawongsanon’s Net as Hive graphically explores emotional connectivity through graphic Risographed imagery

Other books explore the horror of entrapment, like Anna Mandrykina’s lush weaved apart, illustrated with pencil illustrations; Ning Zhou’s fearless  Invisible which challenges the pressures placed on young people by their families; and Noreen Li’s bright, punchy You Are in a Trap. Like Li’s work, Eren Melektosun’s For You expresses the vernacular of the internet in its pages, while Mahsa Ghazvinian’s sculptural Spaces Between combines diorama and scroll, investigating the limits of what a book can be. But this collection also celebrates relationships: McKenzie Knight’s epic Girls, Tayla Schaffer’s coolly sportive Jane, and Gwen Halsted’s exuberant Fishnets each contain profiles of real people in their authors’ communities, demonstrating short-run publishing’s ability to define community. Embodying that interconnectivity, everyone profiled in Fishnets will receive a copy of the book. 

Malvika Garylal’s cinematic All I’ve Ever Known expresses itself through page sequence, poetry, photo essay, writing, and typography. As designers who illustrate, printers who lay out, typesetters who write, we all have our own unique combination of expressive literacies to draw from as we resituate traditional design practices in the smartphone era. Publishing design progresses in cycles. We still make use of traditional craft technologies, like hand-sewn binding, “redundant” technologies, like Riso printing, as well as digital printing, embroidery, and photography. The efflorescence of short run publishing at ECU is supported by this wide range of reproduction technologies. Beth Howe ran a parallel course to ours in the Faculty of Art, elegantly organized around the theme of multiples. When tasked with making artwork in the form of a book, students were required to produce more than one, even when they were working by hand. ComD 300 students’ digital files are designed to facilitate multiples, but some of our class’ books are single editions, often due to material costs. Are these artist’s books, prototypes, or both? 

Echoing Mari, book historian Leslie Howsam wrote in his 2015 book, The Study  of Book History, that those who “make, sell, and save books”⁴ themselves form a complex web, whose connections are often observed only indirectly. Responding to the limitations of print (page space), I have teased out only a few of our  connections here. But the printed book’s emerging  new context is that apparent limitlessness of the web, where we will host an expanded version of this essay at
windowless.framer.website. Meanwhile, copies of this catalogue will circulate physically to the people who helped us make this collection: our network, our “rete.”

Endnotes

1. Found in words like reticular or retina. “Rete” also means “net” or “network” in modern Italian.

2. “Fra le maglie della rete,” Festival della Mente, 2017.

3. pawâtamowin, or “dream,” in Cree
4. This was written in a shared google document where students shared details about their book in the middle of the term.

5. Robin Mitchell Cranfield, The Book Unfolded, “The Book as a Total Object: An Interview with Pietro Corraini.” October 6, 2023.

6. Leslie Howsam, The Study of Book History, 2015