Rosen.
What is a book
It’s a simple question — it’s a rectangular object with pages, and those pages most likely have words on them, and you read it to get information, or be told a story.
Right?
But what if there are no words? What if the pages are filled with images? What if they’re empty? What if the book doesn’t open like books usually do? What if it can become another shape altogether if you unfold the pages right? Is it still a book?
Those were the kinds of questions that drove artist and teacher Paulette Rosen in “What Is A Book?” an introduction to bookmaking that was also an evening of snacks and cocktail pairing hosted by Creative Arts Workshop and Ordinary, as CAW prepares to roll out online classes for winter and spring of 2021 — all still online during the Covid-19 pandemic.
To participate in the event, one paid and preregistered. This meant signing up to pick up a box the day before from Ordinary on Chapel Street. Inside the box were a handful of almonds, gouda cheese, two cocktails ready to be shaken and drank, and a serving of vanilla lemon pudding with graham cracker crumbs to be added right before eating. At Ordinary, co-owner Tim Cabral gave instructions to refrigerate the box until Tuesday evening. About 35 people signed up to take part, and filled the Zoom meeting fast when the allotted time of 7 p.m. arrived.
Astrid Bernard, registrar at Creative Arts Workshop, welcomed everyone and reminded them that CAW has a new slate of online classes ready for the winter into the spring of 2021, including classes for younger folks, classes in drawing, painting, and photography, and — as this event was to demonstrate — classes in bookmaking.
Sobocinski.
But first, Bernard turned the event over to Jason Sobocinski and Tim Cabral of Ordinary. Sobocinski, from his home in Hamden, instructed participants to pair the cheese with the first cocktail. The gouda, he explained was “bright. It’s light. It’s fluffy. It makes you think of summertime and spring.” It was made from goat’s milk, aged somewhere between six and ten months, and as Sobocinski described the flavor, “it tastes really cooked, really caramelized.”
Cabral.
Paired with the cheese was Cabral’s take on the Hemingway daiquiri. A daiquiri, Cabral explained, covers a family of cocktails composed of rum, citrus, and sugar. The Hemingway daiquiri was created in Cuba; the story goes that it was at the request of author Ernest Hemingway, who tasted a particular daiquiri and asked the bartender to “remove the sugar and double the rum,” Cabral said. Cabral’s take added a little sugar back in and added a little more citrus.
“This is a drink that’s going to be shaken and stirred up,” Cabral said, as — from behind the bar at Ordinary — he did just that. Shaking the cocktail “opens it up. It brightens it,” Cabral said. He then strained the ingredients to remove ice particles so that the drink didn’t dilute further as it warmed it. “The flavor will evolve,” Cabral said. “Shake it, stir it up, and sip it.”
He waited a moment for the participants to try the cheese and cocktails together. “Thumbs up? Thumbs down? What do you think? If you don’t like it, you can throw your glass at the screen, but then you’ll have to clean it up. Sorry about that,” Cabral joked.
“Delish,” a participant said.
Rosen, who teaches bookmaking and has been on the Creative Arts Workshop faculty for over 20 years, began her presentation. “What is a book?” she asked. Beaming in from her home studio in Hamden, she explained that “in my private life I make custom books and boxes and do multimedia drawings.” Tuesday evening’s presentation was to be “a conversation and a show and tell. No one’s going to be making anything except new thoughts tonight. You can sit back and sip and get greasy fingers.”
“But you have to participate,” she added. “It’s about us talking about what we think.”
She began by interrogating her own question. Now that e‑books have become a part of everyday life for many, to ask about the nature of books was also to ask a question that booksellers worried about a couple generations ago with the advent of the paperback: “Is the book dying?”
Rosen recalled that when paperbacks became ubiquitous, “there was a panic that books were dead.” But “It turned out there’s a place for books that need to be made with a paper cover and for hardcover.” Today, as digital and audiobooks grow in popularity, Rosen felt that they “have made the physical book even more precious.” Engaging with a physical book was still “very different than what you get from a digital experience.”
So she returned to her first question: “What is a book?”
The chat window filled with replies: “A thing you read”; “a self-contained body of work, whether fictional or non-fictional, usually with words but can be and/or with pictures”; “entertainment!”; “a machine or technology for reading”; “information”; “a journey”; “a record”; “a tactile entity.”
Rosen wrote these responses on a large easel behind her, then asked, “what makes a book a book? If I see a glass and a book sitting here, how can I tell the difference? How do we all seem to know?”
“It has contents,” offered one participant.
“Does it have to have contents?” Rosen asked.
“A book has chapters,” offered another.
“Does it have to have chapters? I see Jason shaking his head.”
“I don’t even think a book needs to have words,” Sobocinski said.
”You’re stealing my thunder,” Rosen said. “I want to show you some things.” She fanned the pages of, well, a book. “I think, based on what we’re saying, we would all agree that this is a book.” She then brought out an object that could fit in the palm of her hand. It had a cover like a book, and pages, like a book, but the pages were blank.
“Is this a book?” she said. “It has a cardboard cover and it has blank pages. If this is not a book, what would you call it?”
“Full of possibilities,” a participant offered.
“Yes, it’s a book, but not a finished one,” typed another participant.
“So a book is only finished if it has words in it?” Rosen said. She brought out a book with pages that were filled with images, but no words. “Let’s not forget we all started with picture books” as children, she added. “I’m taking you down this garden path.”
She brought out a box with what looked like a book in it, but it was impossible to get at the booklike object to find out. “If you can’t open it and can’t read it, is it a book?” she said.
Suddenly there was real disagreement. “No, it’s book art”; “it’s a visual representation of a book”; “it’s not functionally a book”; it was “a piece of art about a book.”
“I have no answers about this,” Rosen said with a smile. She figured it was time for another snack.
Sobocinski and Cabral next paired the helping of vanilla lemon curd, topped with graham cracker crumbs, with a cocktail of Japanese whiskey made like Scotch, citrus, and bitters. “Everyone forgets wintertime is citrus season,” Sobocinski said.
Cabral explained that the second cocktail also had a literary history. When Mark Twain traveled to London, he wrote his wife that he was drinking it with breakfast, lunch, and dinner. He included the recipe in his letter: essentially, two parts spirit to one part lemon and one part sugar, with bitters added “to round it out,” Cabral said.
With the pairings, Sobocinski said, there was always the question of whether the flavors should be “in the same lane” or whether they should “come together and make an explosion.” They opted for the former in this case, and asked what people thought.
“Delicious,” said one participant. “This pudding situation is amazing.”
Rosen then reappeared with an object that had pages that folded like the bellows of an accordion, rather than being all bound on one side, codex (i.e., normal book) style. The pages were filled with images. “Is it a book?” she said.
“Not a codex, but a book,” one participant said.
“I’m working myself into a really tricky hole of book vs. painting,” offered another.
The examples kept coming, pushing the boundaries of what a book could be. There was one with circular pages that illustrated the phases of the moon. “Can we read images? And if so, what is the difference between a book and a painting?” Rosen said. Another example had pages that overlapped and interlocked in a style known as a flag book.
There was a furry book that was almost more like a wallet, filled with words and drawings. An object that looked like a book but unfolded to become a model of a house.
“When an artist makes something and wants to call it a book, it’s a book,” a participant said.
“I think people are speechless,” Bernard said.
“I think people are exhausted,” Rosen joked. “Is it structure or is it function that makes something a book?” The question remained even though “we haven’t really agreed on what the function is.” But it seemed that in practical terms, “there are things that are clearly books. There are things that are maybe not books. And there are things in between.”
Rosen had a final example that she said a student had given her a couple decades ago. It was a small object in a clear plastic box that looked at first like a small model of a book. But it turned out to be two crackers that had been baked and stamped incorrectly. They looked for all the world like a small, open book.
Where was the line between book and art object for Rosen? Sometimes, she said, her pieces were exhibited with other books; sometimes with other forms of art. “For me it’s about finding the right structure for what I want to express,” she said. Was it two-dimensional drawings, or three-dimensional books that employed drawings?
There was another dimension to consider as well: books “include the element of time, and sequencing, and pacing,” Rosen said.“It has to do with the control that I want to have over the ideas or the feelings. Any book is about unfolding in time. Even a regular book you’re reading is an experience over time.”
And that, to Rosen, was one thing that perhaps made books unique — “the sense of moving through time by turning the pages,” she said. “It’s not the same experience” with an e‑book, “and I think we all know that.’
For information on Rosen’s bookmaking class and other class offerings at Creative Arts Workshop, visit its website.