There’s a layer cake—in the form of a book, of course!—at the entrance to Anniversary: 10 Years of the Charles Altschul Book Arts Studio, the wildly imaginative group exhibition at the Haas Gallery in Rockport. Cake is a limited-edition book created by the artist and writer Cig Harvey with designer Anneli Skaar and letterpress artist Art Larson. It was published by Two Ponds Press (Liv Rockefeller
and Ken Shure), who ultimately handed off the printed text block to four generations of bookbinders to assemble Harvey’s baker’s dozen of photographs, drawings, and text in their own ways, bound and unbound.

The tradition of the anniversary gift made from a distinct material with symbolic content dates back at least to the Victorian era, according to myriad wedding websites. The first anniversary gift is paper, for the opening chapter, followed the next year by cotton for the fibrous “intertwining of lives.” Through each subsequent year, embodied in a material like leather, fruit/flowers, wood, iron, wool/copper, clay, willow, or tin, there’s an expression of comfort, allure, durability, vitality, and resilience—qualities that contribute to a lasting relationship.

For Anniversary, Richard Reitz Smith, artist and studio manager of Maine Media Workshop Book Arts, has invited 36 current and former studio faculty to take inspiration from anniversary gifts “with plenty of room to stretch meaning and loosely, often playfully, respond to the theme.” Among the invited exhibitors are many nationally known book artists, as well as celebrated photographers who, like Barbara Bosworth, materially reference book arts and artists from Maine and away who celebrate the book as a form for narrative and sculptural invention.

A decade-long relationship with a shared interest in enduring and thriving is by nature collaborative, and so is almost every piece in this visual feast—from the renowned book artist and studio founder Charles Altschul’s monumental folio The Lost Ones by Samuel Beckett, created in the 1980s by Altschul with engravings by Charles S. Klabunde and signed by Samuel Beckett; to Erin Fletcher’s
gorgeous embroidered, sequined, and hand-bound letterpress edition of Rebecca Chamlee’s
At Low Water: An Intertidal Memoir; to the work of “godmother of book arts in Maine” Rebecca Goodale, whose letterpress accordion-style book Shagbark Sestina illustrates a poem by Lisa Hibl with hand-painted drypoint prints. Other works in Anniversary take on more traditional book art forms as points of departure for sculptural explorations. Rachel E. Church’s soft sculptural clementines printed from inked clementines (really!) seem to roll out of their book box as a dimensional still life. Erin Sweeney’s collection of steel wire forms, handmade books, and soft sculpture arrived at the gallery for Reitz Smith to assemble using his own storyteller’s sensibility. Sweeney, in delightful collaboration with Reitz Smith, presents The Divine Lorraine—Inside My Head (translated by Richard) as a wall installation resembling a puppet theater with dynamic shadow play.

In Anniversary books are containers for stories, or portals to worlds the artists help us to imagine, or forms that, when opened book-like, as are Sal Taylor Kydd’s mixed-media tin box photographs, might reveal something otherwise thought to be lost. All the works in the exhibition exude a reverence for, or even giddy delight in, books. Suzanne Glémot, a librarian and book conservator, presents Confetti Library, a book box enclosing hand-dyed paper confetti sorted by color into glass vessels. Jan Owen’s astounding scrollwork on layers of translucent cloth begins with her words,
“Do you know how beautiful words are…” and encompasses chosen writings by beloved writers of poetry and prose.

As a 15-year Maine Media Workshops veteran, the Book Arts program chair since 2018, and Anniversary’s curator and collaborator, Richard Reitz Smith brings his own story to the piece he presents, which is appropriate for the tenth anniversary gift of tin. His mixed-media piece Tarnished—a story of aging together told in found objects and poetry—speaks as much to a personal storytelling style that lends itself wonderfully to book arts as it does to his love for material forms that can contain emotion and for collecting and caring for beautiful things.

Anniversary: 10 Years of the Charles Altschul Book Arts Studio will be on view at the Haas Gallery at Maine Media Workshops in Rockport through December 2024.