Wednesday, October 6, 2010

Gallery Exhibit - Michael Canavan

The exhibit didn't start on a good note for me. I say this because I mistakenly walked right by the exhibit room and walked into Auditorium A300. As soon as I opened the door and walked in, the whole class (including the professor) just stared at me. Realizing my mistake, I exited and, only then, did I notice the gallery right next door.

Once inside, the first book that caught my eye was the Pictorial Webster's Dictionary. When I first saw it, I thought that that it was a bible. I don't know why, it just had that look. It had two locks on it that you had to unlock before you opened it. Once I opened it, I noticed that the binding was made out of wood. I really liked that feature. It looked really old but the paper detailing it said that it was bound in 2010.



The next book that I really liked was by Peter Madden. The only way that I can describe it is as a scrapbook/diary. My wife likes to scrapbook in her free time so I am used to scrapbooks but this one was different. I liked it because it only had one object on every other page. The usual scrapbook has as many objects as you can fit per page. Each object had a story behind it. Not a long story, just enough to keep you interested. I also liked the fabric, although I am not too sure what it was. It seemed like a sort of rough paper with the pages sown together.



There was a book there that reminded me of books that you would read when you were a child. It was a pop-up book. It was the type of book that when you turned the page, a character would pop out. You could also close doors, open windows and the like. I guess that this is the adult version of a pop-up book.



The book that I thought was engaging was the book inside the book. First, there was the book. It was your average book, nothing out of the ordinary. It told a nice story and had beautiful drawings to go along with the it. The one thing that I did notice was that the back binding of the book was very thick while the front binding was average size.



When I got to the last page of the book and came to the back binding, I realized why the back binding was so thick. There was a flip book hidden in the back binding. When you flipped through the book, it gave you a quick movie version of the book that you had just read. I liked that feature. It just seems to me, a really interesting way to end a book.

2 comments:

  1. The "Pictorial Webster's Dictionary" is the book one professor there recommended to me, it is heavy and leather-bound, but I couldn't open it because one buckle is broken and the other is too tight...

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  2. Infact the Pictorial Webster's Dictionary was the one which caught my attention first upon entering.The details with which it was crafted never looks like it has been an artwork of the current times.I too had a tough time to figure out how to open it..

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