What Katy Did

I am extremely honoured to be the winner of the 2014 Biblio-Art Award. The Biblio-Art brief was to take an existing book—my book was What Katy Did by Susan Coolidge—and to create an artwork which both used and referenced the book in some way. I chose to make an artist’s book, and there is more about it under Artist’s books.

The edition I had to work with was quite old—I’m not sure of its exact age, but it was produced by Purnell and Sons, a family-run printing company that was based in Somerset, England, from 1839 to 1964. Typographically, it was not particularly easy on the eye. It was set in Times on 10pt leading. The type size, as close as I could measure it, was 9.5 or 10pt, making it a little too tight for comfortable reading. Book typesetting has come a long way since then, and typefaces like Electra, Janson Text, Garamond and Caslon, with a little more air in the leading, are used more effectively.