Book Bytes guest review by Barbie Adler from PaperWorks PaperWorks.info
Urgent 2nd Class: Creating Curious Collage, Dubious Documents, and Other Art from Ephemera
by Nick Bantock
Chronicle Books
ISBN 0-8118-4305-X, 120 pages (high-quality softcover)
$19.95 US
Altered Decades, Altered Travel, or how to transform the unexpected into your own idiosyncratic art
Chronicle Books’ reputation is for fine design and production, and this book holds to their high standard. Urgent 2nd Class is different than a Griffin and Sabine book. I enjoyed the author’s famous series because I love to be the voyeur, opening and reading letters meant for another, snooping into someone else’s life — probably the reason I enjoy fiction.
And I do enjoy Nick Bantock’s fiction writing skills. He can tell a story. What is interesting is to peer into what makes Nick tick. He loves ephemera: ticket stubs, stamps, photographs of strangers and foreign places, old paper money, maps and documents gleaned from junk shops.
He collages and photocopies, transfers and stamps these elements to change their history.
If you are interested in what excites Nick Bantock, read this well-designed and well-written book. Urgent 2nd Class shows fans how Bantock creates his visual wizardry.
The best parts of the affordable, colorful 120-page book are when the author plays with viewers’ senses. He wants you to look a second time (as on page 65) at a grouping of four seed packets in which he rearranges the names and pictures on the packets.
Bantock is a magician who takes the old and reassembles to create a new reality. He loves fragile, torn and faded pages and old advertising, as on page 64, which Nick cites as an example of great design.
The author’s eye is sharp for the right arrangement, the perfect positioning of found ephemera. He alters old maps, overlaying them with stamps or menus or rubbings of another photograph.
Bantock tells the reader what thrills him: in particular the chase, the rummaging, the discovery of old stuff and the correct pairing and placement of them to form new art. He sees his work as a reworking of history. From fish swimming across a page of old sheet music (page 31) to canceled envelopes embellished with old air mail stickers and irreverent rubber stamps of his own design, the author’s imagination stretches far afield of the original travel destinations.
For anyone interested in design, peruse the layout and all art work in Urgent 2nd Class. Bantock gives tips on setting up a design and a page, how to make an item look more fragile, or more prominent, or how to plan disparate elements into a pleasing and intriguing collection of images on the page.
If you are sitting too long at the computer, grab Urgent 2nd Class to arouse your curiosity about the old world of print, type, mail, and writing. Nothing electronic in this message, but a nice way to recombine the 20th and 21st centuries.
Barbie Adler
Editor
PaperWorks Journal
www.PaperWorks.info