A birthday cake, a ukulele, a handcrafted lunchbox and iron – in this section, each book is a sculptural object. Subjects are as varied as the digging of a well, the renting of a house, the making of a sail. Unusual forms are defined by content and, in many cases, serve as metaphors for personal events in the artists' lives.

Elaine Antoniuk/Sara Rosenbluth – California
Across the Millennia the Author is Speaking, 2003, 9” x 5 ¾”, 5 copies. Poems from 1700 B.C. resonate in this letterpress homage to the beauty of cuneiform script and its evolution from pictograph to abstract wedge.

C. Joel Beaman – Illinois
Here:There, 2003, 14” square, 10 copies. A semi's "hazardous materials" placard binds photos of the open road captured by means of a converted 1984 GMC Stepvan that is a mobile pinhole camera.

Beverly Burbank – Massachusetts
Sail, 2003, 3”H x 2 ½” diameter, opens to 10” x 12 ½”, 25 copies. Design, construction, and storage of a sail for a cherished boat inspired this folded paper version in which content and form are closely connected.

Ann Coombs – Oregon
Highboy Makes Girl, 2003, 13” x 5 ¾”, 3 copies. The artist made this highboy to honor three men who have always stood by her and delivered on their promises.

Kerri Cushman – Illinois
Pumping Iron, 2003, 10 ” x 12”, 13 copies. Hand-welded lunchbox and iron, handmade paper and letterpress poem combine in a meditation on industry, consumerism, and family.

Jennifer Calvert Edwards – Connecticut
These are the shoes that baby wore..., 2003, 3 ½” x 6 ¼”, 3 copies. Paper shoes, a surprise inside pull-up, and nursery-style text celebrate the universal metaphor of baby's first steps.

Jacques Fournier/Edward Hillel – Quebec, Canada
Le 6 avril 1944, 1999, 6 5/8” x 3 7/8”, 44 copies. A book/cenotaph tells the story of forty-four Jewish children captured in a house of refuge and taken to die at Auschwitz; the title nails the date.

Best integration of message and engineering

Joe Freedman/Ilisha Helfman – Connecticut
Friend or Faux (hyno politico), 2004, 7” square, open edition. The turn of a crank transforms laser-printed pages into an animated indictment of political hypocrisy.

"Friend or Faux is by far the best integration of message and engineering I've ever seen!" --Robert Sabuda

Linda K Johnson – Florida
An Old Lady, A Worm and A Few Other Critters, 2000, 5” x 6”, 50 copies.
Critters of South Florida inhabit this digitally printed tunnel book playing off an old folk-rhyme rewritten in local vernacular.

Peggy Johnston – Iowa
Entries from the Bat Log, 2003, 7 ½” x 3”, 25 copies. Intimate, humorous drawings based on bat encounters in an old house emerge as this paper vademecum (bat book) unfolds.

Best use of typography

Cynthia Marsh – Tennessee
The Book of Genesis Tent Show for Birds and Other Small Creatures, 2003, 12” x 18”, 10 copies. Wood-type printed parchment stands to create a translucent tent-like church for earth's small inhabitants.

"Cynthia Marsh's combination of text, wood type typography, and form are deceptively simple: she takes the historic form of the broadside to new heights. Her work makes me want to stand up and shout.” – Susan E. King

Emily Martin – Iowa
Slices, 2003, 4” square, 3 copies. Autobiographical text in 50-character sentences is the icing on this twelve-slice confection celebrating the artist's 50th birthday.

Barbara Michener – Idaho
Undercurrent, 2001, 22” x 10 ¼” square, 3 copies. Pipes, scrolls, and the sound of running water evoke the confluence of excavations when the artist dug a well and wrote her memoirs simultaneously.

Jen Thomas – Illinois
For Rent, 2003, 10” x 7”, opens to 42”, 10 copies. A screen-printed board-game/book recreates the traumas of "renter's nightmare" and then folds neatly into an apartment building.

Peter and Donna Thomas – California
Ukulele Series Book #23: A Brief History of the Ukulele, 2003, 20 ½” x 6 1/8”, 15 copies. Sawn and hinged, a ukulele is both cover and container for its own hand-written and illustrated digitally printed history.

Mary Wells – Utah
Peace, Love, Prosperity, 2003, 7” x 8”, 3 copies. Blessings emerge as the book opens to reveal free-turning cast paper pages and the Chinese characters for peace, love, and prosperity.

These are books of transformation. Pages burst from ingenious containers or elegant covers and evolve into complex three-dimensional sculptural shapes. The innovative accordions, carousels, Hedi Kyle-inspired flag-books, shadow boxes, and honeycombs are a festival of folds.

Evert Brown – Colorado
The Brown Boys, 2001, 6 1/8” x 4 3/8”, opens to 8 ¾”, 3 copies. Hand-tinted photos from a sixty-year period expand in this carousel to document "a lasting family in disposable times."

Tara Bryan – Newfoundland, Canada
Jack!, 2002, 3 7/8” x 3 ½” square, 24 copies. A twenty-five foot letterpress printed concertina springs from its box bearing rhymes, chanteys and linocuts, all about Jack.

Best use of unexpected materials

Deborah Phillips Chodoff – New York Photo: Lee Rogers
Procrastination, 2002, 4 ½” square, opens to 36”. 6 copies. Bronzed and collaged pages bound in minute timers and alarm clock parts salute procrastination, then stand upside down and wait for time to run out.

“Procrastination, despite its title, generates a sense of spontaneity and raw energy through the arrangement of timers and other found objects, which cleverly express its theme of time suspended.” – Miriam Schaer

Debbi Crane – Indiana
homegrown, 2003, 1 ½” x 3 ¼”, opens to 33” x 8”, 4 copies. This book grows slowly out of its box, planting a message to complainers that one seed of kindness can evolve to something beautiful and big.

Freya Diamond – New Mexico
Frida Kahlo, A Body of Work, 2003, 8 ½” x 4 ¼”, opens to 16 ½”L, 3 copies. Frida Kahlo models her own paintings in a "human flag book" dedicated to her incredible talent.

M.J. Goerke – Missouri
Kaleidoscope: #2, 2003, 5” square, 3 copies. One kaleidoscope is a toy, but the other is the accordion book itself, with movable wheels of brightly colored acetate inside each page.

cj grossman – California
OUT: Victims of Anti-Gay Murder, 2003, 6 ½” x 8 ¼”, 3 copies. Like miniature headstones, flags list victims of anti-gay murder in a book that presents facts and raises questions about this hateful crime.

Gloria Helfgott – California
Cairn, 2003, 7” x 5 ½”, 5 copies. Mysterious hieroglyphics and densely drawn dimensional spirals lead us toward the hidden world of ancient Celtic religion.

Deborah Kogan – California
Starting Over/Looking for Meaning, 2003, 5 ½” square, 5 copies. Complex folds with photos of plants and overlaid instructional text create a visual matrix for the story of a man who had to reinvent himself after a brain injury.

Lois Morrison – New Jersey
In the Land of Shadows, 2003, 8” x 10”, 25 copies. Drawings of doll parts hovering on piano wire cast layers of shadow in a bright land bounded by psychological darkness.

Antonia Nelson – Utah
Time Flies, 2003, 8” x 6”, opens to 19”, 3 copies. Time itself becomes a medium as we explore this lighthearted commentary on the way our reality affects our perception of time.

Tara O’Brien – Pennsylvania
At the Aquarium, 2003, 5 ¾” 4 ¼”, 25 copies. The reader applauds when the octopus escapes its tank in a multi-level star structure about the interplay between observer and observed.

Kyle Olmon – New Mexico
moment(um), 2003, 7 ½” x 4 ¼”, 50 copies. A one-second story in which, with a single flick of the wrist, a diver plunges in as a contender and emerges as a champion.

Best use of serious content

Ambar Past – Chiapas, Mexico
The Lady of Ur, 2004, 4 ¾” x 4”, 100 copies. Inspired by her meditation on a looted mask of the goddess Inana, the artist speaks out through photo and poem for the suffering women of Iraq.

"Ambar Past's THE LADY OF UR is a haunting, accordion-fold revelation reminding us that the artist's namesake does repeat itself, with tragic implications." –Tom Trusky

Michele Heather Pollock – Minnesota
Hexes, 2003, 4 ½” x 1 ½”, 3 copies. Flocked paper box and covers enclose six hexagons expanding to a honeycomb that cradles a poem about the hexagonal nature of love.

Best crafted book

Linda Smith – Arizona
Inside Chance, 2000, 4” cube, 100 copies. Cube, hand-cast globe, and inscribed poem all shift and change, describing how, by chance, we affect each other and our world.

“The artist has pushed the limits of the magic cube by exploring the inner dimensions and crafted an exquisite book that fits comfortably in the hand and opens to engage the reader with surfaces that connect and break-away in unexpected ways.” – Hedi Kyle

Larry Thomas – Georgia
Where There is a Will, 2003, 8 ½” x 7 ½”, 3 copies. In this “pop-up for grownups” with no beginning or end, a man finds he has nothing of value and no one to name in his will.

Val Van Sice – Ohio
A Little Knowledge..., 2003, 5 ½” x 4 ¾”, 20 copies. Inside the metaphorical "belly of desire", flames of passion and imperfect knowledge reflect less about our objects of desire than they do about ourselves.

Maria Winkler – California
Busy as a Bee, 2002, 3 ½” x 3”, 3 copies. A traditional honeycomb pattern moves into three dimensions for this humorous look at women's work that delivers a circular message.

Densely exuberant or elegantly spare, whimsical, poetical, historical, political - these books really pop! Towers and bridges stand, dioramas of modern myth rise up, and sculpture lifts off pages to embody a message. As text and image become dimension, ideas soar.

Carol Barton – Maryland
The Lookout (excerpt from Five Luminous Towers), 2002, 10 ½” x 6 ½”, 350 copies. The folio opens, the tower stands, the windows light up, and we are in Renaissance Italy.

Anne-Claude Cotty – Maine
A Consonant Moon, 2003, 9” x 5 ½”, opens to 32”, 5 copies. Low voltage lights set the scene for the high-voltage metaphors of an elegantly packaged passion/poem.

Laura Davidson – Massachusetts
Mapping My World, 2002, 7 ½” x 11”, 30 copies. Bridges and buildings rise from linocut maps in this personal atlas inspired by famed cartographer Abraham Ortelius.

Charlotte Hedlund – Connecticut
Odin’s Legacy, 2003, 4 ” x 3”, opens to 70”, 3 copies. Birds fly off the page to celebrate remnants of the ancient art of crow augury.

Kelly M. Houle – Arizona
Why is a Raven like a Writing Desk?, 2003, 11 ½” x 12 1/8”, 10 copies. The artist collects solutions to Lewis Carroll's whimsical "riddle with no answer" and explains them through movable imagery.

Paul Johnson – Cheshire, England
The Tree House of Time, 2003, 9” x 19”, 10 copies. Form explodes in this kinetic study of the tree as a structure interacting with man in the shape of a tree dwelling.

Ann Kronenberg – New York
Reptiliaphilia: Scenes from the Journey, 2003, 8 ¾” x 7 ¼”, opens to 72”L, 5 copies. Scenes of women riding or carrying reptiles in historic contexts function as symbols of female creativity, sexuality, and goddess power.

Roberta Lavadour – Oregon
Chaos, 2003, 3 ¼” x 4”, 12 copies. Pop-ups serve as the perfect vehicle for an exploration of the "butterfly effect" in the context of current governmental policies.

Jim Machacek/Sibyl Rubottom – California
Abecedarium of the Universe, 2001, 8” square, 26 copies. In an alphabetical tour of the universe, little known facts, arcane quotes, and visual surprises abound.

Werner Pfeiffer – New York
Fold Out Book #1, 2003, 8” x 8 ½”, 10 copies. Eleven hinged shapes attached to a two-sided core allow endless readings of sculptural content in this interactive book.

Emily Reiser – Illinois
The Bed Bug Book, 2003, 8” x 10”, 10 copies. The sheets contain the poem and the bug unfolds from the bed as a child's fear of insects resolves itself.

Maddy Rosenberg/Hubert Sommerauer – New York and Salzburg, Austria
Shadow of Descent, 2003, 6” square, 40 copies. A three-dimensional realm shifts in space and time as each of the artists creates the illusion of descent into a lower plane.

Julie Sadler – New York
An Animated Field Guide to Fairies Fantasticus, 2003, 7 ½” x 5 ½”, 20 copies. Creatures of the imagination come to life in a collaged world through densely detailed pop-up pages and an animated CD.

Shawn W Sheehy – Illinois
Welcome to the NeighborWood: A Pop-up Book of Animal Architecture, 2003, 9” x 7 ¾”, 10 copies. Eight denizens of a Great Lakes ecosystem share the secrets of their adaptation and the structures that they make in a movable book for all ages.

Best use of humor

Ross Stockwell – California
haiku, 2003, 8 ¼” square, 3 copies. Sculpture and narrative together unfold the essence of being "neither here nor there."

“A man is a floor – until he can twist and turn – then he's outta there" – Linda Costello

Elsi Vassdal Ellis – Washington
The Quest for the Ethical Compass, 2003, 8 1/16” x 6 1/16”, 25 copies. Everything is fair game in this many-layered sculptural quest for ethical consistency in U.S presidencies from JFK to GWB.

Dorothy A. Yule – California
A Book for Ian, 2003, 2 3/8” x 3 ¼”, 10 copies. Designed for the ceremonial scattering of her nephew's ashes, a necklace and concertina comprise the book the artist never made for him.