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Prototype of Specimen Book

Test Binding

Paint Sample Close-upText Close-up

Cover Binding

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Spread Spread

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Output for Submission

Alice In Wonderland A Very Curious Interpretation

TextBinding

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Spread Spread

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Additional Output

The Colours of Wonderland Paint Chart

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Text Close-up Text Close-up

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Submission Report

I wanted to produce a case bound book for the submission because it was a method of binding and book production, which I have had least experience with. I also wanted to produce a book object that had a relatively robust, hardback structure and that was recognisable as a traditional form of hardback book, something that would have been familiar to readers when Alice in Wonderland was first published in 1865.

I felt that this idea was relevant to my choice of binding because on reading the text in full it was apparent just how much the story is routed in a time very different to the present and I wanted to evoke that with a binding which was synonymous with the older traditions of book crafts but still within my technical remit.

Originally I wanted to subvert the scale of the book by producing a miniature book, as a reference to the events in the narrative. A miniature book, defined by the Miniature Book Society of America, is a book which is no more than three inches in height, width, or thickness. Although in the story Alice grows bigger as well as smaller, I wanted to create the book on a small scale because most of the other creatures in Wonderland were small, so the book would be more identifiable with their scale. However after producing several prototypes I found that the scale of the book was unsuitable for the content that I wanted to include and the binding wasnt particularly satisfactory.

My interpretation of the text is, in part, an extension of the work I have been doing for Unit 2.3 Design and Rhetoric, which looks at how colours acquire culture

and associations, through the use of language and naming. Much of the research I have done on this subject has been through the analysis of paint charts and the names given to consumer paint colours.

My initial thoughts on the brief were influenced by the artists book Spring Snow A Translation by Alison Turnbull. The book is a series of coloured blocks, which are a visual translation of all the colours written in the story Spring Snow by Japanese writer Yukio Mishima. I analysed the text of Alice in Wonderland in the same way to pick out the instances that colours were named within the text. My assumption was that the text would feature a rainbow of colour names, due to it being a childrens story about a fantastical place. However I found that there were actually very few instances of colour names, most of which were repetitions of a handful of colours, for example White Rabbit and Golden Key. As a result of this analysis I felt that the concept was not strong enough to use as an interpretation of this particular text.

Instead I referred directly to work I had done in Unit 2.3 looking at the names of colours in paint charts. I initially thought about creating a concertina book, which would employ the visual language of the paint chart. I created a set of colours interpreting key characters, objects and created the connection between the hue and the narrative with the name given to each colour.

The paint chart I chose to reinterpret was Farrow & Ball because they produce traditional colours with some historical reference, so the colours in their palette have more relevance to the world in 1865 rather than that of a modern colour chart. Farrow

Supporting the Interpretation of the Text Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll

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Elective B Supporting Material

& Ball also have an extensive range of colours, representing all hues of the colour spectrum and are also well known for unusual and obscure colour names, which have also previously been used to create stories from. So using colours that already have a significant amount of meaning attached to them and then removing that and adding a different layer of meaning through re-naming was an interesting exercise, which opened up opportunities for further exploration of the ideas I had been working on in Unit 2.3. Although the original names of the colours are not revealed some interesting combinations have arisen, the colour Arsenic, has become Drink Me and the colour Cats Paw, has become Puppy

The colours chosen to represent the characters, objects and events in the narrative are subjective, they are my own interpretation of the story; how I imagine it in colour. Much like the mental pictures you get when you read any story. However, I have been influenced, consciously or not by colours in real life (particularly for some of the animals, like the Eaglet) and also by previous interpretations of the story such as the animated Disney version, where Alice wears a blue dress and the Mad Hatter wears green.

The idea of the chart worked well. It was playful and had a tactile feel to it, so I created a finished version with foil blocking on the cover as an additional output for the elective.

However I wanted to create a book so I decided to use case binding to produce the main output for the submission and to maintain the reference to the fact that it was an interpretation of a story. With some

minor adjustments I continued with the palette of colours chosen for the concertina paint chart. This had the effect of taking the swatches out of their original context as well as removing their original names and re-appropriating and reinterpreting them in the form of the book, and therefore adding another layer of meaning to the colour.

I feel that the interpretation of Alice in Wonderland using colour is valid. Although the actual text employs few colour names, the fantastical world of Wonderland generally evokes the impression of a colourful and peculiar adventure. It has also been suggested that Carroll was under the influence of hallucinogenic drugs at the time of writing, however there is no actual evidence to support this claim. Despite this the story was influential on music and colourful psychedelic art in the drugs culture of the 1960s.

In the context of book arts this interpretation of Alice in Wonderland references Victorian specimen and botany books, traditional binding and some aspects of traditional typesetting, and in terms of authorship the ideas of re-appropriation and semiotics.

Bibliography

Weblinks

Bookworks, 2010. Spring Snow A Translation. [online] Available at: [Accessed 14/11/10].

Christmas by Colour, 2008. [online] Available at: [Accessed 28/09/10].

Ella Young, 2010. Best of British. [online] Available at:

[Accessed 28/09/10].

Papers and Paints, 2010. The 1950s Colours. [online] Available at:

[Accessed 20/08/10].

Wikipedia, 2011. Alice in Wonderland. [online] Available at: [Accessed

16/11/10].

Wikipedia, 2011. Alices Adventures in Wonderland. [online] Available at: [Accessed 4/11/10].

Yahoo Answers, 2010. [online] Available at:

[Accessed 7/11/10].