A Crafted Typology

of the Codex

Book Modelmaking as an Approach to Material Book Study

Gary Frost

We often speak of how a particular phenomenon has “reached a tipping point” – when knowledge and practice have developed in plain sight and then suddenly explodes on scene as a revolution in our thinking. Gary Frost’s career with bookbinding, through his research, practice, and teaching, has been a series of such revolutions, and he has periodically named and defined how to evaluate and express the successive developments of the codex. The lynchpin in his work is ever the model – the why and how, generic, facsimile, or interpretive, material considerations and material compromises – all in the pursuit of an answer to these questions: What does the model tell us about book action in a given structure? What are the possibilities for adaptation? A Crafted Typology of the Codex is the summation of Frost’s thinking, writing, and teaching on book action expressed though modelmaking ... and it presents an exploration of codex chronology in both words and illustrations, and carries the ongoing discussion of the physical book into the electronic realm.

from the "Preface"

by Julia Miller

97 pages   •   52 illustrations   •   full color   •   10 x 7 in.

softcover   •   ISBN 9781953421067   •   2021   •   $17.50