[Note: The web version of this story does not include the large and detailed reproductions that appeared in the issue.]
You’ve probably not seen, much less read, Kamini, a volume made by esteemed book designer and Washington University professor Ken Botnick. He made, after all, just 65 copies. But you’d do well to see it, to read it, to hold it. It’s an exquisite work of art bearing another, much older work of art. Alas, knowing that “limited edition” means limited access, SLM provides a peek inside the pages and a brief look at just how Botnick made it.
1. Know Your Craft
Over the course of the last 25 years, Botnick has become a highly respected, even influential figure in the national book-arts scene. In the 1980s he and peer Steve Miller had several noteworthy letterpress projects with their New York City–based Red Ozier Press—among them Robert Bly’s Mirabai Versions and previously unpublished work by Nobel Prize winners Octavio Paz and William Faulkner. Botnick was recruited to St. Louis in 1997 to serve as the first director of the Nancy Spirtas Kranzberg Studio for the Illustrated Book and a visual communications professor in Wash. U.’s school of art. Meanwhile, he’s been running emdash, the one-person press through which Kamini was published.
2. Love Your Art
“Pages are like landscapes to me,” Botnick says, in a conversation that reveals how deeply he’s connected to the art of making books. “It really goes back to my landscape-architecture training. The pages are like the soil. I love the balance of the typographic information with the imagery and color and the very subtle gradations of things.” Bookmaking, Botnick continues, “is the nexus point between being able to do the hands-on practice of the craft, the hands-on design work and the interpretation of the text.”
3. Be Inspired by Your Subject
Botnick first connected to India through the work of the 15th-century female Indian ecstatic poet Mirabai, which he published a quarter-century ago, and his connection continued through his publishing of Octavio Paz. He traveled to India himself in 2003, to teach at the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad. “The trip revealed the world of Indian color and pattern,” he says. He returned a year later to teach again and continued to be struck by “the nature of dualities” in India—sublime colors and beautiful architecture within the same sphere as the grotty; the spiritual sharing space with the erotic. For Botnick, that tension generated creative energy.
4. Find Good Company
In late 2004 Botnick dialed the number for writer/translator Andrew Schelling, one of the top Sanskrit scholars in the country and a teacher at Naropa University in Colorado. Botnick had enjoyed working with Schelling on their previous book of Sanskrit translation, Kavya. He asked Schelling if he might recommend a classical work of Indian literature for a new project. Schelling said he’d been thinking about tackling the Gita-Govinda, a 12th-century dramatic lyrical poem that hadn’t received a properly fluid and sensual translation.
5. Choose a Good Project
Sensual, indeed. In the Gita-Govinda, the author, Jayadeva, uses 12 cantos, which each contain 24 songs, to chart the courtship and culmination of love between divine cowherd Krishna and Radha, his favorite of the cowherd wives and daughters. It’s a universal story, but vividly narrated—perhaps ideal for a book artist wanting to present it anew. Botnick and Schelling settled on which passages to publish: 30 stanzas, about a tenth of the original poem. Schelling went to work translating.
6. Go, See, Document for Yourself
In 2005 Botnick applied to be—and was soon named—a Fulbright Scholar. The prestigious grant enabled him to return to India for six months, from December 2005 to May 2006, where he’d continue his own research on this project. (Of his funding source: “I think the Fulbright is the best expenditure of American taxpayer money I’ve ever seen.”) As on his previous trips, he carried his camera everywhere, generating a library of source images that would stimulate his thinking on the project. He didn’t expect any of the photographs—walls of murals in an abandoned palace in Dungarpur; the ceiling of the Taj Mahal—to make it into the book.
7. Admit When It’s Not Working
Back in his small St. Louis studio in the Skinker/DeBaliviere neighborhood, Botnick went to work—and found himself using several of the photographs, in an attempt to reproduce the “riot of color and pattern found in India.” After six months he was 70 percent through the volume—the pages and type printed through his relief-plate letterpress, but the photographs through an inkjet—and shared the book with some discerning peers, including curators at the Getty in California. “I realized out there, after having a heart-to-heart with a good friend, that it wasn’t going to work,” he says. The reproductions, Botnick admits, felt “artificial.” The photographs needed to be less illustrative and more purely artistic and suggestive. And in very general terms, Botnick needed to focus: “I realized I had to rein it in and get much more directed toward one thematic color and application.”
8. Make Your One Color Work
At first dispirited, Botnick soon felt liberated. Back at work, he zeroed in on a single color—blue, the color of Krishna. Throughout India, the deity is seen in a succession of blues, from blue-black to turquoise. In designing this new version of Kamini, Botnick used 20 different shades of blue, each from a different manifestation of Krishna he saw in his travels; their placement in the book matches the tone of each poetic passage.
9. Embrace the New Along With the Old
In solving his second visual problem—presenting his photographs less realistically, more suggestively—Botnick had no qualms about joining a traditional project with the latest technology. The turning point came when he discovered a technique in Photoshop by which he translated his color photographs to grayscale, “increased the contrast like mad,” removed the background and translated the images into bitmapped dots. The technique is known as “random dithering,” and using it successfully meant that he could now ignore the inkjet and print his new, more abstract images on a relief plate. “When you have a relief plate, it really bites into the paper, and it’s real ink acting on paper via the plate,” he says. “That process is much more visceral and results in a grittier image, but a more interesting one.”
10. Trust the Reader
The best moment of recognition in Kamini comes about halfway through. On the spread’s left page, the text has Radha’s companion reporting the following: “He shivers for you, / bristles, calls wildly, sweats, goes forward, / reels back. / The dark thicket closes / about him.” On the spread’s right side is an understated pattern of light-yellow swirls, obtained from an Indian woodblock. Behind this pattern the reader sees an outline of a figure—Krishna, bleeding through from the page that follows. (See that image on page 133.) Botnick has used ink to playfully, yet subtly, mirror the language—the reader sees Krishna behind the thicket, because the page has become the thicket. Bleed-through is something printers normally work to avoid, but Botnick exploited it for this project in order to create what he calls “the elusive image,” evocative of the poem’s passionate narrative.
11. Let the Language Rule
How passionate? The prose is blush-inducing, and Botnick’s clean presentation lets us wallow in it between images. Near the opening, we’re told that “secret desires” have overtaken Radha and Krishna. Later, Krishna speaks, looking at his love: “From her mouth the / fragrance of lotus, / a rush of sweet forbidden words. / A droplet of juice / on her crimson lower lip.” Radha’s messenger tells Krishna: “Only the poultice of your body / can heal her, holy physician of the heart.” (Webster’s on “poultice”: “a hot, soft, moist mass.” Even the definitions of these words are sexy.) After several more pages of charged buildup, Krishna meets Radha in the thicket and declares: “Soil my bed with indigo footprints, Kamini, / lay waste the grove / savage it with your petal-soft feet.” Soon, she’s singing to him: “On my breast draw a leaf / paint my cheeks / lay a silk scarf across these dark loins. / Wind into my heavy black braid / white petals, / fit gemstones onto my wrists, / anklets over my feet.” The text continues: “And each thing she desired / her saffron robed lover / fulfilled.”
12. Release It to the World
Botnick completed the book—44 pages of Bugra paper, case-bound in quarter cloth—in September 2007. While its release was quiet, Botnick was gratified to see Kamini selected, from 900 entries, to be in the “50 Books/50 Covers” exhibition curated by the American Institute of Graphic Arts. (“Grace and elegance with a superb selection of colors, both in paper and in ink,” state the jury notes. “The rhythm of the book is perfect.”) Looking back, Botnick recalls the intense experience of working with this 900-year-old poem so closely for so long. “You can imagine what it’s like to be in the studio every day printing poetry like this,” he says. “All day long, these sheets of paper are running through your hands. The act of setting, letter by letter, words like this, is a very intimate act. I’ve never gotten over how inspiring it is.”
