Judith A. Hoffberg
* 1934
lives and works Santa Monica, CA (USA)
umbrella@ix.netcom.com

Judith A. Hoffberg, librarian and archivist, editor and publisher, lecturer and curator, has three degrees from UCLA in Political Science (BA), Italian Language and Literature (MA) and Library Science.

Founder of the Art Libraries Society of North America, Hoffberg has traveled throughout the world, lecturing on artist books, a passion which she developed since the 1960s. Her collection of almost 6000 bookworks is now housed at the UCLA Arts Library Special Collections.

She is the curator of almost 30 artist book exhibitions, has lectured throughout the world on the subject, is publisher of The
Bookmaker's Desire by Buzz Spector (1995), Umbrella: The Anthology (2000), and author of Women of the Book: Jewish Artists, Jewish Themes (Boca Raton, FAU, 2001).

She writes art criticism about artist books and is a frequent contributor to Artscene, the monthly art gallery guide in the Los
Angeles area. She is also editor and publisher of Umbrella, a newsletter on artist books, mail art and contemporary trends in alterative art practice.

She resides in Santa Monica, but travels the world.

Statement

Artists Books in my Baggage: 40 Years of Addiction

In the past forty years, I have been a collector, curator, lecturer, critic, editor and publisher of Umbrella, a newsletter about artist books, and disseminator of information about artist books around the world. This world, which was quite small and insular in the 1960s, when I began has blossomed forth into a global movement without limits. The book, often called threatened and ending, just as I was beginning to collect artist books is alive and well and increasing throughout the globe. Its ramifications can be seen in the ever-increasing exhibitions, documentation and extreme interest of new audiences throughout Asia, the Middle East, Africa, besides North America and Europe, where it all began.

Throughout these forty years, I have traveled throughout the world meeting artists, seeing their amazing bookworks, and buying books from European dealers. Thanks to an early enthusiast and distributor of these books, Jaap Reitman, in New York City during the great 70s, I purchased and found out many of his European contacts whom I visited during my many trips. Among them, my friend Ulises Carribn opened up the first artist bookshop in Amsterdam in 1975, which I visited many times, stayed with Ulises and his companion, Aart van Barneveld and met all the artist bookmakers in Holland, among whom were many Icelanders and Brazilians. The map kept growing.

How did it all start? By seeing some strange visual books near the cash register in an art supply store, and then seeing others, many with text, or just photographs in a museum shop in Pasadena, California. As I started buying these works for their visual appeal, I was spending very little money. Artist books were printed sometimes with half-tones, others were Xeroxed with the new machine that had just been released, and most of the distribution was through the universal postal system to friends and colleagues. $2.50 or $3.00 (U.S. currency) would get you what you wanted, and it did not hurt the pocketbook. The names Diter Rot, Ed Ruscha, Beau Geste Press, Something Else Press became part of my vocabulary.

As the collection grew, you could hardly see it, because most of the books were 8 or 16 pages, stapled together, and did not appear to be significant on any bookshelf. But they were universally appreciated by a small coterie of people, and the word got around. Of course, the first exhibitions were in Europe, but the first exhibition in the United States at Moore College of Art in Philadelphia in 1972 traveled to the University of California, Berkeley and so it grew.

By this time, I was an art librarian, collecting these things (sometimes under duress because there really was no budget for these artist books) for the institution, sometimes often difficult to catalog, and yet it started becoming a collection. The exhibitions oftentimes had only a checklist, but soon there were exhibition catalogs as well. And I, as a collector and archivist, started collecting the documentation as well as the artifacts themselves. The file cabinets grew, the shelves began to increase, and soon it was truly a collection.

Meanwhile, people started thinking about gathering minds and hearts together to see where this movement was going. In 1979 in Rochester, the Visual Studies Workshop had a conference, in which Nathan Lyons, the Director, told us he was working with the National Endowment for the Arts to recognize artist books as a medium which should be funded. That was the beginning. And
when I was at the Library of Congress in the 1960s, where artist books were collected because of copyright laws more than acquisitions, they were stashed into a drawer. Occasionally a book was cataloged, but always under the wrong classification, e.g. 34 Parking Lots by Ed Ruscha was cataloged under Real Estate, and not art. By the 1970s, we had subject catalogers recognizing artist books as "Art" and that helped other librarians throughout the U.S. to recognize this category in their cataloging.

In 1977, at San Jose State University, the first artist publications fair was held, organized by Stephen Moore. It was a significant, intense meeting of minds from all over Canada and the U.S., culminating in an organization of Associated Art Publishers to help with distribution and dissemination.

Stellar individuals came to this congress, among whom Joan Lyons, Carl Loeffler, Anna Banana, Bill Gaglione and so many more. We talked, ate and digested artist publications, including postcards, mail art and even audio and videotapes, and it changed our worlds. All of us were affected by this growing movement, and by the importance of dialogue and communication.

Mind you, this was before computers and before cellular phones, before the speedy postal systems and fax machines. In our "primitive" state of communication, we did find a way of promoting ourselves in mailings, exhibitions, dialogues and just plain correspondence.

AAP (Associated Art Publishers) was not as effective as we thought, but we knew we had to tackle the problem of distribution-a problem which has endured even to this day. By this time, Printed Matter had been founded by Sol LeWitt, Lucy Lippard and others, a bookshop which would distribute artist books. Franklin Furnace, an archive in New York City, had been founded by Martha Wilson, which would also showcase artist books and create a kind of "library" for exhibition and research. And so North America was reacting to this movement. In 1978, I co-curated an exhibition called Artwords and Bookworks, which included over 1500 items by 614 artists throughout the world. It opened in Los Angeles at the Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art in 1978 and traveled to 5 venues in the United States and to Australia and to New Zealand. We created a catalog, a rubberstamp, a series of postcards with original art by some of the artists in the show, and that began my obsession. By 1979, we opened a bookstore on the West Coast called Artworks, which had several lives until the early 1990s.

By this time, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, France, Germany, Holland, Belgium, Spain, Portugal and so many other countries were also forwarding the movement in both exhibitions, bookshops, and collections. In 1982, I traveled to Australia and New Zealand and knew there was a growing interest "down under" in these two countries, besides many practitioners of the book form as well. The Frankfurt Book Fair was always a nexus for many of our interests and each October, many of us exhibited or reported about the goings-on of many small publishers of artist books. We found an amazing array of self-published, fine press artist books thanks to the gathering of like minds in Frankfurt.

We are now on the cusp of finding new vistas for artist books. In China, Japan, Africa and the Middle East, we find a large group of artist who are doing it because they must, not because they have a great amount of publicity or a large group of collectors. In the midst of a war in the Middle East, artists are still producing artist books to reflect the political, social and cultural times in which they live. We should honor them today for their perseverance in the midst of times which are extraordinary, cruel and divisive. In the midst of this electronic and digital world in which we live, the handmade book, or at least, the hand-published bookwork is an artifact that should be revered, honored and admired for its originality, its passion, and its heart. Perhaps now more than ever, the book is the best disseminator of these trying times. And the artist book is even a better indicator of where our souls must be
nourished.

Judith A. Hoffberg