Somewhere in my house there is a small box of artifacts my mother preserved from my childhood. Among the usual drawings of parents, sister, and the family pets is a small, six-page hand-bound story that I wrote and bound when I was around eight. My interest in bookbinding grew from that first pamphlet, and finally led me, perhaps surprisingly, to the practice of lampworking. At first glance, beads and books seem to have nothing in common. Yet beads, precious stones, and books have a long-standing association. Beads have been used for over two thousand years as decoration for books and codices, and even as objects that encode cultural or religious memory, thus becoming de-facto books themselves. Most recently, the growing popularity of altered books and alternative structures for books has meant that many book artists use beads, including lampwork, in their designs. Beads as Memory:
Nearly every culture uses beads as a form of mnemonic device, most usually religious, to help the individual remember complicated sequences of prayers. Pictures of devout Hindus holding rosaries, for example, appear in sculptures dating as far back as 185BC. Christians already used lampworked beads in chalices and pyxes (containers for the Host), but they picked up the idea of using beaded rosaries to keep track of prayers from their encounters with the Arabs in eighth-century Spain, using everything from pressed flowers to Norwegian glass mosaic beads. However, the beads in the rosary were not always just markers for which prayer to say in what order. The center bead of a rosary, the Pater Noster (Our Father) bead, was often very elaborate. In one sixteenth-century example, the Pater Noster bead made for Mary of Burgundy, the bead—no more than five centimeters wide—contains an incredibly detailed carved image of the Crucifixion. Another bead, also dating from the early sixteenth century, tells the story of St. Joseph. In a society permeated with religious imagery, such a bead served the same purpose as a stained glass window, carved stone lintels, or plaster frescoes in a church—as a book, reminding those who saw or used it of a central religious story or idea.
Beads as Decorations:
By far the most common use of beads on books, both medieval and modern, is decorative. During the early Middle Ages, glass beads and jewels covered books for the most wealthy. A popular misconception about these bead and jewel-encrusted books is that they were so decorative because nobody could read except priests, and therefore books—especially religious texts such as the Gospels—came only from monasteries and were precious and mysterious. Like most entrenched ideas, this theory has a grain of truth. Although the bulk of the peasantry could not read, most nobles before the end of the ninth century could at least read, and a few small circulating libraries existed for nobles’ use. Carolingian rulers had their own scriptoria, or writing centers, which they used to send out standardized laws, directives, and religious texts and which they expected people to read or have read to them. In fact, monastic scriptoria often used royal texts as the models for their own copies during this period. However, the idea that the book’s sumptuous decoration meant that it functioned as much or more as an object than as a book to be read is accurate for books given as royal gifts.
Books were among the many displays of wealth used by early medieval rulers such as Charlemagne (d. 814) or Otto III (d. 1002). Covered in jewels and glass beads halved and mounted cabochon-style, and written on purple-dyed leather in gold leaf, these books were meant to be seen, not read, and showed the power and the resources of the ruler who commissioned them or gave them as gifts. The Godescalc Gospel and the Dagulf Psalter not only are written in gold leaf, but their dedication verses begin with Aurea, the Latin term for gold. Their content and their very existence represented spiritual, metaphorical, and quite literal gold. This usage of books as pure display persisted throughout the Middle Ages, alongside books meant for reading.
The medieval perspectives of the book as memory, as object, and as text to be read for meaning, as well as the practice of decorating those books with beads, has carried over into the modern world, where beads form an integral part of the practices of altered books and bookbinding. Beads as well as other small objects can be attached to books and notebooks at the spine, particularly if the book has been bound with an exposed-stitch binding—a wonderful way to use orphaned or slightly wonky beads. Jo Hoffacker, glass artist and owner of Dogmaw Glass, uses her beads in her privately-circulated open-binding blank books. Commercially, Alburnum Wood and Metal are among the many crafters who use African beads on the covers or spines of their books.
In my own work, I use lampworked beads as simple spine ornaments for Japanese and Coptic bound books, and I have incorporated images of my sister Leslie Cifelli (Iron Mountain Jewelry)’s lampworked beads into printed cover designs. “Sister-Speak” (2006) uses one of Leslie’s palm-sized organic lentils as a repetitive frame around the images of both of us as children. In addition, I blended the bead’s image into a fish-scale pattern, and used the resulting print as both end paper and as a partial spine cover for the book, which is bound in an open laced-stitch style. “Sister-Speak” thus functions as book, as art object, and as memory; it combines a useful, practical blank book with the memory of our shared childhood, and ties that together with our shared interest in lampworking as adult women.
In addition to decoration using bead images or single beads, artists can use beads extensively in the design of altered books. Artist and printmaker Miriam Schaer, a book artist, teaches regularly at book arts centers, and incorporates seed, wooden, Czech, and lampworked beads into her bindings and covers. Her traditionally bound books often include elaborate beaded bindings, and she is a regular instructor at book arts centers and book arts programs across the country. Schaer’s sculptural books include “wearable” art, such as her beaded girdle, sock, or apron / baby dress books, or standalone pieces, such as “Altars of the Invisible” (2003).
Miriam Schaer’s work is among many that remind us that books do not have to follow the traditional format of text, cover, and spine to be considered books. Instead, they can appear in many different formats, such as matchbooks, accordions, artificial fruit, even found objects such as watches or model cars. Some of these forms can incorporate beads as integral parts of the design. For example, Peter and Donna Thomas, authors of More Making Books By Hand (2004), developed a type of book that took its inspiration from the continuous, scrolling text on the computer screen as well as from premodern scrolls. Their scroll-book consists of a light wooden frame, often no more than an inch or two high, with two roller pins mounted within the frame at its top and bottom. The text is drawn or printed on a thin strip of paper or gessoed fabric, which is then glued to the rollers. These rollers have tiny handles, which can be made of diverse materials including bone, metal, clay, rolled paper, or lampworked beads. The rollers hold the scroll open and turn to allow the reader to access the text and art.
Pictured is a scroll book that I made in June, 2006, for a friend whose wife had recently died, and whose upcoming wedding anniversary was a stark reminder of his loss. Instead of a generic sympathy card, I made a scroll book using poetry by Nancy Wood from her anthology of Pueblo poetry, Many Winters, choosing a poem in which a loved one, now dead, reminds the reader that there are many ways in which they still can be together. When constructing the scroll’s frame, I needed handles, and decided to use my sister’s lampworked ivory spacer beads. My plans were to make several scroll books for Christmas gifts, and I began to pester my sister for spacer beads of the right size, color, and (most importantly), hole diameter. Instead, she seated me in front of a Hot Head and taught me how to make my own beads. Lampwork is addictive, and a kiln, a Bobcat, and an oxygen concentrator later I still have not made scroll books for Christmas and Hanukkah gifts. However, I maintain an active interest in bookbinding, and now have the skills to create my own beads for one-of-a-kind books.
Although at first glance flammable books and flame-worked beads seem to have nothing to do with each other, in practice they have a long and extensive association. Beads of all sorts can serve as books, helping individuals “read” stories and prayers without text. The use of beads on extravagant books can be a statement of power and position. In modern art books, beads serve a multiplicity of functions, from simple decorative attachments to integral parts of the design. While fire and paper do not play well together, lampworked beads and books make creative partners.
Bibliography
Alburnum Wood and Metal, http://www.alburnum.biz/catalog/index.php?osCsid=5de4e7ff5060bb7bce9f18a698cfcbeb, accessed 1/10/2007
Blackman, Stuart. “Notes on Legends and Beads in Arunachal Pradesh, India,” European Bulletin of Himalayan Research, 2004, 1-46.
Cifelli, Leslie. Bead Artists’ Gallery, http://www.beadartists.org/Gal1157_Iron_Mountain_Jewelry.asp, accessed 1/14/2007.
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de Hamel, Christopher. A History of Illuminated Manuscripts. David R. Godine, 1986.
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Schaer, Miriam. Book Works and Wearable Texts. http://www.colophon.com/gallery/mschaer/, accessed 1/10/2007.
Thomas, Peter and Donna. More Making Books by Hand: Exploring Miniature Books, Alternative Structures, and Found Objects. Quarry Books, 2004.
Wood, Nancy. Many Winters: Prose and Poetry of the Pueblos. Doubleday, 1974.
