By OCB Staff on
5/16/2012 4:02 PM
Among the 1,718 Ohio students who had submitted an entry into this past Letters About Literature contest was Erica Langan, a Seventh grade student from Mercer Elementary School in Cincinnati, Ohio. She wrote her letter to the enigmatic, introverted 19th century poet Emily Dickinson. Erica described the propitious moment when she first made Dickinson's acquaintance. One afternoon, while she and her mother were browsing the volumes of poetry on the shelves of a local bookstore, Erica came across an edition of Dickinson's work. Having bought the book, Erica perused its pages and was bewitched by how Dickinson utilized an ingenuously quirky yet immediate style to commit her innermost thoughts to paper. Although she wrote about much the same concepts as did her contemporaries (spirituality, nature, art), Dickinson--as Erica later encountered--utilized a more expansive vocabulary, less sentimentality and more nuance than they did. Erica thrilled at the challenge that the poems now afforded her--to determine what they meant to her and to her alone. As she read and contemplated, Erica realized that the poetry of her new found friend had changed her life forever.
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By OCB Staff on
5/15/2012 11:50 AM
Check out the full story in the Cleveland Plain Dailer.
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By OCB Staff on
5/9/2012 9:31 AM
 One of the world's foremost bookbinders, Jan Bohuslav Sobota, passed away May 2, 2012. Sobota spent a significant amount of time in Cleveland during the 1980s and 1990s.
Sobota studied in Pilsen, (then) Czechoslovakia, and in 1957 he graduated from the School for Applied Arts in Prague. He started his own bookbinding studio, and later worked in Basel, Switzerland at the Papiermuehle, or Paper Mill, the Swiss museum for paper, printing, and writing. Sobota came to the United States in 1984, sponsored by the Rowfant Club of book collectors in Cleveland, and was employed at the conservation lab of Case Western Reserve University. He moved to the Bridwell Library at Southern Methodist University in Dallas as director of their Conservation Laboratory. Conservation work paid the bills, but his friends and colleagues all knew that his first love was the making of fine unique design bindings. He arrived during the renaissance of American book arts in the 1980s and hit the ground running as an active promoter and sponsor of shows and workshops. He and his wife Jarmila established the Saturday’s Book Arts Gallery in Euclid, Ohio, and kept the name and concept of that gallery alive in various places and incarnations as they moved about the world. Day jobs at universities gave Jan financial stability and institutional support, but also multiplied the effect of his book arts efforts. His university affiliations allowed him to bring a profound knowledge of the craft and tradition of bookbinding to the many American students eager to learn, at a time when that knowledge was being lost at a staggering rate. He shared that knowledge generously with anybody who would listen.
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