Celebration of the Book

12th Annual Celebration of the Book
Free displays of books-as-art plus hands-on activities

Thursday, October 21 - Sunday, October 24
10 am to 4 pm
New Mexico History Museum
John Gaw Meem Room and the Learning Center
110 Washington Ave.


The 12th annual Celebration of the Book features shining examples of the book-arts craft and offers free, hands-on workshops to create your own. In the hands of an artist, books become more than sheets of paper between two covers. Pages pop up. Weavings appear. Albuquerque artist Marilyn Stablein reimagines packages of sewing notions into pages for her work, Inflation:A Biased View.

Co-sponsored by the Press at the Palace of the Governors and the Santa Fe Book Arts Group, the event is free with museum admission. Children 16 and under are free; NM residents are free on Sundays.

The hands-on workshops will be offered only on Thursday and Friday, when masters of the book-arts craft will share their skills with school groups and anyone else who’d like to participate. Have your name written by a calligrapher, learn simple book structures, write poetry or engineer a pop-up card.

On Thursday, Santa Fe Poet Laureate Joan Logghe will be working with kids on poetry from 10 am to 2 pm. For all workshops, morning sessions are from 10 am to noon, and afternoon sessions are from noon to about 2:15 pm. Registration is not required for these free workshops, and participants will be able to rotate through the different activities.

For more on the Santa Fe Book Arts Group, go to their website, or contact Ava Fullerton at (505) 982-2846 or Jean Stratton at (505) 989-7577. For more on the Press at the Palace of the Governors, contact Tom Leech at (505) 476-5096.

Image above: Eldorado Skies: Shades of Blue by artist Jessica Wesolek. Archival ink on canvas, wood. 8 x 36 inches. 2010. A high-resolution version of this image can be downloaded.