5ive Times Floyd

Published by the synaesthesia press. Colophon dated 2022; completed and issued in 2024 to coincide with the exhibition 5ive Times Floyd at These Days LA Gallery, Los Angeles.

Artist’s book. Narrow octavo (approximately 5¼ × 11¼ inches; 13.3 × 28.6 cm). Hand-sewn in printed wrappers; unpaginated. Letterpress, collage, and found imagery throughout. Printed in multiple colors on a variety of paper stocks.

Edition of 50 copies (40 hand-sewn in wrappers; 10 bound in cloth).

The cloth edition was housed in a custom chipboard slipcase printed and blind-embossed with the title and an image of heavyweight boxing champion Floyd Patterson.

5ive Times Floyd began with the discovery of an original publicity photograph of Floyd Patterson found in a box of miscellaneous ephemera at a Southern California flea market. That image became the catalyst for a larger body of work incorporating found photography, collage, letterpress printing, vernacular imagery, and collected materials.

Drawing inspiration from Joseph Cornell’s Manual of Marvels, as well as the work of Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol, and Wallace Berman, the project developed simultaneously as both book and exhibition. The publication transforms found materials into a sequence of visual assemblages while exploring memory, popular culture, celebrity, and the afterlife of printed images.

The completed project ultimately expanded beyond the book itself. Five large-scale paintings, each approximately 2 by 4 feet and incorporating many of the same visual elements found in the publication, were exhibited as part of 5ive Times Floyd at These Days LA Gallery in Los Angeles. Rather than serving as documentation of the exhibition, the book and paintings evolved together from the same source material.

Design, printing, and binding by Jim Camp.

Availability: Cloth edition out of print. Limited quantities of the wrappered edition remain available from the publisher.

Confessions of a French Stenographer (A Tracing of a Frazetta Painting)

Published Winter 2015 by the synaesthesia press

One-of-a-kind artist’s book. 32 unnumbered pages. 5¼ × 7¾ inches (13.34 × 19.69 cm). Stapled wraps.

Letterpress over collage throughout, incorporating hand-assembled vintage printed material, found paper, cut-outs, and laid-in ephemera unique to each page. Printed and assembled by Jim Camp. Colophon letterpress printed on the inside rear cover reading: “Confessions of a French Stenographer (A Tracing of a Frazetta Painting) assembled by Jim Camp at the synaesthesia press, Los Angeles. Winter 2015.” Signature stamp by the publisher beneath the colophon.

The cover consists of a vintage romance magazine illustration, extensively altered through collage and overprinting, with the subtitle presented in a comic-style speech balloon. As with the interior, no two pages follow a conventional sequence of illustration or text, each spread functioning instead as an individual collage composition. Conceived as a unique artist’s book, Confessions of a French Stenographer (A Tracing of a Frazetta Painting) was not offered in an edition and remains the sole copy produced.

Availability: Out of print

June 1, 2014

Tosh Berman

Published March 2015 by the synaesthesia press.

Chapbook. Letterpress printed by hand on a Vandercook OS 219 using a combination of hand-set type and polymer plates. Hand-sewn into wrappers. Signed by the author. Tipped-in color illustrations. Issued in four variant cover colors with no particular priority: Steel Blue, Factory Green, Safety Orange, and Kraft Speckletone.

Edition of 300 copies.

June 1, 2014 is a memoir piece by Tosh Berman recalling a remarkable moment in his family’s history. In the spring of 1967, Tosh’s father, the artist Wallace Berman, received a letter from London containing a photograph and a request from Brian Epstein, manager of The Beatles, seeking permission to reproduce Wallace Berman’s image on the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

Tosh recounts his first impression of the now-iconic album cover and reflects on the strange intersection of family history, art, and popular culture. The piece later appeared in expanded form in Tosh: Growing Up in Wallace Berman’s World (City Lights Books, 2019).

Originally published on Tosh Berman’s Facebook page as part of the “2014 Series,” a year-long project in which he posted a short vignette every day throughout 2014.

Design, printing, and binding by Jim Camp.

Availability: Available from the synaesthesia press.