5ive Times Floyd — Artist’s Book by Jim Camp | synaesthesia press Limited Edition

Description

Sometimes books start out as something else entirely.

I found a lone publicity still of two-time heavyweight champ Floyd Patterson buried in a box of paper / cast-offs at one of my favorite SoCal flea markets. That single image stuck with me. Who knows why? At first, I turned it into a gel-transfer diptych on old book boards. But my idea didn’t stop there. A diptych wasn’t enough. I knew a book had to happen. A book with Floyd as its anchor, pulling in found images, text fragments, and ephemera like a visual gravity well.

Think Joseph Cornell’s Manual of Marvels by way of Rauschenberg, Warhol, with Wallace Berman’s Semina mixed into the mish-mash. The result: 5ive Times Floyd—an artists’ book that lives somewhere between collage, scrapbook, and letterpress object. I wanted it to feel found, too—like something you might pull from the file cabinet of a long-defunct gym.

Fifty total: 40 hand-sewn copies in wraps; 10 were bound in boards and now out of print.  Art from the book, not a book from the art. Or maybe so.

Order one while you can. Once they’re gone, no rematch. 🥊