Love, in so many words: A passion for books inspires an artist to make her own

By Kristina Tedeschi
Staff Writer

Published on November 23, 2007

As a small child, Sarah Horowitz would sit still for hours, crafting delicate jewelry and working on model boats. Today, at age 30, the artist and bookmaker says she can work for eight solid hours on a drawing no bigger than 2 inches tall.

"That's one thing I've always been really good at - concentrating for hours and blocking the world out," says Horowitz.

And now, three years of painstaking labor has culminated in the artist's fourth original book, "Alpha Botanica," the components of which are on view through Jan. 25, 2008, at the National Yiddish Book Center in Amherst in collaboration with BookMarks: A Celebration of the Art of the Book, a Museums10 initiative.

Born to a Swiss mother and a Jewish father from New York City who worked in academic medicine, Horowitz moved a lot as a child, she says, but was always surrounded by books.

"I make books because I love books," she told an audience of about 30 who gathered to hear her speak at the book center last Sunday. She remembers burying her nose in old paperbacks in her grandfather's study and inhaling their scent, she said. Her grandfather, Albert Schudel, ran Schudeldruck, a printing press in Riehen, Switzerland, that printed various publications. In 2001, Horowitz founded Wiesedruck, druck meaning "press" in German. The Wiese, which marks the border between Switzerland and Germany, also is known as the river which Jewish refugees attempted to swim to escape the Nazi regime during World War II.

Horowitz, who graduated from Hampshire College in Amherst eight years ago with a major in mathematics and physics, and a minor in art, studied painting, drawing, ceramics and printmaking at Chautauqua School of Art in Chautauqua, N.Y., the summer between her junior and senior years in preparation for her thesis, and fell in love with making prints.

"It just completely clicked," said Horowitz, who now lives in Portland, Ore., where she teaches printmaking at Portland State University. "When it came down to it, printmaking was the only thing I couldn't not do." Today, her work appears in the collections of the New York Public Library, Wellesley College in Wellesley, and Smith College's Mortimer Rare Book Room in Northampton, the library she visited Monday while in the area for her talk at the National Yiddish Book Center.

"Alpha Botanica," which Horowitz made in collaboration with bookbinder Claudia Cohen, began with intricate sketches of flowering shrubs and trees, the names for which she learned on Hampshire professor Kenneth Hoffman's weekly nature hikes that she attended religiously as a student. Horowitz also drew letters in both the Roman and Jewish alphabets on each drawing, which measured about two inches square.

Each plant name corresponds to the letter it's placed with; for example, "Z" stands with a drawing of zantedeschia aethiopica, or calla lily, and "X" is with xeranthemum, a plant with purple tubular flowers.

Once the sketches were completed, Horowitz began drawing her designs with engraving tools on blocks of resingrave, which is a hard, white epoxy substance mounted on wood, to make her original woodcuts.

The finished book, measuring just 5-by-4 3/4 inches, is bound in black leather with gold embossed vines and leaves.

Because the book was bound by sewing instead of adhesive, it lies flat when opened, Horowitz says.

On each page, made of thick, handmade paper from the Czech Republic, one of the artist's stamps appears. The Roman alphabet starts at the front of the book, while the Hebrew alphabet starts at the end, according to how Hebrew is read, from right to left. Both sets of letters culminate in the center of the book with a colophon, which is a brief description of the book, bearing the printer's mark.

Twelve of the books are hand-painted with watercolor by Horowitz and Cohen. Each hand colored book is $1,400, while the black-and-white version is $950.

"Alpha Botanica" is on display at the center, 1021 West St., Amherst, on the Hampshire College campus. The exhibit is on view through Jan. 25, 2008. The center is open Mondays through Fridays from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. and Sundays from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. It is closed Saturdays. For more information, call the center at 256-4900. For more information about Sarah Horowitz or to purchase "Alpha Botanica," visit www.wiesedruck.com.