Another cool accordion book from John Held Jr., an important mail art historian, rubber stamp artist and collector of both. On one side of this accordion there's a really nice selection of John's rubber stamps which feature self-portraits, publicity for events & performances, and a couple promoting his important book "Mail Art: An Annotated Bibliography" (1991). At the end there's two stamps from the San Francisco alternative space, La Mamelle (1975-1997), and their Imagezine magazine which was published in the form of a rubber stamp. Of this unique magazine format the editors stated, "If publishing is the making public of information, then affixing an Imagezine imprint upon a surface is an act of art publishing."
The other side of this accordion features cool crop circle rubber stamps by Rocola, a long time mail artist and Bay Area resident. John sent me some photographs of Rocola's stamps, and they're not your typical stamps glued to a block of wood, but much more sculptural and can be considered works in themselves. See some at the end of this post.
42 pages, double-sided, individual pages 6" x 4.25", and when fully opened 7' 5.25".
The stamp on the left depicts the head of Shozo Shimamoto (1928-2013), a member of the Japanese Gutai avant-garde art movement (1954-1972) and an experimental artist to the end.
two copies of Imagezine can be seen on the page at the right
the reverse side
Rocola's crop circle rubber stamps, plus one of his well-known 'cow' stamps
