Review: Three children’s books

“Barry’s Best Buddy” by Renee French (Toon Books)

Sometimes friendship can be an antagonistic relationship, despite the best of intentions by at least one of the parties. Renee French introduces young readers to the outgoing and spontaneous Polarhog and his best friend, Barry the Bird.

Polarhog, bemoaning the dull gray house that Barry hides in, takes his friend on a little jaunt of the unexpected. Barry, a squat and uncomfortable looking bird, generally pushes back on any delight Polarhog embraces — not quite Oscar and Felix, but certainly reminiscent of other class odd couples like Frog and Toad or Ernie and Bert.

French is a renowned alternative cartoonist, and her work is often in the realms of absurdist and experimental. With “Barry’s Best Buddy,” she makes perfect use of these qualities within a stripped-down format, offering a entry point for children into a wider world of fiction with these sensibilities that await their attention as they grow up to appreciate the unusual and clever.

 

“Mr. Flux” by Kyo Maclear and Matte Stephen (Kids Can Press)

Inspired the 1960s art movement that stressed anti-commercialism and even anti-art sentiments as a way of testing and celebrating the done-it-yourself and other everyday material, Maclear’s takes the concept of security as safety and contrasts it to flux, that is change, as a formula for everyday adventure.his rather dull town, Maclears’s story has the goofy Mr. Flux arrive in town. He just oozes change out of his pores, and by just existing in city limits with his pajamas and bowler hat, the effects can be felt.

Obviously, this is a lesson in being flexible and embracing the new, and Mr. Flux’s influence on leads to baby steps that work like a virus through town. A good virus. The very best virus.

Soon enough, house are no longer just gray and breakfast is not just confined to one reliable dish, and Mr. Flux seems to have done his job. But, of course, there’s more — change is one thing, but amusement is an important add-on, and Maclear’s finale shows that though change can become routine, something to cause a little laughter is always a valuable turnabout.

Mclear’s cautionary tale is wonderfully realized through Matte Stephen’s retro art style, reminiscent of Miroslav Sasek, renowned for his “This Is” series of children’s travel books and showing that your own hometown can be just as exotic as London or Paris if you want it to be.

 

“Rosie’s Magic Horse” by Russell Hoban and Quentin Blake (Candlewick Books)

Illustrator Quentin Blake is a much acknowledged legend in children’s books, and rightfully so, but his creative partner in many endeavors, author Russell Hoban, elicits fewer looks of recognition when you mention his name. Hoban’s biggest claim to fame were the charming Francis books, but his further work — for both children and adults — hit new heights of quirkiness, always representing a very singular mind that expressed itself through a masterful and idiosyncratic writer.

In this release of Hoban’s final picture, his flair for the outrageous is well-matched by a gentle heart and warm sense of humor. The story follows a group of popsicle sticks following their use to careless discard to being added to the collection box of Rosie. Collectively, the popsicle sticks want more to their existence post-popsicle, and require some purpose again.

Meanwhile, Rosie realizes her family’s financial stress, and has her own wishes that she needs to come true.

What happens is that both their desires collide, leading to a silly adventure that solves everyone’s problems. Hoban takes his simple premise further and further, before letting it come back down to earth with a heartwarming denouement. Blake, meanwhile, rises to the occasion as he always does, injecting the whimsy with a dynamic scrappy energy.

As his last work, “Rosie’s Magic Horse” is a marvelous tribute to Hoban and the originality that flowed from his pen, and will hopefully lead to a much-deserved revival of his masterful work.

Review: Journalism by Joe Sacco

Journalism” by Joe Sacco (Metropolitan Books)

Sacco is known for his in depth work in Palestine and Bosnia, but this collection of shorter works allows readers to get a wider view of the grim world that Sacco has chosen to document.

In the Caucasus, Sacco spends time with Chechen women trying to survive the refugee camps which Russia is eager to force out in order to declare the problem solved. Sacco’s narrative darts between the reality of life in these camps and the nightmare of the experiences that brought the women there, adding up to a harrowing, depressing and angering piece.

In his Iraq pieces, Sacco documents the trials of American soldiers and their harsh lot in wartime, as well as that of torture survivors attempting to sue Donald Rumsfeld for the horrific treatment.

Sacco goes to his native country, Malta, to investigate the influx of African refugees that has created a nightmare of crowding and animosity between the desperate people trying to escape horror and death, and the small country that cannot handle what has descended upon them.

In India, Sacco visits lower caste villages that are beyond bleak. So poor and beaten down are these people that they have given up caring about any human rights they deserve. They survive by raiding rat holes filled with foraged grain. It is a shocking existence perpetuated by the corruption of the higher castes in charge.

As with any of Sacco’s work, the stories he tells will make you cringe and cry, and he does this with clarity as he explains the history and context on a larger scale that leads to the horrors you witness.

It’s reality as too many Americans are unaware of it, but so much of the rest of the world cannot escape. Sacco, in the tradition of the greatest journalists, is on the side of the little guy, and is determined to present the individual stories with dignity and compassion.

His success is greater than many print journalists, and his form of graphic storytelling adds layers that they could never capture. If there is one graphic novelist who should be mandatory reading in American high schools, it is Joe Sacco, an important voice beyond his chosen medium.

Profile: Kate Hosford

When author Kate Hosford decided to tackle the concept of infinity in her most recent children’s book, she found there were possibly an infinite number of ways to even approach the subject.

In Hosford’s book, “Infinity and Me,” a little girl works to conceptualize the real meaning of infinity. The book has garnered all kinds of high praise and honors, including being named an American Library Association 2013 Notable Children’s Book and a 2012 Junior Library Guild Selection.

Hosford began as a children’s book illustrator who took up writing and then completely abandoned drawing books once she weighed her work.

“I was actually so much better at the writing than I was at the illustration that I switched,” Hosford said. “It took me years to have one idea, and then once I had one idea, I had two and then suddenly I had a hundred.”

One of those hundred ideas was to do a book about infinity, which Hosford was shocked to realize had not already been done.

“It was odd to me because kids love to talk about infinity and they start to do it really young,” she said. “Whenever I would talk to a parent, inevitably they would say, ‘My child loves to talk about infinity,’ and then they would recount an anecdote about something their child had said, and oftentimes the child wasn’t 9 and 10, they were 4 and 5, young, picture book age.”

Hosford began working on the idea by writing verse, but said she thought it ended up “stupid and trite,” and went through a few other formats before settling on the idea of asking different people to offer their conception of infinity. She enlisted her old friend, Gabi Swiatkowska, and together they put together a dummy book to shop around.

“When editors saw that, they were interested,” Hosford said, “but almost all of them, except for the ones who published, had a hard time convincing their publishers, who were saying things like ‘This isn’t really a topic for kids’ and some people would say things like ‘When is infinity introduced in the math curriculum?’ and I would think to myself, ‘At the same time you introduce love and justice.’ It’s an idea, so it’s not going to be a unit in the math curriculum.”

The book was eventually picked up by Carolrhoda Books, which also published Hosford’s previous picture books and who didn’t have such reservations.

“They immediately got it and immediately wanted to do it,” said Hosford.

Primary in Hosford’s preparation to try and sell the book, and the source of her confidence that her story was perfectly age appropriate, was a series of interviews she did with the kids in her children’s classes and her friend’s children for confirmation. This gave her the evidence she needed and also the energy to keep pursuing the project.

“I’m bowled away every time I meet with a group of kids,” said Hosford. “They have some new fascinating thing to say about infinity and I think it’s one of those topics where you just really want to master it because, if you can get a grip on that, you’ll have a grip on everything.”

“I think kids feel that and feel the urgency around understanding infinity to the extent that they can, although they get pretty immediately that they also are not going to be able to fully understand it, and it’s that paradox that is so interesting to them.”

Hosford has been putting together a curriculum that she can present to schools, with the idea that infinity can be not just expressed through numbers, but anything, really, and having kids write about their own conceptions. She will also provide options for math-oriented activities to the same end.

Writing about math concepts, and then writing guides to help children learn them, was not what she expected to end up doing in her life.

“I was very interested in philosophy from a very young age and ended up majoring in it in college, but I wasn’t the world’s most stellar math student,” said Hosford.

Math is too often thought of as boring or labor intensive, but Hosford’s story manages to meld her primary interest by exploring the philosophical side of a math concept and showing there is more to math than memorizing times tables. In her research on infinity, she became fascinated with concepts like fractals and tessellations that informed the enthusiasm of her text, and cemented also the work that illustrator Swiatkowska provided for the book, taking the philosophical elements and turning them into visual ones to make the concepts even more clear.

“One really cool thing that she did was she has these birds, and in particular this chicken, that appears over and over, throughout the book,” said Hosford, “and she works very intuitively and, to me, the chicken is brilliant because it’s a symbol of infinity in its own way — which came first the chicken or the egg. She may or may not have been thinking that, but it doesn’t matter because a lot of other people can look at it and think that.”

Hosford’s main goal has been communication and connection, and math concepts are just the unexpected way she has ended up pursuing those passions. It was suggested to her early on by one publisher that she should scrap the story of one girl connecting the book and instead make it a collection of what various kids think about infinity. Hosford felt this would undercut an important aspect of the book that coincides with her own world view. It just wouldn’t service the same message without the core character.

“Part of the point of my book is that thinking about this idea can completely flip you out, and in the end, the only thing that grounds us is love and connection to other people,” said Hosford. “Otherwise, if you are lying out in the grass looking at the stars and you feel alone and that’s it, it’s scary to anyone, let alone a child, so the emotional component of the book is actually what makes it work.”

Review: If You Knew Me You Would Care

“If You Knew Me You Would Care” is a collection of portraiture photography like none I’ve ever seen.

Maifredi is both a fashion photographer and a portrait photographer, who found himself looking for something different to shoot, something meaningful. Salbi and the organization Women For Women International gave him that by providing access to the women they represent, organize, help.

If you’re unfamiliar with Women For Women, one of its most successful aid programs is a direct sponsorship for women in countries like the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Afghanistan and Rwanda, and help them get the training and knowledge they need to start their own businesses, and provide a safe space for them to meet. The book concerns itself with women from these countries and their stories.

What unravels before you is a parade of these women, presented as glittering, vibrant, powerful and spiritually gorgeous. Some have faces of strength, others of weariness, all of experience, and at least several of joy.

What makes the book so harrowing are the first-hand accounts of many of these women’s lives, the circumstance that brought them to the point that Women For Women could transform their lives.

It’s no exaggeration to say that almost every woman in the book has been raped, many of them serially as sex slaves, often shunned by their communities and families after their ordeals — the book pulls no punches as the women recount their horrors.

The personal degradation and violence is just a component of lives surrounded by poverty and war, even genocide and sex slavery, often fueled by male domination that is so ingrained that domestic abuse and child marriage become accepted parts in many of these cultures.

In other words, these women have noticeable odds they have to beat to even make the smallest something of their lives.

With their gleaming and proud eyes on display throughout, it’s tough to claim this is a book about victimhood, and it really isn’t. What is shown here is that within each victim is a survivor and a hero. This book is a tapestry of how not to be defeated by the unimaginable.

Says Zahida from Bosnia and Herzegovina “I know that I’m a fighter, but I can’t believe that someone else recognizes me as a fighter.”

That’s really what the book is, a celebration of fighters and a refutation of our current trend against the idea of a handout. These women show that what they did to earn the charity they receive is to make it through impossible circumstances with the bravery of any solider who would be more typically lauded.

The way they pay you back for the charity is to make something of themselves and seize their own narrative, no longer victims of their history, becoming examples to follow in your darkest of times, proving that good things do happen even in the worst situations and brightening the world with their dignity and joy.

Profile: Adrian Tomine

Adrian Tomine is best known for two bodies of work — his magazine illustration career, which includes regular work for The New Yorker, and his cartooning one, which began with a series of acclaimed, self-published mini comics.

Unlike many cartoonists who make it in larger field of art, Tomine never really transitioned from one into the other, but maintained both concurrently.

“They were more like parallel careers developing,” Tomine said, “doing a lot of low-end amateur illustration work around the same time I was doing low-end amateur comics work.

“More and more it became useful for me to think of them as two separate jobs and two separate pursuits, in addition to the distinction between sequential and single image.”

The different styles that define the work were accompanied by opposite methods of creating them.

In comics, Tomine has complete autonomy and is left to do whatever he wants.

“Illustration work, by definition, is a collaboration between myself and at least one other person, but often something of a committee, not only in terms of how I create the work physically, but mentally, in terms of how I approach it and what my priorities are become pretty different,” he said.

Tomine says that drawing for The New Yorker is one of the few illustration jobs he actively pursued, and it’s been a point of pride for him for the last 15 years.

“If you have a dream of being a magazine illustrator, that’s definitely one of the top places that you want to get work at eventually,” said Tomine.

That side of his career has finally begun to appear in his own publications. Last year’s “New York Drawings” was his first real art monograph, compiling all his work for The New Yorker, as well as other work related to New York City and his move there from the West Coast. It was also the first book of his that he didn’t design.

“I don’t think this book would exist if I had been a life-long New Yorker,” he said. “I don’t think it’s the kind of book that I would have put together. I certainly wouldn’t have used that title if I had grown up in New York.”

Tomine grew up in mostly in California, and his comics, which have a significant autobiographical segment to them, mostly take place there, except his most recent “Scenes From An Impending Marriage,” which glossed over the bi-coastal aspect of his life for simplicity.

Autobiography has always been a major part of his cartooning from the very beginning.

“Initially, it started out when I’d sit down to draw a comic, it was heavily autobiographical,” said Tomine. “At that point in my life, it was very hard for me to just invent a fictional story. I didn’t have a lot of life experience to draw on when I was 14, at least not that I could process as an artist yet.”

“So to me, that was what kick started me as a person who wrote and drew comics, which is that I discovered you could take the most mundane experience from that day and translate it into comics form and it might be interesting. Not necessarily, but it could be interesting.”

Tomine was influenced by other autobiographical writers and cartoonists who worked the field before him, like Harvey Pekar and Chester Brown. As he grew older and began working more professionally, he began to consider how much of his private life he really wanted to make public, and also whether the raw details really served his storytelling in the way he wanted it to.

“I started to become more interested in having an end result that was as good as I was capable of at that point,” Tomine said, “whether that meant drawing heavily on real experience or inventing a lot of stuff or combining the two. I felt a little more in control of what I was doing at that point and less reliant on everyday experience.”

One of the reasons for Tomine’s success in the form was that, unlike his heroes who came before him, Tomine appeared less an eccentric outsider and more an everyman who young readers could identify with.

“A lot of the best autobiographical work is so compelling and fascinating, and in some ways hindered by more grotesque elements, or a stronger focus on sexuality,” he said, “or sometimes just unintentionally the creator’s personality is such that it’s somewhat self-selecting in its readership. Those very qualities that I think have kept some of those people from being on Oprah’s Book Club are generally the qualities that really fascinate me.”

“It certainly wasn’t by design. I didn’t say I’m going to disguise my eccentric personality and create a fake everyman persona in the hopes of getting my comics in the New Yorker. I’m just not as interesting a guy as some of those other artists.”

Tomine attempted to enter into cartooning through art school training, but quickly found the climate that was not encouraging of that form of creativity.

“I was met with great consternation and hostility in the fine art program at Berkeley,” Tomine said. “At worst, my stuff was made fun of, and at best, there were a few charitable teachers who maybe thought I was trying to do a sort of Roy Lichtenstein commentary on junk culture or something like that. They were very disappointed when I just was like, ‘I’m into comic books and I want to be a cartoonist.’ It was hard for them to process. I just didn’t enjoy my first semester as an art major at all.”

Tomine switched to being an English major, which served him well, not suspecting that he was there at the end of an era.

“I didn’t know it and no one knew it at the time, but North American culture was right on this cusp of saying, ‘We are warming up to the idea of comics and illustration work as being a little more legitimate,’” he said. “We were just behind that turning point.”

Tomine spent his time cartooning after going to school, creating his own mini comics and slowly building to the career he has enjoyed for over a decade.

He says his rise from self-made comics to art books and museum appearances is the art world version of a home recording musician having a hit or an amateur videographer becoming a hot filmmaker that has already become accepted in those mediums.

“I think it’s not as outrageous as it once was” Tomine said, “but certainly if I can be objective enough and look back on my career, it is strange to me that when I sit down at my desk every day, I feel like I’m doing the exact same thing I was doing when I was 14 years old.”

“I use a lot of the same equipment that I used, and not in some beautiful professional studio that I go to like my office. I’m still just working in my bedroom. So to me, it is funny that I’m working in the same way that I have most my life — it’s just some of the work ends up being seen by a lot more people.”

Profile: Peter Sis

With his layered and complicated picture books, children’s writer/illustrator Peter Sis has denied the editorial doomsayers, who originally thought his books were too “cerebral” for Americans.

Sis is a multiple-award winner for books like The “Tree of Life: Charles Darwin,” “Starry Messenger: Galileo Galilei” and “Komodo,” as well as a 2003 MacArthur Fellow.

He was born in Brno, Czechoslovakia, and sees his childhood as the integral part of what has made his children’s books stand out as different from the others. A life behind the Iron Curtain in Prague is a huge differentiation in experience. This wasn’t a factor when he started out illustrating other people’s stories, but once he began writing his own books, he sought commonalties in his experience and an American child’s.

“Getting a chance to do my own stories, I was reaching, all of a sudden, into my childhood,” he said. “I didn’t have a childhood in America, so I couldn’t deal with baseball or anything children grew up with here, so I was lucky that some of things did get accepted, but it wasn’t really rational thinking, ‘this is the way I will go,’ I was just looking for subjects that I thought would somehow be universal and which would translate both in my childhood and in my new country.”

Sis says that his books functioned as “diaries from the new world,” documenting many corners of American life through the perspective of someone who was a stranger within that world.

“I did books about strange animals who lived alone, which was more me trying to find my place in the society,” said Sis. “And also about dreams. When you have a dream it can be fulfilled.”

Sis admits that his approach to storytelling — described by some as “cerebral” — has been a strength as well as a deficit, especially in the face of editors who weren’t sure that his sensibility was right for kids. He came over originally as an animator, and found this reaction to be a continuity between the two fields.

“I started to shop my own ideas, and very often I would be told that it’s too cerebral and it’s not American and lots of people told me to go back to Belgium,” he said. “Then the same thing started to happen in the books. They said your ideas are way too serious, too cerebral.”

The un-American quality of Sis’ work became a reason for some editors to attempt micro-managing, to the point where they were directing him to draw bigger eyes on faces, so his characters didn’t look as foreign. Eventually, Sis was able to adapt ordinary American aspects to his stories in a more natural way.

“I think even today I do not feel like I can tell the story in the nice traditional American way,” Sis said, “but then I was very blessed because I met my wife and we had two kids and, for 10 or 12 years, I would just be observing my American kids and documenting their life.”

As an outsider — an immigrant whose creative approach was apparently different from others that the editors and art directors were dealing with — Sis embraced the stories of other people who did not fit in, but who through their difference changed the world.

“I was getting more and more into my own obsessions with people who somehow dared to change the way that everyone was thinking,” said Sis. “There was that whole sentiment of being an immigrant, leaving one place and going to another place, so I was looking for these people, if it was Columbus or Galileo or Darwin, which were different from the whole group or crowd of people, individuals who had enough courage to say things differently or do things differently. I thought it was a good example for the kids, how they have to think outside of the box, but also how it can get difficult to be different from everybody else.”

“I was celebrating what I admired in America, that people are much more free to say what they want to say. But I also have to say that in the beginning, I had seen all of America as being very progressive, and it took me a long time to find out that it doesn’t have to always be like that, so I learned my lesson. I’m still learning my lesson, which is ridiculous, because, like with the accent, after 30 years it doesn’t go away and you can still find things that you had no idea are happening.”

Sis got his start in children’s books in the mid-1980s, thanks to a misunderstanding that won him the support of Maurice Sendak. He was in the country to work on an animated project that fell through. He stayed to work on a Bob Dylan project for MTV that didn’t work out like he planned.

“I was coming from the Communist country, so difficult to explain to people here that I was supposed to come back at a certain time, otherwise I would be in trouble,” said Sis. “I was stranded in Los Angeles because I was afraid to go, as I thought I would have troubles because I was coming late.”

The head of an art gallery that had seen Sis’ illustration work took the liberty of sending samples to Maurice Sendak without asking Sis first.

“He called me in Los Angeles and said, ‘So you want to be in children’s books,’ because he thought I sent the pictures because I wanted to be in children’s books,” Sis said. “He called the number he had for me, and I was completely shocked because I didn’t quite know who Maurice Sendak was. I knew he was a well-known children’s book author, but I didn’t understand anything in America. I still don’t, but at that time, I didn’t understand what are the publishers, and I didn’t understand that I’m in Los Angeles, which is different from other parts of America.

“I remember he said, ‘What are you doing in the worst place in America?’ and I said ‘I don’t know any other place in America.’ He was assuming I wrote to him — I didn’t — and that I wanted to do children’s books. And of course, I was broke, so I said, ‘Sure I want to make children’s books.’ He said, ‘Oh, there’s no more children’s books, it’s all about the money, no more editors, but there are like three people left in children’s publishing and I’ll introduce you to these three people, but you have to move to the East Coast.’ “

Sendak was true to his word and became a mentor for Sis. The relationship drifted over the years as Sendak became more negative about the world.

“He was always very philosophical, very truthful, but also very down,” said Sis. “And I started to understand him. He was down on politics and human relationships. He was a very dark and grouchy man, but I can only see now the exceptional artist.

“He didn’t have to help me at all, and he was always there wondering why I want to do it, would I want to do it, does it have a meaning and he was very respectful about some of my books. He was a wonderful mentor, he was one of the wonderful mentors in my life who made my life what it is.”

Sis tries to help out young creators the same way Sendak helped him, although he says the publishing scene has certainly changed since he got his start, and understands that the students he guides are dealing with the publishing world that is exactly the one that Sendak predicted.

“All those houses that I used to know 25 years ago, now it’s down to three big corporations, which are merging and merging. It used to be seven different publishing houses, which had their own identity. In that sense it’s very difficult. Illustrators will be dealing with basically three art directors, who will have to decide if this fits the mainstream market.

“Maybe it’s because I’ve been around the block too long. Could be that when we get older, we get more skeptical. Maybe there will be some other new ways how to do it, but I don’t know at the moment. I’m in this situation where I feel a lot like Maurice Sendak, that there is no publishing left, there are only three editors.”

Despite that, Sis’ outlook remains upbeat, and in his own work continues to plan to challenge himself and confound those who think they have his work pegged.

“I now feel like I should try once again to do very simple, very colorful, very playful books for little kids,” he said. “I would like to see if I can do it without words, just because through the years I became maybe too serious and somehow it’s expected of me by people.”

 

Review: Don’t Go Where I Can’t Follow by Anders Nilsen

This heart-breaking book of multi-media emotion — prose, poetry, illustration, photography, comics and a scrapbook element — stands as graphic novelist Nilsen’s powerful and touching tribute to his late fiancee, Cheryl Weaver, who died in 2005 of Hodgkin’s Disease.

Compiling his emotions into a journal that documents journeys they made together, the pieces are the ephemera of their lives and, in that way, the displaced emotions that they tossed out into the world making their love and companionship known.

Nilsen bookends the story with the actual postal art he and Cheryl sent to each other, and then allows the reader to get to know their dynamic — that is, the creature made of the both of them — through a lengthy letter about a disastrous camping trip that he sent to his sister, as well as photos and some parts of a cartoon journal that he made.

After Cheryl’s diagnosis, Nilsen presents more journal entries, that include painful portraits he did of his fiancee at hospital bedside, as well as a frank drawing of her body laid out, inching toward death, with all the wires and tubes connected, a diagram of the things that were keeping her alive, and a portrait of how fragile she had become.

Leaving off with a graphic story about her memorial and then a short afterword that fills in the gaps, Nilsen offers his explanation for the work. Partly it is to memorialize the woman he loved so much, but also — and this is the part that cuts furthest — because he realized that losing her was not remarkable, but ordinary, and that there were so many others who had gone through such an ordinary, dreadful, crippling experience.

It’s a beautiful book in which all the pieces add up a a form of poetry, as well as a giving work by Nilsen, opening up his privacy in so elegant a way, a mournful pat on the back to all the people in his shoes who he will never meet, but will take heart in the fact that they are not spiritually alone.

Profile: Johnny Carrera

Johnny Carrera’s upcoming installation at Mass MoCA is technically an extension of his book, “Pictorial Webster,” but it’s also something that never would have happened if not for a chance encounter in his grandmother’s house.

Carrera’s prints will be featured in the show “Life’s Work,” which opens at Mass MoCA on Saturday, March 23.

As Carrera, who specializes in book and print making, recounted in the book, he found an 1898 edition of Webster’s Dictionary while rummaging through his grandmother’s stone farm house in 1995. Captivated by a loose 80-page section of the book that had nothing but illustrations of entries, Carrera embarked on an as-yet-unfinished journey of obsession for the bookmaker.

Carrera tracked down the original engravings through the Merriam-Webster Co. to Yale University, home to more than 10,000 of them and center for the next decade of Carrera’s life, which he devoted to getting the engravings back in print.

The book came out in 2009, and will be followed up by “Pictorial Webster’s Pocket Dictionary” this summer, and both efforts have taken on multiple purposes in the world and in Carrera’s own life.

“I’ve taken the surrealist approach of letting these images help you plumb into your psyche to find your own meanings,” Carrera said. “It’s kind of a meditation book and, to be really frank, it has helped me at times when I’ve been feeling down in the process. I end up going to that and it will be like, ‘okay, this is a good reminder of things one needs to do.’ “

Carrera’s effort has seen the original images that he tracked down augmented with some of his own making, such as a railroad spike and rain, which he felt were interesting additions that were appropriate to the time of the original images, and also had a meta quality that spoke to the project as a whole.

“The one that comes to mind now is DuChamp’s bicycle wheel, which, for me, was an art historical explanation of what I was doing in the book,” said Carrera. “I was taking these workaday images and elevating them into works of art by presenting them in a way that says, ‘this is art.’

“Another way that that work is such a great touchstone for the book was it was also taking two different things and putting them together to make something beautiful. That’s what I’m hoping is happening with the book with people all the time, that they’re trying to combine images on the page to come up with new ideas.”

The show at Mass MoCA has given him the opportunity to go through the images again with fresh eyes, and find new groupings that can be as revelatory as the single images he offers. More than one image can create narratives and raise questions, but the real problem for Carrera has been how to translate the book into a museum space.

“The question I asked myself when I was given the opportunity was, ‘How the hell am I going to turn these one inch-square images into something that will engage viewers in this epic imagination?” he said. “I had this thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be cool if you could walk into a gallery and it would be like walking into a page of the book, or actually being in the book?’ “

“Curator Denise Markonish says that when I was describing this to her, I told her that I’ve been living inside the pages of the book and I want to bring that same experience to the viewers at the museum. I don’t remember saying that, but it sounds awfully good.”

His original thought was that he could paint the images on the wall or project them, but time was a consideration, as well as the capturing the complexities in the lines of some of them. His solution was to teach himself silk-screening, but he required an alternate material to put the images on, canvas being very expensive.

His solution, at the advice of a former associate, was to print on discarded sails, which he could get from sailmakers.

“It’s not canvas, it’s Dacron, and it’s a nightmare,” Carrera said. “When it prints perfectly, it prints perfectly. If it doesn’t print perfectly, it’s either way too light or way too dark. It’s not like printing on paper at all. It’s slightly absorbent, but if your ink is at all watery, it’ll run. So there will be a little bit of that interesting printing in the show, too, as much as I’d like it to not be the case. The sheer magnitude of this project means I can’t be fixing everything.”

Carrera is using the hi-res scans that Chronicle Books did for the book proofs as his source for the printing, and he’s poured himself into researching the images contained in the book in order to map his interest for what he would like to be on the sails and why.

“I’ve been doing a lot of research on endangered and threatened wildlife, because that’s most of the imagery that I wanted to pull out form the books,” said Carrera. “How many of the animals and plants that were in these original dictionaries are now extinct or soon-to-be extinct? That was the basis for the first three sails. Then I introduced the seeds of destruction that were also being created at the same time.”

While these subjects are indicative of the era the images come from, Carrera was also conscious of not allowing the installation to get too much of a downer.

“These dictionaries were first being illustrated at such a fascinating time in the 19th century,” he said. “You have both these new discoveries and the things that are going to destroy those discoveries in one place. It just became very depressing to me. I decided I would make a sail of hope, as well.”.

Carrera has expanded the work not only beyond the book, but the media of hanging a picture to be looked at statically. He has collaborated with installation artist Ben Rubin for a video component that would have every page of the book superimposed over each other.

“I’ve also been printing on articles of clothing,” said Carrera. “I’ve been giving them to folks, so at the opening, I’m hoping to have dozens of people who are wearing the work that’s also on the walls.”

Central to Carrera’s message is that these images belong to all of us, and in many ways, this show at MoCA is one more way to present this collective treasure, as well as tap into extremely personal feelings of his own.

“I didn’t make many of these images, but I have become so intimately attuned to the lines of some of these images that they’re like my children,” he said.

“I feel as if they belong to me, even though a lot of my feeling in doing this work is to say it really belongs to our culture. They’re really cultural artifacts of 19th century America. That’s one of the things that I’m playing with in this exhibit.”

Happy Punks 123

Review: Bodies of Subversion: A Secret History of Women and Tattoo by Margaret Mifflin

Tattoos have hit the kind of critical mass where it seems as though those without are the ones on the outskirts of normalcy. Margot Mifflin tackles the fascinating history of how body ink has manifested itself on women, and what it means when it’s done in the 21st century in this thorough updating of her lovely historical survey by way of photography book, “Bodies of Subversion: A Secret History of Women and Tattoo.”

Tattoos were once generally equated with a disreputable portion of society, but that’s largely because hepatitis scares in the 1950s and ‘60s led to making tattoos illegal. Only certain kinds of people were going to procure and flash body ink at that point. Before, that, though, the practice hinted at a kind of exoticism that was sometimes dangerous, though deliciously so.

Tellingly, it was common for early tattooed women in sideshows to claim that they were taken by Native Americans and forcibly inked against their will. This qualifies somewhat offensively as a rape fantasy and links with some of the current hypersexualized presentations of tattooed women.

At the same time, though, from some point in the Victorian era up to the Great Depression, it became all the rage for society women to have a tattoo. In many circles, it was downright fashionable — even Winston Churchill’s mom sported one. After the mad fad, there were still plenty who kept hidden images on their flesh.

In capturing this era, Mifflin compiles stories of the colorful women who populated the sideshows, as well as those who made their names in the male-dominated profession of tattoo artist. She then traces their impact on their polar opposites in the world, the very society women who came begging for decoration on their skin. It’s a chronicle of oddball lifestyles and a few madcap adventures among women, and also a testament to some marital partnerships.

The book moves forward, though, into the 1970s, when tattoos and women began to be concurrent with empowerment, onto the 1980s and a spiritual component, and then into the 1990s, when popularity began to slowly rise outside of a alternative crowd. The tattoos get more colorful, but not necessarily the lives of the people wearing them.

It’s in the boom of the 21st century that causes Mifflin to show some distress, presenting a world in which tattoo clientele has become dominated by rich corporate folks, reality TV shows have normalized the practice and, in some cases, highly sexualized it — along with a slew of slick magazines — in order to sell it to voyeurs in a way far more offensive than the days of freak shows.

That is the lesson of the triumph of the mainstream over any alternative culture, and the tattoo world is learning it now. What was once meant to individualize, personalize, becomes a conformist affectation meant to ignite the sagaciousness for any given customer.

And then there is the concern that openness is causing young women to fill their bodies with ink too soon, before they have the real experiences required to fill such real estate. They are self-mythologizing too soon, and that’s probably why it’s reported that 69 percent of tattoo removals are on women, usually marks they got at age 20 that became “stigmata.” At the same time, the number of older women getting tattoos is on the rise.

Mifflin refers to the inking of women as “a never-ending project,” and her book shows that it is — but neither is the human need to adorn yourself, define yourself, separate yourself or include yourself, any of which tattooing can service