Title: Smell the coffee
Description: This collection supports and promotes awareness to the important mission and framework of the Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here Coalition's focus on the lasting power of the written word and the arts in support of the free expression of ideas, the preservation of shared cultural spaces, and the importance of responding to attacks, both overt and subtle, on artists, writers, and academics working under oppressive regimes or in zones of conflict, despite the destruction of that literary/cultural content.

"Trying to understand something that happened in a place that at first felt so different from mine, was difficult, until I began to think about my own town and the coffee shops, booksellers and print shops. After a few false starts and complicated beginnings, I stumbled upon the idea of re-using dried coffee filters, cleaned, folded and torn into four with Coptic stitch to hold the pages together. Using only the coffee filters from my one morning cup of coffee, rather than set up a production line was important, as the message/poem on the inside of the front cover alludes to this ritual and meditative quality of that first peaceful morning cup of coffee"--Book Arts at the Centre for Fine Print Research, UK website.
Subjects: Violence, Pictorial works, Booksellers and bookselling, Bombings, Iraq War, 2003-2011, Protest movements, Books and reading in art, Intellectual life, Social conditions, Censorship, Terrorism in art, In art, War and civilization, Vehicle bombs, Visual literature, Specimens, Cultural property, Destruction and pillage, Libraries, Coffee in art, Coffee shops, Tea in art, Artists' books
Places: Iraq, Baghdad, England, Leigh-on-Sea
People: Gwen Simpson
Time periods: 21st century