Title: Boeken
Description: "Books should troop together like street dogs. Piling up in the doorways of shops, sleeping under a blanket of cardboard, beggars without much hope for a hand-out. They should wash away by rain on the benches in parks or lay around on the floor of a tram. Exciting or boring those who pick them up, or leaving them indifferent, or annoying them so much that they want to write an answer that than will drift through the world namelessly. Somewhere that book will disturb the order, bring back balance, freeze joy, commemorate the future or predict the past, irresponsible, at best announced by the rustle of the sheets - the only angels I more or less believe in"--Quote from Erwin Mortier, Godenslaap, 2009, from the Book Arts at the Centre for Fine Print Research, UK website.

Jan de Waard is the owner of a private press in Leeuwarden, The Netherlands. Mooi Rood Pers (Beautiful Red Press) produces hand-bound limited edition books, fine bindings and one-of-a-kind artists' books and boxes. The artist states "Visually, my work reflects my interests in language, text and typefaces. I am also interested in the nature of surfaces and materials. I apply my explorations of these interests along with accumulated technical skills to the interpretation of existing texts or to the invention of content of my own. I aim to create books whose intellectual and sensual facets are integrated, that are interesting and are good company"--The 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, Artists' books, Al-Mutanabbi Street Coalition
Places: Iraq, Baghdad, Netherlands, Leeuwarden
People: Jan de Waard
Time periods: 21st century