Read This details book selections by local authorities, luminaries, institutions, and locals that share deep affections for the written word. These four titles come from the Artists’ Books Collection at the Emily Carr University Library and were selected by co-op student Rachel Bowen. Her choices are all book works by Vancouver artists, on the subject of Vancouver, or somehow in someway connected to Vancouver.

1. | You Are My Nebula : You Are My Sunshine / Euan MacDonald (Vancouver : Contemporary Art Gallery, 2006)
The nebula and the musical saw – two equally fascinating yet seemingly unrelated topics. Euan MacDonald brings together an essay by an amateur astrologer and an amateur historian. Starting from either end of the book, they meet in the middle, spiralling into one another. This is a publication created to accompany the artist’s 2007 exhibition at the Contemporary Art Gallery in Vancouver, but it has an autonomous integrity that extends beyond the gallery’s walls. The result is something that is informative yet sublime, playful yet strangely profound.

2. | Vancouver Treasure Map, Issue No. 2 / Jessie McNeil (self published, 2014)
This is kind of like the analog version of Scout Magazine. Vancouver artist Jessie McNeil creates a gorgeous, handmade guide to the city, with five separate fold-out sections based on geographic areas. Given the dynamic nature of real estate and land use in Vancouver, the status of the locations outlined in the guide are constantly changing. This positions the book somewhere between a tour guide and archive – giving the material a sense of urgency and leaving you to contemplate the meaning of “treasure” in the context of a city in flux..

3. Library Dérive / Beth Howe (self published, 2003-2005)
Vancouver artist, Beth Howe, continues the Situationist thread, introduced by Jessie McNeil’s Treasure Map, in this work. She transitions the idea of a dérive (the practice of wandering through the city) into the stacks of the library, creating four booklets as records of four of these experiences. Her accounts of the unexpected meanderings are delightfully surprising in the way they link something like, an extravagant Italian seaside villa to, let’s say, “a six foot, 200-pound, cigar and pipe smoking, tart-tongued, gun-toting, and hard-drinking black woman”.

4. Dragons of the Air: The Roswell Notebook of Frances Zorn / Jo Cook : edited by Åg Zorn ; with an introduction by Florentine Perro & digitally remastered field recordings by Susan Hawkins. (Mayne Island, BC : Perro Verlag, 2007)
It’s hard to know exactly what you’re looking at when reading through this verbi- visual, pseudo-scientific account from the notebook of a paleontologist’s poet lover spending a summer in Roswell, New Mexico. Jo Cook of Mayne Island letterpress studio/artists’ books publisher, Perro Verlag, presents this puzzling piece that comes across as a mix between a book of prose and an X-file. Don’t let its slim profile fool you, between the surreal diagrams and illustrations to the cryptic texts there’s a few good hours of fun in this one.