Robert MacFarlane writes “There is no lone tree language, but a forest of tree languages.”
In ABOUT TREES, Katie Holten invites us to enter some of these forests. She has created a Tree Alphabet and used it to translate a compendium of well known, loved, lost and new writing. She takes readers on a journey from ‘primeval atoms’ and cave paintings to the death of a 3,500 year-old cypress tree, from Tree Clocks in Mongolia and forest fragments in the Amazon to Emerson’s language of fossil poetry, unearthing a grove of beautiful stories along the way.
ABOUT TREES is the first book in Broken Dimanche Press's series: Parapoetics - a Literature beyond the Human. Recognizing a crisis of representation as our species adapts to life in the Anthropocene, About Trees considers our relationship with language, landscape, and perception.
The result is an astonishing fusion of storytelling and art, which celebrates trees and our understanding of them, their past and their future, their potential and their ubiquity. It is a book to leaf through, again and again.
Publisher: Broken Dimanche Press
City: Berlin, Germany
Year: 2015 (Reprinted 2016)
Design: FUK Design Studio, Berlin and Katie Holten
Font: The book is typeset in Walbaum and Trees, an original typeface created by Katie Holten. The Trees font is available to download for free here.
Pages: 256 pages
Dimensions: 9.25 x 6.5 inches
Cover: Paperback with dust jacket
Binding: Stitched
Process: Offset
Color: Spot color with fore-edge printing
Edition Size: First printing: 500. Second printing: 2,000.
ISBN 978-3-943196-30-6
Texts by Andrea Bowers, Inger Christensen, Tacita Dean, Amy Franceschini, Charles Gaines, James Gleick, Fritz Haeg, Amy Harmon, Natalie Jeremijenko, Eduardo Kohn, Elizabeth Kolbert, Irene Kopelman, Ursula K. Le Guin, Robert Macfarlane, Arianna Occhipinti, Katie Paterson, Pedro Reyes, Robert Sullivan, Rachel Sussman, Nicola Twilley, Gaia Vince, Aengus Woods, Andrea Zittel and others.
ABOUT TREES grew out of Holten's Sunday Salons and a series of drawings made for the group exhibition About Trees at the Zentrum Paul Klee in Bern, Switzerland, October 17, 2015 – January 24, 2016.
ABOUT TREES is available from select independent bookstores or directly from the publisher here.
Limited edition offset prints available here.